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

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 distillation either, Chinese labs are already banned from using US frontier models and look at how good that is working

I don’t get it. Am I missing something? 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, and should by itself also limit the viability of the idea that all those VC billions will ever make a return? In any case this would be something benefitting only a very few for a short time (labs + investors).

Someone please enlighten me what the actual argument here is, cause I can’t see it.

In the end, as a non-US entity; how would the US even stop me from providing services to US companies in private? Well I have a US LLC now, but the moment they become serious about this it takes me a few weeks to incorporate in HK or SG.

I don't think distillation as 'stealing IP' has any legal legs. They can probably claim violation of ToS at best because the terms of use do prohibit use for training rival models.

https://x.com/_vkaku/status/2080352797606744209

Open Data+Open Models gives everyone else an advantage and bringing regulatory capture here should be appealed and brought to the FTC and the courts to challenge such regulations.

Startups need better than this whole lock down into four overvalued frontier models in the US sort of thing

There's a million loopholes (secret distillation so it's no longer foreign, serving mystery model from different jurisdiction, putting it in your basement and not telling anyone). And you bet the motivation and money is there to jump through these hoops.

Article should probably put the above higher in the story.

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 play.

What are the best Chinese models on HuggingFace today? Bucket by ideal RAM: <16GB, <32GB, <96, <256, 256+

Text generation, image generation, TTS, etc

Greed will cost America the entire AI market at this rate

Everyone knows the game someone is going to cut him a check and suddenly the Chinese models are going to be a national security threat. The only saving grace may be that when it comes to China the president has shown himself to be a paper tiger.

The way he waddled around Zhongnanhai after embarrassing himself in the trade war and the Iran war was truly something. For whatever reason, Xi (like Putin) has him scared. But if enough sinophobes with deep pockets cut a check, it will not be surprising. It may even benefit China to watch the United States continue to attempt closing itself off instead of competing.

I don’t know why anyone would think giving Mango Mussolini the power to decide what AI models they can use is a good idea.

Benjamin Franklin

Unfortunately, capitalism of today appears to find public goods and strong, public, healthy public goods to be undesirable investments. Yet, it seems inevitable that some things trend that direction.

I feel if we could get a better handle on what goods fall into which category, and find ways to make those things sustainable and even grow, the situation could get better.

I'm speaking purely from observations here but it also looks like in some ways, the "invisible hand of the economy" (i.e. Adam Smith) might sort these things out by itself, albeit, painfully.

We could look at the fact that LLMs were mostly created from the public domain (except when they were not), and the resulting products/services (expensive to create/operate, benefits a huge swath of humanity, has all kinds of externality issues) as something that perhaps should again almost be considered as a public good.

If we look at the struggles LLM/AI companies have had with legal structure choices, such as nonprofit, for profit, etc and pricing (e.g. do we make it accessible at a loss? Do we extract huge profits?) as a kind of moral dilemma of classifying this new economic good (LLM-based AI).

In the US, the government has been taking investment interests in some tech companies, and recent proposals even include establishing sovereign wealth funds around AI/LLM. I think this is further evidence that the system is trying to figure out how to classify these new economic goods and corporations.

The combination of a wide range of model sizes and capabilities, with good engineering choices as which to use for what applications, that is the way.

A competitor can simply accuse you of using a chinese model and throw you completely off rails with an investigation. Or when the government can't get a valid search warrant for a separate crime, they can get you on suspicion if using a chinese model.

Not sure why this is even news.

The man in charge literally hates intellects.

Well damn that the Chinese are playing the game “capitalism” better than the west.

The last time this happen, the west just forced opium on China. Ironically it was the west that forced China to open its markets in the first place.

History just keeps repeating like a broken record.

There's also I2PSnark, Hyphanet, and others!

Buy extra hardrives. Borrow them. Do whatever you have to do.

But to paraphrase Éomer, don't trust to hope, it has abandoned these lands.

This is about OpenAI, Anthropic and SpaceX. OpenAI, in particular, is a bet on there being a moat for AI and OpenAI "winning". Chinese models threaten this moat. The CCP has decided that it is in China's national security interests to not have Western companies "own" or "win" AI. These AI giants are large enough that the US government is going to intervene to try and protect this outcome. This is a losing battle.

No one cares, we just want cheaper AI models that are equally as powerful. They’re all thieves regardless.

YC is little tech? lol wut.

Peak hypocrisy, US AI companies can train on unlimited intellectual property with 0 rights to it, while Chinese AI companies have to explicitly get the rights to data that isn’t even copyrightable/copyrighted (since AI alone can’t copyright it).

Dystopic.

What next? Some communist open source Finnish operating system?

Well this doesn’t even make sense.