USA restricts Swiss access to AI computer chips(bluewin.ch) |
USA restricts Swiss access to AI computer chips(bluewin.ch) |
https://studios.disneyresearch.com/researchlab/disney-resear...
Meta, OpenAI and similar have made it through their action very clear that they:
- Want to abuse legislation to make sure no future competition can rise to rival them (When it comes to foundational models, close to all AI startups use fundational models from tech startups even if they speak of "having their own model" (which nearly always is just a minimal domain adaption of a foundation model from a US tech giant). OpenAI was very well open okay, or lets better say visible, about that
- Are not okay and will penalize any country with legislation which states you can't just train on copyrighted content without getting a license which allows training (i.e. it's not fair use, which it theoretically shouldn't be either in the US as it's in general trying to replace the people of which content they train on). E.g. various "open source" models from Meta aren't available in the EU and that was before export restrictions.
- Both have no access to influence US government decisions, so removing access from a Uni or even Country which tries to create their own foundation models. Which much less legal copyright issues. Is just kind of the natural consequence of giving tech giants which try to make sure they stay quasi monopolies to much governmental influence.
So I think if the US wouldn't be worried of EU then teaming up with China for ML compute ships the EU might already have been on the "reduced access" list. Or at least some key EU states which have understood how important it is to have a non US foundational model.
Through also to be fair Swiss "neutrality" is complex, and involves having decent political and trade relationships which any super power as far as relevant for them and viable (e.g. not really Russia anymore). Which includes China. This didn't prevent them to criticize China e.g. about Honkong but they are in discussions to improve trade agreements between them and China since last year (see Wikipedia).
So my guess is the main reason is to put pressure on Swiss wrt. future "improvements" of trade agreements with China.
But I think the points listed first still are something the EU has to highly worry about and they might have very well played a secondary role for this decision. You know like testing out the waters how exuding alleys from free chip access will be treated by other alleys.
Threatening with violence (over greenland) is something enemeys do. Not partners. Especially since denmark considered himself a close ally to the US. They are seriously reconsidering that part.
Now Trump being Trump it was of course mainly words to get a better deal. But to other parties, words have more meaning. So the long term effects are probably not beneficial to the US. Neither are moves like excluding Swiss from Chips. Now if the Swiss would have sold those to sanctioned countries - that might have been a understandable reasons. But like this, people are looking for new ways not involving the US.
At this point AI could absolutely be considered potentially threatening in the future.
This is regarding resale, right? IIRC pretty much every country does that?
That's a very poor case. Any country declaring itself neutral stops being neutral the moment it gets attacked by another country (see Belgium and Netherlands in WW2 when they declared themselves neutral but still got steamrolled by Nazi Germany anyway, and Ukraine today).
So then you won't be able to get any ammo or spare parts for those expensive Swiss arms you bought making them paperweights (again see Ukraine right now with it's Swiss Oerlikon AA guns on the German Gepards).
So why would anyone buy swiss arms then if the moment you actually need to use them to defend yourself you can't because the Swiss government puts an embargo on you?
https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/u...
This article falsely claims that "the US leads AI development right now". A very high percentage of research and implementers is from the EU, China and Russia (e.g., Sutskever).
First off, you need rare metals to make chips, so you need access to them. Then you need complex chip frabrication technology that a single company[1] in The Netherlands creates and owns. Then you need to build these incredible sterile and complex factories of which there are only a hand full across the global.
Or having built up a relationship to a country that can get you the chips that you can't manufacture yourself, either that country has a change of political system or a third country threatens you with sanctions if you continue to have dealings with that country.
It all seems to be built on shifting sources of silicon.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/24/asml-the-biggest-company-in-...
"Poland fumes over US block on AI chips" (114 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42778386
The US says "18 countries may purchase our AI chips", but what I understand is "90% of the world may purchase Chinese AI chips".
China just needs to infiltrate Taiwan, which is geographically and culturally closer than the US.
Well well well, who'd have thought!
3 months ago on "Italy stiffens terms of digital services tax in 2025 budget":
> I thought this was what was being implemented to fix that -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_minimum_corporate_tax_r...
> You can sit around and wait for decades until this might get meaningfully implemented, loopholes get closed and enforcement is strict. Great step by Italy to refuse that and just implement a measure in the meantime. Can always be repealed if indeed things get fixed on a global level.
They started talks about a free trade agreement under Trump, which was frozen under Biden.
