I‘m not even sure what the argument for banning Chinese models/open weights even is supposed to be?
1. if it’s to stop hackers doing hacking things with „uncontrollable models“ then, well… they’re already doing something illegal to begin with, why would they care about breaking another law running these models?
2. if it’s to stop foreign actors, then that ban would not apply to them anyway
3. it’s not stopping 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.
Living outside of the US (and EU). I’m in the process of launching an agent assisted automated pentesting and authorized offensive security service. I’m using open weights models to execute the entire audit. So lets for a moment entertain the idea that the US somehow locks open weights. How are they going to stop such audits or actual attackers? A competing service in the US simple won’t be able to execute the same level of audits because many of the models refuse following penetration and offensive security testing instructions. An actual attacker is not going to limit itself to those models either. Why would anyone serious about security then limit itself too.
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.
Simple. If they put your company on something like the entity list that Huawei is on, nobody is going to work with you, public or private.
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?
I am a small entity, expecting less than $250k in yearly revenue. Somehow I’d be honored to be on that list. I wouldn’t expect to end up there either.
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.
Proprietary model weights are IP, their outputs are not IP and I can't imagine a court decision that would rule otherwise because that would set an extremely far reaching and dangerous precedent, even for American businesses.
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.
> Proprietary model weights are IP
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.
I do wonder if their "fair use" argument preempts them from actually being able to claim copyright over the model weights, since it can be argued that the vast majority of what the model is is itself a remix of everything else. Maybe their RLHF, system prompts, architecture and training techniques can be considered copyrightable, but maybe most of the data can't.
I can't wrap my head around the idea that distillation is IP theft but mass training on books, music and art without consent is fair use. The two stances are incompatible. If it is transformative use of a book, it is transformative use of AI output.
I really hope that when a sane administration returns to power in the US we'll actually get a reckoning over how irrational it was to not restrict training data.
Yeah people in the US who want protectionism for US models on grounds of IP rights are appalling hypocrites. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander!
Is it? Turning a book into an AI model is lot more transformative than turning an AI Model into another AI Model.
Setting aside the strict definition of IP, this does satisfy the philosophical motivation of IP, which is to protect people making significant capital investments.
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.
I'm all for framing the spirit this way, so long as we recognize that it was rather difficult to come up with the sum total of human creative output (noting also that approximately zero of the cost to produce it has been born by frontier labs so far).
> Proprietary model weights are IP
I don't think they are. Not copyright at least. There may be some "trade secret" stuff for them but they're not copyrightable.
Trade secrets are easy to claim but hard to turn into a tort without having someone steal them. I'm sure some lawyer can come up with a filing that tries to make distillation an act of theft, but there would be many weak links in that chain.
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.
Trade secrets are a type of IP.
Yes, but if a company publishes its trade secrets on the web you are entitled to read them and use them.
Only if you're going to use them to train an LLM!
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.
And if an AI generated those wights, they are not copyrightable
Even if the weights are just made through traditional training and no AI is used to make the weights... is there a copyright right? If the weights are a numerical derivation that aren't made by a human is there even human expression? Absent human expression, there is no copyright right?
> their outputs are not IP and I can't imagine a court decision that would rule otherwise because that would set an extremely far reaching and dangerous precedent
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.
Read this thread when you get the time:
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
I'm only counting 3 frontier models in the U.S.…
Oh, Claude tells me Llama and Grok might count.
Grok 4.5 is better and cheaper than any Gemini models.
Grok is a terrific model and my work horse. I hope Composer 3 reaches at least this level because Grok 4.5 intelligence + composer type speed pfffff, wild times ahead.
I think Grok is replacing composer now yeah? Fast mode is similar speed to composer.
Not seeing a long thread there. Is that the wrong link?
This is one of those things where I wish navigation were easier on X. Just check the tweets it replies to and the tweets that reference it. I've updated it, so hope it helps.
Maybe they would be more successful if they were posting on an open platform instead of a walled garden. This “free speech” platform is pretty useless at being “open”.
X without an account only shows “this content doesn’t exist”. I cannot read your post so I cannot tell why people would not engage.
Someone explain to me how the US would stop people from using Chinese models?
