This is really exciting! They're laying out an architecture that may mean even small players with cheap GPUs can compete with the majors. The idea implies that eventually crowd-sourcing an open AI is probably technically feasible and we've got the Chinese actively researching how to do it to a high standard that competes with the monolithic models.
I was sceptical of the US sanctions but this seems like a real win if this can be taken all the way to its logical conclusions.
Yeah the sanctions will (not sarcastically) actually improve the world on a number of fronts. Increasing diversity of compute, forcing decentralization of manufacturing, etc. etc.
also increase smuggling, theft, espionage, crime, sabotage.
There are much better ways to increase diversity
The sanctions will (not sarcastically) massively harm the world because Nvidia may no longer be a free money cheat code. I like having an easy economic strategy for investing...
Deepseek-R1 is at the level of GPT 4.1 already, it's open-weight, open-source and they even open-sourced their inference code.
SETI@Home style peer2peer open GPU training network is something I’m looking into as well.
I suppose its exciting, but whether that is a good thing depends entirely on how much you think AI technologies pose existential threats to human survival. This may sound hyperbolic, but serious people are seriously thinking about this and are seriously afraid.
Since the license ban the use and installation in EU, I would ask: It is possible to formulate a license that claims: "The restriction A is motivated to protect our ass but we will not directly or indirectly enforce it against you"?, Such kind of phrasing in the license could be categorized or called "isolating clause" but I don't know if judges could consider it a circumvention of the law.
Edited several times, I should add: IANAL, but this sounds similar to meta releasing llama weights. I think that the spirit of the European law is to control concrete uses of AI and not a broad distribution of weights and architecture. So my question is: Does the EU AI act ban this distribution?, I think it provides more competition and options for Europeans.
Edited: Thinking a little more, installing open weights could allow backdoors (in the form of a way to manipulate intelligent agents via specials prompts designated to control the system), so perhaps from a national security point of view some care should be taken (but I personally hate that). So another question: Is there a way to control if open weights can create back doors (via prompt injection)?, I recall a paper in which prompt by symbols like 0?,#2! could put the system in a state in which one can read information that the LLM is asked to hide (that is a well known attack available to those that know the weights).
Another question: Is fine tuning or Lora a way to eliminate o amilliorate such prompt attacks?, is there any python library to defend against such attacks. Download - install - modify by fine tune or lora - now you are protected.
It's not up to Huawei to tell EU citizens what to do. In fact they did not need to add this restriction to their license at all. As EU citizens we shoud know the laws of the land and protect ourselves by avoiding using these models like the plague.
For security, I'd always treat ANY LLM generated code as untrusted until reviewed.
> Since the license ban the use and installation in EU, I would ask: It is possible to formulate a license that claims: "The restriction A is motivated to protect our ass but we will not directly or indirectly enforce it against you"?, Such kind of phrasing in the license could be categorized or called "isolating clause" but I don't know if judges could consider it a circumvention of the law.
Maybe not the exact thing you're talking about, but that description reminds me of the Alliance for Open Media -- their codec licenses are royalty-free, but the same terms revoke your usage rights if you sue anyone for the use of these formats.
Just a warning, the license [1] specifically blocks EU use:
> 3. Conditions for License Grant. You represent and warrant that You will not, access, download, install, run, deploy, integrate, modify, or otherwise use the Model, directly or indirectly, within the European Union.
[1] https://gitcode.com/ascend-tribe/pangu-pro-moe-model/blob/ma...
I know people get upset when open source is used when open weight is more correct (happily here open weight is specifically being applied).
My question: is open weight even interesting? What does that really offer? Does it allow one to peer into the biases (or lack thereof) of a model? Does it allow one to train a competing model?
Would open source be something different and preferable — or are "weights the new source" in this LLM world we are finding ourselves in?
I'm trying to educate myself.
If current LLMs hit a scaling wall and the game becomes about efficiency, I wonder if there's going to be space in the market for small models focussed on specific use cases.
I use Gemini to extract structured data from images and the flash model is great at this. I wonder how much effort it would be to create a smaller model that would run on something like a NUC with an AMD APU that is good enough for that one use case.
Or perhaps you end up with mini external GPU sticks that run use case specific models on them. Might not be much of a market for that, but could be pretty cool.
that's already the case, and it's called model distillation. You use LLMs to generate labels but then you use a dedicated smaller model (usually NN) to run at 1000x cheaper cost of inference.
> I wonder if there's going to be space in the market for small models focused on specific use cases.
just recent discussion on HN:
"Small language models are the future of agentic AI"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44430311
throwback to that brief period where people would mine bitcoin (ineffectively) using ASICs in their USB ports
Sanctions are at best a stopgap measure. Ideally they would buy enough time to shore up domestic capabilities.
Instead, cutting research funding and discouraging foreign students/researchers from coming to the US means that there will be depleted US capability just when China finds its groove.
Sic transit gloria nvidii
Linguistic deep lore: "invidia" is Latin for "envy".
5 years of Latin finally pays off
Sorry for the nitpick: I'd expect Gen Sg to be nvidiae - i is for o declension
Sic transit gloria nvidiae
Best thing I've read today.
Bravo.
I hope someone can enlighten me, as it's not immediately clear the significance of it.
Does this mean that Huawei phone which has been hurt badly by sanction will now stand a fighting chance because of homegrown GPU?
How good or bad these GPU compares to the SOTA GPU in the west?
And does this mean that Huawei has the ability to crank out the GPU commercially?
Man. Huawei is fucking massive, they do far, far more things than just 5G base stations (a giant business in itself) and cell phones. They build even electric cars.
From the hardware huawei can build competitve phones. It's just hard to justify buying a phone without the google appstore.