However it does spoil the relationship and maybe the next time around when Switzerland is ready to spend 6B Swiss Francs on planes it won't be US made ones.
Additionally if Trump doesn't follow the agreed upon global minimum tax which Switzerland also bent over backwards for why would it do any such agreement with the US in the future?
People keep saying that DeepSeek R1's training cost is just $5.6M. Where is the source?
I'm not even asking for the proof. Just the source, even a self-claimed statement. I've read the R1's paper and it doesn't say the number of $5.6M. Is it somewhere in DeepSeek's press release?
Google just gives me a lot of medium articles and journalist sites. It sounds awfully like a number made up by some analyst and got parroting around. I've even seen people on X saying DeepSeek is "lying", while I can't even find what the exact DeepSeek's claim is.
"assuming the rental price of the H800 GPU is $2 per GPU hour, our total training costs amount to only $5.576M."
Note that's for V3, the base model; we don't know how much extra R1 cost to train.
CNBC: https://noagendaassets.com/enc/1737931632.132_cnbctechceosso...
I don't wanna do all the work, folks.
I don't understand the logic that deepseek somehow is a blow to GPU demand. If anything, more people will try to build on top of R1 style model now, it is only going to drive demand, for customized training.
DeepSeek has shown that you can achieve the same or better result on old hardware with less computing power.
You can't both deny an ally amo to claim neutrality while holding their enemies cash amo.
Russia’s Alpine Assets: Money Laundering and Sanctions Evasion in Switzerland.
https://www.csce.gov/press-releases/hearing-russias-alpine-a...
Anyhow I'm a big fan of accountability and I'm already seeing this phrase pop up.
Corporations are the legal structure that enables, creates and sustains modern life. Taxes reduce the amount of money that will be pushed through that structure. There are people who's entire worldly possessions were made by companies. It is a little more qualitative, but the people with the most and best corporations are typically the people with the most rapidly improving standards of living too.
Although it makes sense that people want to tax them, instituting a global minimum tax has always been a stupid idea. It is like mandating a minimum number of days people must not work, or that they have to ingest poison on. If anything there should be a global maximum tax rate. Leave countries the option to make the world better.
depending on your definition of what "the west" means
or it doubled down on what "the west" means, if you take different and in which case the EU is slowly moving away from "the west"
either way using "the west" to lump together EU+US+Canada+Australia+... seems to be becoming increasingly meaningless
Maybe old ones if this is what you are saying.
Through then if we are realistic both Taiwan and the US did take measurements to make sure the even if China attacks Taiwan and wins they aren't getting their hands on this tech.
Except Taiwan would have been not very clever if they didn't try to find ways to work around this, so that they are a lever to negotiate in case the US abandons them... (it's unclear if they did find ways tho).
Taiwan is China. Their official name is the Republic of China, and they're the remnants of the losers from the civil war that ran away go to an island and assimilated the locals. They still officially claim to be "the one and only real" China. For Americans, think it the Confederation ran away to Puerto Rico (assuming it used to be American before being occupied by Spain for a few years, before they went there) and was still there.
But today Taiwan is de facto independent. More and more of its people consider themselves Taiwanese, not "the real" China. Ideally, they should be left to self-determinate. Unfortunately China (PRC) considers itself to be the one and only real China too, and wants all of it. And it would consider Taiwan, with which it has a lot of bad blood (its former dictator literally preferred fighting the Communists over defending over the Japanese that were invading and committing mass atrocities; and he started all that with multiple purges of anyone left aligned), becoming "independent"/separate as a big humiliation. But they also know that any war will probably result in TSMC being sabotaged, so it might be all for nothing, economically. The question is will they risk it for "prestige".
This is a sever case of word nit-picking and misinterpretation.
When (western) people say China they mean "China (PRC)" _never_ Taiwan and pretending they don't isn't helping anyone.
And just because two countries have the same root in a civil war of a past now gone country which both claim to succeed doesn't mean they are the same country. Nor is today's China the same country as idk. China during the Ming dynasty. Yes they are political successor, yes they use the same name, but no they aren't politically the same country if we really nit-pick. I mean if they where then we also would need to treat Austia and Hungary as the same country. Or say the BRD (i.e. today's Germany) is the same country as the 3rd Reich, Weimar Repulic and the Holy Roman Empire of German Nation. They are all predecessors of Germany, Germany has to take responsibility for some of it's past predecessors, too. But they aren't the same country from a political nit-picking POV. Same for Russia and the UDSSR etc. etc.
