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Soon after that the US has obliterated Chinese semiconductor industry. But yeah, I rather expected some novel activity from the Chinese side.
Yes, Chinese will never make a semiconductor again. (facepalm).
If by 'obliterated' you mean ensured China will develop a world class indigenous semiconductor industry, then that's a rather .. interesting meaning of the word 'obliteration'.
Shooting yourself with smaller bullets doesn't build up your bullet resistance, in the same way having your top talent move to the US and getting shut out of the entire modern supply chain is not a precursor to indigenous development, especially seeing as there are, apparently, <5 years left to human-level AI. The Chinese have had roughly 50 years to catch up; they're farther behind than they were under Mao, and they're immensely more isolated, and their leader is, frankly, a fool with wrong priorities and a charmingly naive idea of politics, which in his Marxist mind revolves around material profits (thus, hoping to just buy European tech because Westerners allegedly care about money and honor contractual obligations). They were making those noises about indigenous development for decades, and increasingly so in Xi's era, with those exact copes – now we truly know we must build our own supply chain, thanks for the wake-up call etc.; but there's a qualitative difference between a relatively harmless «wake-up call» and a knockout punch.
I've been following their work with waning interest and optimism, I guess in much the same way some American reactionaries follow zany Russian adventures in Eastern Ukraine or some anthropologist could observe an Amazon hunter-gatherer tribe try to reinvent agriculture. They have been making modest and fragile progress. Now their crops were razed by Gringos, their supplies were plundered, their chieftain is lost in the conversation with spirits, and they're in for a long and harsh winter. Or summer? Doesn't matter.
I suggest you read gwern here before facepalming at me further.
...Chinese are making 14 nm chips.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/14_nm_process
That's not that bad. Also, the whole thing with 'export ban'
What's going to stop people people in the turd world like say, Phillipines or Brazil mysteriously getting entire containers worth of GPUs getting stolen by unusually lucky & competent thieves ?
In theory, they have cracked 14nm. In practice, using DUV means they will, and already do, have very poor yield. Without access to ASMLs EUV machines, they might eek out a symbolic advance in some lab, but will not advance in any way that matters (ie, producing chips at scale, economically, which is what matters). ASML makes the most advanced lithography machines, and they are deeply dependent on a global supply chain, including firms from America, Germany, etc. AFAIK SMIC has followed Intel in doing 14nm with DUV, and is also having problems with it. Intel eventually started using EUV, though it's now lagging behind TSMC, and even having some CPUs fabbed by TSMC because they lag behind in their process. SMIC now doesn't have the option to buy EUV machines to even try transitioning to them. ASML is something of a system integrator like Boeing and Airbus. Replicating it means replicating all their suppliers, including leaders in optics, robotics, etc. How long will it take? And when they manage, how far will have the West advanced? China will not only be competing with the USA, but all the nations which in some form or another contribute to making the chip industry function. The USA, EU, Japan, UK, SK, India, Israel, and Taiwan, together have almost 2x population, are far richer, and have a good head start.
They're doing it on ASML's machines.
Also, if they physically have ASML machinery, and they presumably have all of ASML's internal documents, why should we think they can't reverse engineer it inside 5-10 years ?
Firstly, afaik China does not have EUV machines, but I'm not sure. What they surely lack is support from ASML. The machines are somewhat custom built for each customer, and companies don't just buy the things. They also buy maintenance, support services, etc.
Secondly for the same reason that if Putin had the design docs for 5th gen fighters and an intact model, Russia would be building 5th gen fighters any time soon. It's bloody hard, and requires a lot of rare expertise and tacit knowledge in multiple domains. It's not impossible, China has after all built things like planes. But it's really hard. And, as is, companies do not have state support for such a venture. The West won't stand still.
For a historical example, let's take Japan. Their government in the mid 70s organized it's 5 big players in the so called VLSI project, and granted them state support. They also had both a large domestic and export market for it's chips. They became a leader, at least for DRAM, for a time. Unlike China, where Xi is no mood to support anything related to computers, and I'm unaware of any big companies which might be able to pull it off on their own. Maybe the industry self organizes, and deals with this on their own. I would bet that they don't, at least for 4 years.
This is almost certainly not true. China sees AI as priority, you need computers for AI hence they're going to be supporting indigenous chip production.
AI has been noted as a priority in the most recent 5 year plan, but that is talk.
Chinese tech companies have been corralled and restrained, starting with Jack Ma and the Ant group. You might say that they aren't AI companies. This would be mostly right. AI hasn't had great success in being monetized in it of itself. Companies like Google and Meta can pay for research and large amounts of compute which need not be profitable by the way of their other businesses. Even OpenAI, is getting investment from Microsoft (as a former employee, I've talked to an intern working on fine tuning GPT3). The real estate bubble popping and the zero covid policy put more strain on tech companies in the midst of their humbling.
Let's look on the three things needed for AI R&D (besides money): data, compute, and human talent/capital.
China as a society gathers a ton of data. The state and companies collect a lot. The question is how much of that is available to researchers. Despite the Chinese advantage in data collection, most of human genetics research uses the UK biobank dateset. Researchers in firms like Alibaba and Tencent are bound to have some good stuff.
China has received a ban on buying advanced compute. It's domestic industry has been hard hit, and received no state support to keep them propped up. YMCA didn't get it's billion dollar deal with Apple to supply memory. On the design front, China has some companies. Their electronics industry in general is good and that includes design. I'm aware of Moore Threads designing GPUs, but haven't looked into other compute hardware (there was a x86 CPU a couple of years back, but that was in partnership with AMD, so it might be dead now).
China has a lot of good engineers, being an AI researcher and engineer is one of the most sought after careers due to the high compensation. That said, a lot of them, especially the very talented, head over to the USA.
As for money, tech companies are hurting right now, and I don't know the state of funding in academia.
Yes, AI needs compute. Where you're wrong is that the support for domestic chips ain't here. The companies are bleeding money and can't wait forever for state help. They're conducting layoffs as we write.
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