With a week left in office, President Joe Biden introduced a new set of guidelines and restrictions on the export of artificial intelligence chips made in the US.
On Monday, the administration announced it Interim final rule in AI diffusion. This decision is intended to “provide clarity to allied and partner countries about how they can benefit from artificial intelligence” and streamline licensing hurdles for chip orders, according to a White House press release. But these rules also introduce new restrictions on the sale of chips in the majority of countries in the world.
These new guidelines divide countries into three groups, according to reference from CNN.
The first group includes the US’s strongest allies, such as Japan and South Korea, which are not affected by the new restrictions. The second group includes countries such as China and Russia. These countries are already unable to buy advanced AI chips and will now face further restrictions under new guidelines on most “closed” AI models. The third group, which includes most of the world, will now have caps on how many tokens they can buy. The cap is set at 50,000 GPUs per country, but there are many ways a country can access a higher cap.
This third group of countries that are neither America’s strongest allies nor enemies, which includes places like Mexico, Portugal and Israel, among many others, are arguably the most affected by the changes, CNN reported. Restrictions on this group of countries are intended to prevent rivals like China and Russia from buying brands through them, but will also hurt AI adoption in those countries in the process.
Nvidia issued a statement On Monday, he called the proposed rules “unprecedented and misguided” and added that they would “derail” innovation and economic growth worldwide.
Those proposals are intended to build on guidance the Biden administration released in October 2022 and October 2023. Today’s proposal also includes a 120-day comment period, but the rules will go into effect before that period ends, according to with a CNN report.
While this news is causing quite a stir in the AI community, with a new administration taking office next week, the debate over chip export restrictions may be completely different by the end of the month.
