Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI • Hacker News Board

Re: Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI

#161

Post by dataflow » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 4:12 PM UTC

4wsn wrote: post #92

GlickWick wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do care. It's an unfortunate truth that we're exiting a global peace era and entering one of (hopefully just...) implied conflict. Our biggest geopolitical rival that's been threatening a hot war also distilling the things we build is not a good thing. Trump is a huge self-own by our electorate sadly, but being concerned about a conflict between China and the US is a very bi-partisan concern for good reason.

I keep hearing about this "we" as if it's still a coherent nation state and not just an unaccountable ruling class from both parties where the most severe consequence is failing upwards into a lobbyist provided position. I literally have no moral preference when it comes to the US or the CCP nor do I care if the entire nation state fails, let alone loses to a geopolitical rival.

> nor do I care if the entire nation state fails

You should care because of the nukes, if nothing else.

Re: Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI

#162

Post by walrus01 » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 4:12 PM UTC

throwa356262 wrote: post #39

3eb7988a1663 wrote: post #28

If there were ever a sign I need to get mirroring, this is it. What are the best Chinese models on HuggingFace today? Bucket by ideal RAM: Text generation, image generation, TTS, etc

It is a lost opportunity that huggingface (or unsloth) frontpage doesn't have a list like this that updates which each model release.

From the HF front page if you hit "models" it should auto sort by trending before you change any search parameters, so if anything large, capable and popular has just been released it's almost certainly going to be at the top of the list.

Re: Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI

#163

Post by duplessitous » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 4:13 PM UTC

GlickWick wrote: post #75

Tostino wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ask yourself, who seems to be the destabilizing force if you take a step back and look at the state of things objectively? There is some blame on all sides for sure, not saying it's black and white...but come on.

I think the major destabilizing force is the country that has been building the infrastructure for a hot war over Taiwan for the last decade while simultaneously blatantly funding the conquest of Ukraine. The US stupidly withdrawing from the world stage is definitely making this worse, of course, but it is not the catalyst. It's unfortunately a very likely side effect of a social media campaign by the same actor to m…

Despite withdrawing from our role on the world stage, we have in no way adapted isolationist like policies. We kidnapped the leader of another country, we are bombing Iran with impunity and will begin striking civilian infrastructure as a response to terrorist within that country, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2026/07/22/trum...

China didn't make us do this any more than they made us bomb civilian fishing boats in South America. We are a major destabilizing force at the moment, China existing does not somehow negate the actions we take of our own free will.

Refusing to acknowledge our role in destabilizing the globe at the moment is a level of infantilization that I, and many others, find unacceptable. We are all adults, China is responsible for their role and the US is responsible for its role. A social media campaign is not forcing the folks in Washington to drop bombs on Iranian civilian infrastructure, the jack asses in Washington did all of this on their own

Re: Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI

#164

Post by addandsubtract » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 4:13 PM UTC

npodbielski wrote: post #60

So Y Combinator signed it too? But this is HN, Y combinator website. I think I am missing something because I never read any opinion like 'we should ban Chinese models'.

They signed the letter to prevent the banning on open-weight models.

Re: Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI

#165

Post by ctxc » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 4:13 PM UTC

WarmWash wrote: post #141

ctxc wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anthropic was asked to pay book authors because it trained on pirated downloaded books. What about books and art where the author/artist does not authorise AI to train on it? They do happily train on it, ignoring their "ToS". This is just double standards, a slap on the wrist to not worsen the situation with authors imo. You could also say the Chinese companies are doing the same - they _do_ pay for their Anthropic s…

>Anthropic was asked to pay book authors because it trained on pirated downloaded books. No, it was asked to pay book authors because it pirated copies of books and stored them on their hard drives. The ruling had nothing to do with training.

Thanks - I didn't verify this personally, but still stand corrected.

If training wasn't considered outside the law, this goes on to make the point about double standards for US vs Chinese model training methods.

Re: Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI

#166

Post by ctxc » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 4:14 PM UTC

adrr wrote: post #128

ctxc wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anthropic was asked to pay book authors because it trained on pirated downloaded books. What about books and art where the author/artist does not authorise AI to train on it? They do happily train on it, ignoring their "ToS". This is just double standards, a slap on the wrist to not worsen the situation with authors imo. You could also say the Chinese companies are doing the same - they _do_ pay for their Anthropic s…

Pirating millions of dollars worth of books would land people in jail. Government went after Aaron Scwartz for "pirating" scientific journals.

I didn't think about this parallel, but that's just so sad.

Re: Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI

#167

Post by root_axis » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 4:14 PM UTC

kennywinker wrote: post #4

Under what authority could he block access?

Have you been paying attention the last two years? With a few exceptions, he has unilateral authority.

Re: Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI

#168

Post by tsimionescu » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 4:15 PM UTC

GlickWick wrote: post #126

SecretDreams wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought you were talking about the US for a minute...

The US is building a Taiwan invasion fleet?

No, the US is actively invading Iran, by ship and by air. And they've invaded Venezuela. And they're actively supporting Israel's invasion of Lebanon and Gaza. And they're bombing a few more countries now and then, especially in Africa.

China is not actively involved in any war at all. They may be supporting Russia with resources, but it's nowhere near the level of material and diplomatic support that the USA is providing to Israel's genocide and war of aggression on Lebanon.

Re: Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI

#169

Post by sscaryterry » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 4:15 PM UTC

sheeshkebab wrote: post #158

nekusar wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are public libraries thieves? Is Anna's Library thieves? Is Library Genesis thieves? Is Archive.org thieves? Is PirateBay thieves? They all look like public libraries to me. And better access to all human knowledge is a net positive for everyone.

Someone going to public library, copying every book out of it and then selling them as their own are thieves.

I don't believe anything is being sold here :)

Re: Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI

#170

Post by sznio » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 4:16 PM UTC

chalupa-supreme wrote: post #154

WarmWash wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Training on copyright was ruled to be transformative. Anthropic was just fined for not paying for the pirated books they copied into a training database. Same as anyone else who copied pirated IP onto their hard drive. However, training an AI on copyright has been ruled to be sufficiently transformative and not a violation of IP laws. The same way you can make a gameplay clone of Call of Duty without any issue.

So they got fined for… stealing? Also, if I clone Call of Duty, and use their skins, make a similar soundtrack, call my maps the same, then there will definitely be an issue. I support the use of AI and all, but to hide behind transformative use of copyrighted intellectual property is a discredit to the colossal amount of human work and knowledge that these companies pirated and had their models trained on.

yep, theft but not plagiarism.