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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

#891

Post by californical »

hirako2000 wrote: post #807
munk-a wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really hope that when a sane administration returns to power in the US we'll actually get a reckoning over how irrational it was to not restrict training data.

It isn't irrational. The idea is that selling, or giving away art grants the consumer to sell art of his own, not a clear copy of. So the court rationally found Anthropic guilty for acquiring copies without paying for them. But didn't charge the training, deemed fair use. If it isn't fair use, then we may need to sue all teachers for spitting out knowledge they ultimately acquired from someone's work. Copyright, some…

I agree that the fair use argument on training data is a genie that’s not getting put back in a bottle. But:

> If it isn't fair use, then we may need to sue all teachers for spitting out knowledge they ultimately acquired from someone's work.

Is such a lazy argument and always was. A human doing something is necessarily different than a machine doing it. We can be ok with a human doing a thing and simultaneously not ok with a machine doing it.

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

#892

Post by californical »

delecti wrote: post #320
EMIRELADERO wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Proprietary model weights are IP I don't think they are. Not copyright at least. There may be some "trade secret" stuff for them but they're not copyrightable.

Trade secrets are a type of IP.

Sure, just like it’s illegal to steal the formula of Coca Cola from their documents.

But you can do an analysis of a bottle of Coke to figure out exactly what’s in it.

You can even make your own and sell it, if you call it a different name.

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

#894

Post by chabska »

mcv wrote: post #542
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 supposed „free market“ country Good scare quotes. The US hasn't been free market in the Adam Smith sense in ages, if ever.

This Schroedinger's Freedom is getting tired now. They happily label themself as free-market democratic liberal progressive when you're justifying bombing a poor third-world country, but suddenly claim to be unfree undemocratic oligarchic whenever anyone asks them to act on that principle.

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

#895

Post by throwaw12 »

OrvalWintermute wrote: post #539
realusername wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> similar to how they banned Huawei, and Chinese cars. And that will go as well as it went for both

Huawei has a long history of “borrowing” IP & source code from US companies

please define "borrowing"

I read a book and learned something, did I "borrow" or "distill"?

I read info from a website without their consent, then learned something, and now I am teaching that knowledge to others, did I "borrow", "steal", "distill" or doing piracy be selling it?

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

#896

Post by wasfgwp »

ngl999 wrote: post #884
HighGoldstein wrote: post #731

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They won't. China doesn't have the training capacity and the quality data sets, the former because of access to fabs, the latter because of internal censorship that is getting worse by day. Simple as that.

> the latter because of internal censorship

Having limited amounts of high quality Chinese data to train on doesn’t really decrease or affect the appeal of these models to the rest of the world. I don’t think the CCP is restricting or limiting the datasets that models can be trained on.

Also the models themselves don’t even seem to be censored or restricted that much. If the Chinese government is fine with the guardrails being on the API level and maybe even restricts the usage of external providers that’s again a net benefit to everyone else since they would have little incentives to force Chinese companies to lobotomize their models.

You are probably about capacity so we can only hope that Huawei and others can catch up and break Nvidia’s monopoly (since Intel and AMD suck too much too much to accomplish anything useful that’s the next best thing)

Also Chinese labs are actually still publishing research publicly which alone would accelerate and increase the competitiveness of open AI models developed in the US or even Europe.

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

#897

Post by ngl999 »

echaozh wrote: post #840
ericmay wrote: post #616

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 they're not? But the American government and Anthropic don't want American models to be used by the Chinese. Anthropic is notorious for its effort to tell if the user is within China.

China is taking the moral high ground when Anthropic bans users from China. But if Anthropic didn't do it, the GFW would have surely banned Anthropic because Claude will say lots of things that do not agree with the official narrative.

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

#898

Post by kube-system »

left-struck wrote: post #770
kube-system wrote: post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A "ban" is a legal prohibition. The possibility of the ban is solely a legal decision. Open weights might make it easy to violate a ban , but it does absolutely nothing to prevent one from being possible . The questions as to whether a ban would be effective hinges entirely on the ability and desire to enforce it.

I don’t think you’re wrong but I think buddy is trying to say a ban would not be enforceable because the ability aspect won’t be there, even if the will is.

That all depends on what the law actually says and the resources and will to enforce it.

Speech/information is difficult to control, but given a draconian enough law and enforcement posture, and there can be a very significant result. You can't stop everyone, but at some point you throw enough people in prison that you've effectively suppressed it.

Not that I think that would actually happen here, but it's certainly possible.

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

#899

Post by wasfgwp »

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…

> costs hundreds of billions to develop - to BOTH US and China

OpenAI and Anthropic are extremely bloated compared to the Chinese labs. They have thousands of extremely well paid people working for them. Deepseek I think has a couple of hundred and I doubt they are paid a lot.

Of course compute for training is expensive but I doubt that’s necessarily the overwhelming majority of the operating costs for Anthropic/OpenAI

> on a market economy and non-state-owned labs

Sure the private companies developing these models are heavily interlinked with and even maybe partially owned by the government. But its a matter of degree. Since that’s the situation in the US similar in how these companies both shape government policy directly and in how the government is constantly intervening and shaping their behavior outside of any regulatory framework.

The US government is both heavily protectionist and interventionist these days.

> next guy

Good try GPT-5…

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

#900

Post by ngl999 »

decimalenough wrote: post #889
ngl999 wrote: post #884

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They won't. China doesn't have the training capacity and the quality data sets, the former because of access to fabs, the latter because of internal censorship that is getting worse by day. Simple as that.

The current panic is happening precisely because Chinese open weight models like Kimi and Qwen are demonstrably competitive with SotA models like Fable, but far cheaper. https://fireworks.ai/blog/kimik3-fable

No, the Chinese tech companies routinely super optimize for a given 'famous' or 'established' or 'mainstream' benchmarks. Any other concern is secondary.

In other words, they look good on surface, but suck whenever anyone put them to any serious use. That's why they are cheap, they have to be cheap because they suck.

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