alt Hacker NewsThe U.S. blocking advanced chip sales to China has ensured China increased their efforts to someday no longer need them.
In effort for us to see clear eyed, it would be good to stop assuming someone is a spy without a shred of credible evidence. Avoiding trade restrictions by routing them through another country does not indicate spy craft.
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Covert actions in the interest and by the request of a foreign power is spy craft. If you do this openly, then it would not be called spying, it is done all the time; sometimes it is called diplomacy. If you hide the fact that you are working for a foreign power, you are a spy. It is not a necessary condition, but it is sufficient.
I don't have a horse in this race, but from a US perspective it makes sense to ban chip sales. This is an arms race and any advantage however small makes a difference.
NVIDIA is the undisputed champion of AI hardware because of the advanced chip node access ban, ensuring no Chinese competition in this area for years. In return NVIDIA was banned from selling their chips to China so that the US holds the state of the art in AI models as well. Selling chips through back channels is a betrayal, spies or not.
It will take years for China to catch up without these GPUs, that's the whole point. By that time we have advanced AGI and can just stay ahead of them
Name a single technology where the US sold to China and China remained reliant on the US long term for it in recent times. Just a single one would do. That would make me believe this theory that keeps being repeated.
Are you living in some parallel universe where china is reliant on the US for Teslas or something? They are even certifying their own commercial jet engines now.
Don't mistake china's reliance 40 years ago while purchasing US technology to what it is capable of reverse engineering now...
I’m not sure if you haven’t followed this story or if you’re constructing some kind of specious argument that the only evidence you’ll accept is a personally signed letter from Xi Jinping. I’ll assume the former.
* US intelligence agencies reportedly monitored Alice Huang for over a year and concluded she was passing information directly to Beijing.
* A memo overseen by Marco Rubio reportedly concluded that China's Ministry of State Security (MSS) recruited her to gather intelligence on Jensen Huang and potentially influence Nvidia's chip exports.
* The FBI reportedly warned US lawmakers nearly a year ago that she might be supplying information to China.
* She was a director and controlling shareholder of Megaspeed, which US authorities investigated over suspected diversion of restricted Nvidia chips to China.
In the spy world, this is about as close to irrefutable evidence as it gets. We know that any strategically important or large company in China requires Party members in positions of authority inside the company. The CCP exerts direct power over these companies in a multitude of ways. Megaspeed is a clear example of the kind of company they oversee. To assume anything other than Megaspeed being in clear cooperation with the CCP would be a rejection of everything we know about how companies operate in China.