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Notes -
The Nvidia H20 exports ban is back on?
Lets recap. DeepSeek stuns the world by dropping a model almost as good as SOTA models while flexing incredible performance gains through cunning Chinese hacking. It's revealed they used lower end H20 GPUs vs the more decadent A100 / H100 / B100 class chips that fat American programmers use. Thusly, the US moves to ban exports of H20s as well.
Except last week, on April 9th, following the news of Jensen Huang dropping a million bucks at a Mar-a-Lago dinner with Trump, the ban is apparently lifted, stunning all China hawks in the country (and AI safetyists) and demonstrating that Trump will sell out his country to fucking China for a $1 million donation.
But today, Nvidia announces the export ban is on. And ... apparently was never lifted? The market reacts and knocks them down a few points.
What... happened? Checking back, it seems the only source for the news that the H20 ban was lifted was "two unnamed sources" reported by NPR.
https://www.npr.org/2025/04/09/nx-s1-5356480/nvidia-china-ai-h20-chips-trump
Weirdly, neither the USG nor Nvidia commented on it.
Can we read into the fact that since neither party commented on it, lifting the H20 ban was actually on the table? Was this leaked by one side to put pressure on the other? Was it a trial balloon? Or do we even trust that NPR actually reached out for comment like they said they did?
So two anonymous sources, whom they don't seem to have checked were legit, made them run a story that had everyone believing something to be true that wasn't. Or might be. Or could be true, or maybe it's false.
Do we call this fake news or not? I'm a lot more angry about the lack of fact-checking than any political manoeuvring here, I'm not going to say NPR is anti-Trump because I don't know one way or the other. But this kind of rumour-mongering is not helping any of us trust the media, or find reliable sources of factual information.
So right now we don't know if 'millionaire businessman pays bribe to get government policy reversed' is true or false or somewhere in Schrodinger's middle where it might be true until it got found out, or maybe it was false because two chancers fooled a news outlet.
At this stage, I think the media should put the kibosh on stories relying on "sources who can't be named", because they're only tabloid-fodder level reliable the same way you see stories about "close friends of Harry and Meghan say that Camilla tried to poison her with ricin at the last family dinner" trash clickbait.
I would say that NPR leans strongly anti-Trump, and is willing to perform standard journalism misrepresentation/spin/story selection in line with that. Outright falsehood creation using fake sources? Probably not.
Creating fake sources is generally out of style, but using fake sources- which is to say, giving attention, focus, and treating suspect sources as credible is on-brand.
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