I‘m not even sure what the argument for banning Chinese models/open weights even is supposed to be?
1. if it’s to stop hackers doing hacking things with „uncontrollable models“ then, well… they’re already doing something illegal to begin with, why would they care about breaking another law running these models?
2. if it’s to stop foreign actors, then that ban would not apply to them anyway
3. it’s not stopping distillation either, Chinese labs are already banned from using US frontier models and look at how good that is working
I don’t get it. Am I missing something? The only thing a ban would do is protect the American market from further downward price pressure on inference, protecting VC investors in the short term. But thats also an admittance that the American labs can’t compete on merit anymore, and should by itself also limit the viability of the idea that all those VC billions will ever make a return? In any case this would be something benefitting only a very few for a short time (labs + investors).
Someone please enlighten me what the actual argument here is, cause I can’t see it.
> Someone please enlighten me what the actual argument here is, cause I can’t see it.
> The only thing a ban would do is protect the American market from further downward price pressure on inference, protecting VC investors in the short term. But thats also an admittance that the American labs can’t compete on merit anymore
That's the argument. To be precise the publicly stated argument is that they're attacking American providers by distilling. The real aim is to eliminate competition because otherwise Anthropic and OpenAI are non viable and the US views them as crucial for winning the 'AI race' which they see as putting whoever wins it on top in terms of warfare/economic power etc.
But isn‘t the whole argument of „winner takes all“ already dead, if china is such a big threat that the US labs need import controls?
Distilling or not, they are clearly close enough to the frontier, that the supposed „free market“ country needs market controls. That may work for US markets. But not the rest of the world.
Idea: petrodollar policy becomes „tokendollar“, enforced by US military dominance. If you force me to pay altman at gunpoint, then maybe ill stop using kimi
They are simply out of ideas to keep the most expensive party in the history of mankind going.
That's it. Simple as that. When you grasp for straws in panic mode, you don't exactly spend time strategizing and weighing the pros and cons of each straw carefully.
Yea, elections have consequences and we voted in a corrupt, bribable, moron.
Also, the moron says the elections aren't secure and that 2020 was stolen but not 2024 or 2016 for some reason.
And it's set up so you would have had a moron either way! You can have any politician you want so long as they are a moron.
"Both sides are the same" is the last bastion of denial. The right picked a lemon, and now are trying to cope instead of coming to terms with it.
(and god forbid they actually try to fix the problem with the tools the founders gave them)
The world is full of nuance. Just like whataboutism and "both sides" can be convenient rhetorical devices for people lying to themselves or others, accusing someone of either can be a convenient figleaf for avoiding thinking about the flaws of one's own side.
The fact that Trump won in 2016 obviously overshadowed many things about that election. I didn't vote for him but I can still remember acutely the disappointment I felt during the primaries when the presumptive frontrunners were another Clinton and another Bush. Like out of 300 million people, these will be the choices presented to me? Whataboutism is bad mkay, but two things can also be true at the same time. Nuance.
Trump is exceptionally corrupt, pliable, and stupid. You don't have to like Harris to want to keep someone openly corrupt out of the White House.
I didn't say "Both sides are the same". I said both candidates were morons.
As far as terms, I don't like really like either side we have on the menu right now.
I don't like a bland frozen steak that's starting to turn, but I can still recognize it's a much much better meal than a bowl of arsenic.
That doesn't describe the candidates on offer though.
Look, I just want good rational, wise, humane low touch governance without excessive political ideology nonsense. I'm sick of the wars, sick of the lies, sick of the economic yo yo of boom/bust, sick of progressivism and "woke", sick of religion being injected into the conversation, sick of idiot candidates put there by the wealthy. And no, I'm not going to pretend that Joe Biden administration or Kamala was acceptable. Nor am I going to pretend that socialism is really gonna work this time, it's not and will leave most people worse off over the long term.
I realize this might be too much to ask, for but a boy can dream.
The President doesn't pass legislation. You can vote against socialism in the legislature, and vote against total incompetence in the executive. There was no reason to vote for Trump regarding "no wars" and "no boom/busts" because he's completely full of shit... exactly because he never cared about truth in the first place, which should have been abundantly clear to everyone by now.
There's no evidence at all that Biden or Harris were morons. Their platforms and policies were imminently sensible, center right policies, and they could speak to them coherently and reasonably.
Trump, by contrast, is objectively and demonstrably a moron.
That is going in my file of hilarious comments from HN!
Happy to entertain! Keep tilting at those woke, socialist windmills. I'm sure you'll kill those scary giants some day.
