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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 „uncon

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.

ThunderBee 2mo ago
You aren’t missing anything. There isn’t an actual argument, this is strictly an attempt at regulatory capture.
- echelon 2mo ago
  You wouldn't distill billions of dollars of SoftBank investment.
  - staticman2 2mo ago
    Is "You wouldn't distill..." the hot new Twitter meme or something?
    - echelon 2mo ago
      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.
      - dtech 2mo ago
        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.
        antonvs 2mo ago
        The “misrememberance” is describing what the words actually communicated. It’s not incorrect, it’s pointing out the logical flaw in the claim.
        deleted 2mo ago
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Matl 2mo ago
> 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.
- lizardking 2mo ago
  That's the real reason, that's not the actual argument.
- m4rtink 2mo ago
  We must prevent a mineshaft gap!
- capevace 2mo ago
  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
  - Slartie 2mo ago
    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.
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jubilee33 2mo ago
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.
- munk-a 2mo ago
  > 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".
  - ux266478 2mo ago
    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.
- Avicebron 2mo ago
  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
- capevace 2mo ago
  > 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?
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coffeemug 2mo ago
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".
- munk-a 2mo ago
  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.
  - coffeemug 2mo ago
    Subsidizing a product to capture market share is very different from exploiting a national security attack vector.
    - munk-a 2mo ago
      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-million-in-new-private-equity-venture-30b78738 https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anthropic-in-talks-to-invest-200...
- Matl 2mo ago
  > Suppose By supposing, you can try to justify taking just about anything away.
woah 2mo ago
Just gotta make it a few more months now to the IPO
sam0x17 2mo ago
> 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
- thijson 2mo ago
  I remember something similar happening where software was going to be outlawed from export: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Zimmermann 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]
  - antonvs 2mo ago
    Never underestimate the stupidity of the US government.
  - marcus_holmes 2mo ago
    I remember t-shirts with the DVD encryption key on them when the authorities tried to ban that. This shit always backfires. You'd think they'd know this by now.
porridgeraisin 2mo ago
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.
- capevace 2mo ago
  > 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?
  - porridgeraisin 2mo ago
    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).
ux266478 2mo ago
> 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.
- capevace 2mo ago
  > 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.
  - ux266478 2mo ago
    > 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.
throwaw12 2mo ago
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
- realusername 2mo ago
  > similar to how they banned Huawei, and Chinese cars. And that will go as well as it went for both
  - OrvalWintermute 2mo ago
    Huawei has a long history of “borrowing” IP & source code from US companies
    - andyroid 2mo ago
      As have Anthropic and OpenAI.
    - throwaw12 2mo ago
      please define "borrowing" I read a book and learned something, did I "borrow" or "distill"? I read info from a website without their consent, then learned something, and now I am teaching that knowledge to others, did I "borrow", "steal", "distill" or doing piracy be selling it?
apexalpha 2mo ago
>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.
- sph 2mo ago
  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.
techjamie 2mo ago
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.
- andriy_koval 2mo ago
  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.
m463 2mo ago
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didibus 2mo ago
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.
- capevace 2mo ago
  > 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.
  - cogman10 2mo ago
    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.
  - andriy_koval 2mo ago
    > 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.
- AnthonyMouse 2mo ago
  > 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?
infamouscow 2mo ago
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.
seydor 2mo ago
It will force US companies (and EU probably) to buy only from OpenAI/Anthropic.
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IncreasePosts 2mo ago
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.
treyd 2mo ago
> 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.
- cobbzilla 2mo ago
  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.
  - TurdF3rguson 2mo ago
    The cost of those output tokens is not zero or marginal.
    - cobbzilla 2mo ago
      The first token on a new AI rig costs $X (full capex cost) then every token after that costs virtually zero. Over time the cost/token trends towards zero (modulo opex). That said, AI does have higher opex than general SaaS so it can’t get as close to zero. But that’s kind of a different question, the running of some service. The “product”, the model, is a collection of files. The “manufacturing” required to add another customer is “send them the files” and has ~zero marginal cost.
      - TurdF3rguson 2mo ago
        There is a finite number of tokens that a rig will turn out over it's lifetime. Divide the cost of the rig plus electricity by that number and you have your cost per token. Yes providers can screw up on scheduling and end up paying more than they should, but that's not magic.
mcv 2mo ago
> 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.
- bg24 2mo ago
  > 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. This is the point. And what nobody seems to bring up that inference is a massively profitable margin. The labs can still grow at 80% margin as opposed to 99% margin (I do not have the numbers). But that will hurt the valuation and investors. With protection from Govt, you can compete at 1.5 or 2x of the equivalent open weights price. But it is not sustainable to keep the prices high, just a matter of time.
ashwon13 2mo ago
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.
antonvs 2mo ago
> 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.
- slashdave 2mo ago
  Free market does not mean breaking laws. China is not socialist. The issue here is the lack of rule of law in China. Not sure this would really fix that, though.
andix 2mo ago
> 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!
nilkn 2mo ago
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.
- ipaddr 2mo ago
  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.
  - nilkn 2mo ago
    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).
itemize123 2mo ago
just protectionism argument would suffice no?
popalchemist 2mo ago
The arguments come ex post facto. Their motivation is profit, because OpenAI is pitching the Trump admin on a 5% stake.
slashdave 2mo ago
