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U.S. government will decide who gets to use GPT-5.6

washingtonpost.com

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Re: U.S. government will decide who gets to use GPT-5.6

#121

Post by revolvingthrow »

This is a real head scratcher. Unless this is a very short term action it seems to have only downsides for everybody:

- people pay much more for US models than Chinese models because right now they're the best. Once they're no longer the best (since you don't get access to them) why would anyone pay several times as much for the same result?

- once you get a high amount of tokens flowing into China instead of US companies, they will train on those chats and their rate of improvement will only accelerate, making US models even less attractive over time

- the sky-high IPO are dead in the water, since their story of "we will replace a good chunk of all knowledge work in the world, capturing a few % of total global spend relating to it" turns into "we will make a bunch of money out of a few dozen S&P 500 paying for the best, and some pocket money out of whoever uses our overpriced models that are as good as Chinese models" - far less money overall. Losing access to untold billions of investor money certainly won't improve performance for the US labs

- all the non-US people start asking themselves why they're funneling money to US corporations who barely share any of the secret sauce compared to Chinese corporations who share plenty when it comes to LLM, including the models themselves (at least for now)

- Chinese models have significantly less guardrails, making for better end-user experience

- there is a small but non-zero chance Euros get off their asses and invest into AI, making something halfway decent and further fracturing the market which cuts into US profits

So what's the benefit here? I thought the Mythos situation was the current admin taking revenge on Antrophic for not kissing the ring, or simply looking for a bribe, but no matter which way I look at it it's a self-own. The only way this would make any sense is if AGI is imminent, which I don't think even the boosters are arguing at this point.

Theoretically US could outlaw Chinese models, but I'm not sure what it's supposed to accomplish as the rest of the world certainly won't, especially as long as they release open weights models that you can run without phoning home.

Re: U.S. government will decide who gets to use GPT-5.6

#122

Post by ChrisLTD »

garn810 wrote: post #100
wewewedxfgdf wrote: post #34

Remember how China turned its tech industry into a smoking ruin - make making them all submit to political priorities: Ant Group: China halted Ant’s IPO and forced a restructuring Alibaba: China fined and politically disciplined Alibaba Didi: China punished Didi after its US listing by removing its apps, freezing users, forcing delisting Tutoring platforms: banned profit from core school-subject tutoring. Tencent gam…

The US is now doing a softer and broader version of the same thing to trust-based export sectors. It’s not the same method but! it is the same mechanism. The main difference is that the US damage is more reputational than structural, so it could be reversed faster (only if policy stops telling customers that dependence on America is a political risk)

Seems like a structural problem that the U.S. elected who they did twice.

Re: U.S. government will decide who gets to use GPT-5.6

#123

Post by amanaplanacanal »

ChrisLTD wrote: post #122
garn810 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US is now doing a softer and broader version of the same thing to trust-based export sectors. It’s not the same method but! it is the same mechanism. The main difference is that the US damage is more reputational than structural, so it could be reversed faster (only if policy stops telling customers that dependence on America is a political risk)

Seems like a structural problem that the U.S. elected who they did twice.

Electing a bunch of spineless hacks to Congress removed the guardrails. They had one job.

Re: U.S. government will decide who gets to use GPT-5.6

#125

Post by amanaplanacanal »

avaer wrote: post #70
digitaltrees wrote: post #2

Open source is looking great right now

This isn't going to save you unless you're ok being a criminal. There is nothing stopping the government from making open source versions of these models equally controlled. And given how willy-nilly they are operating I see no reason they won't clamp down on open source. All it takes is someone with connections/political contributions wakes up one day and realizes that open source is a threat to their power or botto…

They can try. Will the courts go along?

Re: U.S. government will decide who gets to use GPT-5.6

#126

Post by re-thc »

nixon_why69 wrote: post #103
wewewedxfgdf wrote: post #34

Remember how China turned its tech industry into a smoking ruin - make making them all submit to political priorities: Ant Group: China halted Ant’s IPO and forced a restructuring Alibaba: China fined and politically disciplined Alibaba Didi: China punished Didi after its US listing by removing its apps, freezing users, forcing delisting Tutoring platforms: banned profit from core school-subject tutoring. Tencent gam…

It's really interesting that someone can know all of these domestic Chinese names and yet declare the industry generally a "smoking ruin". Is it from a newsletter or something? Because anyone who used these companies' products in China would see a pretty large ecosystem that's making a lot of money.

> It's really interesting that someone can know all of these domestic Chinese names and yet declare the industry generally a "smoking ruin".

They're different things. Just like you can be the most famous actor or singer and still be poor. Being popular, having good products and actually making money is not the same.

And it's all relative. Today if NASDAQ dropped 20% the world would declare it in ruins. Are the companies still "alive"? Yes.

> Because anyone who used these companies' products in China would see a pretty large ecosystem that's making a lot of money.

Not true. A lot of them e.g. the public listed 1s have reported increased competition and reduced margins.

Re: U.S. government will decide who gets to use GPT-5.6

#127

Post by akmarinov »

samuelknight wrote: post #117
akmarinov wrote: post #93

Sooo both OpenAI and Anthropic going bankrupt soon? If they can’t freely sell access to their models and Chinese models catch up to Opus 4.8/GPT 5.5 in 6-8 months - then why pay OAI/Anthropic at all?

It will be much harder for Chinese models to close the gap than it is to keep the historical 6-9 months behind. Their models' performance are heavily propped up on distillation runs. The capital going to their frontier labs is 10x-100x smaller than US frontier labs.

Harder, but they’ll get access one way or another. And once on par - it’s game over

Re: U.S. government will decide who gets to use GPT-5.6

#128

Post by re-thc »

wewewedxfgdf wrote: post #34

Remember how China turned its tech industry into a smoking ruin - make making them all submit to political priorities: Ant Group: China halted Ant’s IPO and forced a restructuring Alibaba: China fined and politically disciplined Alibaba Didi: China punished Didi after its US listing by removing its apps, freezing users, forcing delisting Tutoring platforms: banned profit from core school-subject tutoring. Tencent gam…

> defence - why would anyone buy US weapons after Greenland and Canada

It's the ONLY one (almost) that are actively tested and verified in real battles.

Re: U.S. government will decide who gets to use GPT-5.6

#129

Post by iamnothere »

InsideOutSanta wrote: post #57
sscaryterry wrote: post #54

This will be the end of the US's short-lived AI supremacy. OpenAI and Anthropic are already wildly unprofitable, cutting off the world-wide income stream is just fucking bad business.

Don't worry, their pals in the government will bail them out. But it is odd that this administration has learned absolutely nothing about the mid- to long-term effects of export restrictions on other countries' ability to compete with the US.

> bail them out

You misspelled “nationalize them” (while we privatize Social Security and probably Medicare)

Only the bad parts of capitalism, only the bad parts of socialism. This is what policy looks like in the 2020s.

Re: U.S. government will decide who gets to use GPT-5.6

#130

Post by iamnothere »

bilekas wrote: post #30

Wow.. Okay so it's official now that the playbook is "we will try to prevent anyone who we don't like to use advanced tech". I understand if its military hardware and software, that's the property of the US government however this is the property of a private company.. Now seemingly being commandeered and issued at the will of the government, sounds very Russian/Chinese to me. Is there a precedent for this before in…

This is where AI doomerism has taken us. I also hate LLM abuse, but pretending that they are going to destroy humanity has opened the door for eventual police state level control over computing. It’s hard enough fighting off the “think of the children” idiots, now we have to push back against hyperventilating technophobes who think the world is going to end unless we get computing under control. All while the political elites rub their hands in anticipation.
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