Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI • Hacker News Board

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

#941

Post by allarm » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 5:22 AM UTC

wasfgwp wrote: post #902

allarm wrote: post #846

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Well no.. regardless of anything else the median American generally has q higher standards of livin than the resident of pretty much any major country (including Europe). While compared to e.g. Germany or France those in the lower percentiles are probably doing worse China specifically still has a huge amount of poverty. Even if you happen to be legally allowed to live in one of the major cities and have a decent job…

> the median American generally has q higher standards of livin than the resident of pretty much any major country (including Europe)

If you say so. I visit the U.S. quite often, and the homeless and mentally ill people on the streets there don’t seem particularly happy. I haven’t seen anything like this on such a scale either in the country where I was born, in the countries where I used to live, or in the country where I live now. But yes, the index suggest otherwise, so I suppose it’s just my misconception, sure.

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

#942

Post by hirako2000 » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 6:03 AM UTC

californical wrote: post #891

hirako2000 wrote: post #807

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I side with the argument for machines learning being treated differently than human learning.

And in doubt, to pause and forbid commercialisation given the clear impact it's already having on people's financials, humans have invested in a given set of rules that ML are disrupting.

My argument is simply that the ruling for fair use isn't irrational. It's a rationality that you, me and many others would disagree with. Lazy? Yes. Also call it lazy, and biased towards VC's interest who can't squeezed much profit in status quo.

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

#943

Post by ngl999 » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 6:09 AM UTC

wasfgwp wrote: post #915

ngl999 wrote: post #905

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> doesn’t really decrease or affect the appeal of these models to the rest of the world Anyone who tried using Chinese models for serious programming tasks ditch them quickly if they have a choice. > I don’t think the CCP is restricting or limiting the datasets that models can be trained on. What I meant was censorship limits the amount of high quality training sets by limiting the amount of all training sets from wh…

> Anyone who tried using Chinese models for serious programming Perhaps, but that’s because they are just objectively worse for many tasks than GPT/Claude. I don’t see how that ties to censorship inside of China. > censorship limits the amount of high quality training sets by limiting the amount of all training sets Well again, I don’t really understand how is the lack of high quality Chinese datasets matter much if…

> I don’t see how that ties to censorship inside of China.

LLMs are parrots, when they are trained on English data they behave like English / western speakers which carries the __western__ values.

China would never want a shiny model deployed by some solemn state-own institute to pitch western values like democracy or freedom of speech.

So China is better off starting with Chinese content in the first place, but only to find out it shoots itself in the foot, because censorship __removes__ Chinese content from the Internet, and it __prevents__ truth-reflecting, i.e. quality, content from appearing.

When this is realized to be not sufficient, and they have to use English content, the English content needs to be censored, too.

So compared to other models trained on the uncensored set, the Chinese models are trained on the data sets that is likely smaller. And since high quality content is suppressed, there is likely less high quality training sets. Therefore, their models likely suck.

(Meta knows the importance of high quality training sets so that it started distilling its own employees who are smart.)

> produce GPUs that are competitive

The most recently known advanced process in China is some kind that requires multiple exposures in DUV machines. This already limits the cost to a minimum that's probably not economical.

For GPUs to be competitive, there's more to the hardware. Driver also matters. GPU drivers these days are compilers in disguise. How many high quality compiler projects have we heard of from China?

It's unlikely for both the hardware and the software of a Chinese GPU to deliver what's boasted in its marketing material.

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

#944

Post by ngl999 » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 6:11 AM UTC

numpad0 wrote: post #919

ngl999 wrote: post #900

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

how can you say that with a username of "ngl999", that doesn't make sense (IIUC, -ngl [NUM_LAYERS] specify number of layers to offload to GPU in llama.cpp, 999 on most use cases might as well be -1)

what relation does a username string have to the observations I made?

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

#945

Post by zackwu » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 6:45 AM UTC

handle584 wrote: post #903

chii wrote: post #782

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is that objectively true? objectively true. And there's zero need to factor in things like "human rights" or "environmental protection", because these are costs that have been externalized and the consumer don't pay for it (in their lifetime anyway). That's what objectively means. Chinese cars are unavailable in the US because US manufacturers are 100% unable to compete. Japan was in the exact same position before,…

> because US manufacturers are 100% unable to compete. In the June just passed Tesla Model Y is the best selling EV in China.

Made in Shanghai Gigafactory. Some may even argue Tesla would have died without the manufacture capacity in China

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

#946

Post by wasfgwp » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 8:18 AM UTC

mcv wrote: post #931

wasfgwp wrote: post #909

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it’s freedom both from state interference but also from monopolies, oligopolies and trusts using their position to suppress the competitiveness of other market participants. Which is generally impossible to prevent without the state interfering in the markets.