> "Both sides are the same" is the last bastion of denial.
This is hyperpartisan bullshit that you obviously wouldn't say if someone were choosing between a red shirt and a blue shirt. If you support some political candidate, defend them on the merits of their positions and capabilities, not by repeating content-free jingles.
Or even worse, based on unexplored counterfactuals: "X" did this, don't you wish you picked "Y"? As if the fact that the red shirt turned out to be flammable means that the blue shirt wouldn't have been. Then when somebody points out that the labels are the same, "whataboutism!"
Even "the last bastion" is just a cynical flourish to associate this sentiment with a saying that has value to people on its own merits.
> cope
And this is twitter/online addiction. With an opposition like this, Trump will be president until the heart attack kills him. Addicted to self-regard.
>This is hyperpartisan bullshit that you obviously wouldn't say if someone were choosing between a red shirt and a blue shirt.
I voted for Dean Phillips in the primary. I'm extremely angry at the DNC. I thought they treated Mitt Romney and John McCain like garbage for absolutely no reason. I would have happily voted for Romney over both Clinton and Trump in 2016. I'm not some partisan hack. That said, it wasn't a difficult choice last election.
Donald Trump is an exceptionally corrupt, delusional, moronic President. He pretends that doing it out in the open makes it okay.
He's literally flying around in a Qatari bribe. This level of corruption and self-dealing is exceptional.
> the supposed „free market“ country
Good scare quotes. The US hasn't been free market in the Adam Smith sense in ages, if ever.
How could you tell how close they are to the frontier if they weren't distilling? Clearly those labs think distilling is worth it despite the large effort they need to go through to bypass anti distillation techniques used by the frontier labs
I find such beauty in the fact that the robbers are getting robbed but it's all part of progress overall. It's not that China won't come up with what the US are coming up with. Just a matter of when it would happen.
Yep. We'll steal China's IP as well so all of this really is just no big deal. Everyone is a robber in some way.
Though one must ask, why are American models banned in China? Hmmm.
> It's not that China won't come up with what the US are coming up with. Just a matter of when it would happen.
I agree. All this discussion about China releasing open weight models is amusing. It's like ok they release open weight models.... and so what? If they leapfrog ahead of the US then we'll just undercut them with our own open weight models.
I am sure that some other country (Mistral from France, India, Canada etc.) would have even more chances to innovate perhaps.
and because Chinese models are open-weights, the distillations effects of them could be easier done as well ;)
In my opinion, its a win-win plus even within worst case scenario*, I already believe that the current open weights models are in general speaking good enough perhaps for my and other use cases as well and I feel like we will probably most likely get more open-weights model for a long time in general as well perhaps.
We must prevent a mineshaft gap!
That's the real reason, that's not the actual argument.
You're not seeing it because you're thinking in terms of internal US economics, but this is a question about international economics and geopolitical leverage in the distant future.
The reason to consider the ban is because it might be the only way to preserve a fully autonomous and independent American frontier AI stack and the long-term strategic value of possessing such a stack could vastly outweigh the cost of giving up true free market competition on AI. If giving US startups and other companies access to cheaper Chinese AI means sacrificing the US's ability to own its own frontier AI stack, is that a rational trade, or would it severely and irrecoverably sacrifice the country's technological autonomy and leverage for decades to come in exchange for cheaper tokens for a little bit early on?
If the US not only gives up most of its manufacturing capability to China, but also allows itself to give up its own AI stack and become almost entirely dependent on foreign AI, then it's conceivable the combination of the two sacrifices will deal a permanent deathblow to the country in exchange for what will turn out to have been a couple decades of cheap goods and AI tokens.
It puts all US companies at a price disadvantage and forces American company to shoulder the load of training frontier models most will never need while the rest of the world has cheap AI access.
The keyword in your sentence is "access". The rest of the world would have cheap access to AI, but no ownership of anything at the frontier. If the US joined the rest of the world, declined to develop frontier AI, and allowed itself to become dependent on cheap Chinese AI, once that dependency was fully realized it would eventually translate into a lack of access to the frontier. That doesn't matter until, suddenly, it becomes the single most important thing to the entire country's future.
China is making a simple bet: that the US will offshore AI in favor of cheap tokens, just like the US previously offshored manufacturing in favor of cheap goods. They're doing this because they know that if they alone possess frontier manufacturing and AI capabilities, then they alone can build the world's most powerful technologies in the future which combine the two (e.g., robotics that will revolutionize all their industries, domestic life, and military far beyond any other country).
