Further quote:
"Compared with our initial baseline on the same hardware, we achieved a 3× improvement in end-to-end serving performance, reaching hardware efficiency and per-token cost comparable to mainstream NVIDIA GPUs. This demonstrates that Chinese chips can support frontier-model inference efficiently and economically at scale."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiSilicon#Ascend_910
https://medium.com/@huaweiclouddevelper/a-brief-introduction...
While I think China would always get to hardware self-sufficiency eventually, all export controls have done is (1) accelerate China's development, and (2) divert revenue that would've otherwise gone to NVIDIA/AMD/etc instead.
That doesn't mean by any stretch of the imagination Nvidia will disappear. But the entire stock market valuation, not just tech, has had me scratching my head for a while.
Curiously, there is not a single real CUDA competitor anywhere in the world. We almost had one with OpenCL, but all of the American stakeholders abandoned it right before the crypto/AI takeoff. All of which means that Nvidia sets their own margins, exploiting American investors and taxpayers while letting China avoid their dominance. So the American economy subsumes the bulk of Nvidia's arbitrarily-priced debt, and the Chinese economy can direct SOEs to pour billions in liquid cash into real GPGPU research.
I'm an American and I'm pretty fond of Nvidia, but Jensen was right about this policy; it gives China everything they need to actually replace CUDA. It's reminiscent of America's attempts to deprive China of ARM and Texas Instruments IP, only to end up swimming in unlicensed clones after refusing to sign an IP deal.
This isn't the kind of thing you can hash out in public and go back and forth on. Once you put it out there, the other party will take steps to make sure they don't have to rely on us in the long run.
Similar to the war-pricing of oil, China's reduction of imports is actually helping to keep our inflation from going even higher.
Zai is on another "export control" list outside the broader 1. Doesn't help.
And I don't see a situation where serious API payers are OK with handing the Chinese state all their data. Like manufactures of decades past did and learned a hard, even existential, lesson for it. The state mantra has been "Collect and Copy" for a long time now, tech just hasn't had that moment to experience it yet.
So that leaves local hosting/leasing, but one of those has totally non-practical economics and the other doesn't have enough compute to meet any kind of real demand.
I also have yet to meet a single person who isn't neck-deep in the tech space mention a Chinese LLM. It's 100% the big American three.
If anything it's custom chips from the labs that threatens Nvidia.
https://www.ft.com/content/32a70a3c-7d28-40b4-808e-36edb58c7...
Because I genuinely can't tell if you mean Google or SpaceX/X.ai lol.
xAI is already selling spare compute, and basically exists just to gas spacex's perceived valuation.
RAM was probably the bottleneck for the amount of context they were offering.
I assume it would run a little faster with lower concurrency but "RIP nVidia" is a little premature. The cutting edge inference hardware is amazingly powerful
When it first launched on OpenRouter I was getting nearly 70 Tokens/second.
Edit: Ah:
> This stealth model was developed and operated by ZAI, revealed to be ZAI GLM-5.3-Flash.
> Before release, we tested GLM-5.3-Flash anonymously as ox-alpha on OpenCode and OpenRouter to gather user feedback. It quickly became the most popular model of the week — with all of this traffic served on Chinese AI chips.
... I'm at a loss for words here. It was being served for free. To the entire world.
> ... I'm at a loss for words here
No need to be so dramatic. I think it's great that they're developing chips, but the whole "RIP nVidia" claim was overly dramatic.
Why is Luna not free on OpenRouter? :)
Nvidia will do just fine. (Disclaimer: not a shareholder. At least, not directly.)
Compared to the rest of the world?
Get a 210 strike put contract and if your thesis is that nvidias current 10 day slide continues you could make some money.
I'm sure the chips are fine, but they clearly didn't have enough capacity for the demand they had (that 100T/day claim was asbolute bs)
>> "They are already there on open weight models and Jensen knows that it is only a matter of time until China catches up with GPUs or other AI accelerators."
It is also why Nvidia becoming a bank for other AI companies who are unable to find VCs to fund them isn't really a good thing and that is bearish.
This announcement doesn't really mean anything at all. It means the very few people who are already using Z.ai's API will continue to do so, but the vast majority of money going to Nvidia is through the massive amount of business going to Anthropic, OpenAI, and other western cloud providers and inference providers, who are mostly using NVidia chips for inference.
Also, NVidia chips are still sold out and supply constrained.