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

#341

Post by ch4s3 » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 5:39 PM UTC

tsimionescu wrote: post #208

senordevnyc wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely agree, especially if you consider humanity as a whole. I have asked this question many times to the doomers, and honestly don’t think I’ve ever gotten a good answer: if you had to be born as a random human somewhere on earth, and the only thing you get to choose is the year in which you’re born, what year would you choose? You can’t choose your race, intelligence level, physical abilities, parents, socio…

The discussion here was about the USA, not the world.

That's why I pointed out that US real income, employment, and inflation figures all beat the OECD average.

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

#342

Post by culi » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 5:39 PM UTC

anonymars wrote: post #321

theredleft wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

do you think that China is some place devoid of business? it's the center of global commerce now. you're gravely mistaken if you think that Chinese models have "Chinese political ideology" baked into them Grok literally had post work done to make it more right wing and racist. sheer lunacy

Is your claim that Chinese commerce isn't subject to political censorship? Where does Grok come into this? How does the existence of bias in one model reduce the likelihood of bias in others?

If you self-host these models, there's no censorship. They only have to follow those laws when hosted in China.

You can't self-host or bypass the censorship in Grok

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

#343

Post by sillysaurusx » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 5:43 PM UTC

GodelNumbering wrote: post #281

Proprietary model weights are IP, their outputs are not IP and I can't imagine a court decision that would rule otherwise because that would set an extremely far reaching and dangerous precedent, even for American businesses. I don't think distillation as 'stealing IP' has any legal legs. They can probably claim violation of ToS at best because the terms of use do prohibit use for training rival models.

> Proprietary model weights are IP

Not copyrightable IP, or at least it hasn't been challenged yet. I have experience with this: I made llama-dl, a way to download the original llama model. Meta issued a DMCA, I appealed to the HN community for funds, someone funded, and our lawyer successfully counterclaimed. Never heard from Meta again.

A lack of response to the counterclaim doesn't mean the issue is settled. But now there's legal precedent for people pushing back against companies that claim model weights are secret IP and therefore DMCA-able.

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

#344

Post by robocat » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 5:44 PM UTC

bix6 wrote: post #244

> Almost 200 Silicon Valley companies, including Proton and Y Combinator…On Wednesday, the newly-formed Little Tech Association YC is little tech? lol wut.

> Little Tech Association

"Little Tech" in contrast to "Big Tech" monopolies and hyperscalers

Awful website: ugly particle systems with text you can't scroll to (on SE): https://littletech.org/mission

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

#345

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 5:44 PM UTC

tsimionescu wrote: post #188

GlickWick wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not the "hive mind" of HN or whatever. Individuals hold unique opinions. Yes, China is a rival. No, they have not won. Their economy is in a lot of trouble, likely far worse than the shape of the US's currently. That situation may accelerate a hot war though, as has historically been the case globally.

People have been claiming this since the 2000s. There are Economist articles from 2005 predicting an imminent collapse of China's economy. China has only grown more rapidly since then.

[deleted]

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

#346

Post by Swoerd » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 5:45 PM UTC

tsimionescu wrote: post #176

GlickWick wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the US is not an incredible actor, but China is funding the most brutal war in modern history (the invasion of Ukraine) in order to provide a smokescreen for their own invasion.

The Ukraine war is large and terrible, but its nowhere near comparable in brutality to the genocide in Gaza, that the US is funding, providing weapons for, and protecting diplomatically.

[dead]

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

#347

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 5:46 PM UTC

ctxc wrote: post #42

MangoCoffee wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US's court can enforce IPs. Didn't Antrhpic just agree to pay book authors billion for the recent lawsuit settlement?

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…

[deleted]

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

#348

Post by lowbloodsugar » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 5:46 PM UTC

ch4s3 wrote: post #198

lowbloodsugar wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Inflation adjusted” is offset by the changes to what inflation measures. And again income has only gone up because people are working multiple jobs.

The basket of goods is totally transparent and related to things people really buy. Would you want a 2026 inflation number to reference VCR prices? Only 5.3% of US workers have multiple jobs. The long term average is just above 5%. So it is false to claim more workers have multiple jobs according to BLS stats. This number was above 6% for most of the 1990s.

You are just outing yourself as someone who is a slave to meaningless numbers. Do you think side gigs are reported? You quote unemployment numbers without admitting that people who have given up or simple failed to land a job are not included in those numbers. The numbers are gamed. Feel free to keep showing us who you are.

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

#349

Post by smalltorch » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 5:46 PM UTC

thewebguyd wrote: post #49

andai wrote: post #23

Don't model weights fall under free speech?

Yes, in theory, we've been through this rodeo before in the 90s. Bernstein vs. US ruled that source code is expressive speech. It's being challenged though, the court could consider weights as machine data (non-expressive operational artifacts, not human communication). the US could also pull the functional harm argument in the same way the government uses it to regulate some protected speech (like the whole debacle…

Interesting topic for sure.

You could argue encryption is non-expressive operational artifacts too. Any sources on where it's being challenged with this argument?

Because with free speech, you can just create entirely new languages, so who's to say my language isn't weight values?

Also curious how a business would not have grounds to sue on a sanction like this Businesses (in America) have constitutional protections too.

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

#350

Post by capevace » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 5:47 PM UTC

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.