In the last three years, the United States has been working to reduce China’s access to top computer chips that have strengthened artificial intelligence systems. Its aim was to slow down the progress of China in the development of sophisticated AI models.
Now has a Chinese company Deepseek formed The very technology. In recent weeks, Deepseek has released several AI and Chatbot models, whose performance of opponents with the best products of American companies, all while using much less of the highly costly AI chips that companies usually need. At the weekend, Chatbot Deepseek fired at the top of the Apple App Store chart when people downloaded it all over the world.
Development has raised great issues regarding export controls created by the United States in recent years. Biden Administration has established a system of global rules and constantly expanded them try to maintain advanced AI technology – especially NVIDIA chips – from Chinese hands. They were concerned that technology would give China the advantage not only economically, but also military.
Deepseek’s development caused a hard debate on whether technological controls in the US failed. Here’s what to know.
Deepseek’s innovation suggests that Biden Administration could act too slowly to keep up with private companies that submit their inspections.
Deepseek said his latest model was trained NVIDIA H800S. This is the AI chip that has developed specifically for the Chinese market after the first export checks were stored, and this caused a large amount of drama in Washington.
When the United States sets restrictions On the most advanced nvidia tokens in 2022Nvidia quickly adapted to the creation of slightly reduced chips that fell just below the threshold set by the government. These chips were technically legal for Chinese companies, but allowed them to achieve virtually the same results.
This was angry with biden officials and they moved to limit the new tokens. But the government moved slowly and lasted about a year Disallow h800 and other reduced chips. Meanwhile, Chinese companies supplied many of them.
It is not clear how Deepseek acquired his NVIDIA H800, but it would be legal for the company to buy them at the end of 2022 or 2023. But now they would not be such purchases.
“You can’t control what’s already there,” he said Jimmy Goodrich, head of technology analysis in RAND CORPORATION. “If the biden administration responded faster and limited the H800 to China, there is no doubt that Deepseek would be more questioned in the elimination of this model.”
Deepseek also spent years building a chip device before the Washington checks were valid. Until 2021, Deepseek was one of the only handful of Chinese companies that received at least 10,000 NVIDIA A100, the advanced NVIDIA chip issued in 2020, according to 2020, according to Interview With Liang Wenfeng, founder Deepseek, in the Chinese media outlet 36Kr.
The US also tried to go smuggling chips.
There is no evidence that Deepseek used smuggled chips. But many Chinese companies AI have. Alexander Wang, CEO of AI training giant AI, said New York Times That Chinese companies had much more top chips than allowed the US to limit, and that Deepseek probably had about 50,000 NVIDIA Advanced H100 processors, “what they obviously can’t talk about.”
Nvidia and the US government claimed that the extent of smuggling was limited. But The Times last year He reported active trade in China in limited AI technology. On a busy market in Shenzhen, South China, chips suppliers said they were involved for sale, which includes hundreds or thousands of limited chips.
Representatives of 11 companies said they were selling or transporting prohibited NVIDIA chips – including the A100 and H100, the most advanced companies at the time – and times found that dozens of other businesses offer online. One retailer in Shenzhen showed reporters’ images that organized servers containing more than $ 2,000, NVIDIA’s most advanced chips, a transaction of $ 103 million.
Since More news Documenting of extensive smuggling appeared, especially in other countries in Asia.
Biden Administration has issued extensive regulation This month, he focuses on solving the problem of smuggling by determining the number of chips that Nvidia can sell every country around the world.
It remains to see what Trump’s administration will do about it. In President Trump in the shop signed the first day in the office, but ordered his officials to check the US export control system, including “how to identify and eliminate gaps in existing export checks”.
American controls seem to encourage Chinese ingenuity – but also clearly detained the Chinese development of AI.
It seems that American technological restrictions have accelerated the efforts of Chinese scientists to try to do more with less.
The most remarkable thing about Deepseek is that, according to the company, it has only been developed with a fraction of highly affordable chips that Western companies used to create similar technology. Deepseek engineers said they used only about 2,000 NVIDIA chips, while most top companies trained Chatbots using 16,000 chips or more. Nvidia shares he plunged up sharply On Monday, he is afraid that technology companies will be able to do top artificial intelligence in the future while paying NVIDIA much less.
Jeffrey Ding, a professor at George Washington University, who studies Emerging Technologies, said most global companies are using increasing amounts of computing power and data to improve the performance of AI. But Deepseek and other Chinese companies were “forced to go along this next journey to see if we can get good performance with lower training costs and less calculation,” he said.
The consequences of cheaper models such as Deepseek’s could be deep. With Deepseek, he openly shares the details of how he created his model, companies in China and around the world will be able to replicate their cheap approach.
This means that “it will be much cheaper and can be much less energy -intensive for anyone who will build and run AI, from us Hyperscalers to Midwest Small Businesses, North Korean hackers and the Russian army,” said Martin Chorzempa, older colleague from Peters’s Institute for the international economy.
Yet China would probably be much further in AI without export control. In the interviews, the founder Deepseek acknowledged that the lack of access to computing was a restriction for the company.
Unlike the American companies AI, Deepseek will not be able to legally buy the latest generation of AI chips that Nvidia is introducing right now, multiplied by the speed and performance of the previous chips.
“Anyone who is worried about what Deepseek can do today would be more worried if they did it with access to much better computing resources that American competitors have,” said Mr. Chorzempa.
Deepseek’s success suggests that the AI Silicon Valley leadership has shrunk, despite the efforts of Washington, to limit the Chinese approach to advanced chips. However, it is remarkable that Deepseek is still building his models on NVIDIA chips – not on the competing AI chips that the Chinese technology company Huawei is trying to develop.
Some Chinese computer engineers have suggested that the latest Deepseek model on a larger number of less advanced chips, including those created by Huawei, is much lower.
However, no Chinese company is still able to produce advanced AI chips that compete with NVIDIA, or create the type of complex machine needed to produce these chips. “The only advantage that the United States still has at the moment is hardware,” Goodrich said.
