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H1Bs now require a $100k payment per year (I believe, seeing some remarks saying it might be per visa) to the government due to Donald Trump executive order, plus if you are currently overseas and hold a H1B you need to pay $100k effective immediately on your next entry into the USA if you are not within the country by the 20th of September.
As a foreign non-Lawyer I don't know how effective this is going to be/liable to be immediately derailed in the courts, but I do think it's a positive step towards ensuring skilled immigration is used for the genuinely effective instead of ye olde 'I can import a foreigner who I have more power over at a 10% discount rate to domestic workers'. I'm also deeply skeptical of the 'productivity' of the vast majority of tech H1B hires and wish them the best of luck in attempting to offshore the competencies required to make AI-powered Grindr for Daily Fantasy Sports
This is an annual $100k fee, it's basically telling H-1B applicants they aren't welcome in the US as nobody is going to pay that much extra. Plus it's going to destroy the US international student college market as outside the very top schools a big part of the draw is a chance to work and stay in the US after graduation and nobody outside of Citadel etc. will pay $100k per year in fees for a new grad.
Good boon for the UK/Canada though as it means that instead of American companies hiring in the US they'll instead offshore the jobs and hire here instead. The country can generally do with some of the over inflated US salaries coming over here too.
I feel the US will regret this 10 years down the line, much like how they are now regretting limiting Nvidia sales to China forcing them to build their own homegrown system.
I am a Canadian and I do not want more any Indians. India has plenty of Indians and, well, look at her. Any benefit they would bring is diminished by fraud, nepotism, and making my country more like their country.
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What? This is not happening unless there is very new news. China's home grown system is still much worse.
FT article this week: https://www.ft.com/content/8fd79522-e34f-4633-bc87-ef0aae2d9159
Archive link: https://archive.is/UKulo
Good on them for building it, but if you read the article you would see that the DUV tech they are testing is years behind the latest EUV stuff, and it will still be years before it is up and running.
EUV is a whole different beast from DUV and who knows when China will have one ready.
Well this article just also came out: https://www.ft.com/content/db286a0a-ca2d-4791-809e-c9a1ac73b8ad
Archive link: https://archive.is/jSRNH
The whole feeling that China has come out on top here isn't on the basis of a single article or anything but rather a more latent sentiment shared by many that the US through their actions delved too greedily and too deep and now have awoken something best left sleeping.
Hello derail. You specifically posted the previous article arguing about the effects of chip sanctions. And I said that your argument was bs.
The chinese tech sector is doing fine but that's pretty much irrelevant. If you read the exact article you just linked:
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Yes, they continue to try and play catch up, what I'm definitely not seeing is the regret for making them do that rather than just giving them the more powerful chips. Lack of access to nvidia chips is demonstrably slowing down their AI progress.
What is the end goal here? Or any goal?
OK, you're slowing them down alright. They will not have as capable models, as quickly or cheaply, in the next 4-6 years. Then what? Is this just banking on an AGI superweapon to make economic dimension irrelevant, or on the windfall from economic growth this is supposed to beget? Huawei is superior in networking equipment, China has an overabundance of energy and skilled labor, if they scale up production of even past-generation compute chips (and mainly HBM), they will have a fully adequate and incompatible domestic ecosystem and Nvidia and others will never reenter their market, and American slice of it will be that much smaller.
If China has the ability to leapfrog Nvidia and other western AI tech, they're gonna do it irregardless of any sanctions on chips. Like of course they are going to try.
What networking equipment? 5g or something else?
5G/6G is not very relevant to this issue, but they have extremely advanced datacenter network architecture and their new systems are based on it. This will allow them to cope with lower performance of individual chips.
This is not true. People act like "China" is a perfectly coordinated single entity, a game of Factorio Xi plays, but it's still a country with different economic actors. If Huawei can't sell their crap because everyone in China who is actually good at AI uses CUDA and Nvidia hardware (like, again, DeepSeek), Huawei will not improve as rapidly. Subsidies in isolation cannot replace organic ecosystem support, they just prolong the agony, and at the current level not even China can subsidize the development of the entire supply chain, it's to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars.
