the export ban is both reactionary to the idea of a superintelligence arms race, and retroactively rationalized as letting preferred nations and customers get these chips in the supply crunch

these goals have failed as China's frontier labs closed the inference gap to just a few months or weeks of what the US frontier labs have released

there is also an extremely high degree of utility as all the best open weight models across almost all modalities are from China and released for free, downloabable, portable, for commercial and non-commercial use alike

as the chips are highly liquid commodities, they are an extension of global capital, capital will flow and capital controls merely introduce intermediaries and additional cost

in my view, the spice must flow

trying to put China in a cage has resulted in accelerating their supply chain growth, EUV machine development that will make them immune from inevitable sanctions if they pursued their regional geopolitical aims, building at parity multi modal models with less compute, and so more much beyond what 2022's initial bans in the Biden administration could even imagine these AI would be used for, the Trump administrations continuation and partial more surgical expansion is within an established conduit for intermediaries to extract value from participants