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

politico.com

731–740 of 983 posts

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

#731

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…

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.

Decade? We're 4 years in since ChatGPT released publicly and have gone from "Wow this thing is stupid" to running coding agents on auto mode, and the Chinese labs have been around for even less time. The US providers may lose dominance in 1 or 2 years.

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

#732
post #595

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, train…

Why would model progress slowing be necessarily bad for China?

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

#733
post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the supposed „free market“ country Good scare quotes. The US hasn't been free market in the Adam Smith sense in ages, if ever.

well free markets meant something very different in adam smith's time; what they meant by free was 'free from rents' whereas today its usually mean in the milton freedman terms as 'free from any interference' which is how i interpret the parent poster... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_market#Classical_Economic...

It's not free from interference either. It requires enforcing antitrust, for example, which the US seems to have forgotten. Literally what you quoted:

> the term free market refers to a market free from all forms of economic privilege, monopolies and artificial scarcities.

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

#734

You guys need to wake up and realize that Anthropic are the enemy. They just increased their political spending as well... Stop giving them your money or this never ends.

Can you elaborate on what makes you say this? I'm really struggling to understand the source of all the Anthropic hate on HN recently.

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

#735
post #707

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, b…

Great points, but I think that banning open source databases would have been better not for employees, but for shareholders.

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

#736

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find such beauty in the fact that the robbers are getting robbed but it's all part of progress overall. It's not that China won't come up with what the US are coming up with. Just a matter of when it would happen.

Yep. We'll steal China's IP as well so all of this really is just no big deal. Everyone is a robber in some way. Though one must ask, why are American models banned in China? Hmmm. > It's not that China won't come up with what the US are coming up with. Just a matter of when it would happen. I agree. All this discussion about China releasing open weight models is amusing. It's like ok they release open weight models.…

> Though one must ask, why are American models banned in China? Hmmm.

Because the models are behind a gate and the data goes overseas. The same is not true for open weight models. One should avoid the former and prefer the latter simply based on principle, not on country of origin.

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

#737

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How about: excellent technology will demand premium prices, and hence will have the capital to back it ... horseshit technology will die a death, and any horseshit capital that backed it. Opening up will make things more efficient and at least give said horseshit capital a chance at being redeployed elsewhere a slightly higher chance of being successful.

VCs have been horseshit for some time and throwing money at horseshit startups to increase their AUM, their incentive structures are fundamentally misaligned with their clients.

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

#738

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 official reasoning they use is sanctioning 'intellectual theft' due to distillation.

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

#739
post #520

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 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…

> because they're so much better cars than our domestic brands

Is that objectively true? True after factoring in harms they do to human rights and the environment?

Nope.

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2026/may/12/c...

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/10/human-rights-...

Remember, even EU despite claiming to be morally superior to the US, heavily tariffs BYD (much more than the tariffs that the globe mocks Trump for). https://thenextweb.com/news/byd-rejects-hungary-environmenta...

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