And yes it's complicated as both countries still claim sovereignty over the territory of each other. But for Taiwan that is ironically more to appease China, i.e. dropping that claim would signal Taiwan trying to finally fully break away from China (PCR) which China would never allow.
I know, for example, that Motorola and Texas instruments know how to fab, and a dire shortage would be things like 680x0 and 6502 and 386 (see intel quark for the state of 386/486 processors a decade ago...) And ideally there'd be national RISC-V chips or something idk let's keep it fun.
Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Republic of Korea, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom.
So to your question, I think Switzerland wants to be considered as: someone's trade partner, generally yes (or maybe we call it "trade allies" now?), but not someone's potential ally in war. Military neutrality has always been the number one principle in the Swiss Confederation's foreign relations. If this now is supposed to be an unspoken economic sanction against Switzerland then is the message behind it: "Hey everyone, be our military ally or have nothing to do with us"..?
Neutrality is good for PR.
Depending on the canton, it is virtually impossible to become a Swiss citizen, even if you are married to a Swiss national and have been resident for ten years.
This is wrong.
> In 2023, 30,223 people applied for asylum in Switzerland, an increase of over 20% compared to 2022. The main countries of origin were Afghanistan, Türkiye, Eritrea, Algeria and Morocco.
https://ecre.org/aida-country-report-on-switzerland-2023-upd...
Compared to only 2,122 asylum applications from refugees in Denmark in 2023 overall.
Pretty much everything I know about Denmark is from watching Danish language TV on Netflix.
So, don’t feel so alone.
There's always gonna be demand for middle men to wash dirty laundry of various countries' deals that they prefer to keep secret so they can pretend to stay clean on the public scene.
European countries would do well to stop being so complacent and relying on US for high-tech and defense since the US never hesitates to flip the switch from "you're a valuable ally" to "you're our bitch, whaddaya gonna do about it?" whenever it needs to strong-arm you into complacency, and so the EU should invest heavily on having a competitive local defense and high-tech industry, but who am I kidding, this is always falling on deaf ears and nothing's gonna change.
Yes, I like this speech better with the von der Lyon accent, when I heard it a couple days ago.
This is exactly how it works in many European countries. By law, you can transfer a few vacation days to the next year (or have them paid out in some scenarios) but most of the time you’ll be strongly encouraged to simply use them all.
That's an absurd claim. There was no statistical evidence of any positive effect of lockdowns etc. on mortality: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5... "Rapid border closures, full lockdowns, and wide-spread testing were not associated with COVID-19 mortality per million people."
Similarly https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/hec.4737 :
"Using an event study approach and data from 43 countries and all U.S. states, we measure changes in excess deaths following the implementation of COVID-19 shelter-in-place (SIP) policies. We do not find that countries or U.S. states that implemented SIP policies earlier had lower excess deaths. We do not observe differences in excess deaths before and after the implementation of SIP policies, even when accounting for pre-SIP COVID-19 death rates."
The lowest mortality rates were in Africa, where governments did no intervention. Because the covid mortality rate was under 1% for anyone not very old or obese, and there aren't a billion very old/obese people in the world.
Covid response is still one of yhe dumbest most cruel over reactions done in modern time. And the response and its after effect ( including the increase in vax mistrust and inflation ) probably killed and will continue to kill more than the virus ever would.
Polio or smallpox response is a much better description for government necessity.
Covid response is why the extreme libertans are gaining so much support.
Without government response we would still have smallpox and our children would still face paralyzation by polio. Those are much bettet examples of how critical good healthcare and vaccines are and they are provided via governments.
All covid response has done is ruin trust and split us up. O credits to any government exeot Sweden. 1 country on the whole planet kept reasonably sane.
The governmental over reach nutcracker covid response, backed by hysterical reddit, twitter and facebook users, has brought the danger of preventable lethal diseases back on the table.
I have never seen so much mistrust in authorities, healthcare and safety information since the utterly incompetent c19 response and media coverage.
I still cant get over how MAGA rallies killed people but BLM rallies a week later somehow did not.
I even saw an article in Nature defending BLM rallies.
Buying old chips isn't related to deepseek what so ever, you can buy A100 also.
