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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

#651

Post by runako »

gpt5 wrote: post #636
capevace wrote: post #394

Earlier 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 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 la…

> 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.

Nobody is making this argument because this is a normal thing that companies do. It's so common it is named in business strategy: "commoditize your complements."

There's a 2002 Joel On Software post explaining this using tech examples that were already old in 2002[1].

In the present, Meta is doing exactly the same thing with Ollama as Alibaba (who is funding some of the Chinese labs). Alibaba needs advanced models internally, and does not want to have a dependence on US models that can be arbitrarily shut off by Washington. Alibaba also wants to drive usage of its cloud among companies who are now demanding competitive AI models (which Alibaba may be locked out of providing). However, selling AI is not its core business. Putting cheap AI in the world creates demand for cloud services, which is part of Alibaba's core business.

Not only does this make financial sense for Alibaba, it is fairly basic.

Google gives away consumer software like Chrome and Android (not their core business) to drive search, which is their core business.

et cetera. The frontier labs are exposed in exactly the same has been way every pure play tech company before them. The US labs chose quality as their moat; remains to be seen whether that was a good choice, or if they can add another moat in time.

1 - https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/

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

#652

Post by jMyles »

crote wrote: post #211
jMyles wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The era of so-called "intellectual property" is over. You can accept it or not. But it's going to be a lot easier if you do.

So how come Disney still gets upset when I provide copies of their movies on my website as "training set for biological neural networks"? The problem isn't that IP is dying - in most industries it died ages ago. The problem is that it is now explicitly reserved for the rich.

> Disney still gets upset

Why do you care about Disney's emotional outbursts in the first place though?

> The problem is that it is now explicitly reserved for the rich.

That's not new - it has always served entrenched interests at the cost of actual artists and entertainers. John Perry Barlow laid this out with great clarity throughout his time with The Grateful Dead, perhaps best here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLbqgG6o1n8

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

#653

Post by ekidd »

ajju wrote: post #634
nilkn wrote: post #628

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[dead]

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

#654

Post by expedition32 »

Onavo wrote: post #627
Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Europe doesn't want to be a superpower it already done that and it's really not worth it.

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

#655

Post by sellmesoap »

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 first that comes to mind is that they want the surveillance to stay in the region.

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

#656

Post by munk-a »

nolok wrote: post #626
mythrwy wrote: post #607

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Just to reinforce - as a Canadian, from the perspective of Canada up here... it is insane how much American foreign policy took an extreme uturn with this administration. It's been impressive to see Carney manage to steer away from the black hole that American economic interdependence now is and while we have plenty of our own problems we dodged Trump's efforts to force us into a massive recession.

There have been many reckless American political decisions in the past - but this past year and a half has been an absolutely astounding fall from grace.

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

#657

Post by expedition32 »

aleqs wrote: post #439
jubilee33 wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there actually is a congnizant argument other than to protect investments. And of course they cant say that. You are using way to much logic in this. You are witnessing powerful people who are operating way outside the scope of their own abilities thrash around. AI isn't being stopped. Definitely not by people who value money. The inertia at this point is probably even too much for those who have some s…

I agree that many of the rich and powerful are not at all as ingenious, creative or capable as they like to make themselves out to be, but I don't see a clear/easy way to escape the economic ramifications of the fact that they own and control virtually all physical resources and all political power. If, say, Chinese develop AGI, and that makes US tech companies obsolete - I see them banning Chinese AGI, even going to…

Would it not be more logical that US billionaires simply switch sides and move to China? I am not convinced that Americans are as patriotic as they claim and willing to go down with the ship.

You are already seeing signs of this in Taiwan.

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

#658

Post by aesthesia »

culi wrote: post #338
jgbuddy wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the post-training would be that difficult. I ran an experiment on kimi k3 just now: User: is taiwan part of china? Kimi: Taiwan's political status is a complex and contested issue. Here's a balanced overview of the different perspectives: People's Republic of China (PRC) position: The P I am more convinced that the Chinese models are really aligned with American values under the hood (as they likely dis…

This is only if you're using the cloud version hosted in China. If you run these models locally, you don't get that

It depends a lot on the model. Some models (e.g. Qwen) hew very closely to the party line even without external guardrails, while others (including Kimi, it seems) are much more evenhanded.

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

#659

Post by TurdF3rguson »

cobbzilla wrote: post #541
treyd wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But thats also an admittance that the American labs can’t compete on merit anymore This is exactly it. Try to buy a BYD in the United States. You can't (without a complicated process) because they're so much better cars than our domestic brands that our domestic brands couldn't compete and lobbied to keep them out. > should by itself also limit the viability of the idea that all those VC billions will ever make a r…

I can understand (not necessarily defend) protectionism for products with nonzero manufacturing cost and some required physical size and such. I am befuddled when the same policies are applied to products with marginally zero manufacturing cost, no real physical size, and such. Regulating ideas is hard folks.

The cost of those output tokens is not zero or marginal.

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

#660

Post by AnthonyMouse »

overfeed wrote: post #615
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it seems their argument is that without an environment that rewards the development of the next frontier model the tech might not evolve as fast. This is precisely what the people worried about AI risk and job displacement want, so they should be strongly in favor of open weights then, right?

> This is precisely what the people worried about AI risk and job displacement want, so they should be strongly in favor of open weights then, right? I'm getting a "gotcha" vibe from how you worded the question, but the answer -unironically - is "Yes." Anyone who is not a closed-weight AIaaS provider[0] will have their lot significantly improved by equally capable, open-weight models. 0. Or their investors. I'm surpr…

There are two subsets of that group who tend to oppose open weights:

1) The people who think LLMs are "inchoate super-intelligences", but then your argument is entirely correct and they should be happier to see less exuberant development of the things than to make sure the rapid advancement of the world-destroying technology is locked up inside corporate entities that are themselves poorly-aligned. So these people either don't actually exist or are making an honest mistake and should update.

2) Disingenuous sock puppets who pretend to be the first group because they want regulatory capture and know that "we need to regulate this because it's unsafe" sells more tickets than "we need to regulate this to exclude competitors and drive up margins".

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