Anyone in Europe can download and run a Chinese model and serve it up on the open internet to people in the US. What can the US do about that? The only thing the US can maybe do is ban exports of high powered GPUs to the EU. However the EU can retaliate by banning export of ASML machines to the US, so I don't think the US has that card to play.
The government can strong arm enterprises in a million ways. If they just issue a vague executive order large public companies won't want to buy inference from these models without regulatory certainty. Anyone in regulated industries is going to be weary of regulatory retaliation.
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...
The US is trying to stop them for US companies, it doesn't care about non Americans.
The parent comment, emphasis mine.
> Anyone in Europe can download and run a Chinese model and serve it up on the open internet to people in the US.
Sure, but if you run a business in the US, you might not be able to use it legally.
And, by 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.
But the idea of a blanket ban on Chinese open-weight models was not seriously discussed.
Article should probably put the above higher in the story.
As if making something impossibly difficult to comply with is not defact ban. Case in point: OFAC sanctions waivers. Show me a bank in US that directly deals with those and you will quickly end up with rather interesting representation that mimics current AI situation.
Besides serving no purpose other than an attempt to enforce software by fiat (which would hurt legitimate business, make US AI companies noncompetitive, and do nothing to stop illegitimate use)... it's literally impossible to enforce.
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.
If there were ever a sign I need to get mirroring, this is it.
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+: GLM-5.2 (swap with Kimi K3 when it goes open-weight on Monday)
<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)
Exactly the kind of breakdown I was hoping to see. Thanks.
Alibaba Cloud runs ModelScope, which is like Hugging Face but based in China:
- 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.
The two major image generation models are both by Alibaba - Z-Image and Qwen-Image-2512/Qwen-Edit-2511. They are both decent but have different use-cases. Unfortunately with the recent Qwen-Image 2 and now 3 it doesn't seem likely that they're going to be doing any more open-weight image gen.
https://huggingface.co/Tongyi-MAI/Z-Image-Turbo
My list would be to go grab GLM5.2, Deepseek v4 Flash and Pro, and the various sizes of Qwen 3.5/3.6 dense and MoE, along with at least one of the multi modal qwens (I think it’s called VL). In a pinch, you can quantize them yourself to whatever size you need.
Specific use case is way too important for a list like that to be very helpful. I only know image gen well enough to use as an example, but style, resolution, inpainting, img2img or text2image, lora compatibility, etc. all lead to different “best” models.
Even more complex for image2video, but there’s fewer models to choose from there at least.
Sanctions would cancel the whole business rationale for the Chinese government having/supporting open weight models. You can't commoditize your competitors with open-source if your product is blocked.
Even with US sanctions, Chinese AI companies would continue to serve users in every other country in the world (including China itself), so I don't see why they would stop releasing open weight models.
The open weights models would be even more effective by incentivizing people and companies to switch jurisdictions. It might even break SFs monopoly on AI, or at least weaken it, everybody isn’t there exclusively to funnel money to openAI and Anthropic.
It would also boost research in non US jurisdiction. Who is going to be wooed by “come to our lab where you’re only allowed to work with closed models!”
What researchers want to join a company that is in a race to the bottom to serve inference tokens? If any open weight companies start actually producing state of the art models then maybe, but if it's just copying what others have done for cheaper, you aren't going to find many researchers interested in that
Open-weights models will be downloaded from China and run on local/corporate-owned AI hardware. You would have to ban Internet access and AI hardware next.
It is a lost opportunity that huggingface (or unsloth) frontpage doesn't have a list like this that updates which each model release.
From the HF front page if you hit "models" it should auto sort by trending before you change any search parameters, so if anything large, capable and popular has just been released it's almost certainly going to be at the top of the list.
Hugging Face recently added a filter directly on the models page: https://huggingface.co/models that lets you filter based on hardware.
Hugging Face recently added a filter directly on the models page: https://huggingface.co/models that lets you filter based on hardware.
Filtering based on hardware is super helpful. Everyone should do this. There are millions of models, and most of them require a server room to load and run.
qwen3.6-27B, gemma4-it-31B, poolside/Laguna-S-2.1 are all good text gen models generally in the <128GB (depending on quant, you can fit them in smaller mem footprint)
Note, Laguna provided quants have some issues and they are reworking/updating them.
