Alibaba Cloud says it cut Nvidia AI GPU use by 82% with new pooling system

The US attempt to slow down China's technological development succeeds on the basis of preventing China from directly following the same path, but may backfire in the sense it forces innovation by China in a different direction. The overall outcome for us all may be increase efficiency as a result of this forced innovation, especially if Chinese companies continue to open source their advances, so we may in the end have reason to thank the US for their civilisational gate keeping

History has shown that withholding technology from China does not significantly stop them and they'll achieve it (or better) in a small number of years.

In many senses there's hubris in the western* view of China accomplishments: most of what western companies have created has had significant contribution by Chinese scientists or manufacturing, without which those companies would have nothing. If you look at the names of AI researchers there's a strong pattern even if some are currently plying their trade in the west.

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* I hate the term "western" because some "westeners" use it to separated what they think are "civilized" from "uncivilized", hence for them LATAM is not "western" even though everything about LATAM countries is western.

> History has shown that withholding technology from China does not significantly stop them and they'll achieve it (or better) in a small number of years.

It's worked for a very long time for aircraft.

China has been pushing to build its own aircraft for >23 years. It took 14 years for COMAC to get its first regional jet flying commercial flights on a Chinese airline, and 21 years to get a narrow-body plane flying a commercial flight on a Chinese airline.

If for no technical reasons and purely political, COMAC may still be decades away from being able to fly to most of the world.

Likewise, in ~5 years, China may be able to build Chips that are as good as Nvidia after Nvidia's 90% profit margin - i.e. they are 1/10th as good for the price - but since they can buy them for cost - they're they same price for performance and good enough.

If for purely political reasons, China may never be able to export these chips to most of the world - which limits their scale - which makes it harder to make them cost effective compared to Western chips.

> If for purely political reasons, China may never be able to export these chips to most of the world - which limits their scale - which makes it harder to make them cost effective compared to Western chips.

Note that this happens at the same time the US is breaking up its own alliances, so as of this writing, there's no such thing as certainty about politics.

>the same time the US is breaking up its own alliances

This isn't happening. The US is driving a harder bargain with our allies. No one serious thinks anyone is walking away from alliances with the US.

Why the framing of alliances like it’s a boolean?

The question of “can we trust the American government” is now being asked more often. Existing alliances and new potential alliances face that question, whether or not you personally believe that they should trust America.

Even if no concrete actions are being performed with asking that question, the fact that question is even being asked is a major drop from where we were.

You're right, alliances are not boolean.

From the US perspective, we have been asking ourselves "can we trust Europe's military capacity" for a very long time and the answer (prior to 2025) was: NO.

With Trump on one side and Russia on the other, it seems like the answer has shifted to: MAYBE.