Cool paper but it seems to be a way to achieve similar perf while spending less money on switches. I'm not gonna call it a nothingburger but I don't think it's a huge deal. Also seems to be something that would happen irregardless of the state of compute chips.
China can sell their crap airplane and the airlines don't dare not buy it.
Of course China is not a single entity, but its well within the government's capability and desire to force players to take economically inefficient decisions.
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In the pessimistic view you seem to hold, maybe the horse will sing. In the optimistic view, then nothing and China never catches up to the western SOTA.
Let's turn the question around. We let American companies sell chips to America's geopolitical rival for less than 4-6 years until, apparently, indigenous Chinese capabilities match American capabilities, at which point China tells Nvidia to GTFO. We benefited our rival for... What? A few quarters of sales for a couple of firms?
Your inclination towards China makes it hard to take seriously your opinion on how America should conduct itself with China.
Do you realize that the entire windfall from Trump's tariff nonsense would be an order of magnitude less than those quarters, even as it destroys similar value (hundreds of billions)?
It seems Americans aren't happy with this whole concept of trade anymore. If they buy foreign stuff, that's bad because they're losing dollars, gotta reindustrialize and implement tariffs. If they're selling stuff to foreigners who aren't completely inept and subjugated, that's also bad, because then those foreigners may develop and get richer, and for an American, the world is zero-sum, so the only Deals Americans are now willing to make are that which make the other party poorer, like the humiliation rituals you subject "NATO allies" to. Trump's rhetoric around coercing South Koreans and others to "invest" (he apparently understands FDI in very childish terms, "they give us moneys because they're our bitches") completes the picture.
Yes, I admit this makes me even more sympathetic to China.
Yes? You'll never catch me defending the tariff retardation.
The world is positive sum. Abetting your enemies, however, is likely negative sum. At any rate, it's negative for you.
Yes, this is also retarded. Two retards don't make a right.
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Do I really need some kind of special reasoning to oppose sending scarce resource that already sells out in western markets to a geopolitical rival to not only not direct gain but very straightforward direct losses to domestic firms? To sell our opposition the rope it needs to hang us is something a particularly short sighted firm might advocate for, but to do so below market rate? This is madness.
This lock-in effect is just nonsense and has not worked for literally a single firm that has sold out to china. China is not going to forego building their own echo-system and hasn't for any other sector they've found strategically important.
It's banking on the certainty that surrendering our major advantage in the AI race to china for no reason or gain will turn out badly for us, obviously. I can't even fathom how a thinking person could convince themselves otherwise. You've already highlighted their advantages, is your position that the race is already over despite us currently being ahead?
This has always been the goal and the chips would only be used to push towards this goal faster. Our one chance at dominance in this sector is remaining ahead in AI and reaping compound interest on that lead whether it's AGI or simply accelerated AI and chip development. If it's not enough then I just don't buy this fantasy that selling out now is going to give us a better seat in the future.
This is pretty asinine. You're defending export controls with the claim that their absence would… distort markets? Do you think that's what Nvidia is trying to do, sell GPUs below market rate, despite having an unsaturated domestic market that would generate higher margins? Why do you imagine they would hurt themselves like that? Might it be time to install some loyal apparatchiks on board, or do a little witch hunt for Communist agents?
As I've said before, "China" is not omnipotent and cannot create an ecosystem solely through political will and subsidies, they've been trying for decades and it hasn't been working so long as Nvidia was the obvious superior choice. Even now, nobody wants to use CANN if afforded the chance. I think this is how Jensen views this: he's straightforwardly fighting as the CEO of American company Nvidia, not just for line going up in quarterly reports but for enduring global dominance of his stack.
Are you avoiding the question, or does it not parse for you?
I think that to discuss whether "the race" is over, it's important to establish whether a race is happening and what it is that you are racing towards. The US is ahead in AI. Again, without American chips, China will be developing AI slower for the next few years. Is that a "race"? What happens when you reach the finish line? Don't huff and puff, say concretely. Do you build an AGI superweapon that disables their nukes with nanobots? Or what? What's the end goal, in the face of which every thinking person would deem hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars of profits a mere short-sighted distraction? Can you spell it out?