You don't need an archive of huggingface. Instead you can use the Chinese version of huggingface with all Chinese models - https://www.modelscope.ai/models
Reminds me of American drug import restrictions so that pharma can get recoup its R&D expenses from Americans who pay higher prescription drug prices
The letter really dances around the issue that we don’t want to see a ban on the release and use of open weights foreign or domestic models in the US. If we do it will leave us at a severe competitive disadvantage in a global context. Many of us would consider moving our businesses out of the US to avoid being mired in a stagnant pond that reeks of government capture by a handful of corrupt laggards whose core competency is regulating away competition and killing domestic innovation.
Remember when OpenAI were wise enough to know OpenAI should be…open?
Greed will cost America the entire AI market at this rate
The point of open weight models is that this is not possible, companies will be built by taking 'contraband' chinese open weight models and marketing as something from the US
Without a massive amount of post-training, it will be obvious that they are Chinese models with Chinese political ideology. I doubt that there's any business model that would work there.
I don't think the post-training would be that difficult. I ran an experiment on kimi k3 just now:
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.
This is only if you're using the cloud version hosted in China. If you run these models locally, you don't get that
I know it was the case with earlier versions. Not sure how true it still is. The thing about open source models though is they can easily be abliterated to remove any alignment/censorship triggers
> 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
This is untrue. Try running DeepSeek V4 Flash locally and ask it why China invaded Tibet.
Interesting, didn't know this!
ask grok about the epstein files. ask gemini about the epstein files. ask them about obama's legacy as a war criminal and the reclassification of civilians as combatants to make drone striking weddings more palatable
unbelievable chauvinism in here
How are you accessing K3? If it is through Moonshot's API, then there is very likely guardrails, because it seems like it wanted to answer and was then cutoff.
We are starting to get access to K3 from US providers now, curious if they exhibit the same response pattern?
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> Without a massive amount of post-training,
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.
There are very little (read: zero) references to politics in my codebase so I don't really care if the free Chinese frontier model throws an error when I ask about Tiananmen Square. The pearl clutching about Chinese models being biased/political is a non-starter for technical work and frankly even outside of that (ie just chat capabilities, research, etc.) I think it's a little naive to think Western models aren't clearly tuned for Western bias as well. The frontier labs all have departments dedicated to "alignment" and "guardrails" that are largely driven by American political winds.
do you think that China is some place devoid of business? it's the center of global commerce now. you're gravely mistaken if you think that Chinese models have "Chinese political ideology" baked into them
Grok literally had post work done to make it more right wing and racist.
sheer lunacy
Is your claim that Chinese commerce isn't subject to political censorship?
Where does Grok come into this? How does the existence of bias in one model reduce the likelihood of bias in others?
If you self-host these models, there's no censorship. They only have to follow those laws when hosted in China.
You can't self-host or bypass the censorship in Grok
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Don't model weights fall under free speech?
Yes, in theory, we've been through this rodeo before in the 90s. Bernstein vs. US ruled that source code is expressive speech. It's being challenged though, the court could consider weights as machine data (non-expressive operational artifacts, not human communication).
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.
Interesting topic for sure.
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.
No official court challenge yet, mostly lawyers/academics putting out papers after California's SB 1047. The general argument I've seen is that because weights are generated during training, and not written line by line by humans (like source code), it's non-expressive and no human understands what the raw weights mean, therefore no human reads them as expression.
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?"
Blocking Chinese models would just be regulatory capture by another name. If we want OpenAI and Anthropic to improve they need to compete not just with eachother but with foreign labs too.
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.
It's not really a competition with the foreign labs cause they're copying. To illustrate the difference, if there were somehow an impenetrable firewall between the US and China, the US models would continue improving while the Chinese ones don't.
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.
Could foreign labs compete with openAI and anthropic if they weren't literally just copying their outputs?
Can the foreign labs actually advance the state of the art if they put openAI/anthropic out of business?
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> good dialogue about a serious issue
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.
You’re ok letting Donald Trump telling you what tech you’re allowed to use?
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.
As bad as it will be no one will be surprised when this happens. This administration does not care about the law. The president wants to keep using his position to make a generational bag. This is the same leader of the free world peddling shitcoin.
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.
Everything he does benefits his adversaries because they're all playing him like a fiddle because he's basically the dumbest person alive.
