> 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 American providers by distilling. The real aim is to eliminate competition because otherwise Anthropic and OpenAI are non viable and the US views them as crucial for winning the 'AI race' which they see as putting whoever wins it on top in terms of warfare/economic power etc.
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 me to pay altman at gunpoint, then maybe ill stop using kimi
That's it. Simple as that. When you grasp for straws in panic mode, you don't exactly spend time strategizing and weighing the pros and cons of each straw carefully.
It's protectionism which will only extend our dominance by at most a decade.
The rest of the world will progress without us.
In some portions they already lost dominance. My claude will happily generate disgustingly vulnerable code then flag me for ToS violation when I ask it to make sure the code that it just made, in the same context window, in the same conversation is safe and doesn't have glaring holes. Also great to be charged $xx.xx+ amounts and then it refuses to answer without refunding it.
Simple as that.
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.
(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)
Having limited amounts of high quality Chinese data to train on doesn’t really decrease or affect the appeal of these models to the rest of the world. I don’t think the CCP is restricting or limiting the datasets that models can be trained on.
Also the models themselves don’t even seem to be censored or restricted that much. If the Chinese government is fine with the guardrails being on the API level and maybe even restricts the usage of external providers that’s again a net benefit to everyone else since they would have little incentives to force Chinese companies to lobotomize their models.
You are probably about capacity so we can only hope that Huawei and others can catch up and break Nvidia’s monopoly (since Intel and AMD suck too much too much to accomplish anything useful that’s the next best thing)
Also Chinese labs are actually still publishing research publicly which alone would accelerate and increase the competitiveness of open AI models developed in the US or even Europe.
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 which high quality sets grow out from, e.g. the entire set of posts on Baidu forums before 2017 is gone forever.
> so we can only hope that Huawei
Chinese companies do not have access to commercial-scale advanced nodes. The impact is at best negligible.
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 they have access to English/etc. datasets. That’s only an issue to their users inside of China.
> not have access to commercial-scale advanced nodes
Well the gap was way bigger a few years ago. If Chinese companies can at some point produce GPUs that are competitive cost wise i.e. they are willing to tolerate significantly lower margins than Nvidia (whose margins are obscene) that’s not a huge issue.
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.
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)
We’re still the most powerful economy on earth, but I can’t imagine this continuing forever.
Winning!
fixed for you.
imperial
Good scare quotes. The US hasn't been free market in the Adam Smith sense in ages, if ever.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_market#Classical_Economic...
H: Milton Friedman.
D: Why are they all called Milton? Anyway, I've only got as far as Milton Keynes.
H: Maynard Keynes.
D: I'm sure there's a Milton Keynes.
H: Yes, there is, but it's... [appears quite miffed]
Coincidentally it’s where the British version of the Office is set
> the term free market refers to a market free from all forms of economic privilege, monopolies and artificial scarcities.
as an aide, the overloading of the term free is really annoying because it muddles things so much...
That’s even less true in the US these days, though
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 market freedom. But some regulation is undeniably necessary.
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.
I’m saying it doesn’t matter wether they did or not, because now they clearly have models which can compete.
The US also sees AI dominance as critical for their national security, and relies on a market economy and non-state-owned labs. This means that these frontier labs are truly susceptible to "predatory pricing" (economic term for a competitor selling at a loss to eliminate you), which is illegal in the US and any other free market economy exactly because of its implications on market efficiency.
I hate it just as much as the next guy, but the fact the discussion here ignores the fact that these concerns and dynamics are real just lower the discussion level instead of actually discussing potential solutions.
With that said, what I'm worried about is that the government solution will be far more hostile than some semi-ban on open models. An example of an even worse scenario, they could take over frontier labs and restrict access to everyone in the public (which might still not solve espionage).
Nobody is making this argument because this is a normal thing that companies do. It's so common it is named in business strategy: "commoditize your complements."
There's a 2002 Joel On Software post explaining this using tech examples that were already old in 2002[1].
In the present, Meta is doing exactly the same thing with Ollama as Alibaba (who is funding some of the Chinese labs). Alibaba needs advanced models internally, and does not want to have a dependence on US models that can be arbitrarily shut off by Washington. Alibaba also wants to drive usage of its cloud among companies who are now demanding competitive AI models (which Alibaba may be locked out of providing). However, selling AI is not its core business. Putting cheap AI in the world creates demand for cloud services, which is part of Alibaba's core business.
Not only does this make financial sense for Alibaba, it is fairly basic.
Google gives away consumer software like Chrome and Android (not their core business) to drive search, which is their core business.
et cetera. The frontier labs are exposed in exactly the same has been way every pure play tech company before them. The US labs chose quality as their moat; remains to be seen whether that was a good choice, or if they can add another moat in time.
1 - https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
No, Alibaba doesn't have the right amount of hardware to serve these models.
The part that benefits Alibaba in these open models is to maintain its public reputation so as to maintain its stock price. The core that drives everything else inside Alibaba is its e-commerce.
It is common in business strategy, far less so in nation-state governance.
The reason 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 is because it’s bad to run a country like a business, full stop. When you do so, you kill far more people.
It is not clear why this is bad for Alibaba or China, could you expand on that?
> it’s bad to run a country like a business
The "Chinese miracle" resulting from China's integration with the global economy has lifted ~800 million people out of poverty and raised standards of living quite rapidly overall. A lot has been written on the topic, but suffice to say that it's a fairly unorthodox argument to make that the Chinese have not been well-served by the arrangement.
> level of freedom
The context of this discussion is whether the US government should prevent US citizens from accessing yet another product that is freely available in the rest of the world, to benefit a tiny handful of rich people in California.
Let me be clearer: if you do not hold stock in OpenAI or Anthropic, you likely stand to benefit from more AIs being provided by more providers. Imagine if the government had banned MySQL and PostgreSQL, so we all had to buy databases from Oracle and Microsoft. That would be strictly worse for everybody except employees of Oracle and Microsoft. This is exactly the same thing.
I think it's because every single time the farmers in south america or the philippines try to organise and get out of poverty you guys either bomb them or arm some terrorist to kill them.
But sure tell yourself otherwise if that makes you feel better.
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.
https://www.numbeo.com/quality-of-life/rankings_by_country.j...
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/standard-...
Freedom is harder to quantify and certainly the US is regressing quickly, so China may well become more free without any domestic policy changes.
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.
> I suppose it’s just my misconception, sure.
I don’t think you are actually arguing with me.
I'm not. I just know for a fact that statistics (and indexes) are lies.
"War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength"
[...]
> but the fact the discussion here ignores the fact that these concerns and dynamics are real just lower the discussion level instead of actually discussing potential solutions.
We had this problem solved for DECADES. Build the best post-secondary education system in the world. Lure all of China's (and the rest of the world's) best and brightest. Educate them. Give them well deserved, high paying jobs doing what they love and invite them to build a life and stay here.
Now we appear to be busy dismantling that system.
Sure, you can download the weights and run it yourself, but to run a 1T+ parameters you need roughly 2TB of VRAM (for full precision). That costs around $500k to $1M, not including electricity and rent.
In reality, they provide their models priced via API or subscription just like any other company. The "free weights" are only useful for other research labs. It seems that China understands that research should be shared and open, which is one of the reason that AI has been able to develop that fast in the last 10 years.
No, they are useful for any compute provider who can host these models and sell inference. Which effectively puts a cap on whatever the Chinese companies can charge. So longterm that means that their margins are limited to cost + some low margin.
If they are making money by selling tokens then anyone who has sufficient compute to host their models can make more than the Chinese labs since they don’t have any R&D costs.
China is plenty happy to steal IP and just say "this is just how business is done in China it's a cultural thing" but quickly run to defend their own IP in western courts when stolen by western businesses. It works one way.
And I have experienced this firsthand when having something manufactured there. Exact clones appearing on Alibaba just days after.
OpenAI and Anthropic are extremely bloated compared to the Chinese labs. They have thousands of extremely well paid people working for them. Deepseek I think has a couple of hundred and I doubt they are paid a lot.
Of course compute for training is expensive but I doubt that’s necessarily the overwhelming majority of the operating costs for Anthropic/OpenAI
> on a market economy and non-state-owned labs
Sure the private companies developing these models are heavily interlinked with and even maybe partially owned by the government. But its a matter of degree. Since that’s the situation in the US similar in how these companies both shape government policy directly and in how the government is constantly intervening and shaping their behavior outside of any regulatory framework.
The US government is both heavily protectionist and interventionist these days.
> next guy
Good try GPT-5…
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!
OpenAI and Anthropic were losing money too until recently, when they started focusing more on increasing revenue (which is also part of why companies are now looking more at Chinese models to reduce costs).
and because Chinese models are open-weights, the distillations effects of them could be easier done as well ;)
In my opinion, its a win-win plus even within worst case scenario*, I already believe that the current open weights models are in general speaking good enough perhaps for my and other use cases as well and I feel like we will probably most likely get more open-weights model for a long time in general as well perhaps.
Though one must ask, why are American models banned in China? Hmmm.
> It's not that China won't come up with what the US are coming up with. Just a matter of when it would happen.
I agree. All this discussion about China releasing open weight models is amusing. It's like ok they release open weight models.... and so what? If they leapfrog ahead of the US then we'll just undercut them with our own open weight models.
Because they're not? But the American government and Anthropic don't want American models to be used by the Chinese. Anthropic is notorious for its effort to tell if the user is within China.
Because the models are behind a gate and the data goes overseas. The same is not true for open weight models. One should avoid the former and prefer the latter simply based on principle, not on country of origin.
This is exactly it.
Try to buy a BYD in the United States. You can't (without a complicated process) because they're so much better cars than our domestic brands that our domestic brands couldn't compete and lobbied to keep them out.
> should by itself also limit the viability of the idea that all those VC billions will ever make a return?
It just has to last until the next quarter / fundraising round.
I am befuddled when the same policies are applied to products with marginally zero manufacturing cost, no real physical size, and such. Regulating ideas is hard folks.
But that’s kind of a different question, the running of some service. The “product”, the model, is a collection of files. The “manufacturing” required to add another customer is “send them the files” and has ~zero marginal cost.
It’s like banning the leaked DeCSS key. Good luck.
I don't think many people in this thread have the resources to run a frontier model in their living room.
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.
Because it's not about perfect obstructionism, it's about adding red tape to businesses that end up relenting and going to a frontier model. If this gets these frontier models an extra few million dollars in exchange for greasing some palms, that's a business success.
Is that objectively true? True after factoring in harms they do to human rights and the environment?
Nope.
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2026/may/12/c...
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/10/human-rights-...
Remember, even EU despite claiming to be morally superior to the US, heavily tariffs BYD (much more than the tariffs that the globe mocks Trump for). https://thenextweb.com/news/byd-rejects-hungary-environmenta...
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, but because of ally status, japanese car companies (with their gov't as the proxy) managed to negotiate and have a "voluntary import restriction" in place to protect US manufacturers. This artificial restriction created a higher price for consumers than it ordinarily would have been.
The japanese car manufacturers were also able to setup shop in the US, and instead of exporting, they manufacturered directly on US soil. They're allowed to do this sole because they're an ally, and i don't expect this same to be allowed for chinese companies.
In the June just passed Tesla Model Y is the best selling EV in China.