Not enough for what? Like, what's the theory of victory here? Repeating the Great Divergence, now with automation, relatively growing so quickly that China is forever left in the dust? Lights-out factories spawning across the US, producing ungodly goods optimized by AGI, incomprehensibly advanced weapons systems, Pax Americana becoming permanent?
How likely do you think that is? And what happens if this doesn't work out?
I think the answers are basically "yes/likely/better not to think of this", and personally, I believe this is all deluded and very much in the spirit of last days of Nazi Germany. Both sides will have adequate AI to increase productivity, both will have "AGI" at around the same time, you're not going to have some dramatic inflection point, you will not leave them in the dust as a military or economic power, you'll just slow down global economic growth somewhat, and in the long run end up poorer and have a smaller slice of the global market. That's all.
You'd have to ask Jensen Huang why he's so hungry for demand despite not saturating the domestic market. The traitor, the treasonous little worm, is fighting bills that merely demand he offer the chips to domestic buyers for the same price. His public logic is the same short sighted nonsense of a "toehold" that you propose. This is a man who lies through his teeth at every opportunity. He claims that selling chips to China won't reduce chips available for western markets, this is a lie, in his earning report he very clearly says they already sell out of the chips.
China is already exerting the maximum amount of demand and political pressure it can to try and compete on chips. The internal market demand is irrelevant. The government will guarantee every chip is sold and prop up all the companies making them. Whether or not AI labs can use NVDIA hardware has zero actual influence on the development of their ecosystem. Hardware "lock-in" on these labs is an entirely made up concept.
Specifics could shake out a number of ways depending on where, whether and how you think AI will Plateau. In all cases besides it basically capping out at gpt-5 level dominance in this field is critical. If it is powerful enough to actually do high level engineering work then it instantly obviates China's other major advantage in having a big workforce. If it scales all the way to AGI then forget about it, winning that race is all that matters.
Winner gets to be the center of commerce and yes some latitude that comes along with having the most powerful military. These things come with social and political influence. Social and political influence that I think is better in the hands of democratic powers, as flawed as they are, than the autocratic CCP. We know what PAX Americana looks like and it looks pretty good actually. Billions rising up out of poverty. General spread of democratic institutions. And we know who Xi is allied with, nations like North Korea and Russia.
I'm happy that the Chinese people are prospering. I certainly don't want to take that away from them. But CCP dominance hasn't even been particularly good for them. China is host to the poorest and least prosperous Chinese people in the world. It's not a regime I would like to see replicated and given strength and more than Soviet Russia was a regime I would have liked to see replicated and given strength. surely you understand the "equals across the sea" isn't an option on the table. That isn't what is in store if we give up all our advantages in this sector.
China will take the chips, use them to accelerate their position, including in advancing their own semiconductor industry. I don't know how you could actually believe giving them the chips now would actually guarantee a slice of this market. As soon as China has even slightly competitive chips they will crumple up NVDIA and toss it out like so much garbage. It's what happens with every firm that tries to compete in China.
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AFAIK last week or so the homegrown system seems to have taken a leap but I'm not sure if it's huge.
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Canada is a US vassal state. We can totally access intellectual capital by just quartering it there.
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Large enough US companies will still be able to access intellectual capital by hiring them in Canada and Europe offices instead of bringing them into the US. If you can't import the world's talent, the advantage to doing research and development in the US declines significantly.
This policy change mostly benefits American professionals like doctors who can't do their job remotely. Good for them, I guess.
US doctors are already overpaid, they get all the luck while our NHS doctors languish on ~£50k (only hitting £100k when they become a consultant 10+ years after qualifying). At least UK doctor's aren't hit with 6 figure debt though.
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How many of those H1-B applicants are Ramanujan level intellect and how many are ChatGPT3.5? That is the question.
This reasoning applies to some of the other changes. It might even apply to a $100,000 one-time fee. But it doesn't apply to a $600,000 fee; that's high enough to kill the program almost entirely.
(Though it's been reported as a $100,000/year fee, it looks to me like it's a $100,000 per ENTRY fee, which would be less damaging to the program but pretty harsh on the H-1B holders)
If it's a per entry fee it's probably the most retarded policy the US government has had this year, and that's saying something given RFK's antics.
I dunno, it's up against some pretty stiff competition. I think the ChatGPT generated tariffs are still worse.
