“n general, Americans are understating the technical expertise of these Chinese teams,” Hancock said. “One of the founders of Moonshot was a CMU PhD student. These are legitimate researchers and engineers doing solid work. …if American models ground to a halt, I think China’s progress would slow, but would still continue. They’re not just riding coattails here.”
It’s also hard to disentangle distillation from the second part of Kratsios’ comment — that Moonshot had obtained advanced Nvidia Chips, Grace Blackwell 300s, and also accessed GB300 equipped-servers in Thailand. Those chips are banned from export to China, but a black market exists, according to Sam Bresnick, a research fellow at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology. In May, the founder of Supermicro, a US server builder, was indicted for smuggling advanced chips into China.
“I am a proponent of know your customer laws for data centers across the world,” Bresnick said. “If you are letting a company conduct huge training runs on your state-of-the-art hardware, there needs to be a reporting mechanism for who that company is and what they’re doing.”
President Joe Biden’s Department of Commerce proposed federal know-your-customer rules for data centers in 2024, but no further progress appears to have been made under Donald Trump. Exporters shipping advanced chips abroad, however, are supposed to ensure they are only used for approved purposes.
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