I will get downvoted, but fck it.
The ban on these open models is coming within weeks, if not days. As usual, the excuse will be "national security".
I will get downvoted, but fck it.
The ban on these open models is coming within weeks, if not days. As usual, the excuse will be "national security".
How exactly will they ban them?
By making companies using them "toxic" to touch.
For example: no government contract to any company who uses even one vendor in it's entire chain of dependencies, who uses such open models.
They can extend this further by laying more conditions, such as: any company dealing in this-this field can only use models "officially" approved as "safe". Rest you can guess how easy it would be to get that "safe" rating for such open models.
Can't wait to distill Deepseek v4 flash to America-1
Some contractors are already barred from using Claude due to DoD designation back in March as a "supply chain risk"
So now the US companies will be stuck on expensive models while the rest of the world can do things much more cost effective.
I'm not sure the outcome would be beneficial for the US as a whole here. But perhaps that is not their priority.
There are many proxy-ways to bypass such restrictions. Of course, the costs will be higher. Providers will spun-up.
Companies could self-host models in secret. It would be hard to stop.
The thing is, you don’t need to actually block usage to make something illegal. You make it so toxic that company wants to be seen publicly using open models
Companies would secretly use self-hosted models internally because it would give them a enormous cost advantage.
Sure, companies can indeed do illegal things
But how would the actual weights it be made illegal without violating the 1st amendment?
By ignoring the 1st amendment? The US has a tendency of ignoring its constitution whenever it's convenient.
Don't be glib, the 1st amendment is taken VERY seriously.
Im not sure if you’re joking or not.
- the US strictly regulate cryptography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...
- some prime numbers are considered illegal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number#Illegal_primes
I don’t think banning open weight is that far fetch compared to those
Not legally. Liability is a big thing.
Hell, the US doesn't even need to act.
I claim the CCP will wise up within 2 years, possibly much much sooner, and ban their own companies from open sourcing to prevent the Americans from acquiring the capabilities.
Despite all the nonsense claims of China distilling US models, the reality is that the Americans absolutely do distill these free Chinese models, and distillation when full logprobs are available (i.e. you have access to the weights of the model) is an order of magnitude better than when you don't.
Yes, Chinese open weight models in the short term harm US closed source model providers bottom line. In the slightly longer term, "showing your hand" and publishing both the architecture innovations and the models weights will be too dangerous for the CCP to allow. This is triply true if they can release a model that beats the Americans on most benchmarks.
I've already warned investors that this is probably the closest open weight models will ever get to closed access.
They may reverse course in the future, but the current directive from the CPC is that Chinese AI labs should be open sourcing their models.
https://www.businessinsider.com/xi-jinping-open-source-ai-us...
I don't think it's necessarily "wiser" to go closed source. All of AI is built on mostly openness, at least on the software side. There are other ways to compete, it's just the model itself will be a commodity.
You’re describing the dump and pump strategy that china has historically used across a number of industries. Stands to reason that this is what is going on.
why would you get downvoted, that's one of the most obvious next step
Because reddit unironically has better decorum around usage of their upvote/downvote system than HN does.
People on HN downvote objectively correct information because they don't like it 24/7. There's a reason the creator of Zig left and gave the computer version of a middle finger on the way out to HN!
You define OPs post as "objectively correct information" even though it is an unknown future event for which they provided zero evidence?
There's nothing wrong about that. Historically I have experienced this behaviour on hackernews multiple times, hence my comment.
Since when have hackernews started to become toxic like stackoverflow used to be?
fwiw pg said early on that downvoting for disagreement is perfectly fine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171
commenting about voting is also something the HN guidelines warns against:
> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Reminds me of telling employees to not discuss their wages. If voting here is such a toxic experience, maybe HN needs to wake up and smell the garbage.