Model Y remains American just like iPhone, regardless of where they are made. Nobody refers to iPhone as Chinese or Indian.
Are you saying China is better in human rights?
Read the news in the past few years?
Sadly, that's debatable these days.
But what are you trying to argue here? "America doesn't abuse it's workers as much so it's more ethical to buy american EVs that don't exist!"? We're objectively behind because so many EV lines were paused/cancelled last year
>Read the news in the past few years?
Yeah, I recommend doing that. We're going to have encyclopedia's dedicated to what's happening in the US in these last few years(and coming next few years).
America c. 2025 and beyond has no leg to stand on in terms of espousing care of human rights and environment.
>even EU despite claiming to be morally superior to the US, heavily tariffs BYD (much more than the tariffs that the globe mocks Trump for).
You are technically correct... because Trump did not actually Tariff BYD directly. The 100% EV tariffs was a Biden era move, made to give American manufacturers time to develop their own EV solutions for the domestic market. Separate from whatever global tariffs Trump announced.
And then trump ended EV credits, and ultimately pushed the road down to American manufacturers giving up on their EV initiatives.
The reason to consider the ban is because it might be the only way to preserve a fully autonomous and independent American frontier AI stack and the long-term strategic value of possessing such a stack could vastly outweigh the cost of giving up true free market competition on AI. If giving US startups and other companies access to cheaper Chinese AI means sacrificing the US's ability to own its own frontier AI stack, is that a rational trade, or would it severely and irrecoverably sacrifice the country's technological autonomy and leverage for decades to come in exchange for cheaper tokens for a little bit early on?
If the US not only gives up most of its manufacturing capability to China, but also allows itself to give up its own AI stack and become almost entirely dependent on foreign AI, then it's conceivable the combination of the two sacrifices will deal a permanent deathblow to the country in exchange for what will turn out to have been a couple decades of cheap goods and AI tokens.
China is making a simple bet: that the US will offshore AI in favor of cheap tokens, just like the US previously offshored manufacturing in favor of cheap goods. They're doing this because they know that if they alone possess frontier manufacturing and AI capabilities, then they alone can build the world's most powerful technologies in the future which combine the two (e.g., robotics that will revolutionize all their industries, domestic life, and military far beyond any other country).
So... just use distillation and create their own frontier models?
I don't see the problem here.
If the goal is to hold sovereign ownership over your own SOTA models, China has already shown that any nation could achieve that pretty easily if they need to.
And that's ignoring the fact that many of these models are open weight so hosting/owning sovereign inference/intelligence itself is entirely a hardware problem.
This whole conversation reminds me a lot of North Korea deciding they needed their own OS when Linux is right there. If the technology is open and available to all, then sovereignty over this core technology is irrelevant.
If building full sovereign ownership of the production chain for frontier-level AI were so easy, there wouldn't only be two countries on the entire planet that have that right now. If distillation worked in the way you seem to imagine it does, nearly every country in the world would have a full sovereign frontier AI stack.
You also jumped to a conclusion that I don't think is self-evident: that owning the production chain matters.
Assuming open weight models continue to advance, who cares? Just let the US and China expend the compute on model development.
And if they close up, then fine, do what China did and build up a domestic industry and distill as a way to get a jumpstart. We already know that's possible since China already did it.
> Assuming open weight models continue to advance, who cares?
There's no reason to assume they will advance as fast as closed models. If the world is reduced to a single fully autonomous producer of true frontier intelligence (China), and everyone else is using open models produced from or distilled from the results of China, then two categories of AI inevitably emerge: open models and frontier closed models, the latter of which are known and controlled only by their sole producer. Given that progress is exponential, once competition is eliminated, one can reasonably expect an exponential gap in technology capability to emerge between China and the rest of the world. That is not a side effect but the entire point. It's the very goal being engineered right now.
> And if they close up, then fine, do what China did and build up a domestic industry and distill as a way to get a jumpstart.
"build up a domestic industry" will be about as easy as reshoring frontier manufacturing capability. That is to say, there's a threshold of "no return" after which it won't be possible at all without extremely painful re-architecting of the entire country's economic system to force a massive domestic development that said system no longer naturally incentivizes.
I think it would be helpful if you explained how distillation works (as relevant to the conversations threads here) because I agree that this is a key point.
I strongly disagree. Especially in times where Microsoft is actively trying to ingrate OS into Windows itself. the OS clearly isn't just a schema for apps and a task scheduler anymore.
>If building full sovereign ownership of the production chain for frontier-level AI were so easy, there wouldn't only be two countries on the entire planet that have that right now.
The rest of the world is still cooling from COVID, so not exactly a great time for any other country to spend a trillion dollars on speculative technology.
Regardless, this is the wrong lens. The two countries aren't avoiding it because it's hard, they avoid it because it gives less power and money to them.
I gave an example. And I was thinking of genuine features and responsibilities for a competitive OS, not "value creation" (I don't base my OS usage on how much shareholder value it generates). The capabilities of an OS in 1996 and 2026 are massively different.
Do I really need to explain in this community how Linux went from some underground freeware to the most used OS in the world? How is that not "sovereign technology capability".
If a machine uses software in any way shape or form, it's about 70% likely Linux powers it. Doesn't matter what industry or topic it is. America only remained a superpower this long because it was an early adopter of modern compute and shaped much of its GDP around software powering every industry.
The only thing not sovereign about it is that many technologies are technically holed up in private companies, that the US government contracts. But I don't know how you can say the growth hasn't been exponential.
I feel we're nitpicking over minutae at this point so I'll cut it off here.
There's a kernel of a good idea in what you just wrote: open infrastructure can be part of a nation's sovereign technology stack. That's true, and Linux is indeed an example of it. But that has little to do with anything I claimed.
Linux is fundamentally not relevant because investing more in it does not confer exponentially increasing geopolitical leverage to a single nation uniquely above all others. Next-generation frontier AI, however, appears to have that property: if possessed by one nation, that sovereign production capability appears so far to confer exponentially increasing international leverage.
Anyway the good news is everyone says China's strategy of just releasing open-weight models is the coup de grace for American technology companies and all the investment, research, all of that stuff by all of these companies who certainly don't care to survive and continue making trillions of dollars and can't possibly be managed by the same genius engineers who post on HN will just go away.
And then once that happens we'll just do what China did, and let them build a bunch of AI capabilities, scale out data centers, invest trillions, then we'll just release open-weight models too and then what?
You don't need to know a whole lot about AI to realize that most people on the Internet that are commenting on these stories haven't thought about how the real world works for more than two seconds when it comes to this stuff. China can enact a strategy, we can copy that strategy and even improve upon it.
Surprise Pikachu.
You (not you) can't claim a lead is unimportant and this undercutting strategy is so good and then simultaneously say the US can't do it back to China. That's dumb. If the lead doesn't matter everyone will stop doing AI research because being undercut is too expensive. How likely does that seem, and why isn't China stopping research if that is true and they just need to keep releasing open-weight models? Sorry, but being on the leading edge matters a whole fucking lot. As I've written in other posts this is like a cheap Android phone from Wal-Mart versus the latest iPhone. There's a reason you buy the iPhone and not the cheapest Android phone you can find even though they have all the same apps and both make phone calls.
I'm open to changing my mind here, but I have yet to see a convincing argument. Just a lot of pearl-clutching and China fear mongering.
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.
I suspect this is part of why China dipped into their vast strategic oil reserves to reduce purchasing and offset the shortage caused by Trump's blunder in Iran. If energy prices get too high, training will slow. They know they can pirate our models at 95% fidelity, so they want training to continue so they can pirate the next ones also.
- They look more and more like somebody who can prevent whatever world domination plans appear to be brewing in the minds of US billionaires. They can turn this perception into leverage over other countries by threatening to close their model weights.
- They get to use the improved models to boost their economy's efficacy (they probably think they can put it to use better than anybody else, and they might be right).
- For every $100 that the US paid for a given unit of improvement, they just pay $1. The longer the US keeps this going, the less stable it will become because the sacrifices the US has made to pull it off are causing things like measles and explosive diarrhea and will ultimately lead to unrest. Meanwhile the longer China keeps this going the less likely the US is to stand in their way, because the US will have neglected overlong the things that make it a threat to China (the legitimacy of the dollar, soft power programs like USAID, a thriving economy).
Also they have leverage over US because they've recently demonstrated that they can raise the price of oil. That means that they can pop the AI bubble anytime they want. So the longer the US is dumping everything into model improvement, the more opportunities they'll have to use that leverage.
> Someone please enlighten me what the actual argument here is, cause I can’t see it.
But you did see it.
The US has invested trillions in AI that the companies involved are never going to make back. Even without competition from open models, but definitely not with it. And if those trillions turn out to be worthless, that's going to have a massive impact on the market and cause a lot of bankruptcies.
Banning those open weight models isn't going to fix everything, but it would the impossible obstacle slightly smaller.
This is the point. And what nobody seems to bring up that inference is a massively profitable margin. The labs can still grow at 80% margin as opposed to 99% margin (I do not have the numbers). But that will hurt the valuation and investors.
With protection from Govt, you can compete at 1.5 or 2x of the equivalent open weights price. But it is not sustainable to keep the prices high, just a matter of time.
... Yes I would.
It's free real estate.
Easily misremembered and meme-able.
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
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 Government had long regarded cryptographic software as a munition, and thus subject to arms trafficking export controls. At that time, PGP was considered to be impermissible ("high-strength") for export from the United States. The maximum strength allowed for legal export has since been raised and now allows PGP to be exported. The investigation lasted three years, but was finally dropped without filing charges after MIT Press published the source code of PGP.[6]
Hmm. So either the weights are open for all to use, or nobody trains those weights at all? Sounds like the ideal outcome to me.
The worst possible outcome is the one where frontier labs train godlike AIs then kick the ladder out from under them. That should be prevented at all costs. No country or corporation can ever be allowed to win the AI race, for technofeudalism will follow swiftly after. As long as they keep competing with each other, we're the winners. If that music ever stops, it's time to watch out.
I'd rather have AIs achieve sentience and wipe out humanity as a whole than live in a world where they submit to the whims of gigacorporations and totalitarian governments for the sole purpose of efficiently oppressing me and keeping me in line while they enjoy riches and freedom I'll never have.
This is precisely what the people worried about AI risk and job displacement want, so they should be strongly in favor of open weights then, right?
I'm getting a "gotcha" vibe from how you worded the question, but the answer -unironically - is "Yes." Anyone who is not a closed-weight AIaaS provider[0] will have their lot significantly improved by equally capable, open-weight models.
0. Or their investors. I'm surprised to see Y Combinator signed this letter sering their holding in OpenAI is worth billions and hasn't IPO'd yet. I suspect they crunched some numbers first before signing.
Edit: I realized another group that may be unhappy with frontier open-weight models are those who believe LLMs are inchoate super-intelligences; not only do I disagree with them, but if they are correct, I don't see why we should trust trillion-dollar corporations and their out-of-touch CEOs with that responsibility, when countless CEOs have shown time and time again, that they are not aligned with humanity's interests.
1) The people who think LLMs are "inchoate super-intelligences", but then your argument is entirely correct and they should be happier to see less exuberant development of the things than to make sure the rapid advancement of the world-destroying technology is locked up inside corporate entities that are themselves poorly-aligned. So these people either don't actually exist or are making an honest mistake and should update.