I don’t think he’s dumb, I think he’s very cynical and only does things he benefits from. He’s not dumb for selling out the country because he doesn’t care about the country, he’s accomplished his goal of enriching himself.
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.
You are on the money with this one.
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.
"The Bitterness of Poor Quality Remains Long After the Sweetness of a Low Price is Forgotten"
Benjamin Franklin
But you don't need an F1 car for a grocery run
What did he say about overpaying for something only marginally better?
Would it even be possible to ban open weight models, given all the ways they can be used in finetuned models or online services, also in 3rd countries?
I think that we humans still have a really tough time differentiating and classifying between public and private goods (and everything in between) from an economic sense.
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.
Why? The current administration is doing such a fine job protecting the investments of a few hundred wealthy people, and not caring about the economy of the country.
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.
side note : I wish they had an actual link to the companies instead of just their names in https://littletech.org/membership
I think this would be foolish, a more sound strategy is to focus on critical infrastructure and defense not using models that are "open" but they're really just binary blobs. We have models here in the states like OLMo that could receive more investing to attempt to bring them up to par with some of the frontier open-weight models, removing a lot of these concerns.
English is not my first language, but to me the construct "to urge not to do something" in the title feels off. I think I only saw it without the negative, with some implied urgency... And now that I spelled it out, "urge" and "urgent" are probably related.
Note that a ban doesn't mean you can't download it anymore. Just that if you do so it will be considered illegal.
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.
Didn't Hugging Face have to resort to the Chinese open weight GLM model to figure out that an OpenAI was hacking it?
Will I get my $1.90 back from deepseek? I put $2.00 on my account a couple of months ago and it's taken me this long to use $0.10 worth of tokens.
Why isn’t there a competitive US or European open weights model?
The Chinese open weights models are copies of the American closed ones. Nobody in the US is trying to do that, I guess.
> Nobody in the US is trying to do that, I guess.
Yes, but WHY, I wonder.
Seems like a business opportunity.
Europe is actually catching up right now. Not at the frontier like kimi and qwen 3.6 (yet) but it's just a matter of time until the European A3B models catch up, too.
Apertus and Soofi, both open source (not only open weight) models:
America seems to be heavily invested in making the entire population as dumb as rocks so this aligns with everything I'd assume from America and the current administration in general tbh.
Not sure why this is even news.
The man in charge literally hates intellects.
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They attacked our premier universities and think climate change isn’t real or worse “woke”.
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.
> 54% of adults have a literacy below a 6th-grade level [0]
Trump has been openly anti-education since the 1990s. My favorite Trump quote: “I love the poorly educated.”
[0]: https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/2024-2025-liter...
We must all hoard all available models before they get taken down. Is anyone archiving huggingface?
Post this to
Login-walled for me. Is there a Reddit proxy like Nitter?
yes and its faster than new reddit and written in rust too btw
https://safereddit.com/r/datahoarder
Instances:
https://github.com/redlib-org/redlib-instances/blob/main/ins...
Wanna plug LibRedirect which allows you to easily set up proxies for any site (e.g. invideous for youtube, nitter for twitter, libreddit/redlib/whatever for reddit, breezewiki for fandom, etc)
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.
You can just remove the “old.” And view it on the JS invested “New Reddit” without logging in.
Does this include Deepseek? I don't know if that would crush me, but it would definitely hurt.
Why jump to complex technical and policy solutions when an Open Weights AI champion trophy, in solid gold, is being requested by the Commander in Thief?
What happened to free trade and globalisation? Oooohhh only when it serves the west. What happened to the invisible hand of the market? Oooohhh it only when it serves the west.
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.
My pet theory is that none of the Chinese labs are releasing open weight models for humanitarian reasons. I believe the Chinese government has made a cynical policy decision that AI is too valuable to allow anyone in their country capture a significant amount of its value as that might allow a person or company to accumulate wealth and influence so quickly as to challenge their power. Everyone must be kept below the God state.
Not the west, just rich people in the west.
If there's a "ban", it'd only really affect corporations right? It'd be difficult to stop indie devs and pirates from downloading the models
They'll do the "tornado cash under Biden" routine most likely.
"US government bans floating point numbers"
Can't stop the bittorrent, won't stop the bittorrent!
