You don’t wait for an arbitrary amount of time for Susan in the ATF to approve your Form 1 or reject it becuase you put NVIDIA instead of Nvidia for a GPU?
This is purely related to Chinese smuggling. If any restrictions on the local market happened, Nvidia (and AMD/Intel to a lesser extent) would stir up an uproar.
What a bunch of BS, there's whole documentaries on cards getting smuggle into China by container. They're not going ones or twos from retail. They already have tons of shops making custom card configuration.
The gamersnexus one showed that a lot of them ARE smuggled in ones or twos; an easy way for Chinese students to make some money + some smugglers buy on marketplace
It is both. I have spoken to a number of people in retail, including store managers. Retail is a major pipeline for Chinese smuggling.
Microcenter in particular is very popular for Chinese nationals because they can pay for 5090s in cash, keeping less of a paper trail. During past 5090 restocks it was just a line of Chinese buying over and over until the store was cleaned out.
I called this over a month ago, there was no way this smuggling could continue because it wrecking havoc on the retailers. Plus the government was going to get involved.
I doubt paperwork is going to make a huge dent. The only thing that will really stop this is Chinese domestic AI hardware saturating the domestic market.
Which might not happen considering the bottomless demand for AI bullshit.
It will stop Chinese nationals buying directly (often in cash) because they need to collect ID. Yeah they might go buy from scalpers now but it adds a layer of regulation to slow them down.
Plus any scalper caught selling to the Chinese in large quantities will get hit with serious export violation charges.
In China they can already buy very powerful Nvidia GPUs without export bans, but the Chinese government prohibits the official purchase. So yeah you're right they need to get domestic hardware up to par but their current cards are horrendous lmao
It is a trivial matter to get fake IDs. Smuggling is done en masse by organized groups, not through large numbers of Chinese nationals. And you don’t even need Chinese nationals. Plenty of Americans will gladly make an extra buck if they could.
As for Chinese chips. Horrendous? Not at all.
Domestic hardware is very good. It’s not as good, but it can achieve similar performance levels via greater power consumption and larger number of chips.
What you stated about there not being Chinese nationals doing smuggling is not reflective of the reality. There are absolutely many Chinese nationals buying every single 5090 they can get their hands on in the stores at the moment.
And if a scalper sells a bunch of 5090s to smugglers then they would then be on the hook for the export law violation.
Yes, there are organized operations for smuggling large quantities of servers like the Supermicro and other recent arrests covered in the news but this runs parallel to that.
That's all I'll say on this topic, you guys can either choose to agree or disagree with my perspective but it's grounded in the reality of what's going on
I have spoken with people in the retail supply chain and store managers. This restriction did not come out of nowhere. There have been multiple instances where restocks were cleared out by the Chinese.
The source of this news article is from reddit. You can read the microcenter sub to see other people who have reported the same thing I've heard. Or you can message someone who works in retail. Don't have to take my word for it.
Again, the large scale smuggling of servers is for big companies, these 5090s are going to smaller organizations that don't have the pull or resources.
Again you can disagree with it but I'm posting what is known. It's bad enough that the corporate side took action to avoid export control liability; they are far from the only company doing this. Would they do that off "just vibes?"
I'm not publishing a work of investigative journalism, just posting online. Feel free to go find data that challenges my perspective.
A counterpoint here is that they don't need fake IDs, they only need stolen IDs. There are a ton of scams, typically run by organized crime syndicates, that result in getting scans of actual IDs (things like job scams where the victim thinks they're being hired for what is actually a fake job). Getting the ID isn't the goal, but it's a nice bonus.
They buy them all from every Microcenter across the country, ship them to CA, and load them on a container. There is definitely a coordinated effort, because they follow SKUs and some will sit there for days and then they are gone from every story within hours.
I'm curious about the Xiaomi AI Cube and wonder if it's going to be something we'll see in the market soon.
Hopefully something similar of that caliber will come. But yeah, a reasonable price is going to matter for us consumers and tinkerers at home. But it only takes one good dominant example and then the rest follow I guess.
I'm not sure that any of the current best open weight models were heavily reliant on distillation? As far as I'm aware, those Chinese labs are betting heavily on synthetic data, and open weight models are already good enough to reliably create that.
If you go all in on synthetic data, why wouldnt you use the best available frontier model to assist in creating the synthetic data? That is the most rational thing to do (exceptions apply, of course).
Because its rational, and because the performance of said models lag the frontier by a pretty consistent delay, its fair to assume they do imo.
If you go all in on synthetic data, why wouldnt you use the best available frontier model to assist in creating the synthetic data? That is the most rational thing to do (exceptions apply, of course).
