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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

#871

Post by andix »

zarzavat wrote: post #725
andix wrote: post #583

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Ch…

Congress? Who cares about congress anymore? The president declares it a national security risk. Done.

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

#872

Post by smarnach »

cregy wrote: post #865

They will need to do something new here, somewhere between patents and copyright, to help protect US intellectual property on the AI stage. Otherwise, US r&d will fold on this. Longer term, 2 years plus, it will be a race to the cheapest as almost all models will be better than our current frontier ones.

American AI companies pirated hundreds of thousands of books, scraped the web against the express wish of site owners, extracted all public GitHub repositories without the explicit consent of code authors and distilled all of that information, basically the entire knowledge humanity built over thousands of years, into large language models. The way these models were built was ethically questionable. The models are out there now, and time can't be rolled back, but I still don't think the companies who built the models by ignoring intellectual property rights deserve any special protection of their own intellectual property.

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

#873

Post by regexorcist »

vaaal wrote: post #734
nullbio wrote: post #730

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.

They are lobbying hard for a monopoly, or duopoly at best, in AI, based on protectionism rather than merit.

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

#874

Post by brookst »

allarm wrote: post #846
blackqueeriroh wrote: post #683

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…

> 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 Whether this is true or not is still open to debate, but the fact that it’s presented as some kind of absolute truth that needs no substantiation is simply ridiculous.

Quality of life seems clear enough to assert:

https://www.numbeo.com/quality-of-life/rankings_by_country.j...

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/standard-...

Freedom is harder to quantify and certainly the US is regressing quickly, so China may well become more free without any domestic policy changes.

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

#875

Post by s3p »

tokioyoyo wrote: post #742
WillPostForFood wrote: post #328

But 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”

Going to bet now that it never gets banned. Will come back in a few weeks to see the result :)

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

#876

Post by fennecbutt »

Otterly99 wrote: post #837
gpt5 wrote: post #636

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think the misconception here is that they "give them away". Sure, you can download the weights and run it yourself, but to run a 1T+ parameters you need roughly 2TB of VRAM (for full precision). That costs around $500k to $1M, not including electricity and rent. In reality, they provide their models priced via API or subscription just like any other company. The "free weights" are only useful for other research lab…

I mean I think the primary reason is really the attention is all you need paper and meta's "leaking" of meta's llama.

China is plenty happy to steal IP and just say "this is just how business is done in China it's a cultural thing" but quickly run to defend their own IP in western courts when stolen by western businesses. It works one way.

And I have experienced this firsthand when having something manufactured there. Exact clones appearing on Alibaba just days after.

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

#877

Post by fennecbutt »

inigyou wrote: post #812
jpalawaga wrote: post #665

Earlier quoted context omitted.

genuine question, what IP does america presently steal from China?

AI models. If you ask Claude Opus in Chinese which model it is, sometimes it says Qwen.

That's just conjecture though surely. Like not saying you're wrong but the same thing would result from crawling and using results from Chinese Web for training along with everything else. If the most prevalent model people are posting responses from online in Chinese is qwen then of course that would happen. There's no evidence to say either way really.

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

#880

Post by dosisking »

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…

Companies would simply move away from the US. Kind of like how Britain killed it's own car industry back in the day.
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