The world needs Huawei and China to get competitive on its node size with TSMC and Nvidia.
That would be great, if you ignore geopolitical concerns. Alas, AI technology is a double-edged sword and any competition in consumer space will likely be mirrored in an arms race which (given their current manufacturing capabilities, cheap labor) China would win.
Anyway, they would need to duplicate ASML first which will probably not happen in the foreseeable future.
I have the impression that if the US removed the chips exports control, the government of China would impose a imports control. They have so much more to gain from creating a real contender to Nvidia/TSMC/Apple/Google.
Chinese companies are making great silicon, but they haven't begun exporting them in large numbers. The Chinese internal market is huge, so they will probably continue to grow there before they flood the world with cheap silicon. It is exactly what happened with BYD as well.
So the Huawei Ascend 920 is produced by SMIC on a 6 nm process.
I always thought sceptical of the US sanctions, but that they backfire so fast is insane.
Out of China's perspective it might make sense to take out the wests AI capabilities soon.
Sanctions are generally a stopgap measure. They can't create any meaningful gap for a very long time.
I live in a country which has experienced some hard and soft embargoes over the years, and let's look what has it done.
- We wanted to buy drones, and denied. Now we are one of the biggest drone manufacturers in the world.
- We denied air defense systems. We are developing a whole arsenal of missiles and rockets now, incl. standoff/cruise missiles.
- We denied planes. Our 4.5th generation fighter program got a great speed boost.
- We denied advanced naval technology. We built stealth ships, fast coastguard boats and all navigational systems which goes inside them.
- We denied optical pods for drones and aerial vehicles. We built our own in 6 months.
etc. etc...
Sanctions and embargoes are the biggest catalyst for a country to advance their tech at tremendous velocity.
10s (maybe 100s) of billions that could have gone to Nvidia are going to Huawei, so not surprising they are able to make the progress and pulling along SMIC with them. Most of the sanctions against Huawei were because they were a credible threat to US companies, so again not surprising.
You cannot just point to some amount of a sanctioned good being manufactured to claim a sanctions backfire, you need to look at the difference between with and without sanctions, and also consider the cost.
Huawei was going to work on GPUs anyway, SMIC was going to fab chips anyway. How much of the total GPU compute is the result of increased investment after sanctions, and how much was already planned? And how does it compare to the alternative of importing Nvidia GPUs for the same amount of money?
Unless Huawei is getting better performance per dollar than Nvidia, this is them implementing a costly workaround, which is the point of sanctions: increasing cost.
In 2023 Huawei surprised with the Kirin 9000S in the Mate 60, this seems to get forgotten when talking about GPU moats and sanction effectiveness
even if their chips weren't as good, what stops a company from training a large model for a very long time in less capable hardware? Is there a way to overcome memory limitations somehow?
SMIC is running into real problems without EUV. Just because they are able to produce something at 6/7nm, it doesn't mean that it is efficient or competitive. Right now, they do it because of strategic considerations.
china literally "steal" talent from taiwan TSMC, of course they "progress" fast, it literally the same people
China would have invested in SMIC anyway, with or without sanctions. They consider semiconductors critical technology.
Did they do it with EUV or just more multipatterning DUV? If it's the latter then it's not anything particular to worry about or unexpected.
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So now we’ve reached the point where one AI needs to verify another’s step-by-step thoughts. Feels like the early days of code linters — only now it’s for reasoning chains. Honestly, not mad about it though… if LLMs are going to "think out loud," someone’s gotta fact-check the monologue.
A close friend of mine is Chinese. He went back to China to join a HW start-up as a founding engineer 6 years ago. Then cane the sanctions. He said that was the best thing happened when I recently met him. Their company grew because Huawei and all the other Chinese manufacturers don't want to buy anything from a West-aligned country anymore. Nobody cares about the sanctions anymore apparently as they accepted it as a given, so their focus is self reliance.
The impacts are different sector by sector. Those benefit the most are the small EDA software companies that barely survive before sanctions due to the huge technology gaps behind the large EDA companies like Synopsys. Now they have tones of new customers don't want to take risk of service interruption due to sanction.
It is called hormesis.
Time to sell nvidia shares?
The next moment I'd like to see is a mass 15-20A fab and suddenly making all the controls obsolete.
Strange that they'd ban EU via license but not US
EU has a nebulous AI act that prohibits a myriad things.
They are currently in a war with europe, but not yet US
They wanted to exclude EU reviewers for when publishing their paper to a journal. EU reviewers are notoriously obnoxious and often chosen to be reviewer #2.
The silicon valley should thank Huawei and Deepseek, as the only two reasons AI exists as an industry in US are (a) reduce labor cost (b) win over China.
(a) alone sounds super negative to ordinary people, but with (b), justified by the existence and achievement of Huawei & Deepseek, the AI cause now sounds a legit jihad silicon valley is carrying.
huawei's Ascend GPUs is the only choice for many chinese company for now. Huge win for huawei.
People on HN are so delusional it's funny.
The semiconductor industry is always a key industry for China. They laid it out in Made in China 2025.
Huawei designed and developed its own chip before any sanctions, and the Chinese government never stopped throwing money into the semiconductor industry.
In the short term, money can go to Nvidia, but it won't be long before China creates its own "Nvidia" like BYD.
The sad part is America elected Trump, and he's gutting American research and cutting out the CHIPS Act.
One country is going for the long term while another country is short sighted
Will the US also sanction countries buying Ascend GPUs*?
*) They're NPUs not GPUs, since they can't render graphics
Yes.
Huawei GPUs are illegal worldwide now, according to the US government.
Maybe we could write some code that we can use to use them as gp-npus (graphics-processing NPUs).