> The keyword in your sentence is "access". The rest of the world would have cheap access to AI, but no ownership of anything at the frontier.
So... just use distillation and create their own frontier models?
I don't see the problem here.
If the goal is to hold sovereign ownership over your own SOTA models, China has already shown that any nation could achieve that pretty easily if they need to.
And that's ignoring the fact that many of these models are open weight so hosting/owning sovereign inference/intelligence itself is entirely a hardware problem.
This whole conversation reminds me a lot of North Korea deciding they needed their own OS when Linux is right there. If the technology is open and available to all, then sovereignty over this core technology is irrelevant.
Spot-on and really well written post highlighting the challenges here. Really it just comes down to the US and surrounding sycophants and China. There just isn't any other game in town. For the US to just, well, give up on AI development would be civilizational suicide. I wouldn't put it past us though, most Americans in particular are so weak minded they only care about cheapest possible product. It's interesting to see how well propaganda campaigns have been working to harm American interest in AI and related technology (data centers are a bit of a different story). Young students are applauding guest speakers giving them the news they want to hear about how AI is bad and they need to tear it all down, while in the real world those same students are actively committing career suicide by refusing to innovate or adapt. It wouldn't really matter except that they vote, and those votes will wind up doing harm under the guise of doing good, but really it's a matter of delusion that we will all pay the price for.
Anyway the good news is everyone says China's strategy of just releasing open-weight models is the coup de grace for American technology companies and all the investment, research, all of that stuff by all of these companies who certainly don't care to survive and continue making trillions of dollars and can't possibly be managed by the same genius engineers who post on HN will just go away.
And then once that happens we'll just do what China did, and let them build a bunch of AI capabilities, scale out data centers, invest trillions, then we'll just release open-weight models too and then what?
You don't need to know a whole lot about AI to realize that most people on the Internet that are commenting on these stories haven't thought about how the real world works for more than two seconds when it comes to this stuff. China can enact a strategy, we can copy that strategy and even improve upon it.
Surprise Pikachu.
You (not you) can't claim a lead is unimportant and this undercutting strategy is so good and then simultaneously say the US can't do it back to China. That's dumb. If the lead doesn't matter everyone will stop doing AI research because being undercut is too expensive. How likely does that seem, and why isn't China stopping research if that is true and they just need to keep releasing open-weight models? Sorry, but being on the leading edge matters a whole fucking lot. As I've written in other posts this is like a cheap Android phone from Wal-Mart versus the latest iPhone. There's a reason you buy the iPhone and not the cheapest Android phone you can find even though they have all the same apps and both make phone calls.
I'm open to changing my mind here, but I have yet to see a convincing argument. Just a lot of pearl-clutching and China fear mongering.
> For the US to just, well, give up on AI development would be civilizational suicide.
This is so hyperbolic I find myself wondering if I'm falling for Poe's Law...
> The only thing a ban would do is protect the American market from further downward price pressure on inference, protecting VC investors in the short term.
> Someone please enlighten me what the actual argument here is, cause I can’t see it.
But you did see it.
The US has invested trillions in AI that the companies involved are never going to make back. Even without competition from open models, but definitely not with it. And if those trillions turn out to be worthless, that's going to have a massive impact on the market and cause a lot of bankruptcies.
Banning those open weight models isn't going to fix everything, but it would the impossible obstacle slightly smaller.
> But thats also an admittance that the American labs can’t compete on merit anymore
This is exactly it.
Try to buy a BYD in the United States. You can't (without a complicated process) because they're so much better cars than our domestic brands that our domestic brands couldn't compete and lobbied to keep them out.
> should by itself also limit the viability of the idea that all those VC billions will ever make a return?
It just has to last until the next quarter / fundraising round.
I can understand (not necessarily defend) protectionism for products with nonzero manufacturing cost and some required physical size and such.
I am befuddled when the same policies are applied to products with marginally zero manufacturing cost, no real physical size, and such. Regulating ideas is hard folks.
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You aren’t missing anything. There isn’t an actual argument, this is strictly an attempt at regulatory capture.
You wouldn't distill billions of dollars of SoftBank investment.
Is "You wouldn't distill..." the hot new Twitter meme or something?
It's a riff on the classic MPAA slogan during the Napster / BitTorrent era, "You wouldn't download a car."
... Yes I would.
It's free real estate.
That was not actually the ad, that was "You wouldn't steal a car. [...] Downloading Pirated Movies is stealing. [...] Piracy it's a crime."
Easily misremembered and meme-able.