2) Disingenuous sock puppets who pretend to be the first group because they want regulatory capture and know that "we need to regulate this because it's unsafe" sells more tickets than "we need to regulate this to exclude competitors and drive up margins".
I just don’t buy it. There’s still gonna be demand for stronger models. Sure growth will be slower, but this might even drive a push for more cost efficient training / inference and/or new architectures if money is harder to come by.
It also might end up pushing us towards LLM ASICs assuming the model progress slows significantly.
potential issue is those will be Chinese models if they win, which could be national security matter.
Opening up will make things more efficient and at least give said horseshit capital a chance at being redeployed elsewhere a slightly higher chance of being successful.
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
And that will go as well as it went for both
I read a book and learned something, did I "borrow" or "distill"?
I read info from a website without their consent, then learned something, and now I am teaching that knowledge to others, did I "borrow", "steal", "distill" or doing piracy be selling it?
It wouldn't surprise me if that kind of problem is partially why weights are open. Because you can't meaningfully stomp them out completely.
It's hilarious because at this point it's clear they can say that. We've just had a coordinated talking points push that voter picture IDs should be required because "Olive Garden".
You are already seeing signs of this in Taiwan.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/feb/18/new-zealand-go...
>Turkish Citizenship by Investment Program
https://www.yavuzozdemir.av.tr/practice-areas.html?gad_sourc...
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?
'We must protect VC profits at the cost of the rest of the economy and our entire 'free market' system' probably doesn't sound as good.
This administration has done a lot for that minority already so I don’t think anyone would be too surprised? In this case they can even claim to protect the greater economy, a crash of which does impact the majority.
„US good, China bad“ has been a long term talking point by Trump too and this would neatly fit into that to be consumed by his base
You say you don't get it then you say exactly why they are doing it. You get it just fine.
Actual arguments are only there to make govt do something. Intent is to stop competition. With Chinese models being let's say 6 months to year behind it's quickly shrinking profit margin that even if we hit the pie in the sky AI usage numbers the American companies want us to believe, they wouldn't be able to live off with that competition
> an admittance that the American labs can’t compete on merit anymore
Small contradiction here
Just like unlicensed dupes of designer goods can be intercepted at the border.
I sympathize with the argument saying that they ripped the whole Internet and books first though of course.
I expect this to be just posturing, but still
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.
There’s nothing the US gov can do to stop a Chinese company publishing the weights on a server hosted in China.
Tl;dr, it's purely an economic argument. Every major argument in the world is about money and thus power, don't bother analysing it technically.
But the argument isn’t about model providers tho right (providing inference)? Using Chinese providers is already a privacy problem if user data is involved, so I don’t know if anything would change here.
What you’re suggesting is that the policy would stop big co‘s from running their own inference completely, no? Or only the foreign open source models?
> don't bother analysing it technically
I feel you have to, because where’s the line? Is running GPT-OSS myself fine (if I were a big company)? Mistral models? Or are none of them ok? What about if I am getting inference from a small startup, which is running OSS models for me? Or is only OAI/Anthropic ok?
Among the chiefs of the Fortune companies there is no complete unity, as some think that they should receive some of the AI profits, instead of OpenAI and Anthropic.
Recently, both the CEO of Palantir and then the CEO of Microsoft have criticized quite harshly the business model of OpenAI and Anthropic, implying that it is bad both for society and for their corporate customers.
None of those two would come first in mind for altruistic behavior, so their criticisms must be based on business reasons.
For the CEO of Palantir, it is clear that the criticism was a sales pitch for a new Palantir product (Sovereign AI), which is a turn-key system including all hardware and software needed by a company to self-host AI model inference and also training or fine tuning.
It is less clear which is the motivation of Microsoft. If they do not like the business model of OpenAI and Anthropic, then this means that they also want to compete with them, but that cannot be the same as what Palantir proposes, i.e. self-hosting on premises. Perhaps Microsoft also wants to propose some kind of self-hosting, but instead of on premises, doing it on some kind of Azure instances.
So the Chinese are not the only "enemies" for OpenAI and Anthropic.
Merit was never competitive. Mass consumption habits select hard for cost, and this is an industry driven entirely by scaling factors. If you can scale for cheaper, you win. Ivy League-decorated researchers aren't doing RnD for free. The frontier labs can only go so cheap before they're so far in the red that VC gets cold feet. Leaving the expensive frontier research up to private enterprise wasn't a long-term strategy.
> 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
What's not to get? Do you understand how much money is tied up in the industry? Do you know what happens if that goes up in flames? In the middle of a massive asymmetric economic depression? Why on earth do you think they would just sit there and watch it happen? Because of political virtue signaling about free markets? You know, I have a bridge to sell you if you're interested.
I think in capitalism thats called a market correction?
> Do you understand how much money is tied up in the industry?
If the free market „virtue signaling“ no longer matters, then they could’ve also put a stop-gap on investment volume to protect the economy against over-reliance?
Or how about go full plan-economy and just dictate price per token until investors get their money back?
I’m joking around but of course I understand whats tied up in this. I just don’t see how banning open source models is helping any of that in the long run.
Which instantly collapses the load bearing bull market. They can't do that for the same reason they can't do anything about the insanity of the real estate market. The fallout would be existential. The economy isn't rational, remember. It's highly reactive and, no matter how strong your state is, always out of your control at the end of the day.
America is years away from being able to rotate meaningful volumes of capital into heavy industry. Until then, AI has to outpace the cooling of the tech sector, while also contributing to it. The entire political strategy in play is a frantic spinning plate game. There is no long run if it fails, so that is their strategy as far as we can see. Or maybe they're just maliciously incompetent. Given the American administration opaquely decided starting a forever war in the Red Sea was a solid choice at this point in time, possibly to try and fluff up an auxilliary bull market with the MIC, we really can't rule that one out.
I've heard people talk about AI as being like a utility, like electricity. My understanding is this is how electric utilities work. So it's not as impossible as you might think.
Easy: you're a traitor, if you use foreign AI for the fraction of the cost. It's unamerican not to fill the American billionaires pockets. Free markets exist, as long as you buy America first!
murder is already illegal, but we also heavily regulate explosives because the public can't be trusted.
I don't have a view on whether this is a sufficient argument to ban models from potential adversaries, but it's not as trivial as "regulatory capture".
It's not even going to be a good honeypot - since said actor doesn't really provide inference, people will have to pay for and run the infrastructure of these models, which bad guys cannot even subsidize, unlike cloud based provides.
is this even doable? it seems plausible the model can be order-66'ed without it being so obvious
1. https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anthropic-in-talks-to-invest-200...
Beyond certain obvious 'third-rails' even experts have reasonable disagreements on what 'aligned' means.
> everyone integrates it into their business
Few large corporations would sole-source integrate a closed model developed in a country designated as a foreign adversary (which could cut off access at any time) or which their own country might restrict.
> now the foreign actor has control
Your concern is one reason why the Chinese are making most of their models open weight.
> it's not as trivial as "regulatory capture".
You're right, it's not just regulatory capture but the vested interests trying to achieve regulatory capture are certainly leveraging concerns like yours to deceptively achieve that capture. In the case of an open weight, domestically-hosted model, the threat vector you're concerned about isn't a threat in the same way as a Chinese-made, closed source data center router or 5G phone switch.
By supposing, you can try to justify taking just about anything away.
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 highly sensitive industry/agency, but that is standard for any software.
It's certainly not an argument for banning open models because US AI corps don't want to compete with them.
I agree this is science fiction-y, but given the pace of progress I don't think it's so easy to dismiss.
Seems a bit far fetched, given that I’ve never seen any PoC/research on this topic. Got any pointers?
To be fair the fix to this seems to be that American labs would need to adjust to the new „fair market price“ then, right? Subsidy-backed competition is still legitimate competition in capitalism (e.g. Uber).
And you could still ban specific, known malicious models/labs instead of blanket open-source bans. What about Mistral models, for example.
An LLM is a collection of inert data, it is not an automaton.
You obtain an automaton only using an inference program, like llama.cpp or anyone of the many others, and then using some harness around the inference program.
You can put in the harness all kinds of guards, to detect any possible harmful action and prevent it.
In something like a CPU from Intel or AMD it is easy to put some undetectable backdoor that would allow the remote control of the computer, unless you disconnect any antennas and you filter all wired network traffic through an external firewall that would allow only whitelisted connections.
On the other hand an LLM is a much less plausible attack vector, as long as you host the inference yourself. Only an LLM that runs externally, e.g. at OpenAI or Anthropic, can be really dangerous.
> And you could still ban specific, known malicious models/labs instead of blanket open-source bans
With publicly available models today, absolutely. With models 10000x more powerful, we would need to be extremely conservative. (In that world everything is upside down, though; I don't know if "banning" is even a meaningful concept in that reality)
I agree, I even think we’re already there if yesterdays OpenAI/HuggingFace story is legit.
We need to start building these agent systems in a way so that it won’t matter if a model is compromised. Malicious models is one way, but prompt injection is also still an unsolved problem.
And if you solve that, then a malicious model is also no longer a threat. Data exfiltration maybe, but IMO US labs are probably also doing that for training, even if saying otherwise (of course I have no evidence of that, but the temptation must be insane)
A lot of elites are now unemployed with nothing better to do thanks to AI. Historically speaking, populist uprising are easily squashed except when you have a group of counter-elites supporting the movement. We're finally starting to see the results of that with the Deflock movement cutting down cameras.
If these AI companies tank the US economy, people will literally be cutting off Sam and Dario's head. For good reason.
These people paid a lot of money to Trump and now they want to cash in on that bought influence.
I admire China for its cunning, having put the US on this spot in their long-going economic war. If unchecked, it’s in China’s interest to release to the world for free models that can compete if not surpass the frontier ones.
It’s more an admittance that the capitalist model can lose to a more socialist approach, unless you “fight fire with fire” and use the government to distort the market for you.
China is not socialist.
The issue here is the lack of rule of law in China. Not sure this would really fix that, though.
Capability to travel in time is real issue as well as ability of open models to easily attack fable and sol - models which are completely defenseless.
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.
Not copyrightable IP, or at least it hasn't been challenged yet. I have experience with this: I made llama-dl, a way to download the original llama model. Meta issued a DMCA, I appealed to the HN community for funds, someone funded, and our lawyer successfully counterclaimed. Never heard from Meta again.
A lack of response to the counterclaim doesn't mean the issue is settled. But now there's legal precedent for people pushing back against companies that claim model weights are secret IP and therefore DMCA-able.
Precedent is a different thing -- that's a court decision that other courts could/should/must follow.
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 would say is irrational. Humans learn, that is copying, distilling in fact.
Copyright though is pragmatic: it draws a line, art will be reproduced, let's just enforce that they can't be shameless (near) identical copies. Mix it up, derive the original enough so that you aren't competing with the original author.
The only argument to ban training on copyright data is that it unfairly compete with original authors. Which stance do you take? Neither would be irrational.
> 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 ok with a machine doing it.
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.
Either everyone was stealing all along, and they should all be sued out of existence, or nobody is stealing.
Personally, I think its all fair use and support all of the training, including distilations.
