Nvidia Forecasted To Make $12 Billion Selling GPUs In China

Nvidia is expected to earn $12 billion from GPU sales to China in 2024, despite U.S. trade restrictions. Research firm SemiAnalysis says the GPU maker will ship over 1 million units of its new H20 model to the Chinese market, “with each one said to cost between $12,000 and $13,000 apiece,” reports The Register. From the report: This figure is said by SemiAnalysis to be nearly double what Huawei is likely to sell of its rival accelerator, the Ascend 910B, as reported by The Financial Times. If accurate, this would seem to contradict earlier reports that Nvidia had moved to cut the price of its products for the China market. This was because buyers were said to be opting instead for domestically made kit for accelerating AI workloads. The H20 GPU is understood to be the top performing model out of three Nvidia GPUs specially designed for the Chinese market to comply with rules introduced by the Biden administration last year that curb performance.

In contrast, Huawei’s Ascend 910B is claimed to have performance on a par with that of Nvidia’s A100 GPU. It is believed to be an in-house design manufactured by Chinese chipmaker SMIC using a 7nm process technology, unlike the older Ascend 910 product. If this forecast proves accurate, it will be a relief for Nvidia, which earlier disclosed that its sales in China delivered a “mid-single digit percentage” of revenue for its Q4 of FY2024, and was forecast to do the same in Q1 of FY 2025. In contrast, the Chinese market had made up between 20 and 25 percent of the company’s revenue in recent years, until the export restrictions landed.

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Chinese AI Stirs Panic At European Geoscience Society

Paul Voosen reports via Science Magazine: Few things prompt as much anxiety in science and the wider world as the growing use of artificial intelligence (AI) and the rising influence of China. This spring, these two factors created a rift at the European Geosciences Union (EGU), one of the world’s largest geoscience societies, that led to the firing of its president. The whole episode has been “a packaging up of fear of AI and fear of China,” says Michael Stephenson, former chief geologist of the United Kingdom and one of the founders of Deep-time Digital Earth (DDE), a $70 million effort to connect digital geoscience databases. In 2019, another geoscience society, the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS), kicked off DDE, which has been funded almost entirely by the government of China’s Jiangsu province.

The dispute pivots on GeoGPT, an AI-powered chatbot that is one of DDE’s main efforts. It is being developed by Jian Wang, chief technology officer of e-commerce giant Alibaba. Built on Qwen, Alibaba’s own chatbot, and fine-tuned on billions of words from open-source geology studies and data sets, GeoGPT is meant to provide expert answers to questions, summarize documents, and create visualizations. Stephenson tested an early version, asking it about the challenges of using the fossilized teeth of conodonts, an ancient relative of fish, to define the start of the Permian period 299 million years ago. “It was very good at that,” he says. As awareness of GeoGPT spread, so did concern. Paul Cleverly, a visiting professor at Robert Gordon University, gained access to an early version and said in a recent editorial in Geoscientist there were “serious issues around a lack of transparency, state censorship, and potential copyright infringement.” Paul Cleverly and GeoScienceWorld CEO Phoebe McMellon raised these concerns in a letter to IUGS, arguing that the chatbot was built using unlicensed literature without proper citations. However, they did not cite specific copyright violations, so DDE President Chengshan Wang, a geologist at the China University of Geosciences, decided not to end the project.

Tensions at EGU escalated when a complaint about GeoGPT’s transparency was submitted before the EGU’s April meeting, where GeoGPT would be introduced. “It arrived at an EGU whose leadership was already under strain,” notes Science. The complaint exacerbated existing leadership issues within EGU, particularly surrounding President Irina Artemieva, who was seen as problematic by some executives due to her affiliations and actions. Science notes that she’s “affiliated with Germany’s GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel but is also paid by the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences to advise it on its geophysical research.”

Artemieva forwarded the complaint via email to the DDE President to get his view, but forgot to delete the name attached to it, leading to a breach of confidentiality. This incident, among other leadership disputes, culminated in her dismissal and the elevation of Peter van der Beek to president. During the DDE session at the EGU meeting, van der Beek’s enforcement actions against Chinese scientists and session attendees led to allegations of “harassment and discrimination.”

“Seeking to broker a peace deal around GeoGPT,” IUGS’s president and another former EGU president, John Ludden, organized a workshop and invited all parties to discuss GeoGPT’s governance, ongoing negotiations for licensing deals and alternative AI models for GeoGPT’s use.

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