Do DeepSeek's A.I. Advances Mean US Tech Controls Have Failed?

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. 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. 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.