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Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta warn against overregulating open-weight models

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Re: Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta warn against overregulating open-weight models

#21

Post by voidhorse »

sweetheart wrote: post #12

It makes a ton of sense to see this sort of joint effort being made by these enormous companies, but man, there's some part of me that can't help but feel grossed out knowing the best way to get the US to make the right choice is to have a handful of elite business people say it'd be bad for them.

Yeah, this letter is just proof of (the by now long standing fact) of corporate power/corporate capture of American governance. Tons of popular protests against big AI? Makes no difference. Joint corporate letter about big AI? Possibly the government will do something.

Re: Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta warn against overregulating open-weight models

#22

Post by cyanydeez »

paxys wrote: post #20
christina97 wrote: post #9

I wonder what is happening behind closed doors for these companies to be issuing such a joint letter.

Different companies have different motivations. I'm sure some are genuine, but a lot of them simply lost the race (to OpenAI/Anthropic/Google) and know they can't compete anymore, so are shifting strategies. How many times has Microsoft done exactly this in the past?

looking at both openai and anthropic; they are winning something, but a sober look at their finances will make you silently mouth "but what did they win".

Re: Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta warn against overregulating open-weight models

#23

Post by roenxi »

satvikpendem wrote: post #4

The issue is not open weights as a whole, indeed Hegseth himself said they are important for America (if American made, presumably); the issue is Chinese models, whether open or not, and that's what's looking to be banned, and nothing in this article suggests otherwise.

> ...the issue is Chinese models, whether open or not, and that's what's looking to be banned...

Is the US planning to invade China and take away their models? Because otherwise China is still going to have the models even if the US bans them. I don't think they're going to be going with the US position on this one.

Re: Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta warn against overregulating open-weight models

#24

Post by fidotron »

christina97 wrote: post #9

I wonder what is happening behind closed doors for these companies to be issuing such a joint letter.

If there are effectively only two AI companies allowed to train or run model inference then demand for hosting, GPUs and data centers goes down, so they'd be able to squeeze their suppliers that much more too.

Re: Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta warn against overregulating open-weight models

#25

Post by newpavlov »

derektank wrote: post #18
calebkaiser wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The conversation going on in the industry is a bit broader than that. OpenAI's head of strategic futures just said last week that open models are inherently decelerationist, ungovernable, and will slow development on the frontier. You'll notice OpenAI does not appear as a signatory here despite their relationship with Microsoft.

>open models are inherently decelerationist, ungovernable, and will slow development on the frontier Ungovernable makes intuitive sense, but I don’t understand how open weight models could be decelerationist or slow the development of the frontier. Was there an argument for those positions?

Open weight models challenge the "winner takes all" hypothesis, which motivates the astronomical valuations and acts as a justification for trains of cash dumped into AI development.

In other words, if AI models become a commodity, the "AI leaders" will not be able to burn the cash like they do today, thus resulting in a "slower" (one could say instead "more sustainable") development of AI models.

Re: Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta warn against overregulating open-weight models

#27

Post by calebkaiser »

satvikpendem wrote: post #17
calebkaiser wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The conversation going on in the industry is a bit broader than that. OpenAI's head of strategic futures just said last week that open models are inherently decelerationist, ungovernable, and will slow development on the frontier. You'll notice OpenAI does not appear as a signatory here despite their relationship with Microsoft.

Well of course OpenAI and Anthropic say those sorts of things, it's what they've always said, particularly Anthropic, but that doesn't necessarily mean that's the position of the US government. In other words the government seems to be listening to some but not all of the lobbying done by the big two.

The guy who said those things just joined OpenAI in the last month. He was previously a senior policy advisor, specifically on AI, to the current administration in the White House.

I don't know that the US government has a unified position on open source AI. But it's not like this isn't a discussion happening among policymakers.

Re: Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta warn against overregulating open-weight models

#28

Post by calebkaiser »

derektank wrote: post #18
calebkaiser wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The conversation going on in the industry is a bit broader than that. OpenAI's head of strategic futures just said last week that open models are inherently decelerationist, ungovernable, and will slow development on the frontier. You'll notice OpenAI does not appear as a signatory here despite their relationship with Microsoft.

>open models are inherently decelerationist, ungovernable, and will slow development on the frontier Ungovernable makes intuitive sense, but I don’t understand how open weight models could be decelerationist or slow the development of the frontier. Was there an argument for those positions?

Here's his original post https://x.com/i/status/2078133895766114412

Re: Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta warn against overregulating open-weight models

#30

Post by fidotron »

roenxi wrote: post #23
satvikpendem wrote: post #4

The issue is not open weights as a whole, indeed Hegseth himself said they are important for America (if American made, presumably); the issue is Chinese models, whether open or not, and that's what's looking to be banned, and nothing in this article suggests otherwise.

> ...the issue is Chinese models, whether open or not, and that's what's looking to be banned... Is the US planning to invade China and take away their models? Because otherwise China is still going to have the models even if the US bans them. I don't think they're going to be going with the US position on this one.

It's the same patronizing nonsense as when all the US webcos pulled out of the Chinese market in some misguided supposed protest believing the Chinese so incapable of rolling their own Google, Amazon or WhatsApp they will come begging the americans to go back. Now the western tech universe goes to China for ideas.
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