There's also I2PSnark, Hyphanet, and others!
this would actually be big win for non US founders
exactly. a ban or even any restriction that is "fixed" in time is a bad idea.
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.
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Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.
Are we not there yet?
There's a popular Chinese internet saying: "If you/I are/am not embarrassed, then it's the other person who is embarrassed." (只要我不尴尬，尴尬的就是别人)
In English, that is roughly translated to "I've already depicted you as the Soyjak and me as the Chad"
I think we are pulling in the driveway.
We're maybe only the first half decade into it. Hopefully it doesn't last a century.
It's been pretty clear to me since the first Trump election that it's the end of an era.
US real median household income has been steadily rising[1] for the last 40+ years. Life expectancy is rising again after dipping and plateauing for a few years. Employment numbers are pretty good given the macro headwinds. The US forms ~5.9 million new businesses per year which vastly out paces the EU.
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.
> US real median household income has been steadily rising[1] for the last 40+ years.
Compare it to the Consumer Price Index:
Why is it that the cynics and doomers always have such a poor grasp of the data?
I think CPI is a poor measure, because it's a moving meter stick that understates inflation. When beef is overpriced, hamburger switches into the basket. When hamburger is a luxury, then chicken swaps into it instead. It understates inflation.
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.
But I think there will be a lag. The US has (willingly) forfeited some of its soft power and we may not see the impact of that immediately.
No argument there. The US has been hit hard by the global populist political wave in recent years.
M2 outstrips it.
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!
So many of my people in the US can't even make ends meet anymore that I opened a dedicated line of budget to provide help where I can. It's never been that bad before and it's nowhere near as bad for my people in the EU (not that everything is all rosy there, mind you).
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.
Maybe break down those numbers by income and you'll see that rich people are doing fine, everyone else not so much.
This one has always made sense to me. If you think about circumstances which improve the bottom quintiles’ relative income so that they’re now making as much as the median (I.e. the curve flattens out through unprecedented prosperity for the poorest) then the middle and upper middle incomes will rightly conclude that they’re not relatively high income anymore.
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.
Maybe learn what median means?
More people outside employment than COVID or Great Recession. Inflation wiping out income growth. Family units replaced by multi-job slavery shows up as “improved GDP”. There’s the powerball lottery that one person wins every few weeks and then there’s the crippling medical debt lottery that many people are “winning” every day. Wake up.
“Inflation adjusted” is offset by the changes to what inflation measures. And again income has only gone up because people are working multiple jobs.
>Life expectancy is rising again after dipping and plateauing for a few years
Life expectancy dipping for any develop country, even if temporary, is an embarrassing catastrophe.
Well there was a global pandemic the prematurely killed a lot of elderly people, and the dip happened in a lot of countries.
i feel like we’ve been doing that since 1999
I think we are already quarter of century in. It started with reaction to 9/11 and only got worse since then. Damage was pretty much self-inflicted.
I think it started when the Soviet Union fell apart because we had no global peer or competition and became unserious.
Never seen capitalists this afraid of competition. Same story with Chinese cars… We can’t have cheap, and objectively superior EVs because of protectionist policies towards Musk and his ilk.
Even more bizarre than debating over whether we can stop the free flow of information across communications surfaces (we can't)... is the notion that this one person - a highly ineffectual occupant of an office whose relevance is rapidly decreasing... is somehow in charge of it.
Banning Chinese open source AI is “quick war with Iran” levels of strategic thinking.
Under what authority could he block access?
Extra Judicial punishment and unwanted attention from powerful organizations is absolutely on the table for any larger startup/company who finds themselves in his radar
Have you been paying attention the last two years? With a few exceptions, he has unilateral authority.
I guess my question was, is this a threat to do something legal or something illegal
What do you mean by illegal? It's very nuanced these days.
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.
ITAR and suddenly half a world cannot touch it.
Afaik ITAR only covers export. Which would mean it can only be used to block export of US models, not importing chinese open weight models.
Because the spineless cowards in Congress are somehow afraid of an 80 year old demented man nearing a 30% approval rating.
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.
It's the rule based order america is the boss in. Essentially a mafia ruled country where rules are different for opponents.
"It's a big club and you aren't in it"
The "try and stop me" authority of a guy that has armed goons marching down city streets and brutalizing his opposition.