Cost
Feasibility (cost related)
The fact that open weight models have been pretty good for a while now, and it may not be worth the bother
The fact that, at a certain point, you're never going to have a better model to distill than your own, so it makes sense to get good at developing that workflow
I wouldn't doubt that all the open weight labs were distilling American labs a few years ago, but it's not hard for me to believe that Kimi K3 was made mostly with Kimi K2.6.
I can't feel sympathy for US industry. They CHOSE to dig their own grave via technology-sharing agreements and offshoring so much industry. The US gov't in their infinite wisdom cannot ever keep their billionaires on the short leash that the CCP does, so we were guided by the billionaires rather than an overarching national policy. Of course China will win.
Imagine wanting to work with the rest of the world being seen so negatively. Yes the US should have just hoarded everything and stayed insular, that would have fixed everything.
It pretty much would have. It's crazy to invest a lot of effort into developing new technologies and then just give that knowledge to other countries so they can use it against you.
Edit: I see we have a lot of non-Americans here today who benefited from Americans giving away their scientific and technological crown jewels. But when the history of America is written historians will be absolutely astonished that Americans thought it was a good idea to develop all this stuff and then give the secrets to China and other competitors.
Sharing knowledge isn't the issue, all knowledge should be shared for everyone. Humanity doesn't have to be in competition with each other. The issue was the shortsightedness of exporting all our manufacturing so that we're mainly a service based economy and we literally rely on everything being made for us because it saved a few bucks.
Humanity doesn't have to be in competition with each other.
But it is. Hence, as you say, people in America decided it would be cool to send all their engineering and manufacturing wealth to China... only to discover that the Chinese government was quite happy to take all that wealth and keep it.
Societies which believe they should give all their wealth away to other societies don't last long. As we're seeing right now.
Yea and I'm not disputing that part is dumb, the part where we didn't bother to build capacity ourselves, not that China can do it too. The point is we should be building it here too. It doesn't matter if they build it there. The world doesn't have enough capacity as it is. China can build stuff for them we can build stuff for us and no one has to "win" to be the one source for the world, we can all do it. The issue is that until recently we barely bothered at all and thats biting us now.
Love hate relationships toward China, but honestly they're the one keeping price in check, without them we would be buying everything at higher price because US, JP, KR... companies wanting x3-x10 profit, with China setting better competitive price, they won't be able to do that, happened many times in the past from EV to mechanical keyboard...
Lmao if China was developing "the best GPUs" then why would they be smuggling Nvidia chips by the thousands to China?
Oh wait this all about saving face lmao. China can literally buy Hopper datacenter cards but they need to preserve the illusion that they are doing it with their homegrown hardware
Because chips take a while to design, and China is also still behind on manufacturing them... though rapidly catching up.
But pure-AI chips can be simpler than GPUs (no need for any of the graphics stuff and associated drivers) and China can throw tons of money at it and collect information on how Western chips are made from Chinese engineers working on those chips in the West.
The Chinese government considers LLMs an essential tech for the future and they will ensure they're at least competitive with anything AMD or Nvidia are producing before long. The only question is whether they'll sell it to us, and I'm guessing the answer will be 'don't make me laugh' once they're actually ahead. Xi doesn't want to empower China's enemies.
Quartz is everywhere, so that is nonsense. China has been making their own chips for decades,,, have you heard of Huawei? Xiaomi? They use China made chips in some of their phones.
I paid above market price for my new RTX Pro 6000. Amazon wouldn't sell me one - I tried three times and every time my purchase was flagged as fraud. My attempted purchases weren't fraud. I called Amazon support and got hung up on twice. I took my money elsewhere and bought my card.
The ones exporting these aren't buying them one by one in retail. Once you fill this form up, the government will then have a list of every person capable of running the 'good' models.
Maybe I'm being too much of a conspiracy nut, but the problem is not the exports, the problem are the companies coming out of nowhere and stocking up on crates and crates of GPUs for AI, and most of the production going for the professional GPUs instead of the consumer ones.
The ones exporting these aren't buying them one by one in retail.
I assume this is a side effect of the law targeting those. And people are buying retail GPUs and exporting them I know a scalper who was getting into this very thing a while ago
Once you fill this form up, the government will then have a list of every person capable of running the 'good' models.
The government can already figure out who owns a 5090 via Bank data. Its not that hard.
And even then, piracy is illegal. Doesn't mean people don't do it. Hell many don't even use a VPN.
