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Shouldn't US intelligence already know about these GPUs ? You can fit 5000 GPUs on a standard shipping container with no special handling required. It should be trivial to smuggle 10 shipping containers for acquiring these GPUs. Scale.AI CEO is the child of Los Alamos researchers and deeply embedded within the US military industrial complex. If he knows it, then US intelligence knows too.
The panic is mostly among twitter speculators.
The R1 paper has 200 authors on it. By their own acknowledgement, they aren't small. Over 2023 Post-GPT4 OpenAI had around 400 employees, and most of these were product people. If R1 had 200 researchers, they'd be around the same size as an OpenAI with $10B in funding.
I was working closely with OpenAI as far back as 2021. Technically, tthey weren't that far ahead . They just executed so much better.
They discovered some incredible insights on the continued scaling of model capabilities with size and data. But, once you get that insight, you can't hide it (it's self evident from the model) and is easy to adopt for others in the field. Between Google's Palm 540B & Lambda 2021, the research community clearly knew all the secrets. Openai's other big innovation was the quality of post-training & rlhf, which made talking to it feel far more natural. The Palm models weren't bad, they were just too ADHD to stay on topic. That too wasn't a technical secret as much as an organizational secret. Back then, AI applied-research-2-product pipelines were quite immature at big tech. So, the institutional will power for something like this was lacking.
Alibaba was a major player during the pre-GPT LLM battle (yes, LLMs existed for a good half decade before). I'm more surprised that it took this long for China to catch up. On embeddings & cross-encoders, Beijing academy of artificial intelligence (BAAI) had consistently been state of the art. In Vision, they've been mogging everyone since Kaiming He published Resnet at MSR Asia (China) in 2016.
Yeah, I believe in China. Motherfuckers are cracked.
I think you can fit a lot more than 5000 gpus on a shipping container. Only the core is really needed; the Chinese have no problem buying memory chips or making VRMs and fans to turn the cores into boards. Those outer components are probably made in China or Vietnam already.
Also like 10,000 fairly durable easily stored items a lot easier to get around an embargo than millions of liters of oil
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There is also no requirement for them to be in China. The deepseek serverfarm could be anywhere in the world. It could also be distributed with a bunch of smaller clusters. The model can be trained on regular gaming GPUs. It would be more expensive but the sums are absolute peanuts for a state actor.
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Ah you're right. The rest of it is heat sinks and fans. You could fit a whole super-computing cluster on a shipping container.
Tbf it's probably easier to make full cards fall off the truck on their way to a distributor than batches of cores vanish on their way to board manufacturers. That part of the chain is watched closely.
The Chinese already have a huge scam infrastructure for pulling cores and returning the boards as broken. Lotta people getting the ol Chinese open box experience lol.
https://hardforum.com/threads/4090s-being-sold-from-china-containing-no-gpu.2032868/
This makes me think that they probably have to explicitly destroy the dies that fail QA lest someone nefariously sneak off with "failures" (either actual ones and derating them or falsely flagging failures). I've never worked on the manufacturing side of things, so I'm not sure what happens to rejects at most places.
If GoodSmile knows to destroy their molds once they're done making a figure to prevent them from being used to make counterfeits, then surely a blue-chip, uh, chip maker will know to destroy rejects and other unwanted material.
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