I think the only way governments could have any hope of preventing AI progress is by actually physically taking control of the factories all over the world that produce GPUs and making them require a license to use or else just discontinuing their manufacture altogether. And that just means people will try to invent other computing substrates to use for it besides GPUs. And I don’t think it’s very plausible even this will happen. Probably, as other commenters have said, the reaction would be bungled and only make matters worse.
I think the only way governments could have any hope of preventing AI progress is by actually physically taking control of the factories all over the world that produce GPUs and making them require a license to use or else just discontinuing their manufacture altogether. And that just means people will try to invent other computing substrates to use for it besides GPUs. And I don’t think it’s very plausible even this will happen. Probably, as other commenters have said, the reaction would be bungled and only make matters worse.