Day: July 20, 2023

Every few years, the Pacific Ocean gets a fever, and the symptoms spread all the way around the world. It’s happening again. El Niño is back, and it looks like it’s going to be a big one. That raises the odds of droughts in Brazil and southern Africa, and floods in East Africa and the southern United States.
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Intel Corp. has introduced a processor in China that is designed for AI deep-learning applications despite reports of the Biden administration considering additional restrictions on Chinese companies to address loopholes in chip export controls.

The chip giant’s product launch on July 11 is part of an effort by U.S. technology companies to bypass or curb government export controls to the Chinese market as the U.S. government, citing national security concerns, continues to tighten restrictions on China’s artificial intelligence industry.

CEOs of U.S. chipmakers including Intel, Qualcomm and Nvidia met with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Monday to urge a halt to more controls on chip exports to China, Reuters reported. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, National Economic Council director Lael Brainard and White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan were among other government officials meeting with the CEOs, Reuters said.

The meeting came after China announced restrictions on the export of materials that are used to construct chips, a response to escalating efforts by Washington to curb China’s technological advances.

VOA Mandarin contacted the U.S. chipmakers for comment but has yet to receive responses.

Reuters reported Nvidia Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress said in June that “over the long term, restrictions prohibiting the sale of our data center graphic processing units to China, if implemented, would result in a permanent loss of opportunities for the U.S. industry to compete and lead in one of the world’s largest markets and impact on our future business and financial results.”

Before the meeting with Blinken, John Neuffer, president of the Semiconductor Industry Association, which represents the chip industry, said in a statement to The New York Times that the escalation of controls posed a significant risk to the global competitiveness of the U.S. industry.

“China is the world’s largest market for semiconductors, and our companies simply need to do business there to continue to grow, innovate and stay ahead of global competitors,” he said. “We urge solutions that protect national security, avoid inadvertent and lasting damage to the chip industry, and avert future escalations.”

According to the Times, citing five sources, the Biden administration is considering additional restrictions on the sale of high-end chips used to power artificial intelligence to China. The goal is to limit technological capacity that could aid the Chinese military while minimizing the impact such rules would have on private companies.   Such a move could speed up the tit-for-tat salvos in the U.S.-China chip war, the Times reported. 

And The Wall Street Journal reported last month that the White House was exploring how to restrict the leasing of cloud services to AI firms in China.

But the U.S. controls appear to be merely slowing, rather than stopping, China’s AI development.

Last October, the U.S. Commerce Department banned Nvidia from selling two of its most advanced AI-critical chips, the A100 and the newer H100, to Chinese customers, citing national security concerns. In November, Nvidia designed the A800 and H800 chips that are not subject to export controls for the Chinese market.

According to the Journal, the U.S. government is considering new bans on the A800 exports to China.

According to a report published in May by TrendForce, a market intelligence and professional consulting firm, the A800, like Nvidia’s H100 and A100, is already the most widely used mainstream product for AI-related computing.

Combining chips

Robert Atkinson, founder and president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, told VOA in a phone interview that although these chips are not the most advanced, they can still be used by China.  

“What you can do, though, is you can combine lesser, less powerful chips and just put more of them together. And you can still do a lot of AI processing with them. It just makes it more expensive. And it uses more energy. But the Chinese are happy to do that,” Atkinson said.

As for the Chinese use of cloud computing, Hanna Dohmen, a research analyst at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, told VOA Mandarin in a phone interview that companies can rent chips through cloud service providers.  

In practice, it is similar to a pedestrian hopping on an e-share scooter or bike — she pays a fee to unlock the scooter’s key function, its wheels.

For example, Dohman said that Nvidia’s A100, which is “controlled and cannot be exported to China, per the October 7 export control regulations,” can be legally accessed by Chinese companies that “purchase services from these cloud service providers to gain virtual access to these controlled chips.”

Dohman acknowledged it is not clear how many Chinese AI research institutions and companies are using American cloud services.

“There are also Chinese regulations … on cross-border data that might prohibit or limit to what extent Chinese companies might be willing to use foreign cloud service providers outside of China to develop their AI models,” she said.

Black market chips

In another workaround, Atkinson said Chinese companies can buy black market chips. “It’s not clear to me that these export controls are going to be able to completely cut off Chinese computing capabilities. They might slow them down a bit, but I don’t think they’re going to cut them off.”

According to an as yet unpublished report by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, China is already ahead of Europe in terms of the number of AI startups and is catching up with the U.S.

Although Chinese websites account for less than 2% of global network traffic, Atkinson said, Chinese government data management can make up for the lack of dialogue texts, images and videos that are essential for AI large-scale model training.

 “I do think that the Chinese will catch up and surpass the U.S. unless we take fairly serious steps,” Atkinson said.  
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Artificial intelligence was the dominant topic at the United Nations Security Council this week.