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Didn't you get a 6-month ban for going nuts over a story that was totally made up?
Two months, it was only two months, and it was reported by the Guardian so I believed it, which is seen as a generally trustworthy source here in the UK (other than the FT it is the paper I regularly read).
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"We need to outcompete China in tech, how do we do it?"
"Import 10 million Indians?"
"The UK and Canada are already doing that, is their tech sector doing really well compared to ours?"
"Uh, not really."
"What about China, are they importing tons of Indians to compete better against us?
"No, not really.
"Got it, import 10 million Indians"
Especially when vast reams of the service economy can be credibly accused of not actually 'doing anything' so this immigration is mostly taking over do-nothing dotages better reserved for natives than for people from overseas incentivized and equipped to be the ultimate Immigration KPI maximizers.
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Any reason this is a boon for the UK and Canada instead of the Indian domestic economy? Surely these geniuses will flourish when given an opportunity and motivation to build domestically.
Have you seen subcontinental domestic economies? If these people were actually given they full opportunities they deserve and are capable of actualizing then the subcontinent would be at least China level today, instead [redacted because I don't want to get banned immediately after coming back].
Failing to build in your own backyard and then bailing to go and snipe make work rentseeking fake jobs in the West is not good praxis.
Plus what is 'deserve' in this statement.
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The reality is that India is fundamentally broken, in thrall to a legitimate but dysfunctional democracy that serves the interests of the agricultural peasant class, lower and backward castes, tribal people and resentful minorities over the middle and upper classes, who are a small minority.
I don’t believe truly universal suffrage is viable in a country where almost 50% of the population still work in agriculture. Until 1900 fewer than 20% of the total American population voted in presidential elections, in part because even many who could vote didn’t. In India it’s around 45-50% iirc, similar to Western countries. (Around 650-700 million votes cast in the last election).
The problem with India is that emigration acts as a pressure valve on the domestic middle and upper classes. They leave instead of overthrowing the system. To save India, they must overthrow democracy, re-assert the whip hand over the peasants, abolish the perverse system of reservation, abolish price floors in agriculture, consolidate small holding farms (brutalizing any peasant farmer resistance, which they have caved to every time so far) and embark on the kind of infrastructure development projects China did two generations ago.
But that seems like a lot of work when you can just go to America and be a doctor or engineer and have a nice comfortable life. India is probably the biggest example of the failure of democracy in human history.
Well just due to population size India is the largest example of lots of things.
Argentina is possibly a more cartoonish example of democracy failing. Maybe south africa too.
Argentina had as many problems as a dictatorship, I think the cause is the urban-rural setup, the first period of deglobalization after 1914, the constitutional structure in terms of regional/state authority and some cultural issues, plus some other things.
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South Africa worked quite well as democracy prior to 1994
The democratic victory of the national party in South Africa after the depression arguably led inexorably to its state failure decades later.
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Even under apartheid, SA was not a particularly well run state, with significant corruption issues and lack of full control over large portions of its territory.
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I'm gonna bet that if the fee survives the courts, all 85k h1b slots are still going to be filled even with the 100k fee. Just that those spots will go to the best and not to the slop.
Good riddance. Tuition is insane as it is, and maybe supply and demand will kick in and reduce prices for Americans since demand is down.
It seems to be a 100k annual fee - some of the slots will be filled, but it seems kinda doubtful that all 85k of them will be. I'll take the flip side of your bet.
Even odds, $100 goes from loser to charity of opponent's choice, bet conditional on h1b fee actually happening for a full year and at least 60k of those 85k visas actually paying the fee? i.e. if there's a "$100k fee except for this category of applicants where the fee is waived" and 90% of the visas go to people in the waived category nobody pays, if courts strike down visa fee nobody pays, if visa fee is live for 2 weeks then walked back nobody pays (unless 60k people pay the fee during those two weeks in which case I pay).
Sure, those terms seem fair
Alright, reminder set
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I think you have that backwards. International students are subsidising native students. For cost to come down other things need to happen. University services, wages and administrative bloat needs to be reduced.
One might still believe you have little to gain from them and that they might be bad in some other way (culturally or a security threat).