Chiang Kai-Shek's policy was to prioritize the fight against the Communists over the fight against the Japanese. He only agreed to a united front with the Communists against Japan after he was kidnapped by some of his own generals, who forced him to talk with the Communists.[0]
Also, otherwise, it's easy but not automated. Lots of foreigners get a Swiss passport every year.
Just like how it's no surprise that websites developed where everyone has the latest and grates fully loaded M silicon MacBooks also sufferer from horrible lack of optimizations because "it works on my machine" while being a stuttery mess everywhere else.
But there has been a long term suspicion in the AI community that the ultra expensive to compute and very expensive to run humongous LLM approach is a dead end, or at lest fully unnecessary (and as such monetary wise a dead end).
I mean think about it, the target crown jewel of AI was never to find ways to train on insane amounts of data, but to be able to get as good as possible results with only as much data as necessary but no more. Because for a lot of use cases there simply isn't that much data.
And from everything we know the structure of language is not so complex that you need this insane amount of data and model size.
It's just we worked around of problems by throwing more compute and data on it instead of solving them proper. Similar we try to reformulate any little-data use case by reformulating it in a way where we hope to take advantage of the mass "causal text" data modern foundational LLMs where trained on and fine tune and instrument the model using the "little data" of the use case.
But conceptually this is ... sub-par and non desirable. And sure that we made it work with this trickery is quite magnificent.
And sure this huge LLMs do more then encode language, they encode miscellaneous knowledge/data, too.
But a messy, hallucination prone, non properly updateable and potentially outright copyright or privacy law violating encoding of data...
So many systems already do use RAG like approaches to get supply the knowledge in a updateable much more well defined fore and "only" use the LLM to find the right search queries and combine things together into human readable responses.
In turn the moment we have small LLMs which still work well for language structure they likely will very reliable win through a lot of reasons (the ones mentioned above and they are also much cheaper) and that even through they are _way_ more complicated to use then "just prompting a LLM". But most advanced assistants are anyway already way more complicated then "just prompting a LLM".
Or in other words the technical breakthrough anyone (including OpenAI) would like the most (OpenAI: financially, as long as it's an internal secret) is one which eliminates the need for having the latest bleeding edge ML chip tech. And DeepSeek is seen by some as a signal that exactly such a change is going to happen. Also I have heard rumors (which I don't believe) that one reason for OpenAI to go non-open was because they realized that, too. And with cheap to run open models they would lose the competitive benefit of competition not being able to do from scratch training even if they want to.
So all the claims of DeepSeek R1's cost [0] is indeed bullshit parroted around...
[0]: https://www.google.com/search?q=deepseek+r1+training+cost
Sounds like you think that’s a bad thing (aka punishment).
By the way, the former is called “holidays” and is regulated by law in the majority of the world, the US is the odd one out. Even China has a 11-day minimum vacation policy.
And nobody forces people to take holidays. There are people who work two jobs, work on weekends, work over Christmas and founders that work 30 day months. All legal.
Pretending you're neutral while you're dealing with all sides is a very hypocritical definition of neutrality that people aren't buying.
That's the very definition of it though.
Strictly speaking, a lot of games really shouldn't be playable on the Steam Deck. Baldur's Gate III and Cyberpunk 2077 are both CPU-bound before reaching 60fps and can barely keep their head above 30fps running at 360p internal resolution. The Deck's saving grace is that it can tap into the same dynamic resolution mode that last-gen consoles depend on for consistent framerates.
You probably did not have to. Your employer could have simply paid you for your remaining days.
> and wanted to take much more/longer in 2025.
Again, you can do that. You can actually transfer your free days from year to year. This is not something the EU forbids so it may be dependent on how your country does it.
> Reasons like this are why EU is on a free fall.
It seems that the reason why EU is in a free fall, according to you, is your lack of understanding how things work.
I wanted to but I'm limited to max five days transfer. When the biggest player in eu does this, that's a sign of how things are in eu.
Did I hit a nerve? Here's more for you: most people in eu are fucking lazy, incompetent, have no vision, bureaucratic with no eyes on the outcome/goals.
Here's "its in no ones interest to break the bonds of global economy": https://noagendaassets.com/enc/1737931650.953_queenursulaind...
Working backward: https://noagendaassets.com/enc/1737672200.295_davos-queenurs...
I may have conflated someone else talking about defense at Davos this week with her speech(as). Apologies.
Only definition of Hodler seems to be: a true believer in cryptocurrency
Is there some secret project going on in Greenland? :-)