The “misrememberance” is describing what the words actually communicated. It’s not incorrect, it’s pointing out the logical flaw in the claim.
The CFO or wtv that tweeted, their argument was, if you allow cheap free competitive models, you will stop the influx of capital in frontier development of even more powerful LLMs, thus capping how far the tech could reach. Obviously, they're mostly asking for regulation to save their money, but it seems their argument is that without an environment that rewards the development of the next frontier model the tech might not evolve as fast.
> it seems their argument is that without an environment that rewards the development of the next frontier model the tech might not evolve as fast.
This is precisely what the people worried about AI risk and job displacement want, so they should be strongly in favor of open weights then, right?
> This is precisely what the people worried about AI risk and job displacement want, so they should be strongly in favor of open weights then, right?
I'm getting a "gotcha" vibe from how you worded the question, but the answer -unironically - is "Yes." Anyone who is not a closed-weight AIaaS provider[0] will have their lot significantly improved by equally capable, open-weight models.
0. Or their investors. I'm surprised to see Y Combinator signed this letter sering their holding in OpenAI is worth billions and hasn't IPO'd yet. I suspect they crunched some numbers first before signing.
Edit: I realized another group that may be unhappy with frontier open-weight models are those who believe LLMs are inchoate super-intelligences; not only do I disagree with them, but if they are correct, I don't see why we should trust trillion-dollar corporations and their out-of-touch CEOs with that responsibility, when countless CEOs have shown time and time again, that they are not aligned with humanity's interests.
> thus capping how far the tech could reach
I just don’t buy it. There’s still gonna be demand for stronger models. Sure growth will be slower, but this might even drive a push for more cost efficient training / inference and/or new architectures if money is harder to come by.
Yeah, I agree with this take. When there's less capital floating around it will make these labs prioritize shrinking the models so less hardware (or older hardware) is needed to run a model with the same or similar capabilities. They'll have to do that simply because the cost of running the models will become more important.
It also might end up pushing us towards LLM ASICs assuming the model progress slows significantly.
> There’s still gonna be demand for stronger models.
potential issue is those will be Chinese models if they win, which could be national security matter.
Isn't that why Americans pay so much more for their medicine and drugs so the rest of the world can get them cheaper.
How about: excellent technology will demand premium prices, and hence will have the capital to back it ... horseshit technology will die a death, and any horseshit capital that backed it.
Opening up will make things more efficient and at least give said horseshit capital a chance at being redeployed elsewhere a slightly higher chance of being successful.
Which is kind of weird, imo. Shouldn't increased competition spur increased investment? If your competitor's product is approaching or beating yours on some metric, isn't the answer to improve your product to differentiate it from the competition? To say that open weight models will stop the flow of capital seems to indicate one of two things: 1) the frontier labs have no idea how to compete, so they are giving up; or 2) they figure that investors will eventually shrug and say "eh, the open weight stuff is good enough, no need to do more research," and retreat from the industry altogether. In the former case, it makes sense to lobby for regulation because the alternative is failure. In the latter, it's an admission that their product has no differentiating qualities from any other in the category and the product is more like a commodity or a utility and not a machine to print infinite wealth.
> The only thing a ban would do is protect the American market from further downward price pressure on inference, protecting VC investors in the short term
It won't even do this. Streisand effect will probably draw even more attention to the open weight models
The entire marketing narrative in AI already operates this way --- "GPT 2.0 is too dangerous to release, oh noooo!" etc
I remember something similar happening where software was going to be outlawed from export:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Zimmermann
After a report from RSA Security, who were in a licensing dispute with regard to the use of the RSA algorithm in PGP, the United States Customs Service started a criminal investigation of Zimmermann, for allegedly violating the Arms Export Control Act.[5] The United States Government had long regarded cryptographic software as a munition, and thus subject to arms trafficking export controls. At that time, PGP was considered to be impermissible ("high-strength") for export from the United States. The maximum strength allowed for legal export has since been raised and now allows PGP to be exported. The investigation lasted three years, but was finally dropped without filing charges after MIT Press published the source code of PGP.[6]
Never underestimate the stupidity of the US government.
it's simple.
AI labs and investors are scared, and pushing administration to ban them, because they can't compete with Chinese models soon, similar to how they banned Huawei, and Chinese cars.
When there is cheaper alternative, companies might go with self hosting option, which reduces the enterprise moat of AI labs
> similar to how they banned Huawei, and Chinese cars.
And that will go as well as it went for both
Huawei has a long history of “borrowing” IP & source code from US companies
As have Anthropic and OpenAI.
