DeepSeek的成功是否意味着美国技术控制的失败？
Do China’s A.I. Advances Mean U.S. Technology Controls Have Failed?

The United States has worked steadily over the past three years to limit China’s access to the cutting edge computer chips that power advanced artificial intelligence systems. Its aim has been to slow China’s progress in developing sophisticated A.I. models.
在过去三年里，美国一直在稳步采取措施，限制中国获取尖端计算机芯片的能力，这些芯片为先进人工智能系统提供动力。美国的目的是放慢中国在研发先进人工智能模型上的进步速度。

Now a Chinese firm, DeepSeek, has created that very technology. In recent weeks, DeepSeek released multiple A.I. models and a chatbot whose performance rivals that of the best products made by American firms, all while using far fewer of the high-cost A.I. chips that companies typically need. Over the weekend, DeepSeek’s chatbot shot to the top of Apple’s App Store charts as people downloaded it around the world.
现在，一家名为DeepSeek的中国公司已开发出了这种先进技术。DeepSeek在最近几周发布了各种各样的人工智能模型以及一个聊天机器人，它们的性能可与美国公司生产的最佳产品相媲美，但DeepSeek使用的价格高昂的人工智能芯片数量比美国公司通常需要的少得多。发布后的那个周末，随着世界各地的人们下载DeepSeek的聊天机器人，该应用在苹果应用商店的下载量已跃居榜首。

The development has raised big questions about export controls built by the United States in recent years. The Biden administration set up a system of global rules and steadily expanded them to try to keep advanced A.I. technology — particularly chips made by Nvidia — out of Chinese hands. They were concerned that technology would give China an edge not just economically, but also militarily.
这一进展已在人们心中引发了重大质疑：美国近年来逐渐加强出口管制是否有效？拜登政府建立了一套全球规则体系，并稳步地将其适用范围扩大到阻止先进的人工智能技术（尤其是英伟达生产的芯片）落入中国人手中。美国政府担心，人工智能技术不仅会让中国在经济上获得优势，也会让其在军事上获得优势。

DeepSeek’s development has provoked a fierce debate over whether U.S. technology controls have failed. Here’s what to know.
DeepSeek研发的成果已引发了一场关于美国的技术控制是否已经失败的激烈争论。以下是需要了解的内容。

DeepSeek’s innovations suggest the Biden administration may have acted too slowly to keep up with private companies sidestepping its controls.
DeepSeek的创新暗示，拜登政府行动可能太慢，无法跟上私营企业规避政府控制的步伐。

DeepSeek has said that its most recent model was trained on Nvidia H800s. This is an A.I. chip that Nvidia developed specifically for the Chinese market after export controls were first imposed, and that caused a fair amount of drama in Washington.
DeepSeek表示，训练其最新模型的计算机用的是英伟达H800芯片。这款人工智能芯片是英伟达在美国最初对中国实行出口管制后专门为中国市场开发的，英伟达的做法曾在华盛顿引起了相当大的戏剧性反应。

When the United States put restrictions on Nvidia’s most advanced chips in 2022, Nvidia quickly adapted by creating slightly downgraded chips that fell just under the threshold the government had set. These chips were technically legal for Chinese companies to use, but allowed them to achieve practically the same results.
美国政府2022年对英伟达最尖端的芯片实施出口限制后，该公司很快采取了应对措施，把出口给中国的芯片略微降级到刚好低于政府设定的门槛之下。严格地说，让中国公司用上这些芯片是合法的，但这也使得它们能获得与采用更高端芯片几乎相同的结果。

This angered Biden officials, and they moved to restrict the new chips as well. But the government moved slowly, and it took them about a year to ban the H800 and other downgraded chips. In the meantime, Chinese companies stockpiled a lot of them.
这激怒了拜登政府的官员，他们开始采取行动限制略微降级芯片的出口。但政府的行动缓慢，他们花了大约一年时间才禁止了H800和其他降级芯片的出口。与此同时，中国公司已囤积了大量芯片。

It’s not clear how DeepSeek obtained its Nvidia H800s, but it would have been legal for the company to buy them in late 2022 or 2023. Now, however, such purchases would not be.
目前尚不清楚DeepSeek的英伟达H800芯片是从什么渠道获得的，但如果公司是在2022年底或2023年购买了这些芯片的话，那就是合法的。但这种购买现在已经不合法。

“You can’t control what’s already there,” said Jimmy Goodrich, a senior adviser for technology analysis at the RAND Corporation. “Had the Biden administration more quickly responded and limited the H800 to China, there’s no doubt DeepSeek would have been more challenged in putting this model out.”
“无法控制那里已经有的东西，”在兰德公司做技术分析的高级顾问吉米·古德里奇说。“如果拜登政府更快地做出了反应，限制了H800进入中国的话，毫无疑问，DeepSeek在推出其大模型上会面临更大的挑战。”

