The Information website claimsTikTok's parent company ByteDance, despite the US government's strict technology export ban, has used Oracle's cloud service to rent NVIDIA H100 GPU computing power to train the artificial intelligence models behind its services.
Although the U.S. Department of Commerce had planned to require domestic cloud computing companiesVerify customer identity, thereby restricting risky targets such as China from using resources to train artificial intelligence models. However, it was subsequently opposed by many businesses on the grounds that the actual burden might increase, which slowed down the progress of the relevant bill. As a result, ByteDance was able to successfully train its artificial intelligence models by leasing computing power on the Internet.
Because its AI models are trained online, the US government naturally has difficulty imposing restrictions. Besides ByteDance, Chinese companies including Alibaba and Tencent also appear to be using this method to train their own AI models.
However, not all cloud service providers are willing to provide virtual computing power to Chinese customers through the Internet, perhaps to avoid future investigations by the US government or unnecessary disputes.
If more and more Chinese companies circumvent the US government ban through similar methods and then obtain relevant computing power through network virtualization to train their artificial intelligence models, perhaps the US government will also take corresponding measures.
