30 Comments
Jan 19, 2023Liked by Noah Smith

I had got halfway through the Kill Chain a couple years back, and decided to pick it up again after the war in Ukraine started. It's fascinating just how much it seems to be written in a different world. Obviously the goal of the book was to jolt the US establishment out of complacency, so it presented some best-case scenarios for the Russian and Chinese militaries, but man comparing the Russian Army of that book to the one we saw in real life is extraordinary. A good reminder of how little we often know about others' capabilities, or our own as well - and how the error could really go in either direction.

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Jan 19, 2023Liked by Noah Smith

"To me, this debate shows just how difficult it is to assess national leadership and capabilities in AI — really, the technology is just too new to make that kind of judgement. We don’t really know exactly how AI will be used on the battlefield of a future war, and thus we don’t know which measurements of AI capabilities are most important for assessing national power."

The fact that the U.S. government has let Taiwan, a small island nation of twenty four million people off the coast of China, a hostile power of 1.4 billion people, become the world's epicenter of microchip technology is shameful and a national security risk. We see the military risks of letting microchips be beholden to foreign powers, see Russia's desperate attempts to reclaim microchips from appliances to build military weapons systems in light of the sanctions, as a strategic risk.

All current AI or ML technologies are running on specialized microchips in the form of GPUs, of which the preponderance come from Taiwan, whether NVIDIA or AMD. On-shoring the manufacture of these designs, be it in Intel fabs in Arizona or the proposed fab in Ohio, should be of primary concern. The fact that the U.S. is spending $858,000,000,000 in the latest military budget yet is unconcerned about the sourcing of these processors is disheartening at best.

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Thank you so much! I've added all of these to my reading list, and I appreciate the recommendations and the breakdowns.!

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Jan 19, 2023Liked by Noah Smith

My dad is reading chip wars now and really enjoying it. Anytime you highlight books, I perk up.

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Jan 19, 2023Liked by Noah Smith

I learned a ton about the chip world (semiconductor fab stuff, in particular) in grad school; I'll definitely read Chip Wars and see how it resonates.

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I heartily endorse your review of Chip Wars. I believe that I started on it after a prior mention of the book by you. The chapter on Intel's decline makes clear the flaw of depending only on financial metrics to guide firm decision-making. A manager who does not have operational experience cannot adequately weigh the merits of internal investment versus outsourcing. Investments in R&D are particularly vulnerable to cutting in the name of "profit maximization" which robs firms of their future in a technologically dynamic area like microelectronics.

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„to spy on everybody who uses its equipment“. That’s not technically possible. If there were any ability in the 5G chips to „spy“ the technical details would be published. It’s not possible - the 5G chips in the cells just handle very low level bits and bytes and pass them through to the back haul - the wired connections. Anything that slows that down would make the chips inoperable.

The best chance Huawei have if spying would be a man in the middle attack on their routers, but there’s no evidence of that either and as far as I can see and no desire to ban them. The war against Huawei here is just protectionist.

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In regards to CHIPS Ben Thompson at Stratechery makes a compelling case that China is capable of building trailing edge chips(7NM I believe) and dominating that market. While not as advanced they go into most of the electronics, cars, etc that people use every day. He posits that that is more important than leading edge chips and could cause a lot of problems if they end up becoming the source for trailing edge. Do you have any thoughts or opinions about that? Have you heard anything different?

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Chip Wars is excellent.

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Hi Noah and all, for the book Wireless War the critique is mentioned that the workings of the telecom industry is not explained to the reader and because of this it is more difficult to read for the people who are not familiar with this. Could any of you suggest a book similarly written as the other book Chip Wars, but for this topic? As a lay person I would be happy to get hold of a good book on the subject. Thanks very much!

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Nilay Patel has a great interview with the guy running the biggest deployment of ORAN cellular technology (the openness you referred to in your cellular book review). It's fantastic - this dude is brilliant.

https://www.theverge.com/23297756/5g-rakuten-mobile-ceo-oran-cloud-network-decoder

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Well, interest in such military technologies would seem to be built upon an assumption that conflicts between the great powers will remain limited, such as we see in Ukraine. Hopefully that will remain true for as long as possible, but it's just not credible to assume that such conflicts will never spin out of control in to nuclear exchanges. Sooner or later, one way or another, some limited conflict is going to spin out of control, and then who has the best chips etc isn't going to matter much.

If you accept the premise that we can't keep nukes around forever and never use them, then there is a sense in which none of this matters today. As example, if we're headed towards a nuclear conflict between the great powers, does it really matter who wins in Ukraine?

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Noah, You need to learn about "Software Defined Network (SDN)" architectures. They separate network control from data forwarding. The former is the sensitive part, the latter the expensive part (it is what gets deployed everywhere), and they may be made by separate vendors. 5G uses a SDN architecture. I don't follow this any more, but I suspect that we need to worry about the security of the former but much less about the latter. Huawei's dominance of the non-Western market gives them economies of scale in the latter, much less so in the former. I think the GCHQ (Britain's NSA) had a non-classified analysis of this.

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I would add on the AI point that you are right:AI is a technology in its infancy. The big area is AUGMENTED Cognition AI, the use of AI to do tasks that humans are not cognitively good at (cognitive including motor as well). We have just began to figure out ways to augment our world (a point I think Noah made previously).

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