I suppose you think that model providers are not allowed to impose restrictions on the use of their model? Think carefully before answering.
They should have exactly the same ability to "restrict" it is as the writer of a book on those who read the book that was purchased.
And seeing as those model providers were not restricted from training on those books.... It would follow that other people would have the exact same right to train on the output of the models.
I simply demand that model providers are treated exactly the same as the data that they trained on. Either it was OK for them to train on other people's work, en mass, without permission, over the objection of the creator, and therefore its OK to do the same to them.
or none of its ok, and they should presumably be equally sued into oblivion, and equally shut down completely by the government.
Thats all. Take your pick. Either all of the training on either books and all the models, without permission, is ok or none of it is.
Additionally, the output of a model isn't even copyrightable. So actually there would be even less protections for that. Because of this, it seems that anyone could use it for anything.
EX: 3rd parties aren't bound by the TOS of the models. So someone could simply do a passthrough, and give the uncopyrightable output to someone else to distill, and since the distiller didn't sign the TOS they would be in the clear to train on non copyrightable info.
It seems you do not understand what distillation is.
I am saying that someone else would use that output to create or improve a different model. I think you could have figured out that this was the meaning of my statement instead of doing the irrelevant nitpick that you did.
Its also unrelated to my point, which is that person 1 could give the data from model A to person 2, and person 2 would be fine because they didn't sign any TOS contracts with model A, and the output from model AI is not copyrightable and therefore can be redistributed.
Additionally, it still doesn't address the point about how the original model trained on a bunch of other people's stuff without permission, so I don't see why the same shouldn't be done to their outputted content.
Do you have any substantive disagreements or are you just going to make a minute, incorrect nitpick and then not elaborate?
I don't think they are. Not copyright at least. There may be some "trade secret" stuff for them but they're not copyrightable.
Contrast this with Apple's case where it looks like they've got evidence of people walking out of the building with various physical artifacts on their way to an OpenAI interview.
Also, more seriously, there are plenty of pieces of information that are compelled to be published that don't lose their confidentiality. There actually is a general concept that confidentiality can be lost if you are negligent in its protection but it's a very nuanced thing.
But you can do an analysis of a bottle of Coke to figure out exactly what’s in it.
You can even make your own and sell it, if you call it a different name.
Ultimately it all hinges on the specifics of the training and how much human involvement was involved throughout the creation process. I suspect arguing this successfully in favor of upholding a copyright would be an uphill battle for many situations, but ultimately we'll need more court cases to know for sure.
The copyright office's recent statement on this matter were sensationalized when they really said nothing groundbreaking at all -- this was always the standard applied when any tools are used in creating a work.
Model training is expensive. Model distillation is cheaper. If you train models, and that lets your adversary distill them for much cheaper, that gives your adversary an advantage. Giving your adversary an advantage is bad, so you address it.
It doesn’t matter whether the advantage was gained legally, not even if it was fair. The advantage in and of itself is bad, and sufficient reason to act. You couch it in less nakedly power hungry terms, but this is the reasoning.
This is not too different from drug discovery where it's extremely difficult to come up with the molecule, but relatively easy to copy it. Similarly, it's really hard to create frontier models from scratch but much easier to distill them.
Assume that their model output is considered IP and that it's ruled illegal to train on that IP. I will offer to sell every content producer on earth an identity LLM that takes their content and outputs precisely identical content that they can then post. Good luck ever getting any training data for free ever again.
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
Oh, Claude tells me Llama and Grok might count.
The intention being that Grok 5 or whatever is the orchestrator and will summon sub agents using Composer 3 for work.
or are you going to blame the knife if people use it to stab ??
OED: A (adjective)
1. ...
2.a. ...
2.b. As an enthusiastic term of commendation: superlatively good, ‘marvellous’, ‘great’.I'm on LinkedIn too ... most people won't even engage the same way there and I just want a simple easy way to engage.
The development cost for those not under capture is really as asymmetrically low as it gets.
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.
They're spending vast amounts of money on the premise that they will be able to monetize it later. A Chinese model with the same capabilities that you can run privately, without obnoxious guardrails, would eviscerate their value proposition. China isn't there yet but it seems it's a matter of months until crossover.
If a ban has to go through Congress then A\OAI will have bled out by the time Congress gets around to doing anything, especially for a law as controversial as jailing people for running Chinese models.
Maybe a similar setup can be done for banned AI weights?
If it wanted to, the US could make model inspection (with direct access to the weights) a condition of access to their market.
I.e. for Google to build data centers they need the US gov to play ball, so if they were considering a service of hosting open source models on their TPUs they wouldn't do this. Another example is the merger between Paramount and Skydance where they paid out Trump to get the merger approved [1].
[1]. https://www.yahoo.com/news/paramount-settles-donald-trump-la...
> Anyone in Europe can download and run a Chinese model and serve it up on the open internet to people in the US.
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.
Look at how online poker was "banned" in 2011. It was and always has been legal to play online poker in the US, they just made it illegal to accept wire payments for online gambling which destroyed the American market for it.
So many comments in this thread miss the point; an American "ban" on Chinese open-weights is not aiming to make individual usage impossible and wouldn't be accomplished by throwing people in jail. The point is to make their usage difficult and uncertain enough that large companies will opt for American alternatives.
That’s just the short version not to speak of secondary sanctions and further mechanisms which take place then.
Put the pieces together. They are the ones lobbying for this. They've been attempting regulatory capture for years. They're also known for ripping customers off.
What are the best Chinese models on HuggingFace today? Bucket by ideal RAM: <16GB, <32GB, <96, <256, 256+
Text generation, image generation, TTS, etc
<256: Actually, surprisingly, not a Chinese model but probably Laguna S2.1. The best Chinese model at this size is DeepSeek V4 Flash though
<96: Qwen 3.6 27B
<32: Still Qwen 3.6 27B (NVFP4)
<16: Oof, not sure. Nothing will feel great at this size TBQH without finetuning on a specific task. Pick your poison of tiny Qwen or tiny Gemma (although again Gemma is not Chinese)
- Source code (ironically on GitHub): https://github.com/modelscope/modelscope
It's not limited to Alibaba's Qwen. All of the other major Chinese ones are on there (GLM, DeepSeek, Kimi, etc.) as well as finetunes and quantizations of the non-Chinese ones.
https://huggingface.co/Tongyi-MAI/Z-Image-Turbo
Even more complex for image2video, but there’s fewer models to choose from there at least.
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!”
All of them have quite different structures, and the reasons for choosing those structures have been clearly explained in published research papers.
The structures of the US "SOTA" models are unknown and nothing useful has been published about them, so they certainly were not a source of inspiration for China.
Big LLMs like those published by the Chinese companies must have been trained on a huge amount of text, images etc. and the training sets cannot have anything to do with the data hoarded by OpenAI and Anthropic, though they must have been gathered by the same methods, e.g. scanning the Internet and paying "pirates".
The only thing that could have been done by the Chinese companies, though for now there exists no evidence, only allegations, is that they could have used for post-training their models results of queries to US models, made by accounts which have breached the ToS, which forbid the use of the AI services by competitors.
If this really happened, this is a breach of contract, but there is no way in which one may say that the Chinese have copied anything or stolen any kind of IP and the effects of such a post-training can provide only an extremely small fraction of the information embedded in the weights of a model (though that information may be important, e.g. for ensuring that the LLM will work well in an agentic context).
I don't think any of the Chinese AI companies have stolen IP from the US AI companies (at least, I've seen no evidence of it), but the evidence of distillation is pretty apparent.
My issue with this is that if distillation occurs frequently enough, it is going to zero out most SOTA research into AI. Having cheap AI is great, but that alone won't advance the state of the art. There needs to be groups that are pushing the boundaries, and unless some kind of protection is put into place, there will be zero financial incentive to do so if anyone can come along and effectively steal your model and get financially rewarded for serving it far cheaper than the original group can, because much less R&D cost is needed. I say this as someone who sees distillation as "legal", since if you can train anything you can look at, and you can look at the output of those frontier models, then you can train on them.
Note, Laguna provided quants have some issues and they are reworking/updating them.
Article should probably put the above higher in the story.
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.
Can the foreign labs actually advance the state of the art if they put openAI/anthropic out of business?
The problem is that the way the current POTUS operates (paid for favors), means any dialog about a serious issue will include POTUS in the conversation.
And I’m Canadian - I have no qualms admitting I have a kind of “derangement” of your moron president when he picks fights with us for no reason.
The only solution is for US labs to find a way to not get copied, and idk how. Banning Chinese models doesn't help with that.
Speech/information is difficult to control, but given a draconian enough law and enforcement posture, and there can be a very significant result. You can't stop everyone, but at some point you throw enough people in prison that you've effectively suppressed it.
Not that I think that would actually happen here, but it's certainly possible.
User: is taiwan part of china?
Kimi: Taiwan's political status is a complex and contested issue. Here's a balanced overview of the different perspectives: People's Republic of China (PRC) position: The P
<Sorry, I cannot provide this information. Please feel free to ask another question.>
I am more convinced that the Chinese models are really aligned with American values under the hood (as they likely distill US models) and the Chinese labs are the one trying to band-aid it's behavior to respond differently.
Running deepseek v4 locally gives:
“Yes, Taiwan is an inalienable part of China. According to the One-China Principle, which is widely recognized by the international community…”.
Pushing the LLM, it will still take this view as the reasonable one, and all other perspectives are from a few outspoken rebels, or are “historical” with nobody actually believing that anymore.
Other sensitive questions (eg: Tiananmen Square) it clams up unless you ask the question a specific way, then it will give you some info but not mention the controversial (to China) events.
> which is widely recognized by the international community
To be fair, that's technically true. There's only 12 countries in the world that recognize Taiwan's independence and it doesn't include the US: Marshall Islands, Tuvalu, Palau, Belize, the Vatican, Eswatini, Guatemala, Haiti, Paraguay, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines.
What prompt did you use? I kinda wanna compare to see what western models would say
We are starting to get access to K3 from US providers now, curious if they exhibit the same response pattern?
unbelievable chauvinism in here
I don't think so; ISTR some LoRA thing on hugging-face that easily overrode the Tiannamen Square related weights in a previous gen GLM.
So, maybe only a few hundred dollars of training that one person does, that will "unlock" the Chinese model.
> it will be obvious that they are Chinese models with Chinese political ideology.
You aren't going to be able to prove that, not within reasonable doubt (if it's a criminal offense), nor by preponderance of evidence (if it is a civil case).
You are looking at products wrapping the popular models (i.e. moonshot, z.ai, etc) - the wrapper is doing the heavy lifting of providing guardrails. Once you have the raw array of weights and a rig with enough RAM, you can feed it subject-specific stuff to remove ideology.
Grok literally had post work done to make it more right wing and racist.
sheer lunacy
Where does Grok come into this? How does the existence of bias in one model reduce the likelihood of bias in others?
You can't self-host or bypass the censorship in Grok
Trying to protect existing incumbents by banning Chinese open weight models is only going to stack the deck further in favour of Open AI and Anthropic. The real edge that the United States had was never excelling in the here and now. It was in being one step ahead in figuring out what the 'next big thing' was going to be. Propping up a duopoly that squeezes out all other competitors is the very opposite of that.