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The same authority he used to enact tariffs and a war.
So, illegally, got it
It has the tacit consent of Congress, so it's mostly only illegal in the way it's carried out. Congress could make most of it legal right now, but they don't want to put their names on it. Some of it would probably be unconstitutional for Congress to authorize (ironically via the nondelegation clause which is now being repurposed to justify a thoroughly unconstituational unitary executive arrangement), but much of it would not be, so it's de jure illegal but de facto legal.
If you were to keep using a chinese model after said ban, you would need to be charged with a crime and be found guilty in a court of law for this to be true.
What it would do is have an instant chilling effect across Corporate America, which is the goal.
You just described multiple different ways of being "illegal".
At a certain level legality is enforcement. If the enforcers of the rules decline to enforce them, you're better off acknowledging what is and dealing with it.
and take over Venezuela.
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> I wish all Americans were asking thoughtful questions like this. No notes.
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?
It's the Americans that aren't asking these questions that worry me. It is a significant percentage of the population.
open weight models are not free models. Inference providers should share a meaningful percentage of revenue with the model companies. In fact, open weight model seems a solid business model - they can leverage existing cloud infra for distribution without spending massive CAPEX.
How do you ban numbers?
The same way you ban pirated media from being downloadable on the Internet: not effectively.
Trade restrictions, sanctions. You can't effectively ban for individuals, but you can make it so legally risky for US based companies that it becomes effectively illegal as no US company will touch them, nor host them.
I'm old enough to remember "this shirt is a munition" and the DeCSS t-shirt.
In the same way you can for any digital information?
How do you ban melted sand?
>"banning Americans from downloading Chinese open-weight models" - land of free is being even more so
And how are they supposed to ban them? What Chinese companies release is math.
So Y Combinator signed it too? But this is HN, Y combinator website. I think I am missing something because I never read any opinion like 'we should ban Chinese models'.
OpenAI's strategy lead made a post on X advocating for the banning of Chinese models in the wake of Kimi K3's release.
To be clear, YCombinator et al are advocating for them to remain unbanned.
ah that makes sense now! I must be tired...
They signed the letter to prevent the banning on open-weight models.
Y Combinator the company doesnt particularly have to share the opinions of hackernews the public site.
That's true, and often they diverge. But in this case I think the opinions within YC itself and in the HN community at large are more or less the same - we all want open-weight models.
I tell everyone whenever I get a chance, download any open weights models you can as soon as possible.
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.
Ok, but in 24 months that's the equivalent of downloading 100 variations of MSDOS. Torrents and vpn exist. I think this is more of a problem for corporations.
The turntables do their thing.
Illegal numbers 2: Electric Trumpaloo
Need to print a tshirt with the weights of Kimi 3
he cant shut them off anyways, anyone can just VPN to europe and download them
Individuals can. The US GOV can make it so legally risky for US based corporations to host, download, or integrate with foreign open weight models that they become effectively illegal for commercial use. Any sort of sanctions or ICTS regulations, and you'll see them all rapidly disappear from AWS, Azure, GCP, HuggingFace, GitHub, etc.
> The US GOV can make it so legally risky for US based corporations to host, download, or integrate with foreign open weight models that they become effectively illegal for commercial use.
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.
> They have to tighten that up so much that it would effectively result in "US Corporations cannot source anything from a foreign state".
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.
The ducks at the park are free, you can just take one home with you.
I luv this sentence but have no idea what it means lol.
Do you have many ducks at home?
I think it means, just because something is accessible doesn’t mean it’s legal, permitted, or okay.
The ones at home land on a dinner plate.
The only thing Trump can do is building the US version of GFW, which he knows better than anyone else.
"Nooooo!!! We already laid off half our workforce and got priced out of models from American companies. We need the cheaper models, even risking giving all our data to a foreign adversary, so our big number goes up long enough for us to get acquired!!!"
It will come for you too, fool. You obviously have no fucking clue what’s the deal with open-weight models. Can I run Fable on my computer? No. Can I run Depseek 4 or glm5.2 on my computer? Yes.
> It will come for you too, fool.
Thankfully, I'm not in a position in which any of this will negatively impact me. But, please, keep seething.
The US government exists to protect American capital and the interests of capital owners. I'm not sure why people are still confused by this.
