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…
Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI
771–780 of 983 posts
Re: Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI
#772Earlier quoted context omitted.
Correct. This seems to be poorly understood. You can use an original work to write an encyclopedia (e.g. Wikipedia). That is fair use. You cannot copy an original work and distribute it. LLMs are an encyclopedia.
But no Chinese company has copied and distributed an American LLM. Even if they had wanted that, it would have been impossible, because Anthropic et al. do not let anyone access them directly. Querying the available API can be used to extract only an extremely small part of the information stored in an LLM. That part can be used for the post-training of another LLM, to obtain some desirable properties, but the extrac…
No one has claimed Chinese models violated copyright law.
Some have claimed they violated ToS, which is different.
Re: Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI
#773Re: Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI
#774I‘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…
Re: Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI
#775I‘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…
Currently companies say "you cannot investigate the security of our systems without our permission, because it is our system and we are responsible--also, if there's a data breach, we aren't responsible." See how that works? As a society we seem fine with this.
We are sacrificing national security for the convenience of companies.
So... to answer your question:
Probably, again, we will sacrifice national security, and even our national competitiveness in this important new AI industry--we will sacrifice it all for the convenience of companies and so they can make a few bucks.
It's more important than ever that the good guys actively monitor government and corporate systems for security flaws. These open-weight models are going to be in the hands of the bad guys; the hackers are coming whether the company is ready or not. Ideally a good hacker will find and disclose the vulnerabilities before a bad hacker pwns half the nation's personal data for the 3rd time this month--or worse.
This will require that we stop bullying security researchers. Things like the State Governor personally pushing for felony charges because somebody pressed "view source" on an HTML page shouldn't happen.
Re: Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI
#776Re: Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI
#777Someone explain to me how the US would stop people from using Chinese models? Anyone in Europe can download and run a Chinese model and serve it up on the open internet to people in the US. What can the US do about that? The only thing the US can maybe do is ban exports of high powered GPUs to the EU. However the EU can retaliate by banning export of ASML machines to the US, so I don't think the US has that card to p…
That’s just the short version not to speak of secondary sanctions and further mechanisms which take place then.
Re: Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI
#778I‘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…
Re: Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI
#779Re: Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI
#780Earlier 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 .
Sure, but if you are a business in the US, you might not be able to use it legally. And, through the US exercising extraterritorial jurisdiction, businesses in Europe doing business with the US might not be able to use it either, for fear of reprisals. Even though the model is Chinese and hosted in Europe. This sort of thing happens all the time, especially in the finance and defence sectors.
However if Chinese models start to become noticeably better[0] than US models, it will be hard to hold the line and businesses would start risking using illegal models to get an business advantage, which would be as simple as making HTTP requests to an inference provider outside the US.
The AI companies themselves show that there's a high capacity for lawlessness in corporate America, such as e.g. Meta and Anthropic downloading Library Genesis and getting away with a slap on the wrist.
[0] Chinese models exceeding US models could come sooner rather than later. Stock Kimi K3 is slightly worse than the frontier but it could improve with further post-training, and the weights will be released imminently. All it takes is for China to get a good pretrain and release that model into the world.