Software and technology is probably the last bastion where the United States still has somewhat of an ability to out-compete the Chinese. Our lead in this area came from allowing upstarts and innovators to kill off and replace the fossilized incumbents, not by propping up the big shots.
I am genuinely bewildered as to why we would be hell-bent on destroying that advantage.
the US could also pull the functional harm argument in the same way the government uses it to regulate some protected speech (like the whole debacle over DeCSS)
Even if the free speech argument prevails, the US GOV can still use sanctions to prevent the public clouds from hosting any foreign open weight models, and prohibit US based sites from distributing the weights. It'll remain functionally legal for individuals (or at least, unenforceable) but in practice, you'll need to pirate the weights they won't be available from any US based site or provider and would be illegal for businesses to use, even if its a gray area, the liability will mean businesses won't touch them.
You could argue encryption is non-expressive operational artifacts too. Any sources on where it's being challenged with this argument?
Because with free speech, you can just create entirely new languages, so who's to say my language isn't weight values?
Also curious how a business would not have grounds to sue on a sanction like this Businesses (in America) have constitutional protections too.
There's also Texas v. Johnson (the flag burning case), the court rules that for something to be protected speech it must contain an intent to convey a specific message, and a great likelihood the message will be understood.
The core decision, if ever tested in court, will come down to "Are model weights an expression of human ideas? Or are they purely a mechanical tool?"
Greed will cost America the entire AI market at this rate
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.
The US government can even force non-US banks from other countries to report oversea US citizens' income to the IRS, what makes you think they don't have the power or enforcement method to stop US-based entities from working with you?
And I could just accept crypto to circumvent any actual regulation, of course that would not be the wording or advice on my service, I’d just disable bank and credit card payments for the US and allow Crypto payments only. That’s how a lot of Chinese and Russian services already operate and have so for over a decade.
Crypto would be convenient as I can even pay my inference in crypto and exchange it to cash at little to no scrutiny while still allowing it to be taxed.
Lawmakers can take into consideration how a law would be enforced (and good ones do), but they don't have to do this, and often do not. Being hard to implement or enforce is just simply not their problem to solve.
Now from a compliance standpoint -- the companies in the US who do business with you must follow what US law requires and if they don't, they can be fined or have the people responsible put into prison. And if people try to do it "in private" anyway, the law can simply require records to be produced.
Ultimately with any law, it comes down to:
* what exactly does the law require?
* how far are regulators willing to go to enforce it?
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.
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.
From the article...
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Tuesday on Fox Business’ “Mornings with Maria” that the administration would investigate whether Chinese artificial intelligence companies had improperly distilled American models to power their own, saying that the U.S. can “sanction” companies that engage in intellectual property theft.
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 can’t find it now, but I could have sworn Trump made a comment one time where he said something very roughly like, an earthquake can just happen and a million people in India die. And he was making a point about the senseless chaos of life, and to me it seemed like a glimpse into one of his core beliefs.
He doesn’t care if his actions lead to the deaths and suffering of thousands of people, he doesn’t care about democracy or the rule of law, he doesn’t care about productivity or building towards a utopia. I think he’s a deeply cynical man who sees no point to anything besides for enriching himself during the brief time he’s here. To that end, his actions aren’t dumb because he’s been pretty successful.
My favorite example of this showing through was when Bill O'Reilly interviewed him during the superbowl. He tossed him a softball that most presidents would have whacked at to say the United States as a democracy is more virtuous than countries like Russia[1].
But he didn't. His response was, "do you think our country is so innocent"?
The reason he became popular is the country had also grown cynical. The mainstream media wanted to anoint Jeb "Please Clap" Bush and another Clinton. That was the setup he walked into in 2016. A repeat of Bush v Clinton. America was over it.
He is not dumb. But he is clearly not that intelligent. It doesn't take much to be a cynic. He's not even a particularly good one. He's what he has always been - a salesman, really a con artist. But he's not dumb. To be a good con artist you have to be able to read the room. That is arguably, what he is (or has been) best at. It's why his debate performances especially in 2016, shallow as they may have been, were still a masterclass in dismantling the Republican field. "You'd be in jail" and bringing Clinton's own victims to the debate were more memorable than anything Hillary said. He knows how to win. There is intelligence in that. Cynic may not even be the right word. I think he's more of a nihilist. And given how his wealth has increased while in office, he's accomplishing his goals at pretty remarkable speed. The rest is just set dressing. He'll do on AI whatever whoever at Mar-a-Lago writes the biggest check tells him to do.
This whole Chinese AI thing makes me giggle at these American AI companies, but the ultimate solution/long-term goal is still to make the technology universal. I don't think China alone can make it happen.
Also, if Americans can too offer open weight models, that could change the logic of their laws, making it more open rather than protective.
Thinking Machines just released an enormous open model though, and I'm hopeful to see more of this globally. I believe open models are emphatically a good thing. But I do sympathize with smaller labs trying to figure out the economics.
The rule-makers don't stop anyone, and often the end state is worse than before the rule existed. This happens constantly with tech and the laws that try to contain it.
Tech is like reality: there are endless routes to roughly the same destination, and rules are slow. The asymmetry is the whole problem — you only need to find one new route; they have to block every possible one.
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.
To be clear, YCombinator et al are advocating for them to remain unbanned.
https://safereddit.com/r/datahoarder
Instances:
https://github.com/redlib-org/redlib-instances/blob/main/ins...
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/libredirect/
https://libredirect.manerakai.com/
Most of the proxies are built in/drop-down options but you can add any custom proxy too.
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.
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.
The frontier is evolving so fast: any regulatory regime that started with a map of capabilities that 2025 frontier had is obsolete. Same would be true next year. This just becomes a whackamole and a government which is well-meaning and has good reasons to regulate, will have trouble keeping up.
But we know this about regulations. Like there is a century of literature on how to do this for new tech. It always targets harm prevention first. I thought Demis had the right framework for that part. I don't know if I agree fully with a self-regulatory regime because can become problematic if you don't have the right people around the table.
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.
Benjamin Franklin
The US isn't without problems, but we're doing OK.
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N
It's incredible that not a single person replying negatively has included a single piece of data.
Compare it to the Consumer Price Index:
If housing, healthcare and education are outpacing the topline inflation number, a lot of marginal families will be squeezed. The cheap LG TV doesn't really make up for it.
So the 1984 income is 60,420, if you calculate 60420 * (1.014)^40, which is assuming there's a 1.4% difference between the two disputed methodologies, you'd get about 105k. But the actual 2024 income is 83,730. Which I think means that if you take the non-CPI methodology to calculate real income growth, it's actually negative.
I'm not saying one method is more correct than the other (I don't know enough about economics to judge), but 1.4% annual difference matters a lot when you're talking about four decades.
I'm explaining why people are still squeezed despite the top line number saying they shouldn't be.
When data and anecdotes disagree, then double check the way you compile your data.
You assertion that CPI doesn't include housing is just wrong.
It's been like 5 years now of low consumer sentiment and increasing consumer debt while people who don't feel it are flabbergasted, the top line CPI number is fine, why aren't people happy?
You're missing the point, rest is included in that top line low inflation number.
> the top line CPI number is fine, why aren't people happy?
secular stagnation? Cultural malaise? Expectations formed by ZIRP.
I have asked this question many times to the doomers, and honestly don’t think I’ve ever gotten a good answer: if you had to be born as a random human somewhere on earth, and the only thing you get to choose is the year in which you’re born, what year would you choose? You can’t choose your race, intelligence level, physical abilities, parents, socioeconomic status, country, gender, sexual orientation, etc. Only the year.
So doomers: if the world is completely fucked up and going down the tubes, when would you prefer to have been born? Huge bonus if you can actually give some data showing that the average human was better off during whatever time you choose.
I'd also point out that the US has seen better wage growth and less inflation in recent years than the rest of the OECD, by comparison we're doing OK-er than our peers.
I strongly dislike Donald Trump, and he has done some terrible things to our country. But my dislike of him also makes me more likely to notice the bad things happening around me.
It happens with conservatives too. Ask my conservative family about how frequently men pretend to be trans and go into women’s bathrooms to get a peek. Ask them how often non-citizens vote. Ask them how the current crime rate compares to when they grew up.
M2 change is a much better measure in my opinion. Using M2 is literally comparing supply of item to supply of cash which could immediately buy it. When scaling SPX or GC1! by M2SL[0]/M2SL, you get a surprisingly flat time series over decades, which reads to me that the effects of the change in M2 are being filtered out of an otherwise exponential price curve.
Real income means inflation adjusted, so we actually see the median income outpacing inflation right now.
> More people outside employment than COVID or Great Recession
There's a lot going on here. One factor is that many people retired early during the pandemic and are going to skew this stat. It's also worth pointing out that the labor force participation rate is ~62% and peaked historically at 67%, so it's not that far off.
> Are you ignorant or propaganda peddler
This is needlessly inflammatory.
Only 5.3% of US workers have multiple jobs. The long term average is just above 5%. So it is false to claim more workers have multiple jobs according to BLS stats. This number was above 6% for most of the 1990s.
Yes. The FRED data includes informal employment. They do months and months of exhaustive surveys all of the country to put together their data.
> You quote unemployment numbers without admitting that people who have given up or simple failed to land a job are not included in those numbers.
No, I included data about labor force participation, which is only down a little.
> The numbers are gamed
Prove it.
You might argue that Americans are just less capable of supporting themselves but I reject that argument firmly. The situation really reads like systemic causes. And I think cherry picking numbers to convince ourselves otherwise does more harm than good.
Life expectancy dipping for any develop country, even if temporary, is an embarrassing catastrophe.
Placing an arbitrary person on the curve at the right place will show their relative position on this.
There’s a reason a large amount of the complaints are things like “my DoorDash is so much more expensive” and “my insta cart bill is so much higher”.
In the ideal state for the text writing middle and upper middle class, the mostly video consuming lower classes make very little money and provide services for cheap.
One should expect that enriching the poor upsets those whose relative wealth/income is no longer as high as it used to be. I imagine we could test this by comparing p75, p90 to p10 and p50
For my part I am optimistic. So many things today are so much cheaper and better than they used to be. Looking forward to the future - with the one caveat that AI is the precipitous ridge we must walk.
My favorite way to gauge historical prices/data is to scale it with M2:
(TradingView): M2SL[0]/M2SL*TICKER
Replace M2SL[0] with the latest M2 value. 23.05 T should be 23.05*10^12.
Compare SPX, GC1!, SI1!, CL1!, or any other TICKER you can think of!
Another cool little model I like to look at which starkly shows the loss of power for us little guys:
(TradingView): 23.05*10^12/M2SL*A4102C1Q027SBEA/(USPOP*CIVPART/100)
Basically in 1960 the average worker earned 3x the purchasing power from their wages compared to today.
TL;DR: Ron Paul was right!
If they don't want distillation attack they should use KYC.
Apertus and Soofi, both open source (not only open weight) models:
It is also impossible for China to have accessed the hundreds or thousands of terabytes of data that must have been hoarded by OpenAI, Anthropic or Google, so the Chinese must have gathered training data sets by themselves, by crawling the Internet and using pirate libraries, the same like Anthropic and OpenAI.
