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

#481

Post by torginus » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 7:12 PM UTC

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…

The problem with this argument is that sharing model weights only has downsides for said foreign actor compared to providing a cloud service. Since the suspicion exists, security companies are going to comb over the weights and discover every hidden secret of the model, while with a cloud provider you send your most sensitive data to a remote server, and trust the AI lab wont train on your data, with the only shield being a TOS. While with a local modal, even sending a peep about your internal data without cause would be scandalous.

It's not even going to be a good honeypot - since said actor doesn't really provide inference, people will have to pay for and run the infrastructure of these models, which bad guys cannot even subsidize, unlike cloud based provides.

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

#482

Post by capevace » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 7:12 PM UTC

porridgeraisin wrote: post #418

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 chin…

> In most US-adjacent countries like India, anyone that sells to US companies I see avoiding chinese model providers for the same reason

But the argument isn’t about model providers tho right (providing inference)? Using Chinese providers is already a privacy problem if user data is involved, so I don’t know if anything would change here.

What you’re suggesting is that the policy would stop big co‘s from running their own inference completely, no? Or only the foreign open source models?

> don't bother analysing it technically

I feel you have to, because where’s the line? Is running GPT-OSS myself fine (if I were a big company)? Mistral models? Or are none of them ok? What about if I am getting inference from a small startup, which is running OSS models for me? Or is only OAI/Anthropic ok?

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

#483

Post by satvikpendem » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 7:13 PM UTC

zarzavat wrote: post #357

Someone 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 US is trying to stop them for US companies, it doesn't care about non Americans.

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

#484

Post by ux266478 » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 7:14 PM UTC

capevace wrote: post #442

ux266478 wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Leavi…

> Do you know what happens if that goes up in flames I think in capitalism thats called a market correction? > Do you understand how much money is tied up in the industry? If the free market „virtue signaling“ no longer matters, then they could’ve also put a stop-gap on investment volume to protect the economy against over-reliance? Or how about go full plan-economy and just dictate price per token until investors ge…

> then they could’ve also put a stop-gap on investment volume to protect the economy against over-reliance?

Which instantly collapses the load bearing bull market. They can't do that for the same reason they can't do anything about the insanity of the real estate market. The fallout would be existential. The economy isn't rational, remember. It's highly reactive and, no matter how strong your state is, always out of your control at the end of the day.

America is years away from being able to rotate meaningful volumes of capital into heavy industry. Until then, AI has to outpace the cooling of the tech sector, while also contributing to it. The entire political strategy in play is a frantic spinning plate game. There is no long run if it fails, so that is their strategy as far as we can see. Or maybe they're just maliciously incompetent. Given the American administration opaquely decided starting a forever war in the Red Sea was a solid choice at this point in time, possibly to try and fluff up an auxilliary bull market with the MIC, we really can't rule that one out.

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

#485

Post by cindyllm » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 7:15 PM UTC

aleqs wrote: post #479

capevace wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Nobody would be surprised, and something like that is what's bound to happen to some extent. But I think the current tech/VC cronyism and corruption is becoming more and more evident to the masses, and opposition is growing. There's also the economic factor of US tech being dominant in the world, if US decides to ban better tech because it is too competitive, then US companies cannot really compete globally anymore -…

[dead]

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

#486

Post by infamouscow » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 7:16 PM UTC

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…

The problem isn't so much investors losing money, it's if this kills the economy.

A lot of elites are now unemployed with nothing better to do thanks to AI. Historically speaking, populist uprising are easily squashed except when you have a group of counter-elites supporting the movement. We're finally starting to see the results of that with the Deflock movement cutting down cameras.

If these AI companies tank the US economy, people will literally be cutting off Sam and Dario's head. For good reason.

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

#487

Post by 3eb7988a1663 » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 7:18 PM UTC

reissbaker wrote: post #372

3eb7988a1663 wrote: post #28

If 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)

Exactly the kind of breakdown I was hoping to see. Thanks.

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

#488

Post by kennywinker » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 7:19 PM UTC

throw1234567891 wrote: post #408

kennywinker wrote: post #4

Under what authority could he block access?

ITAR and suddenly half a world cannot touch it.

Afaik ITAR only covers export. Which would mean it can only be used to block export of US models, not importing chinese open weight models.

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

#489

Post by spwa4 » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 7:21 PM UTC

jnovek wrote: post #270

spwa4 wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Theft would give the victim a one-time payment, plagiarism would have given the victims payments every time the model was used. In other words: IP stealing through training LLMs is declared 100% legal. The question is what happens when somebody mass-"uncopyrights" entire libraries of content for the first time. Because, of course, this judgement should have sent the stock price of Disney, Paramount, Warner Bros, New…

If I make Bambi 2 and toss it up on YouTube I’m going to be sued by Disney for a wide variety of intellectual property violations, it doesn’t matter if I make it by hand or via an LLM. Nothing has changed for big organizations with a legal team.

Sued ... of course. But what will they claim? The courts have declared that training an LLM on copyrighted data and then having it produce anything DOES NOT make a derivative for the purposes of copyright. That it is fully owned by the person who used the LLM and zero licenses are needed to sell it, rent it out, or whatever.

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

#490

Post by hnfong » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 7:22 PM UTC

ch4s3 wrote: post #260

nixon_why69 wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the basket of goods for inflation doesn't separate optional from mandatory consumption. If housing, healthcare and education are outpacing the topline inflation number, a lot of marginal families will be squeezed. The cheap LG TV doesn't really make up for it.

Nevertheless if you lump those costs into an inflation number it won't be a lot higher, the Total Living Cost calculated for 2023-2024 showed 4.4% inflation vs 3% CPI. There are a lot of ways to slice and dice this, which is why people stick to the classic CPI.

If you factor in an extra 1.4% inflation per year into the numbers, you're not going to see any "real" wages growth over the 40 year period.

So the 1984 income is 60,420, if you calculate 60420 * (1.014)^40, which is assuming there's a 1.4% difference between the two disputed methodologies, you'd get about 105k. But the actual 2024 income is 83,730. Which I think means that if you take the non-CPI methodology to calculate real income growth, it's actually negative.

I'm not saying one method is more correct than the other (I don't know enough about economics to judge), but 1.4% annual difference matters a lot when you're talking about four decades.