AI Under Control: How the U.S. is Working to Contain Chaos in the Tech World.
The first global regulation of artificial intelligence has predictably come from the United States. How will the new rules work?
The "lame duck" Joe Biden has tightened control over the export of advanced GPU chips for AI. The new restrictions categorize the world into two groups:
- Countries with unlimited access to advanced chips and AI algorithms.
- Countries that will require licenses. They will be able to purchase up to 1,700 chips per year, and if more are needed, only with permission from the U.S. Department of Commerce.
The first category automatically includes 18 countries — Australia, Belgium, the United Kingdom, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, and Taiwan, as well as the United States. Additionally, companies designated as "Universal Verified End User" (such as Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure) are exempt from these restrictions. These companies are also responsible for ensuring that technologies do not reach countries where the sale of American chips is completely prohibited — China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran.
There is a concept called Total Processing Performance (TPP) — the overall processing performance. The introduced restrictions are based on this metric. If your country is not one of the 18 fortunate ones, you will be able to purchase chips only up to 790 million TPP until 2027. This is equivalent to the power of 50,000 Nvidia H100 chips, which is sufficient for conducting advanced research.
Country-specific restrictions are specifically designed to encourage companies to achieve verified end-user status. This way, the U.S. gains transparency in the movement of technologies and significantly helps to prevent chips from reaching China.
It seems that the States have learned from their previous failure to control the spread of cryptocurrency and have decided to immediately rein in artificial intelligence.
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