Peter Yared's Musings

Export controls undermine America’s long-term technological edge. This post was also published in National Review For years, the United States has tried to slow China’s progress in artificial intelligence by restricting exports of advanced AI chips and semiconductor manufacturing equipment. That strategy may have bought time, but it is now backfiring. China has become self-sufficient in AI and is getting ready to export its technology everywhere. Controls that limit America’s ability to compete could hand the global AI market to China on a silver platter and will eventually put even America’s superpower status at risk. Export controls are motivated by fear of enhancing China’s military capability, but that case is weaker than it seems. Many military AI applications run on smaller models and specialized hardware, not only on the most advanced data center GPUs. And where large-scale compute capacity does matter, China has developed qualitatively comparable domestic alternativ...