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

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

#651
US will ban Chinese models and try to get their allies to do the same. Just like they did with Huawei. Alternatively, they'll put up legal roadblocks that open models are unlikely to jump over due to costs or other reasons.

Otherwise they're putting US frontier labs at a huge disadvantage by preventing them from recouping costs on their biggest models.

How much more will OpenAI and Anthropic models cost when they're the only AI you can legally use?

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

#652

I hope this doesn't become the new norm where government becomes the bottleneck for innovation in the AI space. It's worrying that with no formal and transparent policy framework that the government will be picking winners and losers and stifling innovation. There's been no public policy, executive order, legislation, or otherwise on this, I wonder if anyone has filed FOIA requests for these decisions or the conversa…

This is what OpenAI/Anthropic want, it's better marketing than they can pay for -- and it creates a precedent for permanently banning the next generation of open weights models

Banning next gen open models would never happen globally, and would be a major disadvantage to any country that does.

If the USA continues to put barriers into the release of models, open and/or foreign models will start to out perform them.

If open models are competitive enough nothing will stop even US companies from running them locally.

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

#653

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That until it becomes illegal to have or use open source models without approval and licence from government. With more talks about on device scanning, this could be easily plumbed in. If OS detects there is open source model, it could brick your device or alert authorities. Then next step will be limiting what operating system you can install. Likely only those where you cannot remove client side scanning.

It can't easily be plumbed in, though. I can spin up my own Linux build with none of that plumbing and do what I want with it. I can grab China's best models and use them or distilled versions on my own terms because OSS allows for that. Until hardware comes fully locked down and the models cannot be run on old hardware, both a long ways off, OSS is a way out.

Politicians can act very quickly if there is good enough "incentive".

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

#654

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let’s be real, as an EU citizen I have zero doubts that those models would also have been blocked if developed in EU. I like the US approach better: regulate when the need for it arises, not before when you don’t know how the situation is going to evolve.

They're not regulating though – they're arbitrarily blocking releases based on no clear criteria. The EU may be legalistic and rules-based, but I'd take that over capricious and arbitrary.

I wish the EU were legalistic and rules based, but the commission and politicians are involved in many of these things. It's like Trump's executive stuff, just with a committee instead of a single person, and I guess, with less power.

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

#655

This is regulatory capture in action. This will make it hard/impossible for new vendors to come into the market and only established companies will get to play, and charge, for LLMs. What does this mean for open source? Will it become illegal to download weights? What about train your own? Are we heading to a world where GPU use is regulated to ensure that illegal LLMs aren't being processed on your machine? More bro…

> Are we heading to a world where GPU use is regulated to ensure that illegal LLMs aren't being processed on your machine?

Actually that sounds pretty reasonable considering current regulations regarding almost any other important resource / material that affect the general population.

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

#657

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see it too, but worth noting that this is basically unprecedented at least within the last 25 years; I think you have to go back to export controlled cryptography for another example of this kind of abrupt and targeted regulation.

We’ve seen more examples recently. TikTok, wireless routers, polestar cars…

DJI, Huawei and the list goes on. Definitely no need to go back "25 years". The USG is turning into a joke of a surveillance state. As if any of the US based tech is truly any less backdoor'd? Cisco and Flock and Google and Facebook and Microsoft, oh what amazing technology companies that could never be used for... Oh wait, what a fantastic endgame we're on course for! I wonder why other nations are actively moving away from US tech?

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

#658
post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Theoretically that gives edge to all other companied around the world though, no?

I don't think a critical mass of them will oppose the US. The most likely equilibrium is Chinese models being shut out of any US-aligned markets (i.e. Europe at the very least, also East Asia, etc.). Probably India, Russia, Brazil etc. will resist such pressure, but they are protectionist and resilient to trade wars anyway, at the expense of their own welfare of course.

>US-aligned markets (i.e. Europe at the very least,

Member when Trump threatened to invade Greenland? Europe does.

Europe has been in the process of de-americanization for the past few years.

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

#659
post #96

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 Huh? US foreign military sales are up at all time highs "Total exports by the United States, the world’s largest supplier of arms, increased by 27 per cent. This included a 217 per cent increase in US arms exports to Europe, according to new data published today by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI)" [ https://www.sipri.o…

Aren't a lot of these purchases (a) locked in from contracts made pre-admin; and (b) otherwise largely related to anxiety over Russia? There are too many confounding variables here.

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

#660

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on the point of view, I suppose. Powerful enough to shock someone in 2010 with a wikipedia chat bot? Possibly. Powerful enough to shock jaded HN commentators right now? Possibly not.

its not about whether you can shock anyone, if anyone is driving cars outside, you can't say you have SOTA-horse to go from A to B. When models are good, expectations are adjusted accordingly to deliver things on par with the whole industry, you can't just say, I have built my own Intel Pentium II, now I will try to use it to compile Electron App and run 3DS Max there

You don't need SOTA-level LLMs to create value with AI. Hell, you can build good solutions with a simple small finetuned models.

> When models are good, expectations are adjusted accordingly to deliver things on par with the whole industry, you can't just say, I have built my own Intel Pentium II, now I will try to use it to compile Electron App and run 3DS Max there.

I know you are taking your analogy to its breaking point but it really depends on what you are doing. I know people that use 10+-year old thinkpads and they do just fine.

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