Which is why a free market requires regulation, but only for the purpose to break up trusts, cartels and monopolies, and to ensure equal access to the market and a level playing field. It's not a trivial problem to solve and probably requires constant readjustment, and there's probably plenty of room for ambiguity in assessing which decision would make the market more free or whether something is or isn't hurting mar…

I would include consumer rights protection and regulating uneven and unbalanced contracts. To an extent one might expect that sufficient competition could solve this but often it doesn’t. You usually are forced to buy goods/services as a bundle and don’t get to pick the terms and conditions.

While there might be other companies offering better terms the product quality of the first company might outweigh that from the perspective of the consumer. Of course one might argue that if a company is in a position to do that it’s effectively a monopoly and if all major market participants are engaging in that it’s effectively an oligopoly (or a case of implicit collusion)

And another (maybe less controversial example) is establishing minimal quality standards for at least certain products like food and drugs (i.e. the laissez faire offhands approach to that e.g. in the early 1900s resulted in some severe issues) because effectively that means that companies are selling products with hidden defects.

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

#947

Post by wasfgwp » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 8:19 AM UTC

LtWorf wrote: post #936

wasfgwp wrote: post #906

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s extremely American centered, though? Despite the constant complaining the median American is still very well off compared to almost everyone else. If you go to the top 10 percentile or so them maybe only Switzerland and some very small countries (tax havens, petro states and such) can really compete.

We're comparing average, not the 0.001%

Yes, I specifically said the MEDIAN American and the top 10th percentile.

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

#948

Post by wasfgwp » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 8:21 AM UTC

allarm wrote: post #941

wasfgwp wrote: post #902

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well no.. regardless of anything else the median American generally has q higher standards of livin than the resident of pretty much any major country (including Europe). While compared to e.g. Germany or France those in the lower percentiles are probably doing worse China specifically still has a huge amount of poverty. Even if you happen to be legally allowed to live in one of the major cities and have a decent job…

> the median American generally has q higher standards of livin than the resident of pretty much any major country (including Europe) If you say so. I visit the U.S. quite often, and the homeless and mentally ill people on the streets there don’t seem particularly happy. I haven’t seen anything like this on such a scale either in the country where I was born, in the countries where I used to live, or in the country w…

Yes, that’s exactly what I said. The median and above are doing very well in relative terms, the bottom line 10 percent or so are often doing much worse compared to other developed countries.

> I suppose it’s just my misconception, sure.

I don’t think you are actually arguing with me.

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

#949

Post by wasfgwp » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 8:29 AM UTC

ngl999 wrote: post #943

wasfgwp wrote: post #915

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anyone who tried using Chinese models for serious programming Perhaps, but that’s because they are just objectively worse for many tasks than GPT/Claude. I don’t see how that ties to censorship inside of China. > censorship limits the amount of high quality training sets by limiting the amount of all training sets Well again, I don’t really understand how is the lack of high quality Chinese datasets matter much if…

> I don’t see how that ties to censorship inside of China. LLMs are parrots, when they are trained on English data they behave like English / western speakers which carries the __western__ values. China would never want a shiny model deployed by some solemn state-own institute to pitch western values like democracy or freedom of speech. So China is better off starting with Chinese content in the first place, but only…

> carries the __western__ values…China would never want a shiny model

Maybe, but that’s an opinion on what you think might happen. So far that has not been the case.

But yeah currently you can ask their models exactly the same controversial question (from the CCP perspective) in Chinese and the answer would be very different than the one in English.

> And since high quality content is suppressed, there is likely less high quality training sets

For now it seems that the Chinese labs are more interested in maximizing the quality and competitiveness of their models instead of lobotomizing them to enforce compliance with some sort of political agenda.

That might change of Chinese models might surpass Western ones in the future. Which is why competition is necessary to discourage them from doing thay.

> It's unlikely for both the hardware and the software of a Chinese GPU to deliver what's boasted in its marketing material.

Not currently sure. Chinese cars were pretty crap as well a few decades ago (and same applies to countless other example) so there is at least sufficient precedent to believe that China might close this gap eventually (and they clearly have been over the recent years when it comes to GPUs)

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

#950

Post by TurdF3rguson » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 8:37 AM UTC

cobbzilla wrote: post #940

TurdF3rguson wrote: post #930

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, no. We're mostly talking about banning access to models running on someone else's infra. I don't think many people in this thread have the resources to run a frontier model in their living room.

How do you do that without banning the model itself. It doesn't matter who can or can't run it. They are trying to ban something that can be represented entirely by a sequence of bytes. An illegal number, like the DeCSS key. The fact that money is involved does not change the free speech aspects. This isn't CSAM or torture porn. It's data.

It's not the model weights people are panicking over losing access to though. It's the compute.