> it’s not stopping distillation either, > an admittance that the American labs can’t compete on merit anymore Small contradiction here
PostOnce 2mo ago
answer to #1: murder is already illegal, but we also heavily regulate explosives because the public can't be trusted.
- deleted 2mo ago
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sellmesoap 2mo ago
The first that comes to mind is that they want the surveillance to stay in the region.
reinitctxoffset 2mo ago
Freedom means having choice. So we gave you two choices, and you're going to use both and you're going to love it.
riidcjfj2748 2mo ago
It’s to try and direct investment capital into US foundational model firms and to capture that market globally. It requires the containment of China, and cutting it off from the rest of the world, which is the broader geopolitical play at work
Dig1t 2mo ago
How would banning them even work anyway? Like would they say that possession of one on your computer would somehow be illegal? There’s nothing the US gov can do to stop a Chinese company publishing the weights on a server hosted in China.
wolpoli 2mo ago
There is no coherent reasoning here for banning open weights. The billion of dollars to train a model was supposed to be a moat so they can sell tokens. AI labs can't make money by capturing values from intelligence if any company could get the weights to build their own AI token factory.
eunos 2mo ago
They dont want dollars that could be used to grow US frontier labs to fund Chinese instead
zzzeek 2mo ago
It's to give unfair advantage to Anthropic and OpenAI who would then be expected to shower Donald Trump personally with hundreds of billions of dollars in cash, airplanes and tacky golden things.
steve76 2mo ago
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fhub 2mo ago
More broadly, this is one of the things I dislike about the US political system. When executives or major shareholders can legally make very large political donations while their companies are lobbying on issues that directly affect their businesses, it creates an unavoidable perception problem.
byzantinegene 2mo ago
The official reasoning they use is sanctioning 'intellectual theft' due to distillation.
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verdverm 2mo ago
I don't think we can separate out an enlightened argument from the total politics of out time. We are amidst a struggle between labor and capital, nationalism, and the commodification of humanity's most impressive engineering feat. There is a subset of humans who are romanticizing foregone times with artificial intellectualism. This group as significant control over media and are very good at oersuadion through emotions rather than reason.
z0ltan 2mo ago
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Buttons840 2mo ago
I've said before that I think red team security researchers should be able to investigate the security of government and corporate systems without needing permission. Currently companies say "you cannot investigate the security of our systems without our permission, because it is our system and we are responsible--also, if there's a data breach, we aren't responsible." See how that works? As a society we seem fine with this. We are sacrificing national security for the convenience of companies. So... to answer your question: Probably, again, we will sacrifice national security, and even our national competitiveness in this important new AI industry--we will sacrifice it all for the convenience of companies and so they can make a few bucks. It's more important than ever that the good guys actively monitor government and corporate systems for security flaws. These open-weight models are going to be in the hands of the bad guys; the hackers are coming whether the company is ready or not. Ideally a good hacker will find and disclose the vulnerabilities before a bad hacker pwns half the nation's personal data for the 3rd time this month--or worse. This will require that we stop bullying security researchers. Things like the State Governor personally pushing for felony charges because somebody pressed "view source" on an HTML page shouldn't happen.
OrangeMusic 2mo ago
I don't know if this fallacy has a name but there's something about "it's useless to make something illegal because the bad guys will ignore the law".
make3 2mo ago
Your argument about not successfully competing doesn't hold because distillation is essentially model stealing. The situation is like trying to compete on effort in school on an exam against someone who's copying your answers. Of course the person copying your answer will always have to study fewer hours. I sympathize with the argument saying that they ripped the whole Internet and books first though of course.
corv 2mo ago
It’s got electrolytes
hdgvhicv 2mo ago
If the bubble pops before the midterms that will be bad. Everything must be used to ensure that doesn’t happen.
deleted 2mo ago
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swiftcoder 2mo ago
Same as the tariffs, more or less. Both hinge on the same argument: foreign competition will drive down profits for domestic providers, so banning the foreign competition (or making them more expensive) will benefit domestic players
guess_who_is 2mo ago
You get it that it is to protect two american labs and the ego of the orange man?
127 2mo ago
OpenAI and Anthropic valuation crashing would crash the entire AI story, which would crash the market.
Zenul_Abidin 2mo ago
This is why Dario has always wanted more regulation on AI. So that Anthropic would benefit from it.
raxxorraxor 2mo ago
I wonder how they would feasibly ban it. They could do so with some infrastructure offering to run it, but ultimately you would be able to run your own private instance. What am I missing here, how would the ban be implemented? I expect this to be just posturing, but still
PunchyHamster 2mo ago
> 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. You say you don't get it then you say exactly why they are doing it. You get it just fine. Actual arguments are only there to make govt do something. Intent is to stop competition. With Chinese models being let's say 6 months to year behind it's quickly shrinking profit margin that even if we hit the pie in the sky AI usage numbers the American companies want us to believe, they wouldn't be able to live off with that competition
wolvoleo 2mo ago
It's to protect the market dominance of US providers of course, the security concerns are just an excuse.
waterTanuki 2mo ago
The argument is that it will make $OAI and $ATHR billions of dollars because U.S. customers with deep pockets will have nowhere to go but the "vetted as safe and verified model providers" aka the duopoly. No one with two brain cells to rub together takes anything they or the current U.S. government has to say at face value. This is a tale as old as the industrial revolution. I can only hope people see the trick for what it is this time.
tracker1 2mo ago
The only possible legit argument for blocking Chinese models is to force US orgs to use US based providers/models. And despite the fact that I and a lot of others cannot or should not use Chinese based models, they should be generally available as much as anyone in any other nation has access. It's a lot like the guards against dealing with security issues.. I'd rather they be found and fixed then to try to stop people from being able to discover in the first place. I mean, where does that stop, do we let AI security scanners not tell you you have a SQL injection for fear someone might exploit it? They already can and they might use something else that tells them as much.