DeepSeek also spent years building up its chip supply before Washington’s controls took effect. By 2021, DeepSeek was one of just a handful of Chinese companies that had acquired at least 10,000 Nvidia A100s, the advanced chip Nvidia released in 2020, according to an interview with Liang Wenfeng, the founder of DeepSeek, in the Chinese media outlet 36Kr.
早在华盛顿的出口管制生效之前，DeepSeek就已经花了好几年时间储备自己的芯片供应。据中国媒体36氪发表的一篇对DeepSeek创始人梁文锋的采访，到2021年，DeepSeek是少数几家购买了至少一万枚英伟达A100（英伟达在2020年发布的先进芯片）的中国公司之一。

The U.S. has also struggled to stamp out chip smuggling.
美国在打击芯片走私上也困难重重。

There’s no evidence that DeepSeek has used smuggled chips. But many Chinese A.I. companies have. Alexandr Wang, the chief executive of the A.I. training giant Scale AI, told The New York Times that Chinese companies had far more high-end chips than U.S. restrictions allowed, and that DeepSeek probably had about 50,000 Nvidia advanced H100 processors, “which they obviously can’t talk about.”
虽然没有证据表明DeepSeek使用了走私芯片，但许多中国AI公司都在这样做。人工智能训练巨头Scale AI公司的首席执行官亚历山卓·王（音）对《纽约时报》说，中国公司拥有的高端芯片数量远远高于美国的出口限制所允许的水平，DeepSeek可能拥有约五万块英伟达的高端H100芯片，“他们显然不能提这个。”

Both Nvidia and the U.S. government have argued that the scale of smuggling was limited. But The Times last year reported an active trade in China in restricted A.I. technology. In a bustling market in Shenzhen, in southern China, chip vendors reported engaging in sales involving hundreds or thousands of restricted chips.
英伟达和美国政府都认为，走私的规模有限。但《纽约时报》去年曾报道，受限制的人工智能技术在中国有十分活跃的市场。在中国南方城市深圳，一个繁忙市场的芯片供应商称，他们经手过数百或数千枚受限制芯片的买卖。

Representatives of 11 companies said they sold or transported banned Nvidia chips — including A100s and H100s, the company’s most advanced at the time — and The Times found dozens more businesses offering them online. One vendor in Shenzhen showed a reporter messages arranging deliveries of servers containing more than 2,000 of Nvidia’s most advanced chips, a transaction totaling $103 million.
11家公司的代表称，他们销售或转运过被禁的英伟达芯片，包括公司当时最先进的A100和H100芯片。《纽约时报》发现，还有数十家企业在网上提供这些芯片。深圳的一家供应商给记者展示了有关安排交付装有2000多枚英伟达最高端芯片的服务器的短信交流，这笔交易的总额高达1.03亿美元。

Since then, more reports have emerged documenting large-scale smuggling, particularly through other countries in Asia.
时报进行报道之后，还出现了更多记述大规模走私的报道，尤其是通过亚洲其他国家的走私。

The Biden administration released a sweeping regulation this month that aims to deal with the smuggling issue, by setting caps on the number of chips that Nvidia can sell to every country worldwide.
拜登政府已在今年1月发布了旨在解决走私问题的全面法规，对英伟达向世界上每个国家销售的芯片数量设定了上限。

It remains to be seen what the Trump administration will do about it. In a trade executive order President Trump signed on his first day in office, however, he ordered his officials to review the U.S. export control system, including “how to identify and eliminate loopholes in existing export controls.”
特朗普政府将在限制芯片出口上采取什么措施还有待观察。但在上任第一天签署的一项贸易行政命令中，特朗普总统要求官员对美国的出口管制制度进行审查，包括“如何识别和消除现有出口管制中的漏洞”。

U.S. controls appear to have encouraged Chinese ingenuity — but they have also clearly held back China’s A.I. development.
虽然美国的出口管制似乎已激发了中国人的创造力，但也显然阻碍了中国人工智能的发展。

American technology restrictions appear to have accelerated the efforts of Chinese researchers to try to do more with less.
美国的技术限制似乎加速了中国研究人员试图用更少的资源做更多事情的努力。

