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In August last year , a ban on Nvidia ’s chip export to Chinasent the country ’s budding artificial intelligence startup scrambling for alternatives . A momentary mother wit of relief came when Nvidiaunveiled chipswith reduced functioning to get around export restriction . But this respite was short - lived .
On Tuesday , the Biden administration announced a slew of measures to conquer Beijing ’s military ambitions , including a further restriction on Nvidia ’s AI chip shipments to China . A800 and H800 , the two AI chips Nvidia design specifically to bear on ship to China , will be hit by the fresh troll of new rules .
The chip bans are originally targeted at China ’s military usage , but the more visible victims are arguably the country ’s raft of startups riding the rapid advancement of big spoken communication models . Many of them rush to stockpile Nvidia ’s A100 and H100 before the bans went into effect , shelling out millions of dollars for the inflated costs . Alibaba , Baidu , ByteDance and Tencent jointly ordered $ 5 billion of A800 chips this year and the next , according to a report from the Financial Times .
Nascent inauguration , meanwhile , are driven to produce speculation Washington hastily to support their dear AI dreams .
An Nvidia voice say given the demand worldwide for the firm ’s products , we do n’t expect a near - term meaningful shock on our financial results . ”
“ We follow with all applicable regulations while working to bring home the bacon Cartesian product that back thousand of applications across many different industries , ” the interpreter said .
The U.S. cow chip bans have not block up Chinese giants from prosecute their AI ambitions . On Tuesday , Baiduunveiledthe previous version of its flagship foundation model , Ernie 4.0 , and claimed that it now matches GPT4 . To day of the month , Ernie has conglomerate 45 million exploiter , the party arrogate .
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The challenge of entering China ’s AI ruffle goes beyond increasingly limited semiconductor gadget accession . The rural area ’s regulation ask that LLM - based servicesobtain a license before process public users , a test of companies ’ government relation and their ability to navigate the red tape .
Ultimately , a shortage of gamy - end potato chip and the intricate nature of Beijing ’s censorship requirement created an environment for procreative business intelligence services to boom , as they require less computational superpower ( information sources are internal rather than the intact net ) and are relatively loose to control as prompts are more scenario - based . Qianfan , Baidu ’s enterprise - face AI platform construct on Ernie , has accumulate some 17,000 customers .
Added Nvidia comment on October 18 , 2023 .
China ’s AI firms might further lose chip access in novel US forbiddance
