It was illegal, and I'm sure if this comes to light there will be (major) repercussions, but I don't see it as an immoral move.

Cheating on your wife of 40 years OTOH...

You can say it was luck but it was definitely not "average".

Nvidia thrived because it paired great hardware with great software.

AMD and Intel think hardware is enough; it’s not. There’s a reason neither has ever been able to compete with Nvidia.

They have a giant ego, but I’d argue it’s probably well deserved.

Apple is/was similar. They also see that hardware without great software is useless. Spend as much; if not more on software to make your hardware shine.

Yeah, it pretty much does. CUDA is why they are positioned where they are. Other players like AMD and Intel could have done that, but they didn't, and if they had, they wouldn't have persevered for 10+ years with essentially nothing to show for it.

Whether CUDA will continue to maintain dominance is less clear. It may become a literal victim of its own success, as CUDA-based models gain the ability to migrate themselves to new platforms.

Let's assume for a second that the compromat story on Huang is true, how much would that have cost? It could be everywhere from 10k to 10m $, depending on how difficult it was to get access, but it would still be a rounding error for AI invest.

Chips aren't what maketh SI anyway. The US is ahead because of a trifecta of having the best (most) hardware, best data, and best talent. You might also throw in business culture. But the same way Google is leading from behind in the US AI eco system, China is behind the frontier on LLMs, but laying foundational work in robotics, multi-modal models and integrated factories that might prove a big advantage down the line.

If the US or China developes an AGI that can leverage RSI, the game is over. It is over in the same way that WW3 is over as soon as the missiles are in the air: it doesn't matter who has the fastest or highest yield missiles, because there is a finite amount of time before there is nobody left to care about the advantages of one side. Except at least WW3 is over in about an hour, whereas an AGI could take years or decades to complete whatever thing it has been misaligned to desire.

AI alignment research is still in its alchemy era, and global cyber security is underfunded and bad. As a species, we simply do not have the tools to deal with AGI that can self-improve.

An economy kept dependent on American tech is unlikely to drop bombs on America and vice versa. Co dependency prevents war.

No, they haven't. They spent the first decade after WW2 repairing the damage left behind by the Japanese and their Civil War. Subsequently they managed to starve tens of millions afterwards in several missteps, and then righted themselves.

They then spent three to four decades lifting about thrice the US population out of extreme abject poverty, and then in the last 20 years catching up. And catch up they have; they are already the leaders in green technology and EVs, already manufacture some of their own chips, already have indigenous military aerospace capability, which they are now expanding to civilian use. They make almost everything in the average household.

Suppose you want to build something that requires technical knowledge (a GPU, a fighter jet, ...). You have engineers, but they don't yet know how to build it.

If no one on earth has ever built this thing, you need to consider the possibility that it can't be done at a cost you can pay. Perhaps it violates some law of physics, or it can't be manufactured without knowing some chemistry/physics that we are 100+ years from discovering.

If a company in some other country is already building this thing, you can be sure it is possible to build it. That is a critical piece of information! It means you don't need to discover (much) new physics. It means you can buy/steal a working copy and look at it to learn about it. It means there are engineers you can hire/spy on to understand their design process. It means you can more easily convince a bank/government to fund development, as they have proof your goals are achievable.

Inventing a thing is much harder than inventing a clone of a thing. The idea that China doesn't have the people and organization to copy things other countries make is the opposite of Chinese Exceptionalism. It is the belief that the Chinese are uniquely incapable of engineering work. This is obviously not true.

The phrase is “fait accompli”, without a D, and is French for “accomplished feat”.

The ever closing gap between the capabilities of frontier models vs chinese open weight models.

That sanctions only harm the civilian economy is not an argument against them. Kinetic sanctions agains oil refining are also primarily impacting the general population and the military have enough oil. But they still impact the ability of the Russians to fund the war. Civilian infrastructure and economic assets are used by militaries too.