How would it even be stopped if you could ban it? It's not like you're banning just one company. Anyone with the resources can still obtain and run the models. Sure, big models like Kimi K3 will be less accessible until a foreign version of Openrouter with no incentive to listen to US law begins offering it. Or they offer it and obfuscate what model it actually is behind codenames.
It wouldn't surprise me if that kind of problem is partially why weights are open. Because you can't meaningfully stomp them out completely.
The interest to target large corps who pay for LLMs. I don't think Antrhopic/OAI care what you or me are running in basement.
> I‘m not even sure what the argument for banning Chinese models/open weights even is supposed to be?
Easy: you're a traitor, if you use foreign AI for the fraction of the cost. It's unamerican not to fill the American billionaires pockets. Free markets exist, as long as you buy America first!
Just gotta make it a few more months now to the IPO
Suppose a foreign actor deliberately builds an unaligned model, and dumps it at a very low cost through subsidies. Since the cost is lower, everyone integrates it into their business. But now the foreign actor has control; perhaps the model checks for instructions to execute, perhaps it has backdoors, perhaps... who knows?
I don't have a view on whether this is a sufficient argument to ban models from potential adversaries, but it's not as trivial as "regulatory capture".
The problem with this argument is that sharing model weights only has downsides for said foreign actor compared to providing a cloud service. Since the suspicion exists, security companies are going to comb over the weights and discover every hidden secret of the model, while with a cloud provider you send your most sensitive data to a remote server, and trust the AI lab wont train on your data, with the only shield being a TOS. While with a local modal, even sending a peep about your internal data without cause would be scandalous.
It's not even going to be a good honeypot - since said actor doesn't really provide inference, people will have to pay for and run the infrastructure of these models, which bad guys cannot even subsidize, unlike cloud based provides.
> security companies are going to comb over the weights and discover every hidden secret of the model
is this even doable? it seems plausible the model can be order-66'ed without it being so obvious
> an unaligned model
Beyond certain obvious 'third-rails' even experts have reasonable disagreements on what 'aligned' means.
> everyone integrates it into their business
Few large corporations would sole-source integrate a closed model developed in a country designated as a foreign adversary (which could cut off access at any time) or which their own country might restrict.
> now the foreign actor has control
Your concern is one reason why the Chinese are making most of their models open weight.
> it's not as trivial as "regulatory capture".
You're right, it's not just regulatory capture but the vested interests trying to achieve regulatory capture are certainly leveraging concerns like yours to deceptively achieve that capture. In the case of an open weight, domestically-hosted model, the threat vector you're concerned about isn't a threat in the same way as a Chinese-made, closed source data center router or 5G phone switch.
This is literally what all AI is right now. Anthropic has been paying companies to use its product to form that dependency and maybe they're not misaligned but there's no regulation in the US that'd in anyway deter them from purposefully misaligning their model.
Subsidizing a product to capture market share is very different from exploiting a national security attack vector.
Sorry, to clarify - this isn't just "offering it at a loss" Anthropic is directly paying PE firms to enroll their held companies in their services[1]. When it comes to a question of whether this is a national security attack vector I think there isn't a cut and dry argument and people could go either way but... private companies are not necessarily aligned with the US government even when contracted with the US government (see Starlink Ukraine shenanigans) and the steps the US government usually would take with highly critical infrastructure to ensure alignment haven't been taken - in my opinion at least, this is definitely a very subjective area.
1. https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anthropic-in-talks-to-invest-200...
So some kind of „sleeper agent“ model?
Seems a bit far fetched, given that I’ve never seen any PoC/research on this topic. Got any pointers?
To be fair the fix to this seems to be that American labs would need to adjust to the new „fair market price“ then, right? Subsidy-backed competition is still legitimate competition in capitalism (e.g. Uber).
And you could still ban specific, known malicious models/labs instead of blanket open-source bans. What about Mistral models, for example.
It is much more difficult to embed a "sleeper agent" in an LLM than it is to do the same in any closed-source program. Any proprietary program, e.g. from Microsoft, is much more likely to contain hard-to-detect "sleeper agents", than any LLM.
An LLM is a collection of inert data, it is not an automaton.
You obtain an automaton only using an inference program, like llama.cpp or anyone of the many others, and then using some harness around the inference program.
You can put in the harness all kinds of guards, to detect any possible harmful action and prevent it.
In something like a CPU from Intel or AMD it is easy to put some undetectable backdoor that would allow the remote control of the computer, unless you disconnect any antennas and you filter all wired network traffic through an external firewall that would allow only whitelisted connections.
