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

politico.com

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

#411

Post by coffeemug »

Matl wrote: post #396
coffeemug wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 adver…

> Suppose By supposing, you can try to justify taking just about anything away.

I am not supposing a low-risk event. This is an obvious attack vector that an adversary would almost certainly exploit. I would exploit it if I were them.

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

#414

Post by coffeemug »

munk-a wrote: post #393
coffeemug wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 adver…

This is literally what all AI is right now. Anthropic has been paying companies to use its product to form that dependency and maybe they're not misaligned but there's no regulation in the US that'd in anyway deter them from purposefully misaligning their model.

Subsidizing a product to capture market share is very different from exploiting a national security attack vector.

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

#415

Post by capevace »

coffeemug wrote: post #376
capevace wrote: post #350

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 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 adver…

So some kind of „sleeper agent“ model?

Seems a bit far fetched, given that I’ve never seen any PoC/research on this topic. Got any pointers?

To be fair the fix to this seems to be that American labs would need to adjust to the new „fair market price“ then, right? Subsidy-backed competition is still legitimate competition in capitalism (e.g. Uber).

And you could still ban specific, known malicious models/labs instead of blanket open-source bans. What about Mistral models, for example.

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

#416

Post by throw1234567891 »

gaws wrote: post #148

"Nooooo!!! We already laid off half our workforce and got priced out of models from American companies. We need the cheaper models, even risking giving all our data to a foreign adversary, so our big number goes up long enough for us to get acquired!!!"

It will come for you too, fool. You obviously have no fucking clue what’s the deal with open-weight models. Can I run Fable on my computer? No. Can I run Depseek 4 or glm5.2 on my computer? Yes.

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

#418

Post by porridgeraisin »

capevace wrote: post #350

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 distil…

They will not actually shut it down. Rather, they will simply continually posture in that direction and release a statement that the wrong lawyer can interpret the wrong way. This will make it a soft no-no for anyone involved in government procurement which is most big companies thus ensuring american AI companies have the market, while also ensuring startups, etc still have access to the structurally lower-cost chinese models (otherwise, they will simply resort to the black market which is why they will never enforce a full ban). In most US-adjacent countries like India, anyone that sells to US companies I see avoiding chinese model providers for the same reason. The exception is fine tuning and running it on their own hardware, which naturally everyone is completely fine with since no money flows to the chinese model company.

Tl;dr, it's purely an economic argument. Every major argument in the world is about money and thus power, don't bother analysing it technically.

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

#419

Post by ch4s3 »

nixon_why69 wrote: post #368
ch4s3 wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The data shows that inflation inclusive of housing, education, and healthcare isn't that much higher than CPI, which is because CPI already includes shelter, which accounts for ~36% of CPI. You assertion that CPI doesn't include housing is just wrong.

I'm not asserting they don't include housing. I'm saying housing is non-optional, so having low inflation on flat screen TVs is cold comfort if you're struggling to pay rent. The basket of goods isn't the same for everyone. It's been like 5 years now of low consumer sentiment and increasing consumer debt while people who don't feel it are flabbergasted, the top line CPI number is fine, why aren't people happy?

> I'm saying housing is non-optional, so having low inflation on flat screen TVs is cold comfort if you're struggling to pay rent.

You're missing the point, rest is included in that top line low inflation number.

> the top line CPI number is fine, why aren't people happy?

secular stagnation? Cultural malaise? Expectations formed by ZIRP.

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