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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

#571

Post by dilyevsky »

torginus wrote: post #481
coffeemug wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> security companies are going to comb over the weights and discover every hidden secret of the model

is this even doable? it seems plausible the model can be order-66'ed without it being so obvious

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

#572

Post by antonvs »

thijson wrote: post #569
sam0x17 wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Governme…

Never underestimate the stupidity of the US government.

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

#573

Post by kube-system »

greensoap wrote: post #432
downrightmike wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if an AI generated those wights, they are not copyrightable

Even if the weights are just made through traditional training and no AI is used to make the weights... is there a copyright right? If the weights are a numerical derivation that aren't made by a human is there even human expression? Absent human expression, there is no copyright right?

The output being created by a machine is not automatically disqualifying. e.g. PCM audio data is all created by a machine, but that doesn't prevent CDs from being copyrighted... because the input to it was highly human-created.

Ultimately it all hinges on the specifics of the training and how much human involvement was involved throughout the creation process. I suspect arguing this successfully in favor of upholding a copyright would be an uphill battle for many situations, but ultimately we'll need more court cases to know for sure.

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

#574

Post by andix »

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‘m not even sure what the argument for banning Chinese models/open weights even is supposed to be?

Easy: you're a traitor, if you use foreign AI for the fraction of the cost. It's unamerican not to fill the American billionaires pockets. Free markets exist, as long as you buy America first!

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

#575

Post by jmtulloss »

fbrncci wrote: post #562
anvuong wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 servic…

If you're only accepting crypto, you're effectively not serving the US market and the policy would be considered successful.

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

#576

Post by adrian_b »

IncreasePosts wrote: post #525
andy99 wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The open weights models would be even more effective by incentivizing people and companies to switch jurisdictions. It might even break SFs monopoly on AI, or at least weaken it, everybody isn’t there exclusively to funnel money to openAI and Anthropic. It would also boost research in non US jurisdiction. Who is going to be wooed by “come to our lab where you’re only allowed to work with closed models!”

What researchers want to join a company that is in a race to the bottom to serve inference tokens? If any open weight companies start actually producing state of the art models then maybe, but if it's just copying what others have done for cheaper, you aren't going to find many researchers interested in that

The Chinese AI models are certainly not copied from any US sources.

All of them have quite different structures, and the reasons for choosing those structures have been clearly explained in published research papers.

The structures of the US "SOTA" models are unknown and nothing useful has been published about them, so they certainly were not a source of inspiration for China.

Big LLMs like those published by the Chinese companies must have been trained on a huge amount of text, images etc. and the training sets cannot have anything to do with the data hoarded by OpenAI and Anthropic, though they must have been gathered by the same methods, e.g. scanning the Internet and paying "pirates".

The only thing that could have been done by the Chinese companies, though for now there exists no evidence, only allegations, is that they could have used for post-training their models results of queries to US models, made by accounts which have breached the ToS, which forbid the use of the AI services by competitors.

If this really happened, this is a breach of contract, but there is no way in which one may say that the Chinese have copied anything or stolen any kind of IP and the effects of such a post-training can provide only an extremely small fraction of the information embedded in the weights of a model (though that information may be important, e.g. for ensuring that the LLM will work well in an agentic context).

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

#577

Post by satvikpendem »

monooso wrote: post #505
satvikpendem wrote: post #483

Earlier 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 .

No they cannot, legally speaking, and companies do not want to face sanctions avoidance charges, so practically speaking no American company will touch the European model hosts either.

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

#578

Post by anon373839 »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #343
GodelNumbering wrote: post #281

Proprietary 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.

> Proprietary model weights are IP Not copyrightable IP, or at least it hasn't been challenged yet. I have experience with this: I made llama-dl, a way to download the original llama model. Meta issued a DMCA, I appealed to the HN community for funds, someone funded, and our lawyer successfully counterclaimed. Never heard from Meta again. A lack of response to the counterclaim doesn't mean the issue is settled. But n…

Closed model weights probably do qualify as trade secrets, though. But I agree 100% that anything extractable from the API outputs is not secret and does not qualify. And they certainly aren’t copyrighted or patented.

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

#579

Post by kube-system »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #343
GodelNumbering wrote: post #281

Proprietary 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.

> Proprietary model weights are IP Not copyrightable IP, or at least it hasn't been challenged yet. I have experience with this: I made llama-dl, a way to download the original llama model. Meta issued a DMCA, I appealed to the HN community for funds, someone funded, and our lawyer successfully counterclaimed. Never heard from Meta again. A lack of response to the counterclaim doesn't mean the issue is settled. But n…

Congrats on your efforts, but by definition that does not count as legal precedent. At a bare minimum, a legal precedent is some sort of written holding by a court with authority. Even an out-of-court settlement doesn't count.

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

#580

Post by fbrncci »

jmtulloss wrote: post #575
fbrncci wrote: post #562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 servic…

If you're only accepting crypto, you're effectively not serving the US market and the policy would be considered successful.

My main market is still US. Largely US founders with startups and companies.
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