Overview
- A forensic analysis published on Nov. 12–13 by former OpenAI researcher Will DePue and Unemployment Labs says six Chinese models were initialized on Nvidia Blackwell GPUs that are subject to U.S. export controls.
- The method recovered model 'seed' values and used the starting weight layout left by a GPU architecture to match models bit for bit to Blackwell B200/B300 and GB200/GB300 systems in lab tests.
- Hardware reproductions reported in the paper showed exact matches on Blackwell machines while Nvidia’s older H100 and AMD’s MI300X did not reproduce the same starting rows.
- The author estimates very large runs for the biggest models, reporting cluster sizes in the low thousands of Blackwell GPUs per training and aggregate estimates ranging up to tens of thousands across models, though different writeups give varying totals.
- The report stresses key limits: the technique shows which chips made the untouched starting weights but does not prove where the chips were, who owned them, or that any export rules were broken, and the findings are already renewing calls for Nvidia export records and regulatory scrutiny.