In his opening remarks at the session, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said, “AI will have an impact on every area of our lives” and advocated for the creation of a “new United Nations entity to support collective efforts to govern this extraordinary technology.”

Guterres said “the need for global standards and approaches makes the United Nations the ideal place for this to happen” and urged a joining of forces to “build trust for peace and security.”

“We need a race to develop AI for good,” Guterres said. “And that is a race that is possible and achievable.”

In his briefing, to the council, Guterres said the debate was an opportunity to consider the impact of artificial intelligence on peace and security “where it is already raising political, legal, ethical and humanitarian concerns.”

He also stated that while governments, large companies and organizations around the world are working on an AI strategy, “even its own designers have no idea where their stunning technological breakthrough may lead.”

Guterres urged the Security Council “to approach this technology with a sense of urgency, a global lens and a learner’s mindset, because what we have seen is just the beginning.”

AI for good and evil

The secretary-general’s remarks set the stage for a series of comments and observations by session participants on how artificial intelligence can benefit society in health, education and human rights, while recognizing that, gone unchecked, AI also has the potential to be used for nefarious purposes.

To that point, there was widespread acknowledgment that AI in every iteration of its development needs to be kept in check with specific guidelines, rules and regulations to protect privacy and ensure security without hindering innovation.

“We cannot leave the development of artificial intelligence solely to private sector actors,” said Jack Clark, co-founder of Anthropic, a leading AI company. “The governments of the world must come together, develop state capacity, and make the development of powerful AI systems a shared endeavor across all parts of society, rather than one dictated solely by a small number of firms competing with one another in the marketplace.”

AI as human labor

Yi Zeng, a professor at the Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, shared a similar sentiment.

“AI should never pretend to be human,” he said. “We should use generative AI to assist but never trust them to replace human decision-making.”

The U.K. holds the council’s rotating presidency this month and British Foreign Secretary James Cleverly, who chaired the session, called for international cooperation to manage the global implications of artificial intelligence. He said that “global cooperation will be vital to ensure AI technologies and the rules governing their use are developed responsibly in a way that benefits society.”

Cleverly noted how far the world has come “since the early development of artificial intelligence by pioneers like Alan Turing and Christopher Strachey.”

“This technology has advanced with ever greater speed, yet the biggest AI-induced transformations are still to come,” he said.

Making AI inclusive

“AI development is now outpacing at breakneck speed, and governments are unable to keep up,” said Omran Sharaf, assistant minister of foreign affairs and international cooperation for advanced science and technology, in the United Arab Emirates.

“It is time to be optimistic realists when it comes to AI” and to “harness the opportunities it offers,” he said.

Among the proposals he suggested was addressing real-world biases that AI could double down on.

“Decades of progress on the fight against discrimination, especially gender discrimination towards women and girls, as well as against persons with disabilities, will be undermined if we do not ensure an AI that is inclusive,” Sharaf said.

AI as double-edged sword

Zhang Jun, China’s permanent representative to the U.N., lauded the empowering role of AI in scientific research, health care and autonomous driving.

But he also acknowledged how it is raising concerns in areas such as data privacy, spreading false information, exacerbating social inequality, and its potential misuse or abuse by terrorists or extremist forces, “which will pose a significant threat to international peace and security.”

“Whether AI is used for good or evil depends on how mankind utilizes it, regulates it and how we balance scientific development with security,” he said.

U.S. envoy Jeffrey DeLaurentis said artificial intelligence offers great promise in addressing global challenges such as food security, education and medicine. He added, however, that AI also has the potential “to compound threats and intensify conflicts, including by spreading mis- and disinformation, amplifying bias and inequality, enhancing malicious cyber operations, and exacerbating human rights abuses.”

“We, therefore, welcome this discussion to understand how the council can find the right balance between maximizing AI’s benefits while mitigating its risks,” he said.

Britain’s Cleverly noted that since no country will be untouched by AI, “we must involve and engage the widest coalition of international actors from all sectors.” 

VOA’s Margaret Besheer contributed to this story.
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The U.S. has suspended funding for the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the Chinese research laboratory at the center of the debate over the origins of the coronavirus that has killed nearly 7 million people worldwide. 

The lab has not received any U.S. funding since 2020, but for months the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has been reviewing its operations, concluding that the institute “is not compliant with federal regulations and is not presently responsible.” 

The funding cutoff was prompted by the lab’s “failure to provide documentation on [its] research requested by [the National Institutes of Health] related to concerns that [the lab] violated NIH’s biosafety protocols.” 

The virus was first identified in Wuhan. One theory holds that COVID-19 escaped from the Wuhan lab in late 2019, triggering the pandemic. Some scientists believe the virus was passed from animals to people, possibly from a wholesale seafood market.  

The U.S. intelligence community has yet to reach a conclusion about the origins of the virus. 

Researchers at the institute have repeatedly denied that their work was related to the coronavirus outbreak, but China has blocked international scientists from a wide examination of the facility and its operations.
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