Firstly, I agree with you that firmware-based monitoring and compute capacity restrictions would require similar amounts of political will to happen. Then, in terms of technical challenges, I remember one of the forecasters saying they believe that “usage-tracking firmware updates being rolled out to 95% of all chips covered by the 2022 US export controls before 2028” is 90% likely to be physically possible, and 70% likely to be logistically possible. (I was surprised at how high these stated percentages were, but I didn’t have time then to probe them on why exactly they were at these percentages—I may do so at the next workshop.)
Assuming the technical challenges of compute capacity restrictions aren’t significant, fixing compute capacity restrictions at 15% likely, and applying the following crude calculation:
P(firmware) = P(compute) x P(firmware technical challenges are met)
= 0.15 x (0.9 x 0.7) = 0.15 x 0.63 = 0.0945 ~ 9%
9% is a little above the reported 7%, which I take as meaning that the other forecasters on this question believe the firmware technical challenges are a little, but not massively, harder than the 90%–70% breakdown given above.
Thanks for this question.
Firstly, I agree with you that firmware-based monitoring and compute capacity restrictions would require similar amounts of political will to happen. Then, in terms of technical challenges, I remember one of the forecasters saying they believe that “usage-tracking firmware updates being rolled out to 95% of all chips covered by the 2022 US export controls before 2028” is 90% likely to be physically possible, and 70% likely to be logistically possible. (I was surprised at how high these stated percentages were, but I didn’t have time then to probe them on why exactly they were at these percentages—I may do so at the next workshop.)
Assuming the technical challenges of compute capacity restrictions aren’t significant, fixing compute capacity restrictions at 15% likely, and applying the following crude calculation:
P(firmware) = P(compute) x P(firmware technical challenges are met)
= 0.15 x (0.9 x 0.7) = 0.15 x 0.63 = 0.0945 ~ 9%
9% is a little above the reported 7%, which I take as meaning that the other forecasters on this question believe the firmware technical challenges are a little, but not massively, harder than the 90%–70% breakdown given above.