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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

#421

Post by Matl »

coffeemug wrote: post #411
Matl wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You're supposing an event that there's no evidence for happening and that is on par with 'let's ban open source software because some open source software could be malicious'.

Let's not forget that as of now most models are like game cartridges i.e. they need a 'host' to run i.e. llama.cpp - they're not executable code by themselves.

I could see an argument for a security review prior to integrating a model into a highly sensitive industry/agency, but that is standard for any software.

It's certainly not an argument for banning open models because US AI corps don't want to compete with them.

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

#423

Post by ch4s3 »

yoyohello13 wrote: post #271
sarchertech wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason we have data is because of all the biases that come with “just looking around”. Confirmation bias and selection bias are very powerful. I strongly dislike Donald Trump, and he has done some terrible things to our country. But my dislike of him also makes me more likely to notice the bad things happening around me. It happens with conservatives too. Ask my conservative family about how frequently men preten…

Yeah this seems right to me. Politics is so polarizing it's a guarantee that half the country is going to be pissed no matter who is in charge. Most of my family leans left, it's hard to stay positive when the leader of your country actively and proudly hates you while also making terrible policy decisions.

It's much easier if you don't spend all of your free time mainlining negative national partisan news straight into your face. All of the most miserable people I know are very online and very into politics. It's not to say that you shouldn't care, just that the vast majority of the time you can do anything about it, so you're better served to focus elsewhere.

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

#424

Post by Avicebron »

jubilee33 wrote: post #367
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…

I don't think there actually is a congnizant argument other than to protect investments. And of course they cant say that. You are using way to much logic in this. You are witnessing powerful people who are operating way outside the scope of their own abilities thrash around. AI isn't being stopped. Definitely not by people who value money. The inertia at this point is probably even too much for those who have some s…

What does a "non-human-centric idea of progress" even mean here. I have an inkling :) but I'd like to get your actual thoughts

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

#425

Post by ux266478 »

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…

> But thats also an admittance that the American labs can’t compete on merit anymore

Merit was never competitive. Mass consumption habits select hard for cost, and this is an industry driven entirely by scaling factors. If you can scale for cheaper, you win. Ivy League-decorated researchers aren't doing RnD for free. The frontier labs can only go so cheap before they're so far in the red that VC gets cold feet. Leaving the expensive frontier research up to private enterprise wasn't a long-term strategy.

> 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

What's not to get? Do you understand how much money is tied up in the industry? Do you know what happens if that goes up in flames? In the middle of a massive asymmetric economic depression? Why on earth do you think they would just sit there and watch it happen? Because of political virtue signaling about free markets? You know, I have a bridge to sell you if you're interested.

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

#426

Post by coffeemug »

capevace wrote: post #415
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…

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…

I'm not advocating for the policy, I'm just saying that there is a legitimate argument that's not so easy to dismiss.

> And you could still ban specific, known malicious models/labs instead of blanket open-source bans

With publicly available models today, absolutely. With models 10000x more powerful, we would need to be extremely conservative. (In that world everything is upside down, though; I don't know if "banning" is even a meaningful concept in that reality)

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

#427

Post by ch4s3 »

lowbloodsugar wrote: post #348
ch4s3 wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Do you think side gigs are reported?

Yes. The FRED data includes informal employment. They do months and months of exhaustive surveys all of the country to put together their data.

> 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.

No, I included data about labor force participation, which is only down a little.

> The numbers are gamed

Prove it.

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

#428

Post by GlickWick »

mikem170 wrote: post #239
GlickWick wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My argument is that a major world power is pushing towards global conflict by simultaneously funding the conquest of Ukraine while building its own invasion fleet for Taiwan. Allowing them to also destabilize us internally is not exactly a good idea.

> funding the conquest of Ukraine It is well known that China is still engaged in trade with Russia- oil and gold going one way, drones and weapon components going the other. But you said funding, and I assume you meant things like grants or loans. Do you have any sources for that? I could only find one that was attributed to indirect open source intelligence, nothing specific.

Trade is funding.

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

#429

Post by throw1234567891 »

vkaku wrote: post #398
throw1234567891 wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe they would be more successful if they were posting on an open platform instead of a walled garden. This “free speech” platform is pretty useless at being “open”.

Hey, I'm on this one too. Nothing stays forever one way. You all find me on the other ones, add me there and give me a reason to post to a wider audience. I'm on LinkedIn too ... most people won't even engage the same way there and I just want a simple easy way to engage.

X without an account only shows “this content doesn’t exist”. I cannot read your post so I cannot tell why people would not engage.

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

#430

Post by leni536 »

English is not my first language, but to me the construct "to urge not to do something" in the title feels off. I think I only saw it without the negative, with some implied urgency... And now that I spelled it out, "urge" and "urgent" are probably related.
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