Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “The RTX 4090: Banned”.
The US has banned the export of RTX 490s to China as part of their attempts to keep China behind in terms of technological Savvy. It doesn’t seem to be going that well based on that new Huawei phone that just came out. Have you been paying attention to that? No, so it’s supposedly their first completely homegrown fabed processor! That’S reasonably modern and yeah! It’S a little on the slower side compared to what you can get from the likes of Qualcomm or apple right now. But it’s not that bad. Like it’s, you know, if you think about that, they could clearly build guided missiles 10 years ago, and you look at this processor on this phone and go well.
It’S a lot faster than phones from 10 years ago, yeah, it’s like! If, if the US’s goal is that they’re not going to be able to build Weaponry or whatever, then I think that that’s going great uh, the US is increasing. I think it’s AI research but yeah well, AI, is a big part of it. It right now, but in general they’re, trying to put pressure on China and keep them uh, keep them behind the US in terms of technological advancement, which I think is. I think that horse is kind of out of the paddock.
Is it horses that come out of the padic it’s something something horse is bolted, something something like that. The barn door is open. Sure the point is cat out of the bag. The US is increasing.
Why did you put a cat in a bag not not like what is wrong with you? It’S like a it’s like a messenger bag, at least just one cat and the it’s open. How many cats did you have in there? It’S just an easier way to carry. Oh there’s like there’s like six: only one of them got out of the B. The US is increasing export restrictions on Advanced AI chips to China, which will also limit exports to countries like Saudi Arabia, the UAE.
And Vietnam, though China is the primary target of the policy, companies will now require a special export license to ship Nvidia, a800 and h800 gpus to China. There are variants of the a100 100 and h100. I think there’s some typos in here that Nvidia modified. Oh, these are the variants of the a100 and h100 that Nvidia modified to comply with export restrictions put in place last year, so those were intended to keep China from having access to the most advanced AI chips.
Um now they’re, basically going yeah, no uh. The old rules left consumer graphics cards untouched, but the new rules also restrict sales of nvidia’s RTX 490 vendors can apply for a special license to sell these gpus, but it’s not clear How likely the government is to grant them. Companies will also be required to inform the US government before selling chips below the Restriction threshold in August 2022. This is a big hit for NVIDIA Nvidia disclosed that it anticipated $ 400 million in quarterly sales, not annual sales, quarterly quarterly sales from China. So there’s a couple main discussion points here you know one of of them is: is this going to do anything, and I I think I’ve made my feelings on it, pretty clear in the very very, very short term, it might slow down some of China’s AI progress. Um I have a potential counterargument to that, but really yeah. You know what I would love to hear it so maybe uh in regards to Raw compute power.
It will, but I think the policy wrestling that the American companies have to deal with Will slow them down. Just as much or more yeah – that’s that’s probably Fair. Also, I am not convinced that we necessarily need a ton more Hardware out there in the field to continue to develop AI in a meaningful way.
If that makes sense to you like. Yes, if you want to build a service that real customers are really using and refine things for sure, but at the research level, I’m willing to bet that there are enough RTX, what whatever the craps in China right now and I guarantee you they could poke through That firewall to access remote power, if they needed to remote resources, I should say if they needed to um, also a lot of the models like the what llama and all these other ones, they’re all open, anyways like uh and and no maybe it’s not the the The point of the sword, but they’re they’re they’re, pretty ridiculously good. I I don’t know I I don’t think there’s really any holding them back very much. I mean person Elijah from our um who’s, our Junior writer in the writing department and clearly has some research to do.
Uh asks, wouldn’t Nvidia just make a factory over there, or am I ignorant so the restrictions are from the US government on Nvidia, a US company, headquartered in the US that prevent Nvidia from Shipping Advanced processors to China. Those processors are actually manufactured in Taiwan which, depending who you ask, is or isn’t part of China uh, but for the purposes of these regulations, Taiwan would not be part of China, which is a really kind of funny thing. It’S very interesting because the US’s stance is sort of like we don’t take a position on this by the way Nvidia. You may not export chips to China that are manufactured in. You know what we’re not going to take a position on this um, so so so the US government is sort of within their rights to restrict these exports, but also, I think this raises some really interesting questions about in general, the the barriers that are being put Up between International cooperation um, where governments are stepping in and especially the US government uh governments are stepping in and restricting company abilities to operate over borders internationally. Uh, I’m honestly, not the right person to talk about that.
There’S a lot of yeah there’s a lot of geopolitical debates there, it’s complicated, there’s, there’s one people been talking about for long long time, uh that neither of us are, you know in the right position to debate too much, but there’s there’s been this kind of assumption For a long time that there can be no real like War, because all the countries are too interconnected and rely on each other too much and by closing that door. There’S some concerns that are far above my understanding but yeah. In other news, John Stewart’s Apple TV Plus show the problem has reportedly been cancelled prior to its third season, following creative differences between Stuart and Leadership at Apple over how Stewart wanted to cover artificial intelligence and China, things are getting complicated, um, hey, John Stewart. If you want home on float plane, we’re yeah we’re we’re ready, we’re ready for you.
I love John Stewart guy guys real the guy’s real. What he did for the firefighters was super cool yeah guy, the guy’s real .