• Vibes are a-changing. From Stratechery,

    In September 2023 Huawei announced the Mate 60 Pro with a SMIC-manufactured 7nm chip. The existence of this chip wasn’t a surprise for those paying close attention: SMIC had made a 7nm chip a year earlier (the existence of which I had noted even earlier than that), and TSMC had shipped 7nm chips in volume using nothing but DUV lithography (later iterations of 7nm were the first to use EUV). Intel had also made 10nm (TSMC 7nm equivalent) chips years earlier using nothing but DUV, but couldn’t do so with profitable yields; the idea that SMIC could ship 7nm chips using their existing equipment, particularly if they didn’t care about yields, wasn’t remotely surprising — to me, anyways.

    What I totally failed to anticipate was the overwrought reaction in Washington D.C. The dramatic expansion in the chip ban that culminated in the Biden administration transforming chip sales to a permission-based structure was downstream from people not understanding the intricacies of chip production, and being totally blindsided by the Huawei Mate 60 Pro. I get the sense that something similar has happened over the last 72 hours: the details of what DeepSeek has accomplished — and what they have not — are less important than the reaction and what that reaction says about people’s pre-existing assumptions.

  • From xkcd,

    xkcd