ThunderBee 2mo ago

You aren’t missing anything. There isn’t an actual argument, this is strictly an attempt at regulatory capture.

echelon 2mo ago
You wouldn't distill billions of dollars of SoftBank investment.
- staticman2 2mo ago
  Is "You wouldn't distill..." the hot new Twitter meme or something?
  - echelon 2mo ago
    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.
    - dtech 2mo ago
      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.
      - antonvs 2mo ago
        The “misrememberance” is describing what the words actually communicated. It’s not incorrect, it’s pointing out the logical flaw in the claim.
      - deleted 2mo ago
        [deleted]
- deleted 2mo ago
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Matl 2mo ago

> 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.

lizardking 2mo ago
That's the real reason, that's not the actual argument.
m4rtink 2mo ago
We must prevent a mineshaft gap!
capevace 2mo ago
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
- Slartie 2mo ago
  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.
- deleted 2mo ago
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jubilee33 2mo ago

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.

munk-a 2mo ago
> 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".
- ux266478 2mo ago
  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.
Avicebron 2mo ago
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
capevace 2mo ago
> 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?

deleted 2mo ago

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coffeemug 2mo ago

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".

munk-a 2mo ago
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.
- coffeemug 2mo ago
  Subsidizing a product to capture market share is very different from exploiting a national security attack vector.
  - munk-a 2mo ago
    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-million-in-new-private-equity-venture-30b78738 https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anthropic-in-talks-to-invest-200...
Matl 2mo ago
> Suppose By supposing, you can try to justify taking just about anything away.

woah 2mo ago

Just gotta make it a few more months now to the IPO

sam0x17 2mo ago

> 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

thijson 2mo ago
I remember something similar happening where software was going to be outlawed from export: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Zimmermann 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]
- antonvs 2mo ago
  Never underestimate the stupidity of the US government.
- marcus_holmes 2mo ago
  I remember t-shirts with the DVD encryption key on them when the authorities tried to ban that. This shit always backfires. You'd think they'd know this by now.

porridgeraisin 2mo ago

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.

capevace 2mo ago
> 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?
- porridgeraisin 2mo ago
  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).

ux266478 2mo ago

> 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.

capevace 2mo ago
> 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.
- ux266478 2mo ago
  > 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.