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.
I see we're doing "too big to fail" again...
The U.S. does NOT have copyright protections on the data that AI models were and are trained on, it was mass theft. Now all of a sudden, the Chinese are stealing from the thieves and we’re supposed to care?
No one cares, we just want cheaper AI models that are equally as powerful. They’re all thieves regardless.
Ok, but can you please follow the HN guidelines and focus on specific, thoughtful discussion, not generic/indignant tangents? The first is what we're trying for, and the second basically destroys it.
"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.
Its even dumber when you consider AI model output was not considered copyrighted or eligible for copyright to begin with, as far as I know. How exactly would this even be "theft"?
Plus on top of that it's been ruled that training on copyrighted material is allowed because it's transformative. As a result even if the model output is copyrighted training on it would be as allowed as training on books.
If this was ruled ok why are they paying billions to book publishers?
Yea to be more explicit than the other reply they are being fined for the theft of the books not training on them. They trained on tons of legally procured books by destructively scanning and OCRing them. It was discovered in legal filings and is called Project Panama if you want to read more about it.
Because they pirated said books instead of buying them legally.
I can't imagine Moonshot have found a way to completely bypass the subscription or api billing either. So those model outputs have been paid for! No theft of any kind!
At most they'd be getting more out of distributed use of subsidized plans and API than the ToS would prefer.
It’s not they, but it does break TOS.
As if scraping the entire internet doesn't break thousands of TOSes?
I poison their requests with crap, particularly because they were the worst offenders for sheer request rate. The site has maybe a hundred pages, and I'd see them hit at a sustained 20 rps for weeks on end, same content being pulled over and over and over again. Easily handled by my small server as it's static content, but the sheer arrogance (inadvertent or otherwise) pissed me off.
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.
Better to feed them poisoned results...
Scrapping internet realistically does involve Botnets of all kind, the scrapping itself might be legal, but it's certain a ton of infected computers are routing traffic and being used as Proxy.
It's still the pot calling the kettle black.
steal from the rich -> theft
steal from the poor -> capitalism
pay the rich for their services then lawfully use what you paid for to compete with the rich -> national security issue?
Training on copyright was ruled to be transformative.
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.
So they got fined for… stealing?
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.
>So they got fined for… stealing?
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.
Probably why John wasn't ordered to pay $1.5B.
yep, theft but not plagiarism.
If I make Bambi 2 and toss it up on YouTube I’m going to be sued by Disney for a wide variety of intellectual property violations, it doesn’t matter if I make it by hand or via an LLM. Nothing has changed for big organizations with a legal team.
By that same argument, distilling a model to train your own is also transformative. We can’t have it both ways. Either both training on copyright and distillation are transformative, or both are illegal. Also, it is not a matter of settled law that training on copyright is transformative. That was a single case, and others are still pending AFAIK.
Ruled by whom? The International Court of the Northern District of California?
What if use an LLM and attach CoD screenshots, or assets?
> Same as anyone else who copied pirated IP onto their hard drive
Not really the same. Private citizens have received fines MUCH higher per-work when downloading for just their private consumption.
>"Anthropic was just fined for not paying for the pirated books they copied into a training database."
Normal person would be sitting in jail for doing same thing. It is a shame they call it justice.
> The U.S. does NOT have copyright protections on the data that AI models were and are trained on, it was mass theft.
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...
Why is it not fair use for the Chinese models if all they are doing is distilling these fair use models? According to the courts, AI model output is not copyrighted or eligible for copyright.
Distillation does not violate copyright law.
It violates contractual terms of use.
Correct. This seems to be poorly understood.
You can use an original work to write an encyclopedia (e.g. Wikipedia). That is fair use.
You cannot copy an original work and distribute it.
LLMs are an encyclopedia.
Copyright infringement, maybe. Theft? No. When something is stolen from you, you don't have that thing anymore.
This is a silly argument. Like yes, obviously it’s of less U.S. concern if one American is robbing another versus a foreign interest. We can deal with one whenever while the other creates constraints.
The better arguments are the ones made in the article. Open weights increase competition and thus AI availability in the U.S. economy.
This is not robbing. Undesired distillation is a ToS violation, at best.
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).
> 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).
