Nathan Lambert: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Just set context on the chips. What Nathan’s referring to is in 2020, Huawei released their Ascend 910 chip, which was an AI chip, first one on seven nanometer before Google did, before NVIDIA did. And they submitted it to the MLPerf benchmark, which is sort of a industry standard for machine learning performance benchmark, and it did quite well, and it was the best chip at the submission. This was a huge deal. The Trump admin, of course, banned, it was 2019, banned the Huawei from getting seven nanometer chips from TSMC. And so then they had to switch to using internal, domestically produced chips, which was a multi-year setback. Many companies have done seven nanometer chips. And the question is we don’t know how much Huawei was subsidizing production of that chip. Intel has made seven nanometer chips that are not profitable and things like this. So this is how it all feeds back into the economic engine of export controls. Well, so you’re saying that for now, Xi Jinping has not felt the AGI, but it feels like the DeepSeek moment, there might be meetings going on now where he’s going to start wearing the same t-shirt and things are going to escalate.…

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