Never seen capitalists this afraid of competition. Same story with Chinese cars… We can’t have cheap, and objectively superior EVs because of protectionist policies towards Musk and his ilk.
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
#502Banning Chinese open source AI is “quick war with Iran” levels of strategic thinking.
Re: Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI
#503Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you been paying attention the last two years? With a few exceptions, he has unilateral authority.
I guess my question was, is this a threat to do something legal or something illegal
What do you mean by illegal? It's very nuanced these days.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_v._United_States
On July 1, 2024, the Court ruled in a 6–3 decision that presidents have absolute immunity for acts committed as president within their core constitutional purview, at least presumptive immunity for official acts within the outer perimeter of their official responsibility, and no immunity for unofficial acts.[5][6][7][8] The court declined to rule on the scope of immunity for some acts alleged of Trump in his indictment, instead vacating the appellate decision and remanding the case to the district court for further proceedings.
Re: Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI
#504I‘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 CFO or wtv that tweeted, their argument was, if you allow cheap free competitive models, you will stop the influx of capital in frontier development of even more powerful LLMs, thus capping how far the tech could reach. Obviously, they're mostly asking for regulation to save their money, but it seems their argument is that without an environment that rewards the development of the next frontier model the tech mig…
> it seems their argument is that without an environment that rewards the development of the next frontier model the tech might not evolve as fast.
This is precisely what the people worried about AI risk and job displacement want, so they should be strongly in favor of open weights then, right?
Re: Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI
#505Someone 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.
The parent comment, emphasis mine.
> Anyone in Europe can download and run a Chinese model and serve it up on the open internet to people in the US.
Re: Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI
#506Proprietary model weights are IP, their outputs are not IP and I can't imagine a court decision that would rule otherwise because that would set an extremely far reaching and dangerous precedent, even for American businesses. I don't think distillation as 'stealing IP' has any legal legs. They can probably claim violation of ToS at best because the terms of use do prohibit use for training rival models.
Setting aside the strict definition of IP, this does satisfy the philosophical motivation of IP, which is to protect people making significant capital investments.
This is not too different from drug discovery where it's extremely difficult to come up with the molecule, but relatively easy to copy it. Similarly, it's really hard to create frontier models from scratch but much easier to distill them.
Re: Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI
#507Earlier quoted context omitted.
The CFO or wtv that tweeted, their argument was, if you allow cheap free competitive models, you will stop the influx of capital in frontier development of even more powerful LLMs, thus capping how far the tech could reach. Obviously, they're mostly asking for regulation to save their money, but it seems their argument is that without an environment that rewards the development of the next frontier model the tech mig…
> thus capping how far the tech could reach I just don’t buy it. There’s still gonna be demand for stronger models. Sure growth will be slower, but this might even drive a push for more cost efficient training / inference and/or new architectures if money is harder to come by.
Yeah, I agree with this take. When there's less capital floating around it will make these labs prioritize shrinking the models so less hardware (or older hardware) is needed to run a model with the same or similar capabilities. They'll have to do that simply because the cost of running the models will become more important.
It also might end up pushing us towards LLM ASICs assuming the model progress slows significantly.
Re: Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI
#508Read this thread when you get the time: https://x.com/_vkaku/status/2080352797606744209 Open Data+Open Models gives everyone else an advantage and bringing regulatory capture here should be appealed and brought to the FTC and the courts to challenge such regulations. Startups need better than this whole lock down into four overvalued frontier models in the US sort of thing
I'm only counting 3 frontier models in the U.S.… Oh, Claude tells me Llama and Grok might count.
Grok is a terrific model and my work horse. I hope Composer 3 reaches at least this level because Grok 4.5 intelligence + composer type speed pfffff, wild times ahead.
Re: Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI
#509Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 hi…
Imagine a model that's 10000x more intelligent than any human. You integrate that model into a sensitive industry. You now effectively have an extremely powerful foreign agent running e.g. your energy sector. This is qualitatively very different than a backdoor in Redis. I agree this is science fiction-y, but given the pace of progress I don't think it's so easy to dismiss.
You can’t start policy justifications with “imagine” like that. Maybe if you’re the Beatles.
Re: Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI
#510Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Someone please enlighten me what the actual argument here is, cause I can’t see it. > The only thing a ban would do is protect the American market from further downward price pressure on inference, protecting VC investors in the short term. But thats also an admittance that the American labs can’t compete on merit anymore That's the argument. To be precise the publicly stated argument is that they're attacking Amer…
But isn‘t the whole argument of „winner takes all“ already dead, if china is such a big threat that the US labs need import controls? Distilling or not, they are clearly close enough to the frontier, that the supposed „free market“ country needs market controls. That may work for US markets. But not the rest of the world. Idea: petrodollar policy becomes „tokendollar“, enforced by US military dominance. If you force…
How could you tell how close they are to the frontier if they weren't distilling? Clearly those labs think distilling is worth it despite the large effort they need to go through to bypass anti distillation techniques used by the frontier labs