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Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI
741–750 of 983 posts
Re: Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI
#742But the idea of a blanket ban on Chinese open-weight models was not seriously discussed. Article should probably put the above higher in the story.
Dean W Ball from OpenAI kinda laid down how the “ban” would work. Everyone clowned him over the weekend, but pretty much everything he said had substance. It’ll most likely will go that way - “mention in memos in all gov orgs they’re not supposed to use any AI other than American ones. And let the implications handle everything else, rather than legalese”
Re: Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI
#743Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> may lose dominance in 1 or 2 years
In some portions they already lost dominance. My claude will happily generate disgustingly vulnerable code then flag me for ToS violation when I ask it to make sure the code that it just made, in the same context window, in the same conversation is safe and doesn't have glaring holes. Also great to be charged $xx.xx+ amounts and then it refuses to answer without refunding it.
Re: Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI
#744Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 anoth…
There is a finite number of tokens that a rig will turn out over it's lifetime. Divide the cost of the rig plus electricity by that number and you have your cost per token. Yes providers can screw up on scheduling and end up paying more than they should, but that's not magic.
Re: Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI
#745Re: Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI
#746Earlier quoted context omitted.
The world is full of nuance. Just like whataboutism and "both sides" can be convenient rhetorical devices for people lying to themselves or others, accusing someone of either can be a convenient figleaf for avoiding thinking about the flaws of one's own side. The fact that Trump won in 2016 obviously overshadowed many things about that election. I didn't vote for him but I can still remember acutely the disappointmen…
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I'm anything but a fan of Trump, but I think these typical slurs don't really make any sense. Were Trump corrupt and pliable then he wouldn't be doing half the things he's doing. There's tremendous money and influence in opposition to things he's doing that he could easily cash in on if he wanted. By contrast there's basically no 'Let's go invade Iran' lobby outside of Israel, and even 'Israel' misstates that since it's mostly that nut and yahoo they have for a leader.
The one nuance I'd add is that greed and corruption are distinct. Like most politicians Trump is certainly excessively greedy. But I think corruption is when an external power gets somebody to act in a way that they would not otherwise, in exchange for sort of personal benefit. And I think what we have on display here is very much the 'real' Trump. If anything, the half-wit would-be assassins seem to have given him a savior complex, thinking that he's God's chosen or whatever.
So for instance Rubio is 100% corrupt. That only political position he has is regurgitating whoever else's position happens to be politically expedient at the moment. And I got very similar vibes from Kamala with things like claiming she'd do nothing different than Biden did, taking on the obviously poisonous role of 'border czar' under Biden, and so on.
Re: Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI
#747Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm only counting 3 frontier models in the U.S.… Oh, Claude tells me Llama and Grok might count.
Grok is a terrific model and my work horse. I hope Composer 3 reaches at least this level because Grok 4.5 intelligence + composer type speed pfffff, wild times ahead.
You get downvoted for praising Grok because its elon company
Re: Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI
#748Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Chinese AI models are certainly not copied from any US sources. All of them have quite different structures, and the reasons for choosing those structures have been clearly explained in published research papers. The structures of the US "SOTA" models are unknown and nothing useful has been published about them, so they certainly were not a source of inspiration for China. Big LLMs like those published by the Chi…
What would the benchmarks be if GLM5.2 and Kimi K3 be if they didn't use distillation of frontier models? I don't think any of the Chinese AI companies have stolen IP from the US AI companies (at least, I've seen no evidence of it), but the evidence of distillation is pretty apparent. My issue with this is that if distillation occurs frequently enough, it is going to zero out most SOTA research into AI. Having cheap…
good, then the money could be potentially put to better use
Re: Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI
#749Read this thread when you get the time: https://x.com/_vkaku/status/2080352797606744209 Open Data+Open Models gives everyone else an advantage and bringing regulatory capture here should be appealed and brought to the FTC and the courts to challenge such regulations. Startups need better than this whole lock down into four overvalued frontier models in the US sort of thing
I'm only counting 3 frontier models in the U.S.… Oh, Claude tells me Llama and Grok might count.
Grok is my starting point for random stuff at the moment. It's really pretty good.
Re: Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI
#750Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
They've invested in capabilities that undercut attempts at AI supremacy by US companies. Every time they put those capabilities to use:
- They look more and more like somebody who can prevent whatever world domination plans appear to be brewing in the minds of US billionaires. They can turn this perception into leverage over other countries by threatening to close their model weights.
- They get to use the improved models to boost their economy's efficacy (they probably think they can put it to use better than anybody else, and they might be right).
- For every $100 that the US paid for a given unit of improvement, they just pay $1. The longer the US keeps this going, the less stable it will become because the sacrifices the US has made to pull it off are causing things like measles and explosive diarrhea and will ultimately lead to unrest. Meanwhile the longer China keeps this going the less likely the US is to stand in their way, because the US will have neglected overlong the things that make it a threat to China (the legitimacy of the dollar, soft power programs like USAID, a thriving economy).
Also they have leverage over US because they've recently demonstrated that they can raise the price of oil. That means that they can pop the AI bubble anytime they want. So the longer the US is dumping everything into model improvement, the more opportunities they'll have to use that leverage.