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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

#461

Post by realusername »

throwaw12 wrote: post #431
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…

it's simple. AI labs and investors are scared, and pushing administration to ban them, because they can't compete with Chinese models soon, similar to how they banned Huawei, and Chinese cars. When there is cheaper alternative, companies might go with self hosting option, which reduces the enterprise moat of AI labs

> similar to how they banned Huawei, and Chinese cars.

And that will go as well as it went for both

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

#462

Post by capevace »

coffeemug wrote: post #426
capevace wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> With models 10000x more powerful, we would need to be extremely conservative

I agree, I even think we’re already there if yesterdays OpenAI/HuggingFace story is legit.

We need to start building these agent systems in a way so that it won’t matter if a model is compromised. Malicious models is one way, but prompt injection is also still an unsolved problem.

And if you solve that, then a malicious model is also no longer a threat. Data exfiltration maybe, but IMO US labs are probably also doing that for training, even if saying otherwise (of course I have no evidence of that, but the temptation must be insane)

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

#463

Post by throwatdem12311 »

Blocking Chinese models would just be regulatory capture by another name. If we want OpenAI and Anthropic to improve they need to compete not just with eachother but with foreign labs too.

I don’t know why anyone would think giving Mango Mussolini the power to decide what AI models they can use is a good idea.

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

#464

Post by gazebo2 »

intrasight wrote: post #268
jgbuddy wrote: post #78

The point of open weight models is that this is not possible, companies will be built by taking 'contraband' chinese open weight models and marketing as something from the US

Without a massive amount of post-training, it will be obvious that they are Chinese models with Chinese political ideology. I doubt that there's any business model that would work there.

There are very little (read: zero) references to politics in my codebase so I don't really care if the free Chinese frontier model throws an error when I ask about Tiananmen Square. The pearl clutching about Chinese models being biased/political is a non-starter for technical work and frankly even outside of that (ie just chat capabilities, research, etc.) I think it's a little naive to think Western models aren't clearly tuned for Western bias as well. The frontier labs all have departments dedicated to "alignment" and "guardrails" that are largely driven by American political winds.

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

#465

Post by dml2135 »

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…

Saying you value “ideas and progress” is an empty platitude. What ideas? Progress towards what?

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

#466

Post by sph »

apexalpha wrote: post #453
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…

>Someone please enlighten me what the actual argument here is, cause I can’t see it. These people paid a lot of money to Trump and now they want to cash in on that bought influence.

Don’t even need to look into Trump’s pockets. The entire US economy and the bet on AI depend on OpenAI & co. doing well. If you can download a Chinese model and run it on your own hardware instead of giving money to an American corp, a large part of their valuation vanishes into thin air, and so does the rest of the US economy that desperately needs AI to do well.

I admire China for its cunning, having put the US on this spot in their long-going economic war. If unchecked, it’s in China’s interest to release to the world for free models that can compete if not surpass the frontier ones.

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

#467

Post by RazorBucksICO »

Towaway69 wrote: post #366

What happened to free trade and globalisation? Oooohhh only when it serves the west. What happened to the invisible hand of the market? Oooohhh it only when it serves the west. Well damn that the Chinese are playing the game “capitalism” better than the west. The last time this happen, the west just forced opium on China. Ironically it was the west that forced China to open its markets in the first place. History jus…

My pet theory is that none of the Chinese labs are releasing open weight models for humanitarian reasons. I believe the Chinese government has made a cynical policy decision that AI is too valuable to allow anyone in their country capture a significant amount of its value as that might allow a person or company to accumulate wealth and influence so quickly as to challenge their power. Everyone must be kept below the God state.

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

#468

Post by mark_l_watson »

Why? The current administration is doing such a fine job protecting the investments of a few hundred wealthy people, and not caring about the economy of the country.

The combination of a wide range of model sizes and capabilities, with good engineering choices as which to use for what applications, that is the way.

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

#469

Post by clemailacct1 »

throwatdem12311 wrote: post #463

Blocking Chinese models would just be regulatory capture by another name. If we want OpenAI and Anthropic to improve they need to compete not just with eachother but with foreign labs too. I don’t know why anyone would think giving Mango Mussolini the power to decide what AI models they can use is a good idea.

[flagged]

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

#470

Post by capevace »

aleqs wrote: post #446
capevace wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And of course they cant say that That’s what I don’t get tho, I think in today’s world they totally could? „We need to protect US investments as our entire economy depends on this market sector“ seems like something that would be soothing to me as an investor? It’s not like the big money givers can’t see that china is close, it’s been the news multiple times already. But taking active policy steps to protect agains…

I think you are confusing the tiny amount of people who are actually investors or stand to directly benefit from these companies with the overall population - the overall population being generally against AI at this point. 'We must protect VC profits at the cost of the rest of the economy and our entire 'free market' system' probably doesn't sound as good.

No I’m not confusing them. I am very aware it’s mainly policy for a minority of people. But this minority drives the markets.

This administration has done a lot for that minority already so I don’t think anyone would be too surprised? In this case they can even claim to protect the greater economy, a crash of which does impact the majority.

„US good, China bad“ has been a long term talking point by Trump too and this would neatly fit into that to be consumed by his base

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