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> 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 furt
by 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 agoThat's the real reason, that's not the actual argument.
- m4rtink 2mo agoWe must prevent a mineshaft gap!
- capevace 2mo agoBut 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 agoThey 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[deleted]
- IncreasePosts 2mo agoHow 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
- capevace 2mo agoYou‘re reading it wrong. I’m saying it doesn’t matter wether they did or not, because now they clearly have models which can compete.
- etdznots 2mo agoAnthropic is “distilling chinese models”. Everyone uses outputs from every other frontier model in both pre training and post training, hilarious to give it this name and pretend like it’s an attack. Fable is just a distillation of stolen copyrighted works, etc.
- mcv 2mo ago> the supposed „free market“ country Good scare quotes. The US hasn't been free market in the Adam Smith sense in ages, if ever.
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- andrekandre 2mo agowell free markets meant something very different in adam smith's time; what they meant by free was 'free from rents' whereas today its usually mean in the milton freedman terms as 'free from any interference' which is how i interpret the parent poster... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_market#Classical_Economics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_market#Classical_Economic...
- yunnpp 2mo agoIt's not free from interference either. It requires enforcing antitrust, for example, which the US seems to have forgotten. Literally what you quoted: > the term free market refers to a market free from all forms of economic privilege, monopolies and artificial scarcities.
- andrekandre 2mo agoyep, to keep them "free" you have to "interefere" with them as an aide, the overloading of the term free is really annoying because it muddles things so much...
- einpoklum 2mo agoD: "I want to be free" by Milton Schulman. H: Milton Friedman. D: Why are they all called Milton? Anyway, I've only got as far as Milton Keynes. H: Maynard Keynes. D: I'm sure there's a Milton Keynes. H: Yes, there is, but it's... [appears quite miffed] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgUemV4brDU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgUemV4brDU
- 2mo ago
- gpt5 2mo agoThe argument is - these models costs hundreds of billions to develop - to BOTH US and China. China is giving them for free despite not making financial sense because they want to weaken US's tech firms ability to compete - because China sees AI dominance as critical for their national security. The US also sees AI dominance as critical for their national security, and relies on a market economy and non-state-owned labs. This means that these frontier labs are truly susceptible to "predatory pricing" (economic term for a competitor selling at a loss to eliminate you), which is illegal in the US and any other free market economy exactly because of its implications on market efficiency. I hate it just as much as the next guy, but the fact the discussion here ignores the fact that these concerns and dynamics are real just lower the discussion level instead of actually discussing potential solutions. With that said, what I'm worried about is that the government solution will be far more hostile than some semi-ban on open models. An example of an even worse scenario, they could take over frontier labs and restrict access to everyone in the public (which might still not solve espionage).
- runako 2mo ago> China is giving them for free despite not making financial sense because they want to weaken US's tech firms ability to compete - because China sees AI dominance as critical for their national security. Nobody is making this argument because this is a normal thing that companies do. It's so common it is named in business strategy: "commoditize your complements." There's a 2002 Joel On Software post explaining this using tech examples that were already old in 2002[1]. In the present, Meta is doing exactly the same thing with Ollama as Alibaba (who is funding some of the Chinese labs). Alibaba needs advanced models internally, and does not want to have a dependence on US models that can be arbitrarily shut off by Washington. Alibaba also wants to drive usage of its cloud among companies who are now demanding competitive AI models (which Alibaba may be locked out of providing). However, selling AI is not its core business. Putting cheap AI in the world creates demand for cloud services, which is part of Alibaba's core business. Not only does this make financial sense for Alibaba, it is fairly basic. Google gives away consumer software like Chrome and Android (not their core business) to drive search, which is their core business. et cetera. The frontier labs are exposed in exactly the same has been way every pure play tech company before them. The US labs chose quality as their moat; remains to be seen whether that was a good choice, or if they can add another moat in time. 1 - https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
- 999900000999 2mo agoIt's going to force American companies to only use inferior and more expensive models. It's protectionism which will only extend our dominance by at most a decade. The rest of the world will progress without us.
- HighGoldstein 2mo agoDecade? We're 4 years in since ChatGPT released publicly and have gone from "Wow this thing is stupid" to running coding agents on auto mode, and the Chinese labs have been around for even less time. The US providers may lose dominance in 1 or 2 years.
- kay_o 2mo ago> may lose dominance in 1 or 2 years In some portions they already lost dominance. My claude will happily generate disgustingly vulnerable code then flag me for ToS violation when I ask it to make sure the code that it just made, in the same context window, in the same conversation is safe and doesn't have glaring holes. Also great to be charged $xx.xx+ amounts and then it refuses to answer without refunding it.
- 999900000999 2mo agoI’m talking about our overall economic dominance. We’re still the most powerful economy on earth, but I can’t imagine this continuing forever.
- numpad0 2mo agoUS didn't have that much rational reasoning when it killed Japanese exports in cars, chips, and finally software. That in turn lead to China simply taking the seats Japan used to occupy, but as far as imposition of these protectionist means is considered, US does not need that much sophisticated justification internally.
- barbazoo 2mo agoI 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.
- Imustaskforhelp 2mo agoI 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.
- Onavo 2mo agoThe other countries don't have cheap capital, cheap infra, or scale. The talent is not the bottleneck. Look at how many SV companies are helmed by Indian executives. If the Europeans cared an iota about AI progress, Huggingface wouldn't have been headquartered in NYC.
- expedition32 2mo agoEurope doesn't want to be a superpower it already done that and it's really not worth it.
- eklavya 2mo agoSure buddy, they gave it up because it was not worth it.
- godwinson__4-8 2mo agoBe nice to Europe its tired.
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- bicepjai 2mo agoSo basically the argument is we have taken too much debt to afford failure, we might bring down the economy of top 1% so ban Chinese models :)
- glaslong 2mo agowow if they're that crucial, but economically nonviable, we should probably just nationalize them and fund the superproject with taxes, then put the results into the public domain!