The most notable thing about DeepSeek’s model is that, according to the company, it was developed with just a fraction of the high-priced chips that Western companies have used to make similar technology. DeepSeek’s engineers said they used only about 2,000 Nvidia chips, whereas most top companies have trained chatbots using 16,000 chips or more. Nvidia’s shares plunged sharply on Monday on fears that technology companies will be able to do cutting-edge A.I. in the future while paying Nvidia far less.
DeepSeek大模型最值得注意的一点是，据该公司的说法，它只使用了西方公司用于研发同类技术的高价芯片的一小部分。DeepSeek的工程师说，他们只用了约2000枚英伟达芯片，而大多数主要的西方AI公司训练聊天机器人使用了1.6万 枚或更多的芯片。上周一，英伟达的股价大跌，因为人们担心科技公司将来在研发尖端人工智能上使用更少的芯片，让英伟达能赚到的钱大幅减少。

Jeffrey Ding, a professor at George Washington University who studies emerging technologies, said that most global companies have been using ever-larger amounts of computing power and data to improve A.I. performance. But DeepSeek and other Chinese firms had been “forced to go down this other pathway to find out whether we can get good enough performance with lower training costs and less compute,” he said.
乔治华盛顿大学研究新兴技术的教授杰佛里·丁（音）说，全球大多数公司一直在使用越来越多的计算能力和数据来提高人工智能的性能。但DeepSeek和其他中国公司已“被迫走上了另一条道路，它们在探索我们是否能以更低的训练成本和更少的计算量来获得足够好的性能”，他说。

The implications of cheaper models like DeepSeek’s could be profound. With DeepSeek openly sharing details about how it built its model, companies in China and around the world will be able to replicate its low-cost approach.
像DeepSeek这样的便宜大模型带来的影响可能是深远的。因为DeepSeek已公开分享了其大模型的细节，中国和世界各地的公司都将能够复制这种低成本方法。

That means “it will be much cheaper and could be far less energy intensive for anyone to build and run A.I., from U.S. hyperscalers to Midwestern small businesses, North Korean hackers and Russia’s military,” said Martin Chorzempa, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
这意味着“从美国的超大企业到中西部的小企业，从朝鲜的黑客到俄罗斯军队，任何人都将能更便宜地构建和运行人工智能系统，其能源消耗也将大幅减少”，彼得森国际经济研究所高级研究员马丁·乔泽姆帕说。

Still, China would likely be much further ahead in A.I. without the export controls. In interviews, DeepSeek’s founder has acknowledged that the lack of access to computing power was a limitation for the company.
尽管如此，如果没有出口管制的话，中国在人工智能领域可能会走得更远。DeepSeek的创始人在采访中承认，缺乏计算能力对公司来说是一种局限。

Unlike American A.I. companies, DeepSeek will not be able to legally purchase the newest generation of A.I. chips that Nvidia is rolling out right now, which multiplies the speed and performance of the previous chips.
与美国的人工智能公司不同，DeepSeek将无法合法地购买英伟达正在推出的最新一代人工智能芯片，这种芯片的速度和性能是以前芯片的几倍。

“Anyone worried about what DeepSeek can do today would be more worried if they had done it with access to the far superior computing resources their U.S. competitors have,” Mr. Chorzempa said.
“任何担心DeepSeek今天能做什么的人，如果该公司能使用其美国竞争对手拥有的更优越的计算资源的话，就会更加担心了，”乔泽姆帕说。

DeepSeek’s success suggests that Silicon Valley’s lead on A.I. has shrunk, despite efforts by Washington to limit Chinese access to the advanced chips. But it’s notable that DeepSeek is still building its models on Nvidia chips — not on the rival A.I. chips that the Chinese technology firm Huawei is trying to develop.
DeepSeek的成功已表明，尽管美国政府努力限制中国获得高端芯片，但硅谷在人工智能方面的领先地位已经缩小。但值得注意的是，DeepSeek仍在使用英伟达的芯片构建大模型，而不是用中国科技企业华为试图开发的与英伟达竞争的人工智能芯片。

Some Chinese computer engineers have suggested it would be possible to run the latest DeepSeek model on a larger number of less advanced chips, including those made by Huawei, even though Huawei’s A.I. chips are much lower performing.
一些中国计算机工程师暗示，尽管华为的人工智能芯片性能要低得多，但有可能在数量更多的不太先进的芯片（包括华为制造的芯片）上运行最新的DeepSeek大模型。

But no Chinese company is yet able to make advanced A.I. chips that rival Nvidia’s, or the type of complex machinery needed to make those chips. “The only advantage the United States still has over China at this moment is in hardware,” Mr. Goodrich said.
但目前还没有一家中国公司能够制造出与英伟达芯片竞争的先进人工智能芯片，或制造高端芯片所需的复杂机器。“美国此刻唯一仍比中国有优势的东西是硬件，”古德里奇说。