I know universities themselves claim otherwise, but it's absolutely absurd to believe that native students cost the school more than the tuition they bring in.
Their books are open, right? What is there to disagree about here?
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International students are subsidizing (superfluous) university services, wages and administrative bloat. I don't think native students see much benefit from the money at all.
So you think that, in a budget crunch scenario, the administrators are going to fire their fellow administrators (or, even more risible, their reports that give them clout in the organization) rather than doubling down on the existing sliding scale of tuition and soaking the families at the top even more?
No? I don't think I said that? I'm sure the admins, like all useless bureaucrats, will cling to their gibs until the bitter end, even if it means completely hollowing out the educational mission of the university.
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Uh, native students are the ones mostly demanding the better food, fitness facilities, nicer dorms, DEI offices, etc.
Tell me more about that, because when I was in college I didn't demand any of that. I wanted cheaper textbooks and affordable housing close to campus. I went to local restaurants or cooked at home. Our gym was a little old, but it was fine. I don't recall any student protests demanding fancies facilities. Maybe that's a common thing at other universities that I'm just not aware of?
They're not "demanding" it by protesting, they're demanding it by choosing to attend one university over another and therefore sending tuition dollars to one university instead of the other one. It's demand in the economic sense, not the political sense.
Okay, that's fair. I suppose I might be typical minding. I think I am considerably less nerdy/autistic than many users here (no offense meant, I just mean that I'm a socially integrated normalfag) and even I based my choice of college mainly on (1) the fact that it had the field I was interested in, (2) that it wasn't located in an inner city shithole, and (3) that they gave me a fat scholarship.
I've often heard hat new stadiums/cafeterias/fancy dorms are built to "attract students" but I do not personally know anyone who compared universities in this way. Even the 100 IQ normies at my HS who you would expect might care about that stuff were much more interested in whether a particular school had a good "party school" rep, whether their bf/gf was going there, or whether it was the "correct" school for their family sports fan dynasty (I lived in the southeast). I do not recall once ever hearing about the quality of the dorms or gyms.
However! If I were an unscrupulous admin trying to expand my bureaucratic power, this seems like a really convenient argument to make. "We need 50 million dollars for a new gym to attract students to Foobar State! If we don't build it, students will choose University of Foobar instead! We can't fall behind!" And all the other admins have grifts of their own and know how to play the game, so I doubt anyone would stand in the way except to try to grab those funds for their own power expansion ("We don't need a gym, we need to expand and renovate student housing!")
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Superfluous university services etc. that I strongly suspect are mostly demanded by native students. I almost never saw the sort of full-paying Chinese MA students we are presumably talking about use the Disabilities Office, array of mental health and well-being counselors, glitzy sporting facilities or even useless subjects (as they generally come in to get CS and engineering degrees rather than Africana Studies).
You might entertain some hope that the whole system will collapse without their money or native students will be less likely to study useless things if it gets even more expensive, but something something the system staying irrational for longer than you stay solvent. I think ballooning college costs in the US would drive down the birthrate/make reproduction more dysgenic (as more parents decide that they couldn't afford to send a(nother) kid to college and the status drop for themselves and the putative kid is unconscionable if they don't, plus higher college debts delaying ability to settle down) sooner than they would actually drive down college enrollment.
I didn't say international students were demanding shiny facilities and more administrators, I'm just saying that the money from international students most likely goes towards increasing bloat and add more irrelevant facilities. Does a university actually NEED a state of the art massive gym complex or sprawling student union center? These always seemed like make-work bureaucracy expansion projects to me. More facilities = more employees = more admin. At least football can be justified as pulling donations from alumni. Certainly none of the money goes to making education cheaper or better (cheaper books, higher prof salaries, more profs to decrease class sizes, etc).
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At my local university, they are absolutely taking advantage of this particular office, to the point where its staff members regularly call it "abuse" when they think they're talking to a crowd who won't turn around and try to get them fired for saying it.
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I've come from the Australian education system which has similar (arguably greater) international student spending/participation, and yet doesn't really have the same cultures of vast Collegiate stadiums or students residing onsite since most Universities are just smackbang in the middle of the major cities.
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Yeah, most of the huge additional admin spend went on sports, facilities, mental health, nicer dorms etc to compete with other colleges.
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