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

may backfire? it's a bit too late for that.

go to 2024, western labs were crushing it.

it's now 2025, and from china, we have deepseek, qwen, kimi, glm, ernie and many more capable models keeping up with western labs. there are actually now more chinese labs releasing sota models than western labs.

But they aren't keeping up

They are lauded for the ability to cost ratio, or their ability to parameter ratio, but virtually everyone using LLMs for productive work are using ChatGPT/Gemini/Claude.

They are kind of like Huffy bicycles. Good value, work well, but if you go to any serious event, no one will be riding one.

The downside of their efficiency and cost-ratio is that they undermine the circular economy of massive data centers, GPU sales, and VC money that is constructing an extremely wasteful bubble.