Obviously to prevent proliferation of dual-use technologies to potentially adversarial actors. The same intent behind restricting high-fidelity infrared camera and phased radar equipment.
China is leading AI race with their open source deepseek-v3.
It is laughable to think they this regulation with stop them. USA should actually collaborate, not isolate.
China engineers have capability to get around these silly sanctions, by renting cloud GPUs from USA companies for example, to get access to as many compute as they want. or to use consumer grade compute, or their homegrown Chinese CPUs/GPUs.
USA should actually embrace open source and collaborate together, as we are still in the very beginning of AI revolution
The entire point is to not collaborate, because this tech is being used for military purposes. The US wants to throw up roadblocks to make it more difficult. Obviously, against a foreign military, anything is a mitigation and not a prevention.
> China engineers have capability to get around these silly sanctions, by renting cloud GPUs from USA companies for example
That's why they're also moving towards KYC for cloud providers.
Also when you look at the list of nations targeted it's easy to see that this is not necessarily only about China. I think on HN people get China blindness and maybe have a hard time seeing other threats out there.
The list is controversial obviously, but I have to think nations wouldn't be on any tier of the list except the no-restrictions tier if there wasn't something our intel people weren't worried about. Maybe the concerns are not legitimate, but there's definitely a reason we don't want those nations having access to SOTA AI models.
Maybe they intend for it to speed up/start implementation of federal agencies and regulations. The intent is to exert control over an emerging market while it’s still comprised of cooperative participants. Regulators want to define the regulatory frameworks rather than relying on self-policing before it’s “too late.”
Let’s see if this survives the next administration. Normally I’d be skeptical, but Musk has openly advocated about the “dangers” of AI and will likely embrace attempts to regulate it, especially since he’s in a position to benefit from the regulatory capture. In fact he’s doubly well-placed to take advantage of it. Regardless of his politics, xAI is a market leader and would already be naturally predisposed to participate in regulatory capture. But now he also enjoys unprecedented influence over policymaking (Mar a Lago) and regulatory reform (DOGE). It’s hard to see how he wouldn’t capitalize on that position.
You can look at funding to see who will benefit most from regulatory capture, a phenomenon that raises the cost of entry into a market. Obviously the most well-funded participants will have the greatest motivation to increase barrier to entry.
If anything, a well-funded company with a bad product is more likely to engage in regulatory capture because it limits their risk of exposure to a new entrant with a good product.
In this particular market though it's a bit useless because only well funded entities are really able to play here.
Where are any of us gonna get 10,000 H100's?
So it's not like you're overwhelming small players by throwing up regulations. Those players are extremely unlikely to get the compute they'd need to even experiment in the first place.
I can't seem to find any information about that anywhere.