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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

#621

Post by kube-system »

fbrncci wrote: post #543

Living 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…

This is a common confusion I see about the law in tech circles.

Lawmakers can take into consideration how a law would be enforced (and good ones do), but they don't have to do this, and often do not. Being hard to implement or enforce is just simply not their problem to solve.

Now from a compliance standpoint -- the companies in the US who do business with you must follow what US law requires and if they don't, they can be fined or have the people responsible put into prison. And if people try to do it "in private" anyway, the law can simply require records to be produced.

Ultimately with any law, it comes down to:

* what exactly does the law require?

* how far are regulators willing to go to enforce it?

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

#622

Post by unknownfuture »

nilkn wrote: post #598
ipaddr wrote: post #595

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It puts all US companies at a price disadvantage and forces American company to shoulder the load of training frontier models most will never need while the rest of the world has cheap AI access.

The keyword in your sentence is "access". The rest of the world would have cheap access to AI, but no ownership of anything at the frontier. If the US joined the rest of the world, declined to develop frontier AI, and allowed itself to become dependent on cheap Chinese AI, once that dependency was fully realized it would eventually translate into a lack of access to the frontier. That doesn't matter until, suddenly,…

> The keyword in your sentence is "access". The rest of the world would have cheap access to AI, but no ownership of anything at the frontier.

So... just use distillation and create their own frontier models?

I don't see the problem here.

If the goal is to hold sovereign ownership over your own SOTA models, China has already shown that any nation could achieve that pretty easily if they need to.

And that's ignoring the fact that many of these models are open weight so hosting/owning sovereign inference/intelligence itself is entirely a hardware problem.

This whole conversation reminds me a lot of North Korea deciding they needed their own OS when Linux is right there. If the technology is open and available to all, then sovereignty over this core technology is irrelevant.

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

#623

Post by [deleted] »

ericmay wrote: post #620
nilkn wrote: post #598

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The keyword in your sentence is "access". The rest of the world would have cheap access to AI, but no ownership of anything at the frontier. If the US joined the rest of the world, declined to develop frontier AI, and allowed itself to become dependent on cheap Chinese AI, once that dependency was fully realized it would eventually translate into a lack of access to the frontier. That doesn't matter until, suddenly,…

Spot-on and really well written post highlighting the challenges here. Really it just comes down to the US and surrounding sycophants and China. There just isn't any other game in town. For the US to just, well, give up on AI development would be civilizational suicide. I wouldn't put it past us though, most Americans in particular are so weak minded they only care about cheapest possible product. It's interesting to…

[deleted]

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

#624

Post by khriss »

This is such a fundamentally misguided policy. The real competition isn't where the models are today. It's where the innovation will be tomorrow and what that should look like.

Trying to protect existing incumbents by banning Chinese open weight models is only going to stack the deck further in favour of Open AI and Anthropic. The real edge that the United States had was never excelling in the here and now. It was in being one step ahead in figuring out what the 'next big thing' was going to be. Propping up a duopoly that squeezes out all other competitors is the very opposite of that.

Software and technology is probably the last bastion where the United States still has somewhat of an ability to out-compete the Chinese. Our lead in this area came from allowing upstarts and innovators to kill off and replace the fossilized incumbents, not by propping up the big shots.

I am genuinely bewildered as to why we would be hell-bent on destroying that advantage.

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

#625

Post by popalchemist »

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 arguments come ex post facto. Their motivation is profit, because OpenAI is pitching the Trump admin on a 5% stake.

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

#626

Post by nolok »

mythrwy wrote: post #607
nolok wrote: post #604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

That doesn't describe the candidates on offer though. Look, I just want good rational, wise, humane low touch governance without excessive political ideology nonsense. I'm sick of the wars, sick of the lies, sick of the economic yo yo of boom/bust, sick of progressivism and "woke", sick of religion being injected into the conversation, sick of idiot candidates put there by the wealthy. And no, I'm not going to preten…

You're the only one talking about Biden or Kamala. They don't matter when saying Trump is incompetent, idiotic and dangerous. Some other people may or may not also been, yes.

He's also been destroying American hegemony in an impressive speed and depth, weakening it's alliance and control behind anything ever seen, and no this didn't happen under anyone else.

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

#627

Post by Onavo »

Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #531
barbazoo wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The other countries don't have cheap capital, cheap infra, or scale. The talent is not the bottleneck. Look at how many SV companies are helmed by Indian executives. If the Europeans cared an iota about AI progress, Huggingface wouldn't have been headquartered in NYC.

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

#628

Post by nilkn »

unknownfuture wrote: post #622
nilkn wrote: post #598

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The keyword in your sentence is "access". The rest of the world would have cheap access to AI, but no ownership of anything at the frontier. If the US joined the rest of the world, declined to develop frontier AI, and allowed itself to become dependent on cheap Chinese AI, once that dependency was fully realized it would eventually translate into a lack of access to the frontier. That doesn't matter until, suddenly,…

> The keyword in your sentence is "access". The rest of the world would have cheap access to AI, but no ownership of anything at the frontier. So... just use distillation and create their own frontier models? I don't see the problem here. If the goal is to hold sovereign ownership over your own SOTA models, China has already shown that any nation could achieve that pretty easily if they need to. And that's ignoring t…

Linux is not a relevant comparison, because the fundamental capabilities of an OS do not grow exponentially with time or investment.

If building full sovereign ownership of the production chain for frontier-level AI were so easy, there wouldn't only be two countries on the entire planet that have that right now. If distillation worked in the way you seem to imagine it does, nearly every country in the world would have a full sovereign frontier AI stack.

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

#629

Post by unknownfuture »

nilkn wrote: post #628
unknownfuture wrote: post #622

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The keyword in your sentence is "access". The rest of the world would have cheap access to AI, but no ownership of anything at the frontier. So... just use distillation and create their own frontier models? I don't see the problem here. If the goal is to hold sovereign ownership over your own SOTA models, China has already shown that any nation could achieve that pretty easily if they need to. And that's ignoring t…

Linux is not a relevant comparison, because the fundamental capabilities of an OS do not grow exponentially with time or investment. If building full sovereign ownership of the production chain for frontier-level AI were so easy, there wouldn't only be two countries on the entire planet that have that right now. If distillation worked in the way you seem to imagine it does, nearly every country in the world would hav…

They would if they cared to invest in it. That they've not is a policy and economic choice (possibly because they don't have the same sense of panicked urgency I see among a lot of folks around here), not evidence of some insurmountable barrier to entry.

You also jumped to a conclusion that I don't think is self-evident: that owning the production chain matters.

Assuming open weight models continue to advance, who cares? Just let the US and China expend the compute on model development.

And if they close up, then fine, do what China did and build up a domestic industry and distill as a way to get a jumpstart. We already know that's possible since China already did it.

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

#630

Post by [deleted] »

dtech wrote: post #546
echelon wrote: post #458

Earlier 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.

[deleted]
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