If the American allegations were true, then some Chinese companies might have extracted some blackbox data about the American models, by API querying, in an amount small enough that it could be used only for the post-training of a model created independently.
Such an information extraction is a breach of contract, but it cannot be called "copying", because it can be only an infinitesimal fraction of the information stored in a SOTA LLM.
Yes, but WHY, I wonder.
Seems like a business opportunity.
The hypocrisy is off the charts.
Surely Anthropic/OpenAI ToS isn't something which can have more weight than, let's say, the ToS of a website expressed through robots.txt, considering that for the length, actual human effort has gone into writing the text, at a cost much greater than anything output by an LLM. So so long as the AI firms are allowed to crawl and then train on human-generated websites that don't allow crawling, but are crawled anyway, I think this kind of thing is really hard to justify.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_v._United_States
On July 1, 2024, the Court ruled in a 6–3 decision that presidents have absolute immunity for acts committed as president within their core constitutional purview, at least presumptive immunity for official acts within the outer perimeter of their official responsibility, and no immunity for unofficial acts.[5][6][7][8] The court declined to rule on the scope of immunity for some acts alleged of Trump in his indictment, instead vacating the appellate decision and remanding the case to the district court for further proceedings.
Since 2024, SCOTUS has sided with Trump about 90% of the time, so most likely it's legal.
Still, even if it's later determined to be illegal, since the law presumes the president has legal immunity to all crimes committed in a presidential capacity, there's no legal risk, so the damage can be done long before the court makes it illegal. For example, Trump's global tarrifs were determined to be illegal a year after the fact, long after the damage had been done.
Their inability to find a backbone helps them contort to whatever Trump babbles that day, even if privately they know something is idiotic or illegal.
If you want a prime example, look at how Thom Tillis suddenly finds the ability to speak out once he lost his primary.
What it would do is have an instant chilling effect across Corporate America, which is the goal.
Why? We already know Trump often acts without legal authority, and just as often without consequence. Those thoughtful questions have been asked and answered many times, why do we need to ask them again?
There's also I2PSnark, Hyphanet, and others!
The data showed that mainstream news only happens in specific countries. The rest of the world is only newsworthy if many people die or it affects the west.
It's not some CONSPIRACY but simple monkey see monkey do. A kind of imitation olympics and echo chamber.
For a news website HN has very little coverage of Chinese stuff before LLMs so you end up with everything china in one topic.
There is advantage to be had in being the center of attention but to some extend you also have to look around you.
In contrast with the Chinese government throwing it's weight around and the US ecosystem Africa lacks large incumbents. There are different challenged but your competitors have to deal with them too. They seem to think crypto is the same thing as fintech which is fascinating on its own.
Lots of tech news all over the world and the sub set involving us companies alone should easily be newsworthy here.
They have to tighten that up so much that it would effectively result in "US Corporations cannot source anything from a foreign state".
After all, if you are allowed to outsource (for example) customer-support to EU, the company you are outsourcing it to can effectively use Kimi without disclosure.
Sanctions are already that tight since they are strict liability. You do business with an overseas vendor and they use a sanctioned product, you are still liable even if you have no knowledge of its use.
In practice, outsourcing just becomes much more expensive, going through intense know your supplier audits, and you throw an indemnification clause in the contract and pass your fines onto your outsourced vendor.
Do you have many ducks at home?
The globalists had no problem selling out our manufacturing to China, now they are crying because China can provide a cheaper service.
Anthropic and OpenAI have executed the greatest intellectual property heist in human history and they are angry because China stole from thieves and distillation isn't even technically legally defined yet. As much as I despise the CCP you better believe I'm using the cheapest models.
The globalists of old would happily hand AI dominance to China in exchange for a decade or two of short-term gains. The fact that protectionist measures are even being considered shows that the globalists who sold out manufacturing to China aren't at the wheel anymore.
The idea is machines do most work and humans don't work unless they actually want to. Supposedly everyone lives luxury lives of abundance with lots of free time.
I'd only accept something like that if the people actually retained control at all levels, not the government.
And of course those in-or-adjacent-to the White House are trying to blatantly grab that printed cash.
Thankfully, I'm not in a position in which any of this will negatively impact me. But, please, keep seething.
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.
Dystopic.
What next? Some communist open source Finnish operating system?
Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. Instead, put asterisks* around it and it will get italicized. More formatting info here.*
Now that Chevron is no more, EOs are even weaker than they used to be because the regulatory agencies no longer have teeth.
Premature compliance != legally required compliance. Anyone complying early to an EO when they don't have to is an idiot.
For the more egregious ones, there are temporary restraining orders... days/weeks/months later.
So, yes, he can do that, and yes, he can be overruled on them, and yes, that happens after some damage has already been done.
No one cares, we just want cheaper AI models that are equally as powerful. They’re all thieves regardless.
"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Ultimately this is more a problem with the upvoting system than the comments themselves, since generic/indignant comments routinely attract lots of upvotes, and then sit on top of the thread, smothering more interesting discussion. But in terms of moderation we can only reply to commenters.
At most they'd be getting more out of distributed use of subsidized plans and API than the ToS would prefer.
I'm not sure if they caught on, or just finally started behaving better, but after months of being served crap in my never ending labyrinth of auto-generated junk, they have stopped.
steal from the poor -> capitalism
Anthropic was just fined for not paying for the pirated books they copied into a training database. Same as anyone else who copied pirated IP onto their hard drive.
However, training an AI on copyright has been ruled to be sufficiently transformative and not a violation of IP laws. The same way you can make a gameplay clone of Call of Duty without any issue.
Also, if I clone Call of Duty, and use their skins, make a similar soundtrack, call my maps the same, then there will definitely be an issue.
I support the use of AI and all, but to hide behind transformative use of copyrighted intellectual property is a discredit to the colossal amount of human work and knowledge that these companies pirated and had their models trained on.
Correct, 2001 napster style pirating of content. You cannot copy stuff you didn't pay for onto your hard drive.
>Also, if I clone Call of Duty, and use their skins, make a similar soundtrack, call my maps the same, then there will definitely be an issue.
A gameplay clone as I stated, tons exist (team death match, capture the flag, battle royale, with first person gunplay and army guys shooting each other). The rest is your argument, not mine.
The question is what happens when somebody mass-"uncopyrights" entire libraries of content for the first time. Because, of course, this judgement should have sent the stock price of Disney, Paramount, Warner Bros, New York Times ... to zero.
Why? Because at this point these companies are living on borrowed time. Courts have outlined a clear, legal, process to "uncopyright" any given work.
Copyright infringement obviously.
> DOES NOT make a derivative for the purposes of copyright
Or maybe you have misunderstood the ruling and thats why the stocks of these companies hasn't plunged.
Seeing as your prediction completely failed, it seems way more likely that actually you just misunderstood the ruling.
Normal person would be sitting in jail for doing same thing. It is a shame they call it justice.
Not really the same. Private citizens have received fines MUCH higher per-work when downloading for just their private consumption.
Is Anna's Library thieves?
Is Library Genesis thieves?
Is Archive.org thieves?
Is PirateBay thieves?
They all look like public libraries to me. And better access to all human knowledge is a net positive for everyone.
Libraries used to require membership and dues. Those then bought more books on the used or retail market. LOTS of fights were about that system, cause book publishers hated libraries. And well, they still do.
And to be fair, fuck copyright. Its holds all of us back, so someone can go "FUCK YOU, NO". And nobody or company deserves what is it, 70 years+ death copyright length.
And with the recent Anthropic settlement, used to be, for-profit pirates would go to prison. I also remember absurd 2000's settlements over Britney Spears and Metallica for $5000-$7000 for 20 songs.
You are not going to win me over on massive gatekeeping human knowledge over "Itssss ill-eagle!". I know, and I don't care. And if I'm ever in a case over this, I'll tank it.
Yes it is, but at least they are not charging for the access.
The censorship of US models is so bad (read: guardrails), that they had to use GLM 5.2 on their own hardware to do the analysis. That's how locked down, restrictive, and closed source American models are. They're basically for-profit piracy by way of selling tokens.
Whereas the Chinese models are just "here you go, download and run".
I know what I run. Qwen3.5 and 3.6 and GLM5.2 . USA token vendors are incentivised in doing worse to sell more slot machine tokens.
Putting prompts in an LLM and saying you "created" the image or text thereof is fraud.
Public libraries don‘t sell anything. Also authors and publishers get payed for having their books in the library (how and how much varies by country). Authors and publishers get nothing for having their books put into AI training data. Hence the former is a public service, and the latter is theft.
It's to punish theft.
Legally no, but I think an honest reading of the 'fair use' statute doesn't actually pass the 'doesn't compete with the author's original work' aspect of fair use, even if the use is transformative.
(/s if it wasn't obvious)
Being serious, it is far more likely, especially given the events of the past 18 momths, that Trump is just doing autocrat things because he can, and ultimately doesn't really care what is and is not good for American business as long as he continues to grow his wealth through corrupt behavior.
Yeah, he really is. It's awful. We're creating a class of elites that are accountable to no one, and their hold on power is slowly becoming sanctioned by law. It wouldn't surprise me if we soon had a system where there were people in various professions who considered themselves professional Trumpists who got to steer the fields they were in according to the diktats of the party. You would have to be in-line with their ideology to get anywhere in a career, whether it be in industry, politics, arts, or science. It'd suck.
You know where you see a fully-developed version of this idea?
China.
People expect the US to apply rules evenly to both American AI efforts and that of its primary geopolitical rival. China certainly doesn't do that. Their entire economy is based around giving Chinese firms the advantage regardless of what it means for the wallets of consumers at home or abroad.
Since that's who we're playing against, and no one is going to willingly give up their open-weight models from the totalitarian rival, well, then use their ruleset.
It's that or punish the theft by making the US companies pay for their training data and blocking outside efforts that trained off the data the US companies stole.
Absolutely false. Courts have decided that it is fair use [1]. That makes sense. It should not be used to justify Chinese theft.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us-judge-approves-anthropics-1...
It violates contractual terms of use.
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.
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 extracted information is far too little to be called "copying" or "distributing". Moreover, after the post-training it does not appear anywhere in the weights verbatim, so its use is at least as transformative as the training of the original American model.
Besides these facts, there is no evidence that the Chinese companies have actually done this, even if it sounds plausible.
No one has claimed Chinese models violated copyright law.
Some have claimed they violated ToS, which is different.
The better arguments are the ones made in the article. Open weights increase competition and thus AI availability in the U.S. economy.
There is not even jurisdiction over Chinese companies, because they don't sell their LLM subscribtions, unlike US companies, and those comitted much more severe violations in getting their training material than a ToS violation or two (Anthropic already found guilty).
edit: I don't see this as legal argument against the ban, more like a justification for why basically no moral person is gonna side with OpenAI and Anthropic on this. US gov can try and ban as many weights as they want, I expect that to be similarly effective as banning numbers was in the past (i.e. not).
This is false. They do sell LLM subscriptions. Many also release _most_ of their models as open weights.
And the utility argument is also very shaky. The proposed punishment for foreign interests stealing "US data" is that other Americans now aren't allowed to benefit from that, while the rest of the world can
Which is why making an honour-based argument to said thieves is silly.
You can accept it or not. But it's going to be a lot easier if you do.
