This was always where this was heading, but we got here much faster than expected.
Once western governments declare it to be a "national security" risk for citizens to have access to open-weight frontier models, and once they classify using these models as acts of terrorism, what will that world be like?
Will using Kimi K3 come to be like how napster was in the olden days? Everybody knew it was technically illegal, but come on -- any track at your fingertips? But surveillance is quite more evolved now.
Or it will be like cannabis, where a guy in the neighborhood will low key rent you metered access to the 8x5090 rig in his basement he cobbled together from parts on ebay? Or everyone will flock to VPNs?
Or will the oppressors actually succeed? The same way that napster is long gone, and everyone accepts that they must pay spotify for a homogenized collection, where artists must take only a minuscule cut (more than napster though)... We'll be stuck with nerfed Cohere or Mistral models for open-weight options, as if they need more lobotomizing. Or else we can pay through the nose for Anthropic/OpenAI for "American Frontier" models which will fall increasingly far behind China.
Or else, like how Kindle Fire was subsidized by ads, we'll have "Kindle AI" where influence is sold to the highest bidder, where the LLM will tell us that smoking is actually healthy if big tobacco can engineer its renaissance by turning its lobbying dollars to pay-to-play, pumping its propaganda into the training pipeline for Amazon's extra commercialized line of ultra budget LLMs.
Basically a new iron curtain didving the world into digiatl blocks.The era of open internet/science is on its last legs with the potential forr bifurcation into incompatible ecosystems high , the onger the exchange is disrupted. As recently as this month the USgov has donce a Wolf Amendment style declaration for the Scientific collaboration NSF while shifting its purview under the military. To add to that its trying to rope as many countries into its Pax Silica idea intentionally to exclude China while simultaneosly coercing its 'allies' into using its nerfed offerings [1]
So maybe some isolated switzrland/singapore type locales would exist for US/EUusers to be able to dip their toes across the curtain legally without reprucursions.
[1] https://nitter.net/RnaudBertrand/status/2069574934972797089
> The Wolf Amendment is a law passed by the United States Congress in 2011, named after Representative Frank Wolf, that prohibits the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) from using government funds to engage in direct, bilateral cooperation with the Chinese government and China-affiliated organizations from its activities without explicit authorization from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Congress
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_Amendment
At this point, the United States will lose that battle most Countries in the world are going end up using electronics from Asia, that ship has sailed Japan, China, Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Vietnam, dominate that area, China already dominates EVs, Drones and many other electronic devices, and with the way Donald Trump has picked fights, Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Mexico and many others are looking for other business partners.
If you need infrastructure done, China is dominating that area too. Rail, High-speed rail, Nuclear reactors, (near future Thorium reactors), Dams, Highway roads, bridges, Ocean ports, airports you name it, and they can roll it out, Transport ships, And if they don’t do it, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and Taiwan do.
Is it too late? No, not necessarily, but America needs a regime change…
Singapore? Singapore doesn't produce shit.
Are you dissing my boy Sound Blaster??
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We've banned this account for using HN for ideological battle and ignoring our requests to stop.
Hilarious response to concerns about industrial production, thanks for getting us here.
If rural America is that unappetizing, you understand you can just go live somewhere else, right? There is a very deep-seated hatred here that I suspect has little to do with actual "rural people".
America is what it is. The only thing that will change it is leaning in not bemoaning "rural people" on Hacker News.
If they outlaw open source models that'll just handicap American companies, the rest of the world will be running open source and have an arbitrage against US companies.
Exactly. It's an incredibly stupid idea to restrict access to open source models if your want your nations economy to succeed.
> western governments
Are you talking about the US, specifically?
Why would other countries, that don't share the same anxiety about China as the US, would be troubled with the this?
"Why would other countries, that don't share the same anxiety about China as the US, would be troubled with the this?"
It's the other way around.
There is a high likelihood that many countries of the "west" (the "global north"?) will outlaw, restrict, or otherwise control LLMs and the tools that enable them.
The US, however, is blessed with the first amendment which makes it extremely difficult to restrain speech in any form - including code.
> There is a high likelihood that many countries of the "west" (the "global north"?) will outlaw, restrict, or otherwise control LLMs and the tools that enable them.
Why? Based on what?
I've seen absolutely no indication of this.
Only the US are playing this game atm.
It wasn't difficult for the US to restrict TikTok (or BYD, Huawei, DJI...)
And we saw how easily the US political class capitulated once Americans started complaining.
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The US might pressure them?
