Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

politico.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

431–440 of 983 posts

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

#431

Post by throwaw12 »

capevace wrote: post #350

I‘m not even sure what the argument for banning Chinese models/open weights even is supposed to be? 1. if it’s to stop hackers doing hacking things with „uncontrollable models“ then, well… they’re already doing something illegal to begin with, why would they care about breaking another law running these models? 2. if it’s to stop foreign actors, then that ban would not apply to them anyway 3. it’s not stopping distil…

it's simple.

AI labs and investors are scared, and pushing administration to ban them, because they can't compete with Chinese models soon, similar to how they banned Huawei, and Chinese cars.

When there is cheaper alternative, companies might go with self hosting option, which reduces the enterprise moat of AI labs

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

#432

Post by greensoap »

downrightmike wrote: post #332
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.

And if an AI generated those wights, they are not copyrightable

Even if the weights are just made through traditional training and no AI is used to make the weights... is there a copyright right? If the weights are a numerical derivation that aren't made by a human is there even human expression? Absent human expression, there is no copyright right?

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

#433

Post by capevace »

jubilee33 wrote: post #367
capevace wrote: post #350

I‘m not even sure what the argument for banning Chinese models/open weights even is supposed to be? 1. if it’s to stop hackers doing hacking things with „uncontrollable models“ then, well… they’re already doing something illegal to begin with, why would they care about breaking another law running these models? 2. if it’s to stop foreign actors, then that ban would not apply to them anyway 3. it’s not stopping distil…

I don't think there actually is a congnizant argument other than to protect investments. And of course they cant say that. You are using way to much logic in this. You are witnessing powerful people who are operating way outside the scope of their own abilities thrash around. AI isn't being stopped. Definitely not by people who value money. The inertia at this point is probably even too much for those who have some s…

> And of course they cant say that

That’s what I don’t get tho, I think in today’s world they totally could?

„We need to protect US investments as our entire economy depends on this market sector“ seems like something that would be soothing to me as an investor?

It’s not like the big money givers can’t see that china is close, it’s been the news multiple times already. But taking active policy steps to protect against that should boost market confidence, no?

Instead we get alibi arguments to accomplish the same thing in the end?

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

#434

Post by munk-a »

coffeemug wrote: post #414
munk-a wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is literally what all AI is right now. Anthropic has been paying companies to use its product to form that dependency and maybe they're not misaligned but there's no regulation in the US that'd in anyway deter them from purposefully misaligning their model.

Subsidizing a product to capture market share is very different from exploiting a national security attack vector.

Sorry, to clarify - this isn't just "offering it at a loss" Anthropic is directly paying PE firms to enroll their held companies in their services[1]. When it comes to a question of whether this is a national security attack vector I think there isn't a cut and dry argument and people could go either way but... private companies are not necessarily aligned with the US government even when contracted with the US government (see Starlink Ukraine shenanigans) and the steps the US government usually would take with highly critical infrastructure to ensure alignment haven't been taken - in my opinion at least, this is definitely a very subjective area.

1. https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anthropic-in-talks-to-invest-200...

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

#435

Post by coffeemug »

Matl wrote: post #421
coffeemug wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not supposing a low-risk event. This is an obvious attack vector that an adversary would almost certainly exploit. I would exploit it if I were them.

You're supposing an event that there's no evidence for happening and that is on par with 'let's ban open source software because some open source software could be malicious'. Let's not forget that as of now most models are like game cartridges i.e. they need a 'host' to run i.e. llama.cpp - they're not executable code by themselves. I could see an argument for a security review prior to integrating a model into a hi…

Imagine a model that's 10000x more intelligent than any human. You integrate that model into a sensitive industry. You now effectively have an extremely powerful foreign agent running e.g. your energy sector. This is qualitatively very different than a backdoor in Redis.

I agree this is science fiction-y, but given the pace of progress I don't think it's so easy to dismiss.

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

#437

Post by LatencyKills »

buzzerbetrayed wrote: post #413
johnnyApplePRNG wrote: post #358

[flagged]

[flagged]

> 54% of adults have a literacy below a 6th-grade level [0]

Trump has been openly anti-education since the 1990s. My favorite Trump quote: “I love the poorly educated.”

[0]: https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/2024-2025-liter...

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

#439

Post by aleqs »

jubilee33 wrote: post #367
capevace wrote: post #350

I‘m not even sure what the argument for banning Chinese models/open weights even is supposed to be? 1. if it’s to stop hackers doing hacking things with „uncontrollable models“ then, well… they’re already doing something illegal to begin with, why would they care about breaking another law running these models? 2. if it’s to stop foreign actors, then that ban would not apply to them anyway 3. it’s not stopping distil…

I don't think there actually is a congnizant argument other than to protect investments. And of course they cant say that. You are using way to much logic in this. You are witnessing powerful people who are operating way outside the scope of their own abilities thrash around. AI isn't being stopped. Definitely not by people who value money. The inertia at this point is probably even too much for those who have some s…

I agree that many of the rich and powerful are not at all as ingenious, creative or capable as they like to make themselves out to be, but I don't see a clear/easy way to escape the economic ramifications of the fact that they own and control virtually all physical resources and all political power. If, say, Chinese develop AGI, and that makes US tech companies obsolete - I see them banning Chinese AGI, even going to war, rather than ceding power (realistically there may be some backroom deal), they would grind the population into dust if it let them retain their wealth and power.

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

#440

Post by [deleted] »

capevace wrote: post #394
Matl wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Someone please enlighten me what the actual argument here is, cause I can’t see it. > The only thing a ban would do is protect the American market from further downward price pressure on inference, protecting VC investors in the short term. But thats also an admittance that the American labs can’t compete on merit anymore That's the argument. To be precise the publicly stated argument is that they're attacking Amer…

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…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN