in principle they can produce 7nm chips, just not at a low enough defect density that the yield for the reticle-sized AI compute dies is good enough to ramp their production.
Unfortunately, I doubt that China will fail to mitigate the effects of defective chips. Adding noise to the weights is already used to, for example, uncover sandbagging.
China sufficiently progresses in domestic chip manufacturing that they move on to being able to produce their own 5nm and then 3nm chips without being left too far behind in power-efficiency.
Xiaomi already asks us to hold its beer while it tries to produce the 3nm chips. Hopefully for the USA, China could end up receiving the chips at an insufficient rate.
unless export controls sufficiently loosen or fail
China is already likely to openly buy NVIDIA-produced chips or to undermine the USA’s project by invading Taiwan. If I make the flawed assumption that China has no smuggled chips and forever increases its compute production five times a year (while the USA increases 1.5 times per four months[1]), then, as I tried to show in my severely downvoted post, the USA are unlikely to keep leadership by slowing down. What about the world without any flawed assumptions?
Unfortunately, I doubt that China will fail to mitigate the effects of defective chips. Adding noise to the weights is already used to, for example, uncover sandbagging.
Xiaomi already asks us to hold its beer while it tries to produce the 3nm chips. Hopefully for the USA, China could end up receiving the chips at an insufficient rate.
China is already likely to openly buy NVIDIA-produced chips or to undermine the USA’s project by invading Taiwan. If I make the flawed assumption that China has no smuggled chips and forever increases its compute production five times a year (while the USA increases 1.5 times per four months[1]), then, as I tried to show in my severely downvoted post, the USA are unlikely to keep leadership by slowing down. What about the world without any flawed assumptions?
The latter assumption is almost verbatim lifted from the AI-2027 forecast and didn’t take into account the USA’s potential weakness.