The issue is not open weights as a whole, indeed Hegseth himself said they are important for America (if American made, presumably); the issue is Chinese models, whether open or not, and that's what's looking to be banned, and nothing in this article suggests otherwise.
What is a "Chinese model"?
If I change one weight in Kimi, is it still a Chinese model?
If I fine-tune Kimi on pro-America nationalistic freedom loving anti-Chinese propaganda, is it still a Chinese model?
If I distill Kimi from one server to the next without ever directly transferring any weights, is it still a Chinese model?
If Claude accidentally trains on some of Kimi's output, is Claude then considered to be a Chinese model?
If China's next open-weight model is released secretly through a European company, is it still a Chinese model?
The conversation going on in the industry is a bit broader than that. OpenAI's head of strategic futures just said last week that open models are inherently decelerationist, ungovernable, and will slow development on the frontier. You'll notice OpenAI does not appear as a signatory here despite their relationship with Microsoft.
>open models are inherently decelerationist, ungovernable, and will slow development on the frontier
Ungovernable makes intuitive sense, but I don’t understand how open weight models could be decelerationist or slow the development of the frontier. Was there an argument for those positions?
Open weight models challenge the "winner takes all" hypothesis, which motivates the astronomical valuations and acts as a justification for trains of cash dumped into AI development.
In other words, if AI models become a commodity, the "AI leaders" will not be able to burn the cash like they do today, thus resulting in a "slower" (one could say instead "more sustainable") development of AI models.
Well maybe they should find better training methods or architectures
Tough shit welcome to capitalism
Here's his original post https://x.com/i/status/2078133895766114412
It's a copy/paste of the arguments against open source software from decades ago. The argument goes: innovation requires profit motive, and profit motive requires IP rights. Of course, this was soundly disproven in software and I don't see any reason it should be different here.
Chinese providers are actively debunking that argument by innovating on and releasing open weight models.
Well of course OpenAI and Anthropic say those sorts of things, it's what they've always said, particularly Anthropic, but that doesn't necessarily mean that's the position of the US government. In other words the government seems to be listening to some but not all of the lobbying done by the big two.
The guy who said those things just joined OpenAI in the last month. He was previously a senior policy advisor, specifically on AI, to the current administration in the White House.
I don't know that the US government has a unified position on open source AI. But it's not like this isn't a discussion happening among policymakers.
Surprised to see I partially agree. They are indeed ungovernable and that is the best part.
> ...the issue is Chinese models, whether open or not, and that's what's looking to be banned...
Is the US planning to invade China and take away their models? Because otherwise China is still going to have the models even if the US bans them. I don't think they're going to be going with the US position on this one.
It's the same patronizing nonsense as when all the US webcos pulled out of the Chinese market in some misguided supposed protest believing the Chinese so incapable of rolling their own Google, Amazon or WhatsApp they will come begging the americans to go back. Now the western tech universe goes to China for ideas.
If by "pulled out of the Chinese market" you mean "were hacked by the Chinese government in a way that compromised their intellectual property and the safety of dissidents", then yes [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Aurora
The point is did the US reaction work or was it completely counter productive?
Then will attempting to cutoff China again today work or do we expect that also will prove to achieve the exact opposite of what its proponents are claiming?
We didn't cut off anything. American companies would have been more than happy to continue offering products and services in the Chinese market.
The Chinese government didn't like that idea. They attacked American companies, stole the IP, and created their own analogs of American corporate offerings. If you are a company and are targeted by a totalitarian government, it's not unreasonable to pull out of that totalitarian government's jurisdiction.
Honestly, the American response to that was not nearly stout enough. Chinese goods and services had been sold in the US without issue for decades at that point, often to the detriment of both domestic and other international market players. When China was expected to play by those rules and allow American companies to do business in a mostly-unfettered way, they attacked the companies and drove them out of their market.
Banned in the US, obviously, not worldwide. The problem is if the US wanted to, they actually could enforce such a ban nearly worldwide, by putting Chinese AI companies on a sanctions list and disallowing any US company (or anyone that does business with a US company, which is much of the world) from touching them.
Why anyone would care what Hegseth thinks about open weight models? What's wrong with Chinese models? The censorship? I think it's good to have diversity of opinion. Get US flavored output on sensitive subjects from US models and ZH on ZH models. That's a useful tool.
China is doing open models better. I think there's little going in Hagueseth's head other than the usual reactionary nationalism reflex.
I mean I agree with you, as what I said above is not my position, that's the US government's position.