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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

#721

Post by pbgcp2026 »

3eb7988a1663 wrote: post #487
reissbaker wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

256+: GLM-5.2 (swap with Kimi K3 when it goes open-weight on Monday) Chinese model but probably Laguna S2.1. The best Chinese model at this size is DeepSeek V4 Flash though <16: Oof, not sure. Nothing will feel great at this size TBQH without finetuning on a specific task. Pick your poison of tiny Qwen or tiny Gemma (although again Gemma is not Chinese)

Exactly the kind of breakdown I was hoping to see. Thanks.

And we can quickly see that the real problem is not the models, but HW to run them. You can build whole Enterprise on Gemma 4 31B full precision without significant problems. If you can afford not to lobotomise it by quantisation.

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

#722

Post by steve76 »

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…

[dead]

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

#723

Post by pbgcp2026 »

ericd wrote: post #91
3eb7988a1663 wrote: post #28

If there were ever a sign I need to get mirroring, this is it. What are the best Chinese models on HuggingFace today? Bucket by ideal RAM: Text generation, image generation, TTS, etc

My list would be to go grab GLM5.2, Deepseek v4 Flash and Pro, and the various sizes of Qwen 3.5/3.6 dense and MoE, along with at least one of the multi modal qwens (I think it’s called VL). In a pinch, you can quantize them yourself to whatever size you need.

"you can quantize them yourself" ... to the point where usual Excel will have more intelligence.

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

#724

Post by pbgcp2026 »

g42gregory wrote: post #336
intrasight wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sanctions would cancel the whole business rationale for the Chinese government having/supporting open weight models. You can't commoditize your competitors with open-source if your product is blocked.

Open-weights models will be downloaded from China and run on local/corporate-owned AI hardware. You would have to ban Internet access and AI hardware next.

It's already in the making, just look at EFF recent emails and what is happening now with ID checks ...

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

#725

Post by zarzavat »

andix wrote: post #583
zarzavat wrote: post #357

Someone explain to me how the US would stop people from using Chinese models? Anyone in Europe can download and run a Chinese model and serve it up on the open internet to people in the US. What can the US do about that? The only thing the US can maybe do is ban exports of high powered GPUs to the EU. However the EU can retaliate by banning export of ASML machines to the US, so I don't think the US has that card to p…

Just declare it illegal (national security risks). Treat it like sexual abuse material, scan cloud services for copies, and jail everyone who has them.

It's probably too slow for them. Anthropic and OpenAI need Chinese models banned soon to stay in business. The moment China has the most capable model it's game over for them.

They're spending vast amounts of money on the premise that they will be able to monetize it later. A Chinese model with the same capabilities that you can run privately, without obnoxious guardrails, would eviscerate their value proposition. China isn't there yet but it seems it's a matter of months until crossover.

If a ban has to go through Congress then A\OAI will have bled out by the time Congress gets around to doing anything, especially for a law as controversial as jailing people for running Chinese models.

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

#726

Post by fhub »

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…

More broadly, this is one of the things I dislike about the US political system. When executives or major shareholders can legally make very large political donations while their companies are lobbying on issues that directly affect their businesses, it creates an unavoidable perception problem.

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

#727

Post by calebkaiser »

nirui wrote: post #700

One question here: Why you don't see a lot of good American open weight models on the market? I'm guess it's about money? Could there be ways to lower that cost? Sharing idle GPUs through network (like Folding@home, BOINC), open and fair market for training data, open source training framework, and such? This whole Chinese AI thing makes me giggle at these American AI companies, but the ultimate solution/long-term go…

Money is a big part of it. The notable thing about Chinese open models is their size. Most open source models out of US labs have not tried to compete with the enormous flagship models you see from frontier labs now. Cohere, Arcee, Poolside, etc all put out open source models, and of course, Google has their Gemma line, Meta has their open models, OpenAI released an open weight 120b model, etc. The incentives are just tricky for running a massive training run for a fully open model. Monetizing can be hard, as if you want to monetize inference, you'll be competing against platforms like Fireworks etc that will also be serving your model.

Thinking Machines just released an enormous open model though, and I'm hopeful to see more of this globally. I believe open models are emphatically a good thing. But I do sympathize with smaller labs trying to figure out the economics.

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

#728

Post by surajama »

dmuso wrote: post #588
zarzavat wrote: post #357

Someone explain to me how the US would stop people from using Chinese models? Anyone in Europe can download and run a Chinese model and serve it up on the open internet to people in the US. What can the US do about that? The only thing the US can maybe do is ban exports of high powered GPUs to the EU. However the EU can retaliate by banning export of ASML machines to the US, so I don't think the US has that card to p…

Probably in a similar way to how they go after IP/copyright currently. One method they use is to push for law changes in free trade agreements. US would use whatever leverage they have to get other countries on board and locked in to US providers.

That might stop European companies from buying inference directly from China. I don’t see how anyone could possibly stop them from taking an open-weight Chinese model and then modifying it and selling it to Americans as a European model.

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

#729

Post by coliveira »

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…

That's nonsense, people pretend that a "frontier model" is the most important technology ever, but we know for sure it cannot be because several companies are doing copycats of one another. It is not China that is doing much effort to copy-cat, it's the US companies that are copying one another. The only real barrier in this technology is how many Nvidia chips you can buy and how much data you can get to train your LLM. All these models are basically moving in the same trajectory, it is essentially a very expensive copy-paste job they're doing.
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