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Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI
561–570 of 983 posts
Re: Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI
#562Living outside of the US (and EU). I’m in the process of launching an agent assisted automated pentesting and authorized offensive security service. I’m using open weights models to execute the entire audit. So lets for a moment entertain the idea that the US somehow locks open weights. How are they going to stop such audits or actual attackers? A competing service in the US simple won’t be able to execute the same l…
Simple. If they put your company on something like the entity list that Huawei is on, nobody is going to work with you, public or private. The US government can even force non-US banks from other countries to report oversea US citizens' income to the IRS, what makes you think they don't have the power or enforcement method to stop US-based entities from working with you?
I am a small entity, expecting less than $250k in yearly revenue. Somehow I’d be honored to be on that list. I wouldn’t expect to end up there either.
And I could just accept crypto to circumvent any actual regulation, of course that would not be the wording or advice on my service, I’d just disable bank and credit card payments for the US and allow Crypto payments only. That’s how a lot of Chinese and Russian services already operate and have so for over a decade.
Crypto would be convenient as I can even pay my inference in crypto and exchange it to cash at little to no scrutiny while still allowing it to be taxed.
Re: Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI
#563I‘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
It’s more an admittance that the capitalist model can lose to a more socialist approach, unless you “fight fire with fire” and use the government to distort the market for you.
Re: Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI
#564Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 .
Sure, but if you are a business in the US, you might not be able to use it legally.
And, through the US exercising extraterritorial jurisdiction, businesses in Europe doing business with the US might not be able to use it either, for fear of reprisals. Even though the model is Chinese and hosted in Europe.
This sort of thing happens all the time, especially in the finance and defence sectors.
Re: Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI
#565Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t think he’s dumb, I think he’s very cynical and only does things he benefits from. He’s not dumb for selling out the country because he doesn’t care about the country, he’s accomplished his goal of enriching himself. I can’t find it now, but I could have sworn Trump made a comment one time where he said something very roughly like, an earthquake can just happen and a million people in India die. And he was mak…
You are on the money with this one. My favorite example of this showing through was when Bill O'Reilly interviewed him during the superbowl. He tossed him a softball that most presidents would have whacked at to say the United States as a democracy is more virtuous than countries like Russia[1]. But he didn't. His response was, "do you think our country is so innocent"? The reason he became popular is the country had…
The guy watched Citizen Kane and his takeaway was "what a great guy and what an incredible life he lived."
Re: Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI
#566[flagged]
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Re: Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI
#567Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Proprietary model weights are IP I don't think they are. Not copyright at least. There may be some "trade secret" stuff for them but they're not copyrightable.
And if an AI generated those wights, they are not copyrightable
That could effectively be the case here but your statement in isolation is an oversimplification of recent legal guidance on this matter -- AI generated things are copyrightable if there is sufficient human authorship involved in the generation process.
The copyright office's recent statement on this matter were sensationalized when they really said nothing groundbreaking at all -- this was always the standard applied when any tools are used in creating a work.
Re: Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI
#568Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> the supposed „free market“ country Good scare quotes. The US hasn't been free market in the Adam Smith sense in ages, if ever.
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Re: Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI
#569I‘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 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 It won't even do this. Streisand effect will probably draw even more attention to the open weight models The entire marketing narrative in AI already operates this way --- "GPT 2.0 is too dangerous to release, oh noooo!" etc
I remember something similar happening where software was going to be outlawed from export:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Zimmermann
After a report from RSA Security, who were in a licensing dispute with regard to the use of the RSA algorithm in PGP, the United States Customs Service started a criminal investigation of Zimmermann, for allegedly violating the Arms Export Control Act.[5] The United States Government had long regarded cryptographic software as a munition, and thus subject to arms trafficking export controls. At that time, PGP was considered to be impermissible ("high-strength") for export from the United States. The maximum strength allowed for legal export has since been raised and now allows PGP to be exported. The investigation lasted three years, but was finally dropped without filing charges after MIT Press published the source code of PGP.[6]
Re: Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI
#570Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a riff on the classic MPAA slogan during the Napster / BitTorrent era, "You wouldn't download a car." ... Yes I would. It's free real estate.
That was not actually the ad, that was "You wouldn't steal a car. [...] Downloading Pirated Movies is stealing. [...] Piracy it's a crime." Easily misremembered and meme-able.
The “misrememberance” is describing what the words actually communicated. It’s not incorrect, it’s pointing out the logical flaw in the claim.