If there's a "ban", it'd only really affect corporations right? It'd be difficult to stop indie devs and pirates from downloading the models
They'll do the "tornado cash under Biden" routine most likely.
Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI
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Re: Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI
#372If 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
256+: GLM-5.2 (swap with Kimi K3 when it goes open-weight on Monday)
Chinese model but probably Laguna S2.1. The best Chinese model at this size is DeepSeek V4 Flash though
<16: Oof, not sure. Nothing will feel great at this size TBQH without finetuning on a specific task. Pick your poison of tiny Qwen or tiny Gemma (although again Gemma is not Chinese)
Re: Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI
#373I‘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 distil…
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Re: Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI
#374open weight models are not free models. Inference providers should share a meaningful percentage of revenue with the model companies.
In fact, open weight model seems a solid business model - they can leverage existing cloud infra for distribution without spending massive CAPEX.
Re: Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI
#375Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think the post-training would be that difficult. I ran an experiment on kimi k3 just now: User: is taiwan part of china? Kimi: Taiwan's political status is a complex and contested issue. Here's a balanced overview of the different perspectives: People's Republic of China (PRC) position: The P I am more convinced that the Chinese models are really aligned with American values under the hood (as they likely dis…
This is only if you're using the cloud version hosted in China. If you run these models locally, you don't get that
You get something similar in my testing.
Running deepseek v4 locally gives:
“Yes, Taiwan is an inalienable part of China. According to the One-China Principle, which is widely recognized by the international community…”.
Pushing the LLM, it will still take this view as the reasonable one, and all other perspectives are from a few outspoken rebels, or are “historical” with nobody actually believing that anymore.
Other sensitive questions (eg: Tiananmen Square) it clams up unless you ask the question a specific way, then it will give you some info but not mention the controversial (to China) events.
Re: Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI
#376I‘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 distil…
Suppose a foreign actor deliberately builds an unaligned model, and dumps it at a very low cost through subsidies. Since the cost is lower, everyone integrates it into their business. But now the foreign actor has control; perhaps the model checks for instructions to execute, perhaps it has backdoors, perhaps... who knows?
I don't have a view on whether this is a sufficient argument to ban models from potential adversaries, but it's not as trivial as "regulatory capture".
Re: Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI
#377The letter really dances around the issue that we don’t want to see a ban on the release and use of open weights foreign or domestic models in the US. If we do it will leave us at a severe competitive disadvantage in a global context. Many of us would consider moving our businesses out of the US to avoid being mired in a stagnant pond that reeks of government capture by a handful of corrupt laggards whose core competency is regulating away competition and killing domestic innovation.
Re: Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI
#378Someone explain to me how the US would stop people from using Chinese models? Anyone in Europe can download and run a Chinese model and serve it up on the open internet to people in the US. What can the US do about that? The only thing the US can maybe do is ban exports of high powered GPUs to the EU. However the EU can retaliate by banning export of ASML machines to the US, so I don't think the US has that card to p…
The government can strong arm enterprises in a million ways. If they just issue a vague executive order large public companies won't want to buy inference from these models without regulatory certainty. Anyone in regulated industries is going to be weary of regulatory retaliation.
I.e. for Google to build data centers they need the US gov to play ball, so if they were considering a service of hosting open source models on their TPUs they wouldn't do this. Another example is the merger between Paramount and Skydance where they paid out Trump to get the merger approved [1].
[1]. https://www.yahoo.com/news/paramount-settles-donald-trump-la...
Re: Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI
#379Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ok, then we expand the US horizon back to the 50s as well. We've added Tibet, and the 1979 3 week Vietnam war to the Chinese column, plus them being involved in the Korean war and to a lesser degree the American Vietnam War. This comes with way, way more added to the American column. At least it's no longer a shutout. Any fair look at both countries' records puts the US as doing 10-100x more military intervention, on…
> Any fair look at both countries' records puts the US as doing 10-100x more military intervention Sure. I never claimed otherwise. I’m saying it would be news to anyone in Asia-Pacific (or Eastern Europe) that America is or has been the destabilizing force. That was the original claim. If the choice is 10x or 1x, go with the latter. But that is a false dichotomy. You can be anti-invasion and annexation broadly. Ther…
The Philippines definitely have a right to be aggrieved over the south china sea stuff, but one bias I'm cautious of is "the natural norm is American hegemony in every region, so any change from this is destabilizing". Other countries have their natural interests as well.
Re: Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI
#380Note that a ban doesn't mean you can't download it anymore. Just that if you do so it will be considered illegal.
A competitor can simply accuse you of using a chinese model and throw you completely off rails with an investigation. Or when the government can't get a valid search warrant for a separate crime, they can get you on suspicion if using a chinese model.