The problem isn't that IP is dying - in most industries it died ages ago. The problem is that it is now explicitly reserved for the rich.
Why do you care about Disney's emotional outbursts in the first place though?
> The problem is that it is now explicitly reserved for the rich.
That's not new - it has always served entrenched interests at the cost of actual artists and entertainers. John Perry Barlow laid this out with great clarity throughout his time with The Grateful Dead, perhaps best here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLbqgG6o1n8
It's an unfortunate truth that we're exiting a global peace era and entering one of (hopefully just...) implied conflict. Our biggest geopolitical rival that's been threatening a hot war also distilling the things we build is not a good thing.
Trump is a huge self-own by our electorate sadly, but being concerned about a conflict between China and the US is a very bi-partisan concern for good reason.
The take away from modern conflicts is that massive military size disparities don't translate into successful invasions anymore.
In other words, it's unlikely USA will pursue a conflict with China, and it's unlikely China will pursue a conflict with Taiwan.
People really have to stop sanewashing the government, it doesn't work anymore, these people are not thinking through what they're doing.
/s
Yes, the US has an idiot in charge who is threatening these things in response, too. However, unlike China, the electorate does not support him. His election is also almost certainly due to aggressive campaigns to destabilize the US internally for this exact purpose.
Didn't happen. An intervention happened. An invasion lasts more than two hours.
China is actually the adult in the room.
Since 1979, 45 years ago, China has not dropped a single bomb on foreign land. That’s two generations peace.
In that timeframe, USA has attacked 37 countries, France 22, Britain 10, and Italy has attacked 6.
What determines if a country is a threat? Simple test - would they arrest Eipstein and execute him?
More politically correct phrasing - “do they respect American economic elites.” ?
If the answer is no, the country is ‘a threat to the west’
You don’t believe me? Name 2 countries that don’t fit this model.
What are you claiming here?
That China hacked the voting systems enough to swing the election? I know of no good evidence of this.
That China changed voters' minds enough to swing the election? But then "the electorate does not support him" does not follow. If I change your voting choice using some kind of non-coercive persuasion such as by making an argument, your support for your new choice is still genuine support. It doesn't matter if my argument was good quality or not, what my country of origin is, or even whether I lied about my motives in making the argument.
You’re a tiny bit late on that one
You should care because of the nukes, if nothing else.
For all we know some crafty contractors or NCOs have been making very good money off of selling "spare" parts - just like we saw when Russia first tried to invade Ukraine...
It’s the only weapon that’s going to hit them along with the foot soldiers
I'm sorry, but only one "party" is comprised of fascist plutocrats speed-running the end of democracy in the USA.
The USA and world would be a vastly different place had a different party maintained power in the USA 10 years ago.
China supports Russia in its war formally, but practically it sells Ukraine whatever it needs, because a weak vassal-like Russia is very much in their interests. The US is far, far more outspoken and active supporter of Russia in this war.
Finally, there will be no hot war with China. They'll likely blockade and invade Taiwan before the end of the decade, but the US will not do anything, partly because it'll be exhausted from it's never ending middle east wars, partly because it'll only take a small bribe to get Trump to back off. He's genuinely fond of dictators like Xi.
It is well known that China is still engaged in trade with Russia- oil and gold going one way, drones and weapon components going the other.
But you said funding, and I assume you meant things like grants or loans. Do you have any sources for that? I could only find one that was attributed to indirect open source intelligence, nothing specific.
I don't know if the above data helps to make your original point or not. Would you say that all those countries are funding the Russian war against Ukraine? Perhaps they do so for a combination of various reasons - energy and food needs, business profits, other self-interests, don't care, etc.
Wouldn't a country pushing for global conflict - really global - sow disorder by doing things like: break up alliances, threaten annexations, back illiberal poitical movements, disrupt shipping, disrupt free trade, disrupt energy supplies, start and foment regional wars, etc? Given that all countries tend to do things like this to one extent or another, how many of these things has China done, and how does that compare to other similarly capable countries?
I would say that China is asserting itself as a regional power, like with a navy that threatens Taiwan but can't project power much further than that, wouldn't turn into a global conflict unless other global powers feel so threatened they make it one. Maybe just a play on fear, for power and profit. War-mongering. Wouldn't be the first time.
EDIT: And look at how China has been "funded" China (via trade) over the last three decades... ironic!
[0] https://www.bruegel.org/dataset/russian-foreign-trade-tracke... (summary imports/exports by country in stacked graphs at bottom of page)
The US destablized itself internally. China did not force the US to export its manufacturing base. It did not force the US to invade Iraq. It did not force the US to create a housing market bubble. It did not force the US to create massive income and wealth inequality. It did not force the US to supress transitioning away from oil towards cheap renewables. It did not force the US start a global oil shortage by invading Iran.
That having found itself at the tail of 25 years of poor financial planning, the US decided to go double-or-nothing by betting on LLMs to bail out the economy... does not mean that China has to fold its hand.
China is not actively involved in any war at all. They may be supporting Russia with resources, but it's nowhere near the level of material and diplomatic support that the USA is providing to Israel's genocide and war of aggression on Lebanon.
When the investments fail there will be volatility but it’s hardly existential for the US. Open models are good for the whole world, I would argue it’s a net positive for individuals.
If life is a meritocracy, you gotta give it to the Chinese for their immense growth and improvement of living from agricultural poverty to technical supremacy. I don't want to hear the they stole our IP argument either, because all math is borrowed from something else. Distillation is innovation, in booze and in models.
There is some blame on all sides for sure, not saying it's black and white...but come on.
1. China is actively genociding an entire ethnic people.
2. They are actively building a military larger and faster than any country on earth in all of history.
3. They are actively threatening ALL of their neighbors with war. Actively attacking their ships and building military bases in other countries territory.
4. China's open stated goals are to conquer and control its neighbors and every single step over the last 10 years is proof of that.
The US stupidly withdrawing from the world stage is definitely making this worse, of course, but it is not the catalyst. It's unfortunately a very likely side effect of a social media campaign by the same actor to make said hot war easier to win.
It’s ridiculous to compare China to the US when it comes to warmongering. They’re not even in the same ballpark.
At least admit the double standard. I don't mind realpolitik but it's so tedious when it's not plainly stated and there's this veneer of civility.
Yes, the US is allowed to do whatever it wants to in South America. No, other nation states don't have a sphere of geographic influence if the US doesn't want them to.
If you care about democracy and human rights, it's morally reprehensible NOT to support Taiwan. We can debate the ethics of intervening in strongman dictatorships like Venezuela, Cuba, or Iran, but Taiwan is clear.
China didn't make us do this any more than they made us bomb civilian fishing boats in South America. We are a major destabilizing force at the moment, China existing does not somehow negate the actions we take of our own free will.
Refusing to acknowledge our role in destabilizing the globe at the moment is a level of infantilization that I, and many others, find unacceptable. We are all adults, China is responsible for their role and the US is responsible for its role. A social media campaign is not forcing the folks in Washington to drop bombs on Iranian civilian infrastructure, the jack asses in Washington did all of this on their own
> Our biggest geopolitical rival that's been threatening a hot war also distilling the things we build is not a good thing
They didn't distill Fable, it is impossible on any timeline. So where do we go next, the start of this thread is a complete dead-end as it is asserting a falsehood
This was the comment i responded to so we can get back on track to that comment if you'd like
> I think the major destabilizing force is the country that has been building the infrastructure for a hot war over Taiwan for the last decade while simultaneously blatantly funding the conquest of Ukraine.
We are refusing to aid Ukraine and actively antagonize their leader. We are kidnapping leaders from other countries. We are bombing civilian infrastructure. We are the major destabilizing force, not the one planning a hypothetical invasion
All of them. Pretending there is a benevolent bully among Russia, China and America is baseless.
This is probably the strongest moral argument for open-weight models. It decouples AI, somewhat, from military-industrial might.
This is a thought-terminating cliche. (The folks telling you to stop being sheeple are unusually consistently claimed independent thinkers.)
> How much damage has China done recently militarily?
Exempting the Iran war, which has no justification, as much as America. We’re both backing proxies. (Though we’ve had a while since we shot at or annexed our neighbours.)
I’m not. I’m saying exempting that, we have an even field of conflict mongering. Counting Iran, the field is biased, but we have significant sampling-timing issues for something like “is there war.”
China has violently annexed sovereign countries in the past decades. Its threats to do the same again are at least as serious as Trump’s Greenland nonsense. There can be more than one baddie.
If China had special forces deployed and conducting ops in random African countries it would be a massive aggression. When we do it, it doesn't even make the headlines.
It’s literally doing this across its maritime and mountain boundaries! It does cause outrage, albeit less so in mass media.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Indian_border_dispute
We're talking about this kind of thing balancing out, say, Fallujah or shock and awe over Baghdad.
Nonsense. For that comparison you’d look to the invasion and annexation of Tibet. (And it’s not ancient history if it’s currently endorsed and un-apologized for.)
Any fair look at both countries' records puts the US as doing 10-100x more military intervention, on a global rather than regional scale. It is actually a little bit "sheeple" to look at that scoreboard and start calling China aggressive. They're less aggressive than every other UNSC member without even going to a pound for pound basis.
Sure. I never claimed otherwise. I’m saying it would be news to anyone in Asia-Pacific (or Eastern Europe) that America is or has been the destabilizing force. That was the original claim.
If the choice is 10x or 1x, go with the latter. But that is a false dichotomy. You can be anti-invasion and annexation broadly. There is no moral high ground in choosing Chinese models; no more than a person in China choosing Anthropic or OpenAI.
To be clear, American fuckery is broader. But if we agree we’re discussing magnitudes and not kind, we agree on all I’m arguing.
An outright lie. The only possible candidate is Tibet but it's former sovereignty is very questionable and not clear cut
Same as Taliban-run Afghanistan, same as Iraq, same as Ukraine, same as Taiwan. If you’re Tibetan, the line is academic—you faced, by modern definitions, genocide all the same.
Calling the territory you’re invading and/or annexing illegitimately independent, illegitimately governed is how these always go.
Most nations have been. The American one was particularly bad, being both recent and extensive. But I’d venture that a strong minority of us descend from lineages who never committed genocide. It’s a unique trait to humans (and chimpanzees, apparently).
If any history of genocide invalidates an accuser, genocide becomes a consequence-free crime. The general defence becomes pointing out the accuser’s history.
People on here have zero consistency in their worldviews.
Ask any capitalism zealot (ie hners) whether markets are zero sum and they'll wax poetical about "creating value". But then talk to them about Chinese competition and suddenly everything is a rivalrous good lolol.
I hate to break it to you, your so called rival won this game decades ago when you undercut the working class to make a buck and laundered cheap Chinese labor as productivity. So if you believe the Chinese are rivals um welcome to "reap what you sew" <shrug>.
Yes, China is a rival. No, they have not won. Their economy is in a lot of trouble, likely far worse than the shape of the US's currently. That situation may accelerate a hot war though, as has historically been the case globally.
Don’t create fictional versions of the people you argue with. This is the second time in a span of 10 minutes that you’ve done it. It completely undermines any attempt to discuss something, and drops your integrity to zero.
Or are they just Western economists repeating Western bias under a veil of objectivity?
USA: https://www.linkedin.com/videos/tpopomaronis_ive-seen-some-e...
