Tech company Nvidia – which is valued at more than US$3.2 trillion (A$5.2 trillion) – has launched a stinging attack on outgoing US President Joe Biden’s administration, saying it is attempting to “control technology worldwide” and “rig” the AI market.
In comes in the wake of a White House statement released today titled “Ensuring U.S. Security and Economic Strength in the Age of Artificial Intelligence”.
“Artificial intelligence is quickly becoming central to both security and economic strength,” the White House stated.
“The United States must act decisively to lead this transition by ensuring that U.S. technology undergirds global AI use and that adversaries cannot easily abuse advanced AI.
“In the wrong hands, powerful AI systems have the potential to exacerbate significant national security risks, including by enabling the development of weapons of mass destruction, supporting powerful offensive cyber operations, and aiding human rights abuses, such as mass surveillance.”
It said “countries of concern actively employ AI – including U.S.-made AI – in this way, and seek to undermine U.S. AI leadership”.
These threats mean “it is essential that we do not offshore this critical technology and that the world’s AI runs on American rails”.
“It is important to work with AI companies and foreign governments to put in place critical security and trust standards as they build out their AI ecosystems.”
The Biden-Harris Administration today released an Interim Final Rule on Artificial Intelligence Diffusion, saying it “streamlines licensing hurdles for both large and small chip orders, bolsters U.S. AI leadership, and provides clarity to allied and partner nations about how they can benefit from AI. It builds on previous chip controls by thwarting smuggling, closing other loopholes, and raising AI security standards”.
Extract from the White House AI statement.
Some of the mechanisms put in place by the US include no restrictions on chip sales to 18 key allies and partners. The allies and partners are not named.
“This flexibility enables jurisdictions with robust technology protection regimes and technology ecosystems aligned with the national security and foreign policy interests of the United States to benefit from seamless large-scale purchases,” the White House said.
Also, chip orders with collective computation power up to roughly 1,700 advanced GPUs do not require a licence and do not count against national chip caps.
“The overwhelming majority of chip orders are in this category, especially those being placed by universities, medical institutions and research organisations for clearly innocuous purposes,” the statement claimed.
What the administration describes as “government-to-government arrangements” will “cultivate an international ecosystem of shared values regarding the development, deployment, and use of AI”.
“Governments that sign these arrangements – which align those nations’ export control, clean energy, and technology security efforts with the United States – can double their chip caps (up to 100,000 of today’s advanced GPUs).”
In response Nvidia’s VP of Government Affairs, Ned Finkle, said that “for decades … the federal government has wisely refrained from dictating the design, marketing and sale of mainstream computers and software — key drivers of innovation and economic growth”.
“The first Trump Administration laid the foundation for America’s current strength and success in AI, fostering an environment where U.S. industry could compete and win on merit without compromising national security.
“As a result, mainstream AI has become an integral part of every new application, driving economic growth, promoting U.S. interests and ensuring American leadership in cutting-edge technology.”
Finkle said AI was leading to advancements in healthcare, agriculture, manufacturing, education “and countless other fields” and that “the adoption of AI around the world fuels growth and opportunity for industries at home and abroad”.
Nvidia AI Foundry.
“That global progress is now in jeopardy. The Biden Administration now seeks to restrict access to mainstream computing applications with its unprecedented and misguided ‘AI Diffusion’ rule, which threatens to derail innovation and economic growth worldwide.
“In its last days in office, the Biden Administration seeks to undermine America’s leadership with a 200+ page regulatory morass, drafted in secret and without proper legislative review. This sweeping overreach would impose bureaucratic control over how America’s leading semiconductors, computers, systems and even software are designed and marketed globally.”
This would “rig market outcomes and stifle competition” Finkle claimed.
“While cloaked in the guise of an ‘anti-China’ measure, these rules would do nothing to enhance U.S. security. The new rules would control technology worldwide, including technology that is already widely available in mainstream gaming PCs and consumer hardware.”
Ultimately, it claimed, the new rules “would only weaken America’s global competitiveness, undermining the innovation that has kept the U.S. ahead”.