throwaw12 2mo ago

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

realusername 2mo ago
> similar to how they banned Huawei, and Chinese cars. And that will go as well as it went for both
- OrvalWintermute 2mo ago
  Huawei has a long history of “borrowing” IP & source code from US companies
  - andyroid 2mo ago
    As have Anthropic and OpenAI.
  - throwaw12 2mo ago
    please define "borrowing" I read a book and learned something, did I "borrow" or "distill"? I read info from a website without their consent, then learned something, and now I am teaching that knowledge to others, did I "borrow", "steal", "distill" or doing piracy be selling it?

apexalpha 2mo ago

>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.

sph 2mo ago
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.

techjamie 2mo ago

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.

andriy_koval 2mo ago
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.

m463 2mo ago

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didibus 2mo ago

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.

capevace 2mo ago
> 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.
- cogman10 2mo ago
  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.
- andriy_koval 2mo ago
  > 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.
AnthonyMouse 2mo ago
> 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?

infamouscow 2mo ago

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.

seydor 2mo ago

It will force US companies (and EU probably) to buy only from OpenAI/Anthropic.

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

IncreasePosts 2mo ago

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.

treyd 2mo ago

> 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.

cobbzilla 2mo ago
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.
- TurdF3rguson 2mo ago
  The cost of those output tokens is not zero or marginal.
  - cobbzilla 2mo ago
    The first token on a new AI rig costs $X (full capex cost) then every token after that costs virtually zero. Over time the cost/token trends towards zero (modulo opex). That said, AI does have higher opex than general SaaS so it can’t get as close to zero. But that’s kind of a different question, the running of some service. The “product”, the model, is a collection of files. The “manufacturing” required to add another customer is “send them the files” and has ~zero marginal cost.
    - TurdF3rguson 2mo ago
      There is a finite number of tokens that a rig will turn out over it's lifetime. Divide the cost of the rig plus electricity by that number and you have your cost per token. Yes providers can screw up on scheduling and end up paying more than they should, but that's not magic.

mcv 2mo ago

> 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.

bg24 2mo ago
> 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. This is the point. And what nobody seems to bring up that inference is a massively profitable margin. The labs can still grow at 80% margin as opposed to 99% margin (I do not have the numbers). But that will hurt the valuation and investors. With protection from Govt, you can compete at 1.5 or 2x of the equivalent open weights price. But it is not sustainable to keep the prices high, just a matter of time.

ashwon13 2mo ago

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.

antonvs 2mo ago

> 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.

slashdave 2mo ago
Free market does not mean breaking laws. China is not socialist. The issue here is the lack of rule of law in China. Not sure this would really fix that, though.

andix 2mo ago

> 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!

nilkn 2mo ago

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.

ipaddr 2mo ago
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.
- nilkn 2mo ago
  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).

itemize123 2mo ago

just protectionism argument would suffice no?

popalchemist 2mo ago

The arguments come ex post facto. Their motivation is profit, because OpenAI is pitching the Trump admin on a 5% stake.

slashdave 2mo ago

> it’s not stopping distillation either, > an admittance that the American labs can’t compete on merit anymore Small contradiction here

PostOnce 2mo ago

answer to #1: murder is already illegal, but we also heavily regulate explosives because the public can't be trusted.

deleted 2mo ago
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sellmesoap 2mo ago

The first that comes to mind is that they want the surveillance to stay in the region.

reinitctxoffset 2mo ago

Freedom means having choice. So we gave you two choices, and you're going to use both and you're going to love it.

riidcjfj2748 2mo ago

It’s to try and direct investment capital into US foundational model firms and to capture that market globally. It requires the containment of China, and cutting it off from the rest of the world, which is the broader geopolitical play at work

Dig1t 2mo ago

How would banning them even work anyway? Like would they say that possession of one on your computer would somehow be illegal? There’s nothing the US gov can do to stop a Chinese company publishing the weights on a server hosted in China.

wolpoli 2mo ago

There is no coherent reasoning here for banning open weights. The billion of dollars to train a model was supposed to be a moat so they can sell tokens. AI labs can't make money by capturing values from intelligence if any company could get the weights to build their own AI token factory.

eunos 2mo ago

They dont want dollars that could be used to grow US frontier labs to fund Chinese instead

zzzeek 2mo ago

It's to give unfair advantage to Anthropic and OpenAI who would then be expected to shower Donald Trump personally with hundreds of billions of dollars in cash, airplanes and tacky golden things.