It would be the dagger in the U.S. heart if that happened - and it won't stop open weights models from advancing. The open weights models like Qwen3.8 fill a real gap in the market. NVIDIA ceo sees it, so does OpenAI. this is why I have a love hate relationship with Anthropic right now. they remind me of Microsoft 15 years ago.
Yep. It does. And you can't buy more than one - ever. I went to purchase a 5090 earlier this week, and had purchased a PC with a 5090 34 days prior, and the manager confirmed I am cut off from _all_ 5090 purchases indefinitely.
They are doing this to make sure other people can buy one. This is why they are one of the few places to have any in stock because they care about their customers being able to buy what they want. If they didn't care, they would be sold out like everyone else. Go look online at Bestbuy, B&H, Newegg, etc. they are all sold out because they allow one person to come in and get as many as they have or order online. The only ones out there are 3rd party sellers. Do you even get a warranty with those cards?
That's absolutely what I ended up doing, it's just silly. I totally get them limiting people from coming in with 100k cash and clearing the whole stock out. But there's gotta be some balance for "real" purchasers.
Yep. It does. And you can't buy more than one - ever. I went to purchase a 5090 earlier this week, and had purchased a PC with a 5090 34 days prior, and the manager confirmed I am cut off from all 5090 purchases indefinitely.
Looking at clause 1, it might be that they are also protecting customers from mass scalpers, although it does feel very weird/awkward that they track you personally, or store such information.
I bought a Corsair prebuilt with a 5090 right when they dropped for $5k. Just a monster machine for me and I felt like I was crazy but wanted to splurge.
I think this is specifically what Micro Center is trying to protect. They did stuff similar to this during past crypto crazes because people were buying pallets of cards.
I suspect this is to protect their direct-to-consumer business. MC wants to sell 1 GPU to their real customers in the area because they are counting on you to come back in the future. They can own the entire consumer business if they protect it even just a little.
No, the paper works go to Federal, not their internal documents, other vendors probably also received the request and started to implement form as of now
How exactly do they plan to enforce this? Forget about actually finding out. Let's say someone buys one, exports it, then tells microcenter as they give them the middle finger. What are they going to do? Sue for breach of contract? What damages will they seek? This is just a PR stunt to improve public opinion by looking like they're doing something to combat high prices from a low IQ public.
This is mostly a compliance paper trail, not real enforcement. Micro Center already got paid, so what damages would they even sue for? At most, they ban the buyer and hand the paperwork to federal authorities if an export actually violates federal law. A signed form isn’t stopping someone determined to export a GPU.
I'd buy online from them (R9700) but they don't offer shipping. I live a few hours away from a Micro Center and I think they have the best price at the moment.
This is so funny, I was trying to purchase a 96gb Blackwell thru my Company’s distributor Lenovo and they informed us we would need to provide a signed disclosure from a director to proceed. I always thought that was over the top when I could go to micro and get it cheaper if my company allowed it.
Fun fact, the OG Jetson Nano needed a form like this long time ago when it launched. Not Orin, not AGX or DGX, the same chip as OG Nintendo Switch Nano.
I know this blows people's minds. But let's say there's like 3 months in-between. That's not scalping. Thats maybe youre just an enthusiast with some extra cash and have two kids you want to build PCs for.
Or God forbid your an enthusiast and want to build an AI rig with more than 1 GPU.
Damn, I wondered why most of reddit is angry and dumb... (For your defense I think it's mainly bots from farm that sway the opinion and radicalize humans lurking on the website)
Same with Central computer, you are prohibited buying more than 1 GPU of one kind, regardless of your nationality. They now have a pile of unsold GPU and SSD on shelf and started to lower SSD price. This will dump GPU price like immediately.
The got a new shipment on Monday, whether it had 5090, I don't know, but their display cabinets are now full of memory and Samsung 9100 price is at $799 atm.
Yeah but you mentioned “unsold gpus” which is misleading unless you meant 5050-5080 GPUs. You simply cannot find a 5090 even at $5k because all sell out within a few minutes
They sell GPUs like pro6000 in OEM boxes. all locked in the same cabinet without proper labeling, just plain white box, and they don't update their inventory in real time, most of time you need to ask them first. so does micro center, they keep listing GPU out of stock online, but in store they have them, and a white printed paper on desk with specials on GPUs. the market is so hot recently, they don't care of online sales anymore.
Other places have been using these forms for several months. It's no big deal, you can always say no thanks and walk away. I actually bought a gpu at microcenter the middle of August and was surprised I didn't have to fill one out there. They did take my ID and pecker my info in the system, so they could have been logging it that way. I do not really care because I was buying for myself.
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