At least 8 PRC China police projects require NVIDIA and Intel chips to power their Uyghur-detecting analytics, according to procurement documents found by IPVM.
Intel promptly condemned the usage while NVIDIA remains silent to IPVM inquiries. Intel told IPVM it had no idea about this and condemned human rights abusing applications of their products, adding that it did not always have control over where its chips end up. NVIDIA, which has heavily promoted Tesla GPUs for PRC smart cities in the past, did not respond to repeated requests for comment from IPVM.
Meanwhile, the PRC government has increasingly promoted the use of its own domestic chips, in sharp contrast to the ongoing requirements for US chips in these video surveillance projects.
In this note, we examine this news and the human rights concerns, including:
Background: Ethnicity Analytics in the PRC
Evidence Of Ethnicity Analytics Mandated from the Top
Examples: 8 Separate Police Projects
Western Equipment Easily Available
Not Subject to Sanctions
Intel: "Opposes Any Abuse of Human Rights", Can't Always Control Where Chips End Up
NVIDIA No Response, Previously Touted Tesla GPUs for China Smart Cities
Amnesty International: "Extra Precautions" Needed for AI Equipment
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*****opposes *** ***** ** ***** ****** and has a policy to not ship any products in situations such as these unless we have high confidence that our products are not being used in connection with human rights abuses. Intel processors are general-purpose computing products that can be incorporated into countless systems and applications, and Intel products are resold through a large number of distributors and OEMs. We ** *** ****** **** *** *** ** ******* what products our customers create or the applications end-users may develop. Notably, *** ***’* *** **** *** ******** ** ******, *** *****. [emphasis added]
“The ***’* *********** *********** and NVIDIA’s end-to-end AI and deep learning platform can be applied to video streams to create smarter applications for a variety of industries,” said Shiliang Pu, president at Hikvision Research Institute.
Huang is playing with fire, using Taiwan to bypass tariffs and profit from selling AI to China. Once China has successfully cloned Nvidia technology, they will shut the back to door to Huang or force his AI money to stay in China.
imagine there was, besides IPVM, another independent security industry news organization (crazy i know, but bear with me).
now imagine that during their reporting they came to you and said,
”We have seen several of the deployment plans for facial recognition cameras in Uyghur. Some apparently were generated by a tool known as the IPVM calculator. Are you aware of this, and will you attempt to deny such use in the future?”
It is quite probably the software they are using is using the SenseTime Facial Recognition Server.
Older System specifications requirements of their Servers for face detection are very close to the ones expertly reported here, which both specify use of GPU and als the Intel Xenon CPU's. Their software is using the CUDA part of the GPU to process the detections.
That was a fantastically researched article - well done - very informative and a reminder to manufacturers that they cannot hide what they are doing re: investigative journalism (there’s always a trail if you follow the money/shipping invoices).
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Comments (7)
Undisclosed #1
Huang is playing with fire, using Taiwan to bypass tariffs and profit from selling AI to China. Once China has successfully cloned Nvidia technology, they will shut the back to door to Huang or force his AI money to stay in China.
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Undisclosed #2
what software packages currently support Uyghur identification?
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Undisclosed Manufacturer #4
That was a fantastically researched article - well done - very informative and a reminder to manufacturers that they cannot hide what they are doing re: investigative journalism (there’s always a trail if you follow the money/shipping invoices).
Create New Topic