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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

#711

Post by anon373839 »

IncreasePosts wrote: post #525
andy99 wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The open weights models would be even more effective by incentivizing people and companies to switch jurisdictions. It might even break SFs monopoly on AI, or at least weaken it, everybody isn’t there exclusively to funnel money to openAI and Anthropic. It would also boost research in non US jurisdiction. Who is going to be wooed by “come to our lab where you’re only allowed to work with closed models!”

What researchers want to join a company that is in a race to the bottom to serve inference tokens? If any open weight companies start actually producing state of the art models then maybe, but if it's just copying what others have done for cheaper, you aren't going to find many researchers interested in that

This comment is really out of touch with reality. Chinese labs have incredible talent and they're excited to be doing the work they're doing. Moreover, Kimi K3 appears to be well beyond the San Francisco frontier in some domains. Look at the code arena for web dev, for example: K3 is +44 points ahead of Fable.

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

#712

Post by glaslong »

Matl wrote: post #354
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…

> 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…

wow if they're that crucial, but economically nonviable, we should probably just nationalize them and fund the superproject with taxes, then put the results into the public domain!

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

#715

Post by glaslong »

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…

> "predatory pricing" (economic term for a competitor selling at a loss to eliminate you), which is illegal in the US

It is very funny that this was/is the playbook of a huge number of successful, VC-funded, "disruption" plays.

Cheap cabs that undercut the market, wait for taxi companies to die, raise your rates now that your "rideshare" app got everyone hooked on the subsidized rate, IPO!

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

#716

Post by marcus_holmes »

ericmay wrote: post #620
nilkn wrote: post #598

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The keyword in your sentence is "access". The rest of the world would have cheap access to AI, but no ownership of anything at the frontier. If the US joined the rest of the world, declined to develop frontier AI, and allowed itself to become dependent on cheap Chinese AI, once that dependency was fully realized it would eventually translate into a lack of access to the frontier. That doesn't matter until, suddenly,…

Spot-on and really well written post highlighting the challenges here. Really it just comes down to the US and surrounding sycophants and China. There just isn't any other game in town. For the US to just, well, give up on AI development would be civilizational suicide. I wouldn't put it past us though, most Americans in particular are so weak minded they only care about cheapest possible product. It's interesting to…

We can see the same situation play out with manufacturing capability.

The USA has recognised that it needs more manufacturing capability. But rather than just build that capability (which is what the Chinese state-planned economy would do, and did) it tries to incentivise private companies to build it. Which didn't work because the companies building domestic manufacturing face competition from Chinese imports. The investment money can get better returns chasing property deals or rent-seeking monopolies.

In the "we can do it back" case, it still takes a US private company a lot of time and money to distill their model off the Chinese model. There has to be a lot of profit for them to do that. That profit isn't really available - it's a competition with all the other models, and no monopoly rents. There's for sure a viable business there, but it's a "lifestyle business" not the 1000x growth business that VC's want.

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

#717

Post by bicepjai »

Matl wrote: post #354
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…

> 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…

So basically the argument is we have taken too much debt to afford failure, we might bring down the economy of top 1% so ban Chinese models :)

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

#718

Post by marcus_holmes »

thijson wrote: post #569
sam0x17 wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 It won't even do this. Streisand effect will probably draw even more attention to the open weight models The entire marketing narrative in AI already operates this way --- "GPT 2.0 is too dangerous to release, oh noooo!" etc

I remember something similar happening where software was going to be outlawed from export: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Zimmermann After a report from RSA Security, who were in a licensing dispute with regard to the use of the RSA algorithm in PGP, the United States Customs Service started a criminal investigation of Zimmermann, for allegedly violating the Arms Export Control Act.[5] The United States Governme…

I remember t-shirts with the DVD encryption key on them when the authorities tried to ban that. This shit always backfires. You'd think they'd know this by now.

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

#719

Post by pbgcp2026 »

satvikpendem wrote: post #577
monooso wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The parent comment, emphasis mine. > Anyone in Europe can download and run a Chinese model and serve it up on the open internet to people in the US .

No they cannot, legally speaking, and companies do not want to face sanctions avoidance charges, so practically speaking no American company will touch the European model hosts either.

In 5 to 10 years most of EU will be partnering with China, not US. Banking will become more "Chinese centric" and most of EU will show a middle finger to US with its FATCA, DMCAs, sanctions and other BS.

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

#720

Post by sergiotapia »

pants2 wrote: post #554
sergiotapia wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Grok is a terrific model and my work horse. I hope Composer 3 reaches at least this level because Grok 4.5 intelligence + composer type speed pfffff, wild times ahead.

I think Grok is replacing composer now yeah? Fast mode is similar speed to composer.

Cursor has confirmed that Grok will be their flagship model, and Composer 3 their workhorse.

The intention being that Grok 5 or whatever is the orchestrator and will summon sub agents using Composer 3 for work.

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