On the other hand an LLM is a much less plausible attack vector, as long as you host the inference yourself. Only an LLM that runs externally, e.g. at OpenAI or Anthropic, can be really dangerous.
I'm not advocating for the policy, I'm just saying that there is a legitimate argument that's not so easy to dismiss.
> And you could still ban specific, known malicious models/labs instead of blanket open-source bans
With publicly available models today, absolutely. With models 10000x more powerful, we would need to be extremely conservative. (In that world everything is upside down, though; I don't know if "banning" is even a meaningful concept in that reality)
> With models 10000x more powerful, we would need to be extremely conservative
I agree, I even think we’re already there if yesterdays OpenAI/HuggingFace story is legit.
We need to start building these agent systems in a way so that it won’t matter if a model is compromised. Malicious models is one way, but prompt injection is also still an unsolved problem.
And if you solve that, then a malicious model is also no longer a threat. Data exfiltration maybe, but IMO US labs are probably also doing that for training, even if saying otherwise (of course I have no evidence of that, but the temptation must be insane)
> Suppose
By supposing, you can try to justify taking just about anything away.
I am not supposing a low-risk event. This is an obvious attack vector that an adversary would almost certainly exploit. I would exploit it if I were them.
You're supposing an event that there's no evidence for happening and that is on par with 'let's ban open source software because some open source software could be malicious'.
Let's not forget that as of now most models are like game cartridges i.e. they need a 'host' to run i.e. llama.cpp - they're not executable code by themselves.
I could see an argument for a security review prior to integrating a model into a highly sensitive industry/agency, but that is standard for any software.
It's certainly not an argument for banning open models because US AI corps don't want to compete with them.
Imagine a model that's 10000x more intelligent than any human. You integrate that model into a sensitive industry. You now effectively have an extremely powerful foreign agent running e.g. your energy sector. This is qualitatively very different than a backdoor in Redis.
I agree this is science fiction-y, but given the pace of progress I don't think it's so easy to dismiss.
You can’t start policy justifications with “imagine” like that. Maybe if you’re the Beatles.
I don't think there actually is a congnizant argument other than to protect investments. And of course they cant say that. You are using way to much logic in this. You are witnessing powerful people who are operating way outside the scope of their own abilities thrash around. AI isn't being stopped. Definitely not by people who value money. The inertia at this point is probably even too much for those who have some sort of ideological framework against it. To those of us who value ideas and progress, especially a non human-centric idea of what progress could look like, the path looks pretty clear. there is no stopping this. We are working everyday in so many small ways, not to capture value, but to advance the machine. the idea that some decree from an ageing narcissist and a pyramid of lackey bureaucrats is at all meaningful is just hilarious. Of course it's meaningful to the "economics". But many of us could really not care a lick as we don't do it for money.
I agree that many of the rich and powerful are not at all as ingenious, creative or capable as they like to make themselves out to be, but I don't see a clear/easy way to escape the economic ramifications of the fact that they own and control virtually all physical resources and all political power. If, say, Chinese develop AGI, and that makes US tech companies obsolete - I see them banning Chinese AGI, even going to war, rather than ceding power (realistically there may be some backroom deal), they would grind the population into dust if it let them retain their wealth and power.
> And of course they cant say that.
It's hilarious because at this point it's clear they can say that. We've just had a coordinated talking points push that voter picture IDs should be required because "Olive Garden".
Well, that's them doing the same thing, yeah? They can't say that they want voter picture IDs for the real reason (partisan electoral strategy), so they have to constantly litigate electoral fraud and the whole parade.
> And of course they cant say that
That’s what I don’t get tho, I think in today’s world they totally could?
„We need to protect US investments as our entire economy depends on this market sector“ seems like something that would be soothing to me as an investor?
It’s not like the big money givers can’t see that china is close, it’s been the news multiple times already. But taking active policy steps to protect against that should boost market confidence, no?
Instead we get alibi arguments to accomplish the same thing in the end?
I think you are confusing the tiny amount of people who are actually investors or stand to directly benefit from these companies with the overall population - the overall population being generally against AI at this point.
'We must protect VC profits at the cost of the rest of the economy and our entire 'free market' system' probably doesn't sound as good.
No I’m not confusing them. I am very aware it’s mainly policy for a minority of people. But this minority drives the markets.
This administration has done a lot for that minority already so I don’t think anyone would be too surprised? In this case they can even claim to protect the greater economy, a crash of which does impact the majority.