US pressure is worth a lot less than it used to be; that's why other developed countries are urgently prioritizing digital sovereignty after years of technological sclerosis where they were happy to run on US-managed cloud infrastructure.
It's not just the tariffs and imperialist/autocratic aspirations of the current President; it's also the fecklessness of the federal legislature and the revelation via social media that a large cohort of the public hold a negative-sum worldview and enthusiastically endorse bad faith dealing.
It’s worth less, unfortunately the country is still the most powerful military and economical actor in the world, and still has a lot of influence
EU countries are homeshoring their digital stacks as fast as they possibly can, and the reason is precisely because of the pressure that the US government is exerting via its (temporary) dominance in technology.
That’s really something that has to be seen, we (European countries) talk a lot about sovereign software but have very little to show for it. Things are moving but it’s still mostly a political posturing more than anything else. Might be different in a few years
Presumably the first step is changing the perception that US service providers are the only options.
I dislike the term "sovereign software" because it collapses every aspect of the discussion. It is intentionally dumb, a slogan.
But now that politicians have waved their slogan around, perhaps some actions can be taken.
Those days are gone. Look no further than the occupant in the White House. IE the Swedish jet industry is about to get bigger, future drone expertise, if the Ukraine can hold on if you want to learn the ins and outs, you don’t need the United States. If you’re serious about learning and building drones.
It’s going to be a different world, a world where many former allies are not gonna look to the United States first they can no longer afford to.
It’s not gone yet, the US is still a bully with a lot of power and with access to quite a lot of levers to pressure other actors. Actually, our (Europe) weak response to US aggression and threats has been disappointing so far. We will see how that evolves, the EU is slow to react
Not sure if you noticed, European countries are distancing themselves from the US. They couldn't be pressured to offer logistic support to the US shitshow in Iran, why would they be pressured to help the US in its protectionism of its AI bubble?
Im aware, I’m in Europe… The US is still a bully and I would expect to be very likely to pressure other countries, even if the influence reduced. But you will notice that I used a conditional in my comment, to soften it
Well, many EU countries like Italy and Germany officially freaked out about DeepSeek, ordering it to be banned from app stores etc.
That's about the mobile apps specifically, and it is related to personal data of EU citizens being transferred to servers in China.
It has nothing to do with running open models, especially in hardware within Europe.
The disappearance of high ram Mac studio rigs is probably just a coincidence, right? :/
Apple, like everyone else in the industry, doesn't have enough DRAM. For every 512GB in a Mac Studio, they could put those chips to 64 Macbook Neos^.
Apple benefits enormously from on device AI (sells hardware) and prominently features software like LM Studio in the marketing and press releases of their new hardware.
^Technically the on-chip packaging of A-series processors make this a bit different, but point still stands.
More like the pricing was too turbulent. Apple doesn’t really do rapidly changing prices and there isn’t any stable price for that much ram.
even 8x rtx pro 6000 is only 768GB of VRAM. IDK how anyone is going to run k3
Usually offloading experts to system RAM. DDR4 has gone up a lot, but on a 8-channel used Xeon motherboard or whatever, you can get tolerable mem bandwidth out of it.
This is why God gave us 1.58-bit ternary quants?
1-trit*
on the 1.5 tB macStudio that is going to be released next quarter
768GB next quarter. The chip supporting 1.5TB won't come out until 2028 or 2029.
Free server racks for everyone when the bubble bursts!
No they will ship it to China as ewaste and then sell it back to us.
Almost free server racks for everyone when the bubble bursts!
I just want an Oxide server at home for sub $1000. Or this, whichever's cheaper.
"Free server racks for everyone when the bubble bursts!"
I actually have this trophy from the previous bursting bubble ... a Sun microsystems rack populated with three e4500.
$750k + of equipment at original list price ...
> Sun microsystems rack populated with three e4500
That's super cool; I bet that's a lot of fun to play around with. I wonder how much of this stuff just ended up in a landfill because it was too much effort to find buyers.
> Or it will be like cannabis, where a guy in the neighborhood will low key rent you metered access to the 8x5090 rig in his basement he cobbled together from parts on ebay?
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/iNotXHO8NWU
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/groove-thing/the-worlds...
this doesnt even capture it.
cars are a final product. beyond a basic threshold they dont influence other products, their quality or cost structure.
this is different.
all software, and everything that depends on software, will be enshittified into trabis and ladas once the idiot west starts "building the wall".
as a developer, techie or just a modern person, the only response to this is to get out while you still can, like east germans in 1950s.