This is The Substrate
A newsletter about possibly the most important resource of our time: compute
Welcome to The Substrate. The Substrate is a newsletter about compute and AI hardware, security, semiconductor manufacturing, and the geopolitics of these.
Should the US sell advanced AI chips to China? How can the US better enforce its export controls? How can we design and build highly secure data centers? When will China develop its own extreme ultraviolet photolithography machines? Can we design governance mechanisms into chips securely, for example to verify international agreements? How exactly does compute benefit nations anyway? — these and many others are questions we’re interested in.
The world is not about to run out of AI-related Substacks, so what’s different about this one? Let’s first stake out our fundamental beliefs, such as they are. A lot of people have a lot of opinions about AI, but here are some things we tend to believe:
AI is very likely the most important technology of our time
A world with very powerful AI could be very good or very bad
Good policy can help secure a more positive future with powerful AI
Compute is one of the most important resources of our time, and will likely remain so
Compute is a strategic resource that will see intense geopolitical competition
Compute can be used to better govern AI
These claims, if true, raise a lot of very important and very interesting questions about policy and strategy, and these are the questions we want to explore with this newsletter. We’re calling it The Substrate because compute is the substrate that AI runs on, silicon wafers are the substrate that circuits are etched onto, and (more poetically) the underlying structures are the substrate that surface phenomena emerge from.1
And who are we? The Substrate is run, and mainly written, by the compute policy team at the Institute for AI Policy and Strategy (IAPS). (Caveat: The opinions expressed in this newsletter are solely the authors’ own, and not indicative of any institutional stance of IAPS.) IAPS is a think tank whose mission is “securing a positive future in a world with powerful AI”, and ultimately that is our mission too. But mostly we’ll just write about things we find important and interesting, because we are betting that you also find those things important and interesting.
Most of us have worked on these topics for years. We have previously written reports on, among other things:
Hardware-enabled mechanisms, such as delay-based location verification to combat AI chip smuggling and flexible hardware-enabled guarantees for future treaty verification
But much of our past research and writing remains unpublished. With The Substrate, we hope to publish more things more quickly, including takes that are more tentative than what we’d put in a long report, but that we think can benefit from discussion and feedback even in that tentative form. We also want to write commentary on ongoing events, summaries of our longer research reports, and more.
Our first substantive post is written by Onni and argues that for chip export controls, quantity is at least as important as quality. After that, we will publish a post by Erich on the Stop Stealing Our Chips Act—which would introduce a whistleblower incentive program for export violations—and a post by Max on what the Bureau of Industry and Security needs money for.
And also because we are not afraid of conflation with semiconductor start-ups. But just to be absolutely clear, we are a not-for-profit newsletter and have no relation to the start-up called Substrate (without the definite article).