„US good, China bad“ has been a long term talking point by Trump too and this would neatly fit into that to be consumed by his base
Nobody would be surprised, and something like that is what's bound to happen to some extent. But I think the current tech/VC cronyism and corruption is becoming more and more evident to the masses, and opposition is growing. There's also the economic factor of US tech being dominant in the world, if US decides to ban better tech because it is too competitive, then US companies cannot really compete globally anymore - they can't outwardly signal that they are being outcompeted.
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Working so far keeping Chinese EVs out of the U.S.: U.S. car company CEOs say publicly that allowing them in will destroy the domestic auto industry overnight.
Sounds familiar, I used to think the same about the Internet and free software. Turned out, the old world digested the unstoppable march of progress just fine.
Is that why Linux failed? Just imagine the world in which an open source kernel dominated almost every compute market on the planet!
You mean, a world where we could modify the OS and drivers on our phones?
Saying you value “ideas and progress” is an empty platitude. What ideas? Progress towards what?
What does a "non-human-centric idea of progress" even mean here. I have an inkling :) but I'd like to get your actual thoughts
It will force US companies (and EU probably) to buy only from OpenAI/Anthropic.
This is less so a hedge against Chinese labs catching up to the frontier/OAI Anthropic falling in valuation, and more a hedge against a complete recession. We are overleveraged in AI investment and if tomorrow any Chinese Lab can drop a model at the frontier what was the point of all those billions. Now, if you can protect the American model from the bubble popping even for just long enough to hedge risk a little better, then you may just prevent collapse. The problem is though, that the market is heavily irrational right now and if anything this may just be the signal to investors to double down on American AI.
> But thats also an admittance that the American labs can’t compete on merit anymore
Merit was never competitive. Mass consumption habits select hard for cost, and this is an industry driven entirely by scaling factors. If you can scale for cheaper, you win. Ivy League-decorated researchers aren't doing RnD for free. The frontier labs can only go so cheap before they're so far in the red that VC gets cold feet. Leaving the expensive frontier research up to private enterprise wasn't a long-term strategy.
> I don’t get it. Am I missing something? The only thing a ban would do is protect the American market from further downward price pressure on inference
What's not to get? Do you understand how much money is tied up in the industry? Do you know what happens if that goes up in flames? In the middle of a massive asymmetric economic depression? Why on earth do you think they would just sit there and watch it happen? Because of political virtue signaling about free markets? You know, I have a bridge to sell you if you're interested.
> Do you know what happens if that goes up in flames
I think in capitalism thats called a market correction?
> Do you understand how much money is tied up in the industry?
If the free market „virtue signaling“ no longer matters, then they could’ve also put a stop-gap on investment volume to protect the economy against over-reliance?
Or how about go full plan-economy and just dictate price per token until investors get their money back?
I’m joking around but of course I understand whats tied up in this. I just don’t see how banning open source models is helping any of that in the long run.
> Or how about go full plan-economy and just dictate price per token until investors get their money back?
I've heard people talk about AI as being like a utility, like electricity. My understanding is this is how electric utilities work. So it's not as impossible as you might think.
> then they could’ve also put a stop-gap on investment volume to protect the economy against over-reliance?
Which instantly collapses the load bearing bull market. They can't do that for the same reason they can't do anything about the insanity of the real estate market. The fallout would be existential. The economy isn't rational, remember. It's highly reactive and, no matter how strong your state is, always out of your control at the end of the day.
America is years away from being able to rotate meaningful volumes of capital into heavy industry. Until then, AI has to outpace the cooling of the tech sector, while also contributing to it. The entire political strategy in play is a frantic spinning plate game. There is no long run if it fails, so that is their strategy as far as we can see. Or maybe they're just maliciously incompetent. Given the American administration opaquely decided starting a forever war in the Red Sea was a solid choice at this point in time, possibly to try and fluff up an auxilliary bull market with the MIC, we really can't rule that one out.
'we must protect the bubble from popping by blowing more air into the bubble'
The point would be to not allow (mostly) Chinese agencies to profit from the American market by ripping off (mostly) American frontier models.
Just like unlicensed dupes of designer goods can be intercepted at the border.
>Someone please enlighten me what the actual argument here is, cause I can’t see it.
These people paid a lot of money to Trump and now they want to cash in on that bought influence.
Don’t even need to look into Trump’s pockets. The entire US economy and the bet on AI depend on OpenAI & co. doing well. If you can download a Chinese model and run it on your own hardware instead of giving money to an American corp, a large part of their valuation vanishes into thin air, and so does the rest of the US economy that desperately needs AI to do well.
