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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

#631

Post by kube-system »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #608
kube-system wrote: post #579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It was referenced by other legal cases. Why would they mention it if it didn’t help their case?

Because lawyers have a broad ability to simply attempt to persuade the other party -- and "Meta is a big rich company with lots of lawyers and they didn't pursue this" is valuable because it is something that could persuade the opposing side not to bring a case. It wouldn't persuade a court if it got that far, but it could be useful in convincing someone not to bring it to court. (e.g. "are Meta's high paid lawyers smarter than me? am I wasting my time and money by bringing this to trial?")

Precedent is a different thing -- that's a court decision that other courts could/should/must follow.

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

#632

Post by vrganj »

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…

I already am eating from the trashcan all the time. The name of this trashcan is ideology.

The material force of ideology makes me not see what I am effectively eating. It’s not only our reality which enslaves us. The tragedy of our predicament when we are within ideology is that when we think that we escape it into our dreams, at that point we are within ideology.

-- Slavoj Zizek

Or, to slightly simplify: there is no such thing as "without political ideology". What you perceive as such is just a reflection of your own political ideology nonsense.

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

#634

Post by ajju »

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…

(Sincere question, not a rhetorical one)

I think it would be helpful if you explained how distillation works (as relevant to the conversations threads here) because I agree that this is a key point.

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

#635

Post by [deleted] »

lowbloodsugar wrote: post #518
ch4s3 wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you think side gigs are reported? Yes. The FRED data includes informal employment. They do months and months of exhaustive surveys all of the country to put together their data. > You quote unemployment numbers without admitting that people who have given up or simple failed to land a job are not included in those numbers. No, I included data about labor force participation, which is only down a little. > The nu…

I mean, everything you just said is trivially refutable with just Google. FRED data isn’t the governments unemployment figures. FRED data relies on people to self report their side gigs that they aren’t paying taxes on? It is a known gap.

[deleted]

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

#636

Post by gpt5 »

capevace wrote: post #394
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…

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 argument is - these models costs hundreds of billions to develop - to BOTH US and China. China is giving them for free despite not making financial sense because they want to weaken US's tech firms ability to compete - because China sees AI dominance as critical for their national security.

The US also sees AI dominance as critical for their national security, and relies on a market economy and non-state-owned labs. This means that these frontier labs are truly susceptible to "predatory pricing" (economic term for a competitor selling at a loss to eliminate you), which is illegal in the US and any other free market economy exactly because of its implications on market efficiency.

I hate it just as much as the next guy, but the fact the discussion here ignores the fact that these concerns and dynamics are real just lower the discussion level instead of actually discussing potential solutions.

With that said, what I'm worried about is that the government solution will be far more hostile than some semi-ban on open models. An example of an even worse scenario, they could take over frontier labs and restrict access to everyone in the public (which might still not solve espionage).

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

#637

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

ipaddr wrote: post #595
nilkn wrote: post #587

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not seeing it because you're thinking in terms of internal US economics, but this is a question about international economics and geopolitical leverage in the distant future. The reason to consider the ban is because it might be the only way to preserve a fully autonomous and independent American frontier AI stack and the long-term strategic value of possessing such a stack could vastly outweigh the cost of gi…

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.

Lots of people want this outcome. We now know that the closed-weight model isn't an effective moat, but if the closed-weight model business fails, the open-weight business has nothing to distill, and model progress slows.

I suspect this is part of why China dipped into their vast strategic oil reserves to reduce purchasing and offset the shortage caused by Trump's blunder in Iran. If energy prices get too high, training will slow. They know they can pirate our models at 95% fidelity, so they want training to continue so they can pirate the next ones also.

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

#639

Post by ch4s3 »

lowbloodsugar wrote: post #518
ch4s3 wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you think side gigs are reported? Yes. The FRED data includes informal employment. They do months and months of exhaustive surveys all of the country to put together their data. > You quote unemployment numbers without admitting that people who have given up or simple failed to land a job are not included in those numbers. No, I included data about labor force participation, which is only down a little. > The nu…

I mean, everything you just said is trivially refutable with just Google. FRED data isn’t the governments unemployment figures. FRED data relies on people to self report their side gigs that they aren’t paying taxes on? It is a known gap.

Then try to refute it. All of my number came from FRED.

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

#640

Post by dolebirchwood »

bix6 wrote: post #404
dolebirchwood wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A little bit of Googling goes a long way...

A little bit of explaining does to. What’s your point?

People shouldn't have to explain that "Little Tech Association" is a proper noun and therefore its own entity. Learn how words work, bro.
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