>>106636097
that's such a surface level interpretation.
there's extremely good reasons for this policy, none of which is relevant to "how all in" national policy is in regards to AI.
1 - there's a strong possibility that AI development is plateauing overall, and hardware that's "90% of the way there" can yield largely the same benefits without unnecessarily tying your economy to external suppliers
2 - the next advancements in AI might not be hardware based - having more flops (or I guess it's int8 operations) might be a brute force approach to research that should be directed at better software, better datasets or better usecases
3 - in the event that AI is overvalued and overinvested in right now, limiting chips to domestic production means that the government can intervene on potential bubbles since having all the relevant actors being chinese means you have a lot more tools available to contain the fallout (as opposed to being potentially forced to bail out an American company)
4 - even in the event that AGI just pops off out of nowhere and does require the latest and greatest process nodes, there really isn't much stopping the chinese from just stealing it. One key characteristic of AI thus far has been that training has been expensive, actually running the AI or even the model itself isn't that big.
5 - this also grants the added benefit of allowing chinese companies to at least stand a chance at becoming field leaders, as opposed to the current model where the majority of funds go to nvidia and the rich get richer - you don't win a race by giving up at the starting line
in short, this is good policy on paper, how it plays out is anyone's guess but it's harder for this policy to fail than it is to succeed.
