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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

#701

Post by zzzeek »

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 to give unfair advantage to Anthropic and OpenAI who would then be expected to shower Donald Trump personally with hundreds of billions of dollars in cash, airplanes and tacky golden things.

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

#702

Post by Der_Einzige »

vrganj wrote: post #632
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…

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 n…

[flagged]

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

#703

Post by DivingForGold »

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.

He ain't the only one talking about Kamalga or Sleepy Joe, I am, and many others too. Unfortunately political choices for decades have come down to who would be the "lesser of all combined evils". There are many things I abhor about the current admin., but billions of dollars of welfare fraud, a wide open border for illegals and criminals, and sponsoring LBGTQ+ whatever all over Africa is just over the top hideous.

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

#704

Post by cobbzilla »

TurdF3rguson wrote: post #659
cobbzilla wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The first token on a new AI rig costs $X (full capex cost) then every token after that costs virtually zero. Over time the cost/token trends towards zero (modulo opex). That said, AI does have higher opex than general SaaS so it can’t get as close to zero.

But that’s kind of a different question, the running of some service. The “product”, the model, is a collection of files. The “manufacturing” required to add another customer is “send them the files” and has ~zero marginal cost.

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

#705

Post by capevace »

IncreasePosts wrote: post #510
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…

How could you tell how close they are to the frontier if they weren't distilling? Clearly those labs think distilling is worth it despite the large effort they need to go through to bypass anti distillation techniques used by the frontier labs

You‘re reading it wrong.

I’m saying it doesn’t matter wether they did or not, because now they clearly have models which can compete.

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

#706

Post by pbgcp2026 »

blackqueeriroh wrote: post #683
runako wrote: post #651

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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." It is common in business strategy, far less so in nation-state governance. The reason you, me, and so many people in the United States still have a far better quality of life and level of freedom than most people in China is because it’s bad to run a count…

"you, me, and so many people in the United States still have a far better quality of life and level of freedom" LOL - are you sure about this?

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

#707

Post by runako »

blackqueeriroh wrote: post #683
runako wrote: post #651

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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." It is common in business strategy, far less so in nation-state governance. The reason you, me, and so many people in the United States still have a far better quality of life and level of freedom than most people in China is because it’s bad to run a count…

> It is common in business strategy, far less so in nation-state governance.

It is not clear why this is bad for Alibaba or China, could you expand on that?

> it’s bad to run a country like a business

The "Chinese miracle" resulting from China's integration with the global economy has lifted ~800 million people out of poverty and raised standards of living quite rapidly overall. A lot has been written on the topic, but suffice to say that it's a fairly unorthodox argument to make that the Chinese have not been well-served by the arrangement.

> level of freedom

The context of this discussion is whether the US government should prevent US citizens from accessing yet another product that is freely available in the rest of the world, to benefit a tiny handful of rich people in California.

Let me be clearer: if you do not hold stock in OpenAI or Anthropic, you likely stand to benefit from more AIs being provided by more providers. Imagine if the government had banned MySQL and PostgreSQL, so we all had to buy databases from Oracle and Microsoft. That would be strictly worse for everybody except employees of Oracle and Microsoft. This is exactly the same thing.

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

#709

Post by anon373839 »

blacksoil wrote: post #681

They argue that the Chinese models distill US models as one of the basis of the potential ban. I think it's quite ironic considering even the US models themselves are using data out there on the internet without asking for permissions and in many cases even infringing copyrights...

The real threat is the time machine Moonshot built to distill Fable and Sol before those models were even available! And with K3 surpassing Fable by a wide margin in some domains, Moonshot apparently also have distilled models that won't be released for some time into the future.
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