steve76 2mo ago

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fhub 2mo ago

More broadly, this is one of the things I dislike about the US political system. When executives or major shareholders can legally make very large political donations while their companies are lobbying on issues that directly affect their businesses, it creates an unavoidable perception problem.

byzantinegene 2mo ago

The official reasoning they use is sanctioning 'intellectual theft' due to distillation.

deleted 2mo ago

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verdverm 2mo ago

I don't think we can separate out an enlightened argument from the total politics of out time. We are amidst a struggle between labor and capital, nationalism, and the commodification of humanity's most impressive engineering feat. There is a subset of humans who are romanticizing foregone times with artificial intellectualism. This group as significant control over media and are very good at oersuadion through emotions rather than reason.

z0ltan 2mo ago

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Buttons840 2mo ago

I've said before that I think red team security researchers should be able to investigate the security of government and corporate systems without needing permission. Currently companies say "you cannot investigate the security of our systems without our permission, because it is our system and we are responsible--also, if there's a data breach, we aren't responsible." See how that works? As a society we seem fine with this. We are sacrificing national security for the convenience of companies. So... to answer your question: Probably, again, we will sacrifice national security, and even our national competitiveness in this important new AI industry--we will sacrifice it all for the convenience of companies and so they can make a few bucks. It's more important than ever that the good guys actively monitor government and corporate systems for security flaws. These open-weight models are going to be in the hands of the bad guys; the hackers are coming whether the company is ready or not. Ideally a good hacker will find and disclose the vulnerabilities before a bad hacker pwns half the nation's personal data for the 3rd time this month--or worse. This will require that we stop bullying security researchers. Things like the State Governor personally pushing for felony charges because somebody pressed "view source" on an HTML page shouldn't happen.

OrangeMusic 2mo ago

I don't know if this fallacy has a name but there's something about "it's useless to make something illegal because the bad guys will ignore the law".

make3 2mo ago

Your argument about not successfully competing doesn't hold because distillation is essentially model stealing. The situation is like trying to compete on effort in school on an exam against someone who's copying your answers. Of course the person copying your answer will always have to study fewer hours. I sympathize with the argument saying that they ripped the whole Internet and books first though of course.

corv 2mo ago

It’s got electrolytes

hdgvhicv 2mo ago

If the bubble pops before the midterms that will be bad. Everything must be used to ensure that doesn’t happen.

deleted 2mo ago

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swiftcoder 2mo ago

Same as the tariffs, more or less. Both hinge on the same argument: foreign competition will drive down profits for domestic providers, so banning the foreign competition (or making them more expensive) will benefit domestic players

guess_who_is 2mo ago

You get it that it is to protect two american labs and the ego of the orange man?

127 2mo ago

OpenAI and Anthropic valuation crashing would crash the entire AI story, which would crash the market.

Zenul_Abidin 2mo ago

This is why Dario has always wanted more regulation on AI. So that Anthropic would benefit from it.

raxxorraxor 2mo ago

I wonder how they would feasibly ban it. They could do so with some infrastructure offering to run it, but ultimately you would be able to run your own private instance. What am I missing here, how would the ban be implemented? I expect this to be just posturing, but still

PunchyHamster 2mo ago

> 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. You say you don't get it then you say exactly why they are doing it. You get it just fine. Actual arguments are only there to make govt do something. Intent is to stop competition. With Chinese models being let's say 6 months to year behind it's quickly shrinking profit margin that even if we hit the pie in the sky AI usage numbers the American companies want us to believe, they wouldn't be able to live off with that competition

wolvoleo 2mo ago

It's to protect the market dominance of US providers of course, the security concerns are just an excuse.

waterTanuki 2mo ago

The argument is that it will make $OAI and $ATHR billions of dollars because U.S. customers with deep pockets will have nowhere to go but the "vetted as safe and verified model providers" aka the duopoly. No one with two brain cells to rub together takes anything they or the current U.S. government has to say at face value. This is a tale as old as the industrial revolution. I can only hope people see the trick for what it is this time.

tracker1 2mo ago

The only possible legit argument for blocking Chinese models is to force US orgs to use US based providers/models. And despite the fact that I and a lot of others cannot or should not use Chinese based models, they should be generally available as much as anyone in any other nation has access. It's a lot like the guards against dealing with security issues.. I'd rather they be found and fixed then to try to stop people from being able to discover in the first place. I mean, where does that stop, do we let AI security scanners not tell you you have a SQL injection for fear someone might exploit it? They already can and they might use something else that tells them as much.