The Washington Post-Commerce Department moves to cut key supply lines to Chinas AI industry
October 17, 2023 4 min 696 words
这篇报道涉及到美国商务部采取措施限制中国人工智能行业的关键供应线，是拜登政府中国政策的一个关键举措。这一行动是在商务部长吉娜·雷蒙多的领导下推出的，旨在限制中国在高级人工智能技术领域的发展。雷蒙多指出，这些规定的目的是削弱中国军事领域的发展，尽管她承认这将对商业产生广泛的影响。人工智能是一项双重用途技术，既对下一代军事系统至关重要，也对现代经济中的关键民用领域，包括消费电子、医疗保健和教育，具有重要意义。 这一举措显示出拜登政府试图限制中国获得一些关键技术，以阻止其赶超硅谷，尽管在其他领域寻求稳定与中国这一美国最大贸易伙伴的关系。其中，高级芯片是华盛顿出口管制的重点，因为它们是尖端计算系统的核心，包括大型语言模型和其他高级人工智能应用程序。 这一新规定是拜登政府一年前宣布的针对中国的芯片出口规定的备受期待的更新，这些规定曾是该政府最激进的措施。然而，一些华盛顿人士呼吁更严格的监管，称先进的美国芯片制造技术仍然通过漏洞传递到中国。在中国科技巨头华为上个月发布了一款含有国产制造的5G七纳米芯片的智能手机后，对加强控制的呼声更加响亮，而美国的出口管制旨在阻止中国制造这种芯片。 报道中也指出，政府官员承认，要阻止中国军队获得先进技术并不容易，因为这可能对国家经济产生更广泛的影响。这表明了人工智能和军事应用之间的复杂关系，以及在这个领域取得平衡的重要性。 美国半导体行业对商务部的新规定提出了批评，警告表示，加强规定可能会加强中国寻求建立替代美国技术的决心，同时可能伤害美国半导体生态系统，而不会提高国家安全性。这反映出了在制定这些政策时需要考虑到多方利益和全球供应链的复杂性。
2023-10-17T02:09:05.286Z
The Commerce Department is set to announce Tuesday a raft of new export controls aimed at slowing China’s development of advanced AI technologies, a key plank of the Biden administration’s China policy.
Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said in a late Monday briefing that the rules were aimed at hobbling advances in China’s military, even as she acknowledged they would have broader commercial impact. AI is a dual-use technology that promises to be critical for next-generation military systems — but also for key civilian sectors in a modern economy, including consumer electronics, health care and education.
“Artificial Intelligence is probably the most obvious example of the kind of transformational technology that we have to assess and control,” Raimondo said. “It’s true that AI has the potential for huge societal benefit. But it also can do tremendous and profound harm if it’s in the wrong hands and in the wrong militaries.”
The Biden administration wants to limit China’s access to some critical technologies to try to prevent it from catching up with Silicon Valley, even as it has sought to steady relations with China — the United States’ largest trade partner — in other areas. Advanced chips are a focus of the Washington export controls, as the brains of cutting-edge computing systems including large language models and other advanced AI applications.
The new controls represent a highly anticipated update to the Biden administration’s chip export rules for China announced a year ago, which had been the administration’s most aggressive measures. Yet some in Washington called for heavier oversight, saying advanced U.S. chipmaking technology was still filtering to China through loopholes.
Calls to tighten the controls grew louder after Chinese tech giant Huawei Technologies unveiled a smartphone last month that contained a domestically manufactured 5G seven-nanometer chip — an advanced brain that the U.S. export controls were meant to prevent China from making.
Administration officials acknowledged that it would be difficult to prevent the Chinese military from accessing the advanced technology without broader ramifications for the nation’s economy.
“Now I can’t say that there’s not going to be some slowdown in Chinese capability around artificial intelligence at that high level that could possibly be used for goodness,” a senior administration official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity in a briefing ahead of the announcement. “But we have to focus on the national security implications there. Large language model applications or military applications can be very risky for the United States and its allies.”
China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson, Mao Ning, criticized the prospect of tighter U.S. chip restrictions on Monday and said China would safeguard its interests. “The U.S. needs to stop politicizing and weaponizing trade and tech issues,” she said.
The United States dominates the global chip industry, with Nvidia the world’s leading maker of GPU chips used to train AI models, Qualcomm the top vendor of smartphone processors, and Intel the strongest developer of PC chips. China is investing heavily in an effort to narrow the gap. Analysts say Huawei makes the best Chinese alternative to Nvidia’s AI-training chips, though its production scale has been limited.
Huawei Rotating Chairman Eric Xu said in a speech in 2018 that the company believed AI would be a new “general purpose technology,” joining the ranks of the wheel, electricity, automobiles and the internet as technologies that fundamentally transformed mankind, with broad spillover effects. Western economists have previously posited 25 general purpose technologies.
Xu said in the speech that cheaper, abundant access to computing power was a necessity for rapid advancement in AI, and the limits of this supply were a key factor restricting the pace of its development. “At the current technical level, it takes days or months to train complex models,” he said.
The Commerce Department’s new rules drew criticism from the U.S. semiconductor industry, with executives warning that the tightened rules could intensify China’s resolve to build alternatives to U.S. technology.
“Overly broad, unilateral controls risk harming the U.S. semiconductor ecosystem without advancing national security as they encourage overseas customers to look elsewhere,” the Washington-based Semiconductor Industry Association said in a statement.