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How GLM built its own inference infrastructure

411 points · 285 comments · whiteros_e

  1. zicohacks · · focus · HN ↗
    US chip export restrictions may actually be an advantage for China's AI Infrastructure. Chinese companies are forced to speed up developing their own AI chips
    1. menaerus · · focus · HN ↗
      It was evident that this will happen.

      > Compared with our initial baseline on the same hardware, we achieved a 3× improvement in end-to-end serving performance, reaching hardware efficiency and per-token cost comparable to mainstream NVIDIA GPUs. This demonstrates that Chinese chips can support frontier-model inference efficiently and economically at scale.

      1. gpt5 · · focus · HN ↗
        I’ll just note that NVidia’s moat has never been inference, and there are many chips used at a much larger scale than Chinese chips for inference like TPUs and AMD chips.

        The other part is that it’s a bit of a meme here to say that the chip restriction is actually helping China (or shall I say, coordinated effort?). For once, we know that China has put a lot of pressure on the US to relax these controls multiple times. In addition to large chip smuggling networks (e.g. 22% of NVidia’s worldwide revenue magically comes from Singapore, and the ratio has been growing).

        Lastly, assuming acceleration in AI (which we ARE seeing), there might not be time to China to catch up. The best estimate right now is that the first EUV chips from China will not come out before 2030. By that time who knows how powerful AI will be.

        All I’m saying is that the discussion is so one sided and a bit baselesss with no nuance, that it seems either a meme/groupthink in the community or coordinated. If anything, the data suggests that the US should increase its export controls and better track the tech supply chain if it wants to further curb Chinese progress.

        1. menaerus · · focus · HN ↗
          Why do you think the Chinese are not using their ai chips, which afaics are from huawei, to train their models? If that is true, which I think it is, we don't have to wait until 2030 to see if they're gonna match the performance of nvidia GPU. The evidence is already here - glm is among the most competitive models out there.
          1. gpt5 · · focus · HN ↗
            Look up reports by The Information, DeepSeek’s training of its big models are all done on NVidia’s chips (more than that - on smuggled Blackwell as well). There have been attempts by many Chinese labs to train on Huawei h chips, but they have all been limited to more minor models or distillations of the bigger ones.
            1. menaerus · · focus · HN ↗
              Unless you have the source for the latter it's nothing more than propaganda. Also, DeepSeek report is 2-3 years old, and at that time there were no huawei chips, at least not known to the public. This is a different model, in different age where huawei chips are already delivered into the production as we see
              1. gpt5 · · focus · HN ↗
                The Information have reports on this as recent as this summer
                1. menaerus · · focus · HN ↗
                  Do you have a link?
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