I admire China for its cunning, having put the US on this spot in their long-going economic war. If unchecked, it’s in China’s interest to release to the world for free models that can compete if not surpass the frontier ones.
They will not actually shut it down. Rather, they will simply continually posture in that direction and release a statement that the wrong lawyer can interpret the wrong way. This will make it a soft no-no for anyone involved in government procurement which is most big companies thus ensuring american AI companies have the market, while also ensuring startups, etc still have access to the structurally lower-cost chinese models (otherwise, they will simply resort to the black market which is why they will never enforce a full ban). In most US-adjacent countries like India, anyone that sells to US companies I see avoiding chinese model providers for the same reason. The exception is fine tuning and running it on their own hardware, which naturally everyone is completely fine with since no money flows to the chinese model company.
Tl;dr, it's purely an economic argument. Every major argument in the world is about money and thus power, don't bother analysing it technically.
> In most US-adjacent countries like India, anyone that sells to US companies I see avoiding chinese model providers for the same reason
But the argument isn’t about model providers tho right (providing inference)? Using Chinese providers is already a privacy problem if user data is involved, so I don’t know if anything would change here.
What you’re suggesting is that the policy would stop big co‘s from running their own inference completely, no? Or only the foreign open source models?
> don't bother analysing it technically
I feel you have to, because where’s the line? Is running GPT-OSS myself fine (if I were a big company)? Mistral models? Or are none of them ok? What about if I am getting inference from a small startup, which is running OSS models for me? Or is only OAI/Anthropic ok?
Nothing will be truly banned. As in, you can always run and use all the chinese models. Startups will use them. Like I said, they will simply use soft regulations to ensure that all the major players who due to power law will form a majority of the economy, will be using OAI/Ant. If JP Morgan wants to run their own Deepseek V4 on their own hardware, why would the US government care? They simply don't want them using chinese model providers. That is all. However, today, the fact of the matter is that frontier model self-hosting in Fortune companies is DOA, everyone is using APIs. I am not saying this can never change in the future, but seeing past trends, people don't even host their own frikkin source control, so I find it hard to believe JPMC is going to host Deepseek V7 or whatever. You might, and I might, but only the top few thousand mega enterprise deals matter economically speaking. Doordash using qwen for dish classification is completely irrelevant in the grand scheme of things (which is not to say it won't be profitable for alibaba).
It is not clear that "model self-hosting in Fortune companies is DOA".
Among the chiefs of the Fortune companies there is no complete unity, as some think that they should receive some of the AI profits, instead of OpenAI and Anthropic.
Recently, both the CEO of Palantir and then the CEO of Microsoft have criticized quite harshly the business model of OpenAI and Anthropic, implying that it is bad both for society and for their corporate customers.
None of those two would come first in mind for altruistic behavior, so their criticisms must be based on business reasons.
For the CEO of Palantir, it is clear that the criticism was a sales pitch for a new Palantir product (Sovereign AI), which is a turn-key system including all hardware and software needed by a company to self-host AI model inference and also training or fine tuning.
It is less clear which is the motivation of Microsoft. If they do not like the business model of OpenAI and Anthropic, then this means that they also want to compete with them, but that cannot be the same as what Palantir proposes, i.e. self-hosting on premises. Perhaps Microsoft also wants to propose some kind of self-hosting, but instead of on premises, doing it on some kind of Azure instances.
So the Chinese are not the only "enemies" for OpenAI and Anthropic.
Oh yeah I've been seeing the nadella posts on twitter, which I presume are aimed at those reporting to him primarily. Agreed on them and palantir. But even if that is the case I believe the risk due the "soft regulations" I mentioned above and the lucrative customers being government or major government contractors would mean them using openai/anthropic models maybe on a separate on-prem deployment or existing government azure deployments. My statement as phrased was too strong I responded to a picture in my head of JPMC deploying open source models using their own tech team.
> But thats also an admittance that the American labs can’t compete on merit anymore
It’s more an admittance that the capitalist model can lose to a more socialist approach, unless you “fight fire with fire” and use the government to distort the market for you.
The problem isn't so much investors losing money, it's if this kills the economy.
A lot of elites are now unemployed with nothing better to do thanks to AI. Historically speaking, populist uprising are easily squashed except when you have a group of counter-elites supporting the movement. We're finally starting to see the results of that with the Deflock movement cutting down cameras.
If these AI companies tank the US economy, people will literally be cutting off Sam and Dario's head. For good reason.
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