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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

#531

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

barbazoo wrote: post #519
Matl wrote: post #354

Earlier 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…

I find such beauty in the fact that the robbers are getting robbed but it's all part of progress overall. It's not that China won't come up with what the US are coming up with. Just a matter of when it would happen.

I am sure that some other country (Mistral from France, India, Canada etc.) would have even more chances to innovate perhaps.

and because Chinese models are open-weights, the distillations effects of them could be easier done as well ;)

In my opinion, its a win-win plus even within worst case scenario*, I already believe that the current open weights models are in general speaking good enough perhaps for my and other use cases as well and I feel like we will probably most likely get more open-weights model for a long time in general as well perhaps.

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

#532

Post by lelanthran »

thewebguyd wrote: post #110
misiti3780 wrote: post #6

he cant shut them off anyways, anyone can just VPN to europe and download them

Individuals can. The US GOV can make it so legally risky for US based corporations to host, download, or integrate with foreign open weight models that they become effectively illegal for commercial use. Any sort of sanctions or ICTS regulations, and you'll see them all rapidly disappear from AWS, Azure, GCP, HuggingFace, GitHub, etc.

> The US GOV can make it so legally risky for US based corporations to host, download, or integrate with foreign open weight models that they become effectively illegal for commercial use.

They have to tighten that up so much that it would effectively result in "US Corporations cannot source anything from a foreign state".

After all, if you are allowed to outsource (for example) customer-support to EU, the company you are outsourcing it to can effectively use Kimi without disclosure.

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

#533

Post by andsoitis »

frollogaston wrote: post #521
andsoitis wrote: post #420

Why isn’t there a competitive US or European open weights model?

The Chinese open weights models are copies of the American closed ones. Nobody in the US is trying to do that, I guess.

> Nobody in the US is trying to do that, I guess.

Yes, but WHY, I wonder.

Seems like a business opportunity.

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

#534

Post by jmaw »

throw1234567891 wrote: post #429
vkaku wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You should be able to suffix the x domain with "cancel" to view the content through a proxy. i.e. "xcancel.com/...."

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

#535

Post by avaer »

Besides serving no purpose other than an attempt to enforce software by fiat (which would hurt legitimate business, make US AI companies noncompetitive, and do nothing to stop illegitimate use)... it's literally impossible to enforce.

There's a million loopholes (secret distillation so it's no longer foreign, serving mystery model from different jurisdiction, putting it in your basement and not telling anyone). And you bet the motivation and money is there to jump through these hoops.

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

#537

Post by doctorwho42 »

stickfigure wrote: post #248
4wsn wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's literally on their border and the history is akin to if The South established its own nation state in Cuba after the Civil War and China became its ally. At least admit the double standard. I don't mind realpolitik but it's so tedious when it's not plainly stated and there's this veneer of civility. Yes, the US is allowed to do whatever it wants to in South America. No, other nation states don't have a sphere of…

Taiwan has been self governing for longer than almost everyone that lives there has been alive. It's also a vibrant democracy. If you care about democracy and human rights, it's morally reprehensible NOT to support Taiwan. We can debate the ethics of intervening in strongman dictatorships like Venezuela, Cuba, or Iran, but Taiwan is clear.

Cool, and it's morally reprehensible to NOT support drastic action to curb the worst effects of climate change, and start trying our very best to prepare our children and grandchildren for an adulthood where they will be clawing back minor things we take for granted even in today's world of regular continent spanning forest fire smoke pollution.

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

#538

Post by trescenzi »

mahkeiro wrote: post #451
trescenzi wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plus on top of that it's been ruled that training on copyrighted material is allowed because it's transformative. As a result even if the model output is copyrighted training on it would be as allowed as training on books.

If this was ruled ok why are they paying billions to book publishers?

Yea to be more explicit than the other reply they are being fined for the theft of the books not training on them. They trained on tons of legally procured books by destructively scanning and OCRing them. It was discovered in legal filings and is called Project Panama if you want to read more about it.

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

#539

Post by OrvalWintermute »

realusername wrote: post #461
throwaw12 wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Huawei has a long history of “borrowing” IP & source code from US companies

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

#540

Post by adrian_b »

porridgeraisin wrote: post #511
capevace wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 thei…

Nothing will be truly banned. As in, you can always run and use all the chinese models. Startups will use them. Like I said, they will simply use soft regulations to ensure that all the major players who due to power law will form a majority of the economy, will be using OAI/Ant. If JP Morgan wants to run their own Deepseek V4 on their own hardware, why would the US government care? They simply don't want them using…

It is not clear that "model self-hosting in Fortune companies is DOA".

Among the chiefs of the Fortune companies there is no complete unity, as some think that they should receive some of the AI profits, instead of OpenAI and Anthropic.

Recently, both the CEO of Palantir and then the CEO of Microsoft have criticized quite harshly the business model of OpenAI and Anthropic, implying that it is bad both for society and for their corporate customers.

None of those two would come first in mind for altruistic behavior, so their criticisms must be based on business reasons.

For the CEO of Palantir, it is clear that the criticism was a sales pitch for a new Palantir product (Sovereign AI), which is a turn-key system including all hardware and software needed by a company to self-host AI model inference and also training or fine tuning.

It is less clear which is the motivation of Microsoft. If they do not like the business model of OpenAI and Anthropic, then this means that they also want to compete with them, but that cannot be the same as what Palantir proposes, i.e. self-hosting on premises. Perhaps Microsoft also wants to propose some kind of self-hosting, but instead of on premises, doing it on some kind of Azure instances.

So the Chinese are not the only "enemies" for OpenAI and Anthropic.

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