Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

politico.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

641–650 of 983 posts

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

#641

Post by slashdave »

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…

> it’s not stopping distillation either,

> an admittance that the American labs can’t compete on merit anymore

Small contradiction here

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

#642

Post by slashdave »

antonvs wrote: post #563
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…

> 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.

Free market does not mean breaking laws.

China is not socialist.

The issue here is the lack of rule of law in China. Not sure this would really fix that, though.

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

#643

Post by slashdave »

stusmall wrote: post #351
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.

I can't wrap my head around the idea that distillation is IP theft but mass training on books, music and art without consent is fair use. The two stances are incompatible. If it is transformative use of a book, it is transformative use of AI output.

No, it is stealing the R&D of another company.

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

#644

Post by slashdave »

mmonaghan wrote: post #633

I think distillation is inevitable and pretty hard to prevent but I also dunno why anyone would spend billions to train frontier models if there's enough distillation going on to get near it with much lower spend.

Oh, you mean not commit fraud? Why would any respectable company do that?

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

#645

Post by petilon »

adrian_b wrote: post #609
paulddraper wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct. This seems to be poorly understood. You can use an original work to write an encyclopedia (e.g. Wikipedia). That is fair use. You cannot copy an original work and distribute it. LLMs are an encyclopedia.

But no Chinese company has copied and distributed an American LLM. Even if they had wanted that, it would have been impossible, because Anthropic et al. do not let anyone access them directly. Querying the available API can be used to extract only an extremely small part of the information stored in an LLM. That part can be used for the post-training of another LLM, to obtain some desirable properties, but the extrac…

Terms of Use violation cannot be justified as "transformative" or "fair use".

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

#647

Post by arjie »

ch4s3 wrote: post #327
arjie wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This one has always made sense to me. If you think about circumstances which improve the bottom quintiles’ relative income so that they’re now making as much as the median (I.e. the curve flattens out through unprecedented prosperity for the poorest) then the middle and upper middle incomes will rightly conclude that they’re not relatively high income anymore. Placing an arbitrary person on the curve at the right pla…

This is a very zero sum view of the world that I don't think most people actually hold.

I don't think people need to hold a specific view. The experience of higher income percentiles is that the goods and services they rely on will get more expensive. Their position will be against a generic economic term, inflation, not against any individuals and awareness of other income percentiles will be limited. People at each position on the percentile curve will simply experience what they are experiencing and assume it is occurring to others as well.

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

#648

Post by 999900000999 »

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…

It's going to force American companies to only use inferior and more expensive models.

It's protectionism which will only extend our dominance by at most a decade.

The rest of the world will progress without us.

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

#649

Post by PostOnce »

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…

answer to #1:

murder is already illegal, but we also heavily regulate explosives because the public can't be trusted.

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

#650

Post by matheusmoreira »

didibus wrote: post #475
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 CFO or wtv that tweeted, their argument was, if you allow cheap free competitive models, you will stop the influx of capital in frontier development of even more powerful LLMs, thus capping how far the tech could reach. Obviously, they're mostly asking for regulation to save their money, but it seems their argument is that without an environment that rewards the development of the next frontier model the tech mig…

> if you allow cheap free competitive models, you will stop the influx of capital in frontier development of even more powerful LLMs, thus capping how far the tech could reach

Hmm. So either the weights are open for all to use, or nobody trains those weights at all? Sounds like the ideal outcome to me.

The worst possible outcome is the one where frontier labs train godlike AIs then kick the ladder out from under them. That should be prevented at all costs. No country or corporation can ever be allowed to win the AI race, for technofeudalism will follow swiftly after. As long as they keep competing with each other, we're the winners. If that music ever stops, it's time to watch out.

I'd rather have AIs achieve sentience and wipe out humanity as a whole than live in a world where they submit to the whims of gigacorporations and totalitarian governments for the sole purpose of efficiently oppressing me and keeping me in line while they enjoy riches and freedom I'll never have.

Post reply on HN