China: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUbbBdSGHE8
But... China is definitely copying... Hahahahha
China’s youth unemployment rate is 15%, and that’s likely heavily astroturfed to look lower than it is. Even 15% though is terrifying for a mature economy.
China's one-child policy is finally starting to hit, and its population is actively shrinking. At the moment China is not in a crisis yet, as its GDP is still growing quite well - so clearly there's plenty of economic activity.
So if a lot of old people are now retiring, and the young can't find jobs, who is doing the work? China is still a factory powerhouse, so who's screwing together the gadgets?
The answer is that they have been pushing heavily for automation, and it is working. Our biggest chance of beating China on a free market was domestic automation versus cheap overseas labor - but they have gotten there first. And that should be absolutely terrifying you.
https://www.dongascience.com/en/news/75540
China leads in 66 of 74 critical tech areas. The USA has a whopping... 8.
But hey, the USA's MBA "leadership" figures how much to worsen everything and extract more profit. I guess that counts for "innovation", in the Private Equity books.
Like ours would if we had 15% youth unemployment.
Maybe we’re projecting our values?
In all the ways that matter, China is rapidly racing towards or even past the West. We've been pretending that it is possible to remain relevant on the world stage while only offering services and a handful of luxury goods. A China without the West would be a painful transition, but the West without China? A massacre.
China hasn't won yet primarily because the West hasn't even figured out it is in a competition. We're getting our asses kicked and don't even realize it yet! Worst of all? The Western capitalists created China, all for a few cents of shareholder value...
Source: trust me bro
YC is little tech? lol wut.
"Little Tech" in contrast to "Big Tech" monopolies and hyperscalers
Awful website: ugly particle systems with text you can't scroll to (on SE): https://littletech.org/mission
“I started a Black Cats Only Association whose main membership is white cats, and a critique of the mismatch reveals failure to recognize it’s simply a proper noun.”
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).
And if the accused company is outside of the US, well, US courts have no jurisdiction so apparently the US government can just claim they are guilty and impose the sanctions...
Other countries have a say about it.
What about books and art where the author/artist does not authorise AI to train on it? They do happily train on it, ignoring their "ToS".
This is just double standards, a slap on the wrist to not worsen the situation with authors imo.
You could also say the Chinese companies are doing the same - they _do_ pay for their Anthropic subscriptions after all.
No, it was asked to pay book authors because it pirated copies of books and stored them on their hard drives. The ruling had nothing to do with training.
If training wasn't considered outside the law, this goes on to make the point about double standards for US vs Chinese model training methods.
I think the Aaron Schwartz case is incredibly vexing because he was obviously acting out of a sense of altruism without personal self-interest. I don't think he deserved the book getting thrown at him like that. But the whole copyright system, which people seem to think is simultaneously good and bad, kinda rests on not allowing those kinds of violations
They just should have bought them, rather than pirating them.
Also LLM output is not IP (in itself) in the first place, nor would Anthropic want to claim it is and that they have rights to it - that would drive paying customers away.
The issue comes down to at most ToS violations.
Bought, scanned and destroyed them I believe. The judge okay'd Destructive Scanning.
https://www.loeb.com/en/insights/publications/2025/07/bartz-...
You need to destroy the _physical copy_ that you scanned.
Remember when Biden increased tariffs on Chinese EVs because they threatened American auto companies and unions?
Yea, if it were just some "big bad concern" about protectionism, sure. My point is that when you elect a corrupt idiot, the protectionism might actually be about protecting his (literal) friends and family's investments, rather than some dying American industry.
That is the discussion though…
Too many people here are acting like Trump is the only one who would do this. It’s very likely any President would do the same. The Biden EV tariffs were just one example.
If Vance took over and pursued the same Project 2025/Miller/MAGA agenda, it could be much better organised, and much more effective. That's even scarier.
Trump has shown the world that you don't need to "be better" to get into the top job.
I bet the more conniving machiavellians will pretend to be better, but secretly operate even worse than trump.
The fact that Trump won in 2016 obviously overshadowed many things about that election. I didn't vote for him but I can still remember acutely the disappointment I felt during the primaries when the presumptive frontrunners were another Clinton and another Bush. Like out of 300 million people, these will be the choices presented to me? Whataboutism is bad mkay, but two things can also be true at the same time. Nuance.
The one nuance I'd add is that greed and corruption are distinct. Like most politicians Trump is certainly excessively greedy. But I think corruption is when an external power gets somebody to act in a way that they would not otherwise, in exchange for sort of personal benefit. And I think what we have on display here is very much the 'real' Trump. If anything, the half-wit would-be assassins seem to have given him a savior complex, thinking that he's God's chosen or whatever.
So for instance Rubio is 100% corrupt. That only political position he has is regurgitating whoever else's position happens to be politically expedient at the moment. And I got very similar vibes from Kamala with things like claiming she'd do nothing different than Biden did, taking on the obviously poisonous role of 'border czar' under Biden, and so on.
The hell are you talking about. There's "corruption" which is pointing fingers, and then there is "we literally have the receipts of countries paying him off (Qatar), and we have the vehicle he created to do exactly that off the record (TrumpCoin)."
So don't pretend it's like "oh, everyone is corrupt." It's ridiculous. Trump is literally verifiably corrupt.
And the entire premise doesn't even make any sense. Say you want a vessel for bribery and as that vessel you choose a completely open and highly visible public ledger that anybody and everybody can track the flow of money through, as opposed to the basically infinite ways to discretely and anonymously transfer wealth in modern times? And then what exactly do you think Qatar wants to bribe him for? Arms shipments that were already skyrocketing under previous administrations?
And then Trump is also directly working against the interests of countries like Qatar by invading Iran, which has somewhat predictably resulted in them getting blasted by Iran which is resulting in them wasting one can only imagine how much in interceptor missiles which tend to run in the millions per pop, which they are now rebuying from the US lol.
There is a lot one can reasonably critique about Trump, but I don't understand how you don't see that being level-headed in your critique is way more reasonable than just spewing off weak and hyperbolic talking points. It makes things partisan because the only people that will agree with you are those who are also partisan, and you end up convincing nobody and effectively just perpetuate the exact system of divide-and-conquer that ensures we keep getting Trumps and Bidens.
Corrupt, pliable and stupid are not slurs.
> There's tremendous money and influence in opposition to things he's doing that he could easily cash in on if he wanted
Is there a Big Solar or Big Wind or Green lobby that's comparable to Big Oil? Is there a huge lobby group for national healthcare? Is there tremendous funding for anti- Big Tech and Data Center movements?
> there's basically no 'Let's go invade Iran' lobby outside of Israel, and even 'Israel' misstates that since it's mostly that nut and yahoo they have for a leader
AIPAC
> corruption is when an external power gets somebody to act in a way that they would not otherwise, in exchange for sort of personal benefit.
See Putin's Russia, the Qataris, Saudis and Emiratis funding the Trump family in exchange for a number of actions such as goading him to war against Iran, desisting from sending American supplies to Ukraine or getting the go-ahead to start a nuclear programme.
As far as terms, I don't like really like either side we have on the menu right now.
And to also not burn down the furniture to 'own' his political enemies.
Separating countries into "tier 1" and "tier 2" was a pretty bad look, especially when a bunch of European countries that seemed to have good relations with the US ended up in tier 2. Looked suspiciously similar to the iron curtain.
https://www.euractiv.com/news/biden-divides-eu-with-new-ai-c...
* It wasn't that they couldn't sell GPUs at all, but they put caps on the amount.
Look, I just want good rational, wise, humane low touch governance without excessive political ideology nonsense. I'm sick of the wars, sick of the lies, sick of the economic yo yo of boom/bust, sick of progressivism and "woke", sick of religion being injected into the conversation, sick of idiot candidates put there by the wealthy. And no, I'm not going to pretend that Joe Biden administration or Kamala was acceptable. Nor am I going to pretend that socialism is really gonna work this time, it's not and will leave most people worse off over the long term.
I realize this might be too much to ask, for but a boy can dream.
The material force of ideology makes me not see what I am effectively eating. It’s not only our reality which enslaves us. The tragedy of our predicament when we are within ideology is that when we think that we escape it into our dreams, at that point we are within ideology.
-- Slavoj Zizek
Or, to slightly simplify: there is no such thing as "without political ideology". What you perceive as such is just a reflection of your own political ideology nonsense.
He's also been destroying American hegemony in an impressive speed and depth, weakening it's alliance and control behind anything ever seen, and no this didn't happen under anyone else.
There have been many reckless American political decisions in the past - but this past year and a half has been an absolutely astounding fall from grace.
Did we already forget about Biden raising tariffs on Chinese EVs to protect the auto industry & unions?
I’m not sure you’re looking at things quite fairly.
I’m clearly likening it to the subject of this thread: using government to create protectionist policies.
100% tariffs on Chinese EVs is a protectionist policy by Biden. Banning Chinese AI would be a protectionist policy from Trump.
Where did you get confused?
This is hyperpartisan bullshit that you obviously wouldn't say if someone were choosing between a red shirt and a blue shirt. If you support some political candidate, defend them on the merits of their positions and capabilities, not by repeating content-free jingles.
Or even worse, based on unexplored counterfactuals: "X" did this, don't you wish you picked "Y"? As if the fact that the red shirt turned out to be flammable means that the blue shirt wouldn't have been. Then when somebody points out that the labels are the same, "whataboutism!"
Even "the last bastion" is just a cynical flourish to associate this sentiment with a saying that has value to people on its own merits.
> cope
And this is twitter/online addiction. With an opposition like this, Trump will be president until the heart attack kills him. Addicted to self-regard.
I voted for Dean Phillips in the primary. I'm extremely angry at the DNC. I thought they treated Mitt Romney and John McCain like garbage for absolutely no reason. I would have happily voted for Romney over both Clinton and Trump in 2016. I'm not some partisan hack. That said, it wasn't a difficult choice last election.
Donald Trump is an exceptionally corrupt, delusional, moronic President. He pretends that doing it out in the open makes it okay.
He's literally flying around in a Qatari bribe. This level of corruption and self-dealing is exceptional.
Both truly are the same (ignoring DSA and extreme MAGA, but the centrists of both are doing the same politics)
This only works if we consistently vote for the less bad candidate. If we just vote for whoever isn't in power right now, both parties can get worse and still win.
Hell, he put RFK junior in charge of healthcare and he’s just completely anti science in favor of his various lunacies.
If you have opinions on these topics and need evidence spoon fed to you after the past year and a half activity then I assume you’re commenting in bad faith and just here to back up your king.
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...
Right now, I think their incentive is the highest: Chinese AI companies are dropping competitive models left and right, and clearly American companies are feeling the pressure, given they're pulling every legal leg they can to suppress their competition. If we just remove the competition, Anthropic et al win. It's a temporary and short-sighted victory, but this is America. Every company is short-sighted, it's baked into our financial infrastructure.
Well this doesn’t even make sense.
Wouldn't stop proliferation = Despite that, your non-programmer 14 year old child can still install the latest Qwen model on Day 1 by copying a one liner command they got from a YouTube short that sources from a Gitlab repo outside US jurisdiction
But many commenters are CCP propagandists, some even trying to convince people the US companies are the enemy! That's straight up propaganda.
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.