I think the window for a ban of open weight models is closing fast so let's hope US administration is going to miss it and we get Fable-level models (at least in some aspects) with open weights without infringing any newly introduced law as a long-term local baseline.
Even if the US does ban it, Europe due to its lack of European competitors, has no current similar protectionist incentives. Even if there is regulatory capture in the US, the rest of the world isn't going to follow suit until the current market leaders outright are replaced with other competitors that Europe would want to favor. The genie is out of the bottle in the West already.
> lack of European competitors
There's Mistral. Although they've been surprisingly quiet for the last 6 months.
They are profitable and active on the enterprise local model territory. You can RL a model with them for your own purposes and I heard good things about it.
Mistral's business model works even if they start using Chinese models instead of training their own.
If China keeps releasing LLMs with such permissive licenses it probably works better since the pretraining rnd is subsidized and de-risked - but that’s a big if.
> There's Mistral
https://trackingai.org
Mistral: eq.IQ ~70
Kimi, Claude, Grok, Gpt, Gemini: eq.IQ ~130+
France might do something mad and take that route, but EU wide ain't happening for Mistrals sake.
Would be hard for them to act alone due to free movement in EU. Would be hard for them to outlaw a German business from offering the models from a German datacenter to French customers.
Theres a pretty big chance imho that europe will follow suit , or at least the segmenets that are fully aligned with the US on all things china even to their own detriment. Remeber rip and replace Huawei 5G because of national security , leading to some parts of europe having worse coverage than some tiny african markets. Best bet would be for europe to look at it like what it is an open source commodity that is useful to build on rather than a moat to extract rents with.
Doubt it now when US declared that Europe is an enemy, Europe is banned from the best models and that US is considering an invasion of Europe (Greenland). The days of US influence in Europe is limited.
If it was 2021, probably. But Trump has soured relations in the last 18 months enough that the soft power about technology isn't there like it once was assumed to be. What's he going to do if Europe doesn't step in? Jack up tariffs? Is it that day of the week already?
Open weights is more beneficial to Europe spring-boarding a catch up than defending Claude/Anthropic.
If CADA passes in its current state I doubt we'll be banning Chinese models any time soon. I think most people misunderstand the extent of the permanent damage caused by Trump
He threatened to go to war with Denmark over Greenland. In the US, that might just be a side story, a little joke from insane grandpa president. But it's not in Europe. And it's only one of the crazy adversarial things he did.
Yeah… but last 5 years happened and UE is now in the overdrive to decouple from Usania :D
well, the EU just brought down the regulatory hammer which complicates things a bit. we will have to see if it operates as a proxy ban on open models depending on how they go about enforcing all the safety, bias, transparency and data provenance requirements.
I mean there is Mistral?
I mean it’s not competitive at all?
It’s more that they have a different business case than competing for the top spots on public benchmarks.
They seem to be oriented more toward customizing models for the concrete needs of a company, on-prem deployment, proprietary knowledge-bases, etc.
It has been more competitive than any other LLMs by non-US/CN companies. Including Korean and Japanese models in case you want to bring those up.
A distant third is not saying much.
It has produced some locally useful models.
>Europe due to its lack of European competitors, has no current similar protectionist incentives [...] The genie is out of the bottle in the West already.
I agree, but you are underestimating EU regulatory incompetence
Yeah, but the world is not limited to the US so who cares…
If it's fable level then I am sold. I didn't have so much success with Qwen compared to claude x supermax plus thinking, no matter what I did.
What can the US administration do about it?
Send you to jail.
Worked well with alcohol last time
It sure did. Even Al Capone went to prison.
How can the US administration send me, a citizen of Sweden, to jail?
Sweden is dependent on the American nuclear umbrella. Until that changes, the US will have a lot of leverage on Sweden.
I mean they did manage to make Swedish authorities go after Pirate Bay.
I mean, it's not like they have done it all over the place already...
No.
What they always do. Send in armed men with guns? Export Controls. Import Controls. National Security Laws.
Good luck doing that in China?
You can send armed men to your house, or restrict companies in America from using these models.
They can also restrict US providers from serving these models. Looking at OpenRouter, there is currently 11 providers for 'DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731' with the only non-US one being Deepseek themselves, which aren't even the cheapest.
> the only non-US one being Deepseek themselves, which aren't even the cheapest.
Interesting.
If I were a western lab, might I be tempted to subsidize at least one faster & cheaper provider for Chinese models to keep even more data from leaving the US?
(I know in this case there can just be more efficient providers, am asking more than speculating)
>Good luck doing that in China.
Crazy how all the 5 eyes nations banned Huawei within like 18 months of each other.
For certain specific uses. As a consumer I can still buy Huawei phones. As a business I can still buy Huawei routers, if I feel so inclined.
Europe still heavily uses Huawei though, so it’ll be the same with Chinese models
Import control would only affect US? Also good luck sending armed men to China.
Level 1: Anyone using unauthorized model weights in their business is prohibited from doing business with the government...
Level 2: ... or with anyone who does.
Level 3: Anyone caught with unauthorized model weights is subject to the same prosecution they could expect if they had been caught with CSAM.
Cool - how are they going to detect/police that?
The NSA will run Mythos against the entire US population and it will find the patterns. Powerful computer purchases. Energy consumption suddenly spiking. HN comments demonstrating intent and/or contempt for the glorious self-evident freedom preserving laws of the United States.
Then they call your local law enforcement with an anonymous tip about this suspicious dude who's long overdue for a totally random home inspection.
Yeah but I'm in Australia and just host AI models as a service - how are the NSA gonna convince the local law enforcement to do anything?
Ask Kim Schmitz. (Yes, I know, NZ is nowhere near Australia, the point still holds.)
When has enforceability ever been a concern of the government? This is the same government that had anti-sodomy laws on the books until the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional in 2003.
Making it illegal even without having a realistic means of enforcing it still chills behavior, and so just because it isn't practically enforceable in the general case doesn't mean it isn't without consequences.
Same way they detect if you do business with Russia, North Korea, Iran. They don’t detect 100% of the cases but the punishment are severe enough to deter most companies.
How exactly though? I have my 4 RTX 6000 pumping out Deepseek code for my website - how are they going to tell i've used Chinese models?
This post exactly ;-)
Whistleblowers. Personal use would still be possible of course.
It's not out of the realm of possibility to do AI audits. I'm not saying it's a good idea or likely, but certainly something they could do.
They can't enforce a ban. Companies can just download the models and run them on MacBooks or GPUs (or the cloud) and USG has no idea. It would also hurt the administration's funding from corporate tech (companies don't like to fund politicians who restrict them). I'm not saying the administration won't do it, it would just be very dumb.