This is false. They do sell LLM subscriptions. Many also release _most_ of their models as open weights.
None of it is robbing because there is no violence, but sure. The point is being confused why an external threat is treated differently from internal ones is a self goal in a debate where there are far better arguments for not banning these models.
It's not like those American companies were only stealing form Americans. Maybe you could argue about utility, but morally I don't see any ground to stand on
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
There isn’t an argument for banning Chinese or open-weight models. I’m just saying OP’s moralistic outrage take is about the weakest one you can come up with against it.
Obviously stealing is bad, doesn't matter who you steal from. In this case, its a simple case of no honour amongst thieves.
> its a simple case of no honour amongst thieves
Which is why making an honour-based argument to said thieves is silly.
Whether or not it’s robbery is irrelevant. It’s the proposed remedy that is the problem
Sure. Great. OP’s argument focuses on the outrage. That’s focusing on the first bit.
Blatantly lack of principles.
Sure. The American electorate isn’t really principled right now. If the best argument we can surface is this tripe, we’ll lose access.
You're trying to kidnap what I've rightfully stolen!
The answer to widespread theft is not to simply allow the guy who did the theft to get away with it because his implementation was cheaper.
It's to punish theft.
But distillation is not theft. They are paying for the usage of the API. It is also not copyright infringement, as AI companies do not hold the copyright for the output of their models.
> But distillation is not 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.
Fair use? Anthropic does not own the copyright to the output of their LLMs. Fair use does not enter into it at all.
not when by your own rules it's legally ruled "not theft".
Rules are flexible. The people who pay attention know this.
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.
Exactly! While the people who spent more money on their theft are rewarded with more business to counteract their losses! Justice is finally being wrought on those who have wronged society with their wicked ways!
(/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.
> Trump is just doing autocrat things
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.
Are public libraries thieves?
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.
Public library buy the works they distribute. They also pay for the usage of these works. Copying of said works is still illegal. You should read up on how libraries actually work.
> Copying of said works is still illegal.
Yes it is, but at least they are not charging for the access.
That's NOT always been the case.
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.
Someone going to public library, copying every book out of it and then selling them as their own are thieves.
Not technically theft unless the public library no longer has the books. Selling something and saying you created it when you didn't is a different five-letter word: fraud.
Putting prompts in an LLM and saying you "created" the image or text thereof is fraud.
No, they've merely infringed copyright. Theft is a well understood concept and it does not pertain to information.
I don't believe anything is being sold here :)
Barrels of tokens sold by thieves that copied every book sure looks like selling to me.
AI companies sell access to their models, via subscriptions and ads.
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.
Okay, but that's not what happened as far as I'm aware. Who did they sell their copies of the books to?
That’s fine too, in that case Open Weight models made by China are doing humanity a favour
I strongly believe that's the case. That's even the case with the recent OpenAI hack of HuggingFace.
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.
The era of so-called "intellectual property" is over.
You can accept it or not. But it's going to be a lot easier if you do.
So how come Disney still gets upset when I provide copies of their movies on my website as "training set for biological neural networks"?
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.
The solution is straightforward -- be rich!
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You can be against both.
One’s like taking something from your brother or sister and the other is like taking from your neighbor with whom you have a bad history…
I do care.
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.
Might wanna reflect on who’s threatening hot war lately.
It's not a threat anymore if you actually start a war!
/s
The main actors threatening (and delivering) a hot war are China, and by proxy, Russia. The Ukraine war is absolutely and transparently enabled by China, who is also trying to actively destabilize the EU and the US in order to make its conquest of Taiwan more likely.
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.
>invaded Venezuela
Didn't happen. An intervention happened. An invasion lasts more than two hours.
Taiwan, while simultaneously preparing an invasion fleet trained to stop US and EU attempts at a rescue.
Count wars, invasions and simply messing with other countries by the US starting since the end of WWII and then come back. Your post is a pile of BS
> The main actors threatening (and delivering) a hot war are China
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.
Luckily for the peace side, the USA's inability to achieve their mission objectives in a war against an adversary that was perceived as being substantially weaker means they are very much less likely to engage in one with a "near peer".
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.
Yes, the administration is definitely and would not start a war for no reason other than to start a war.
People really have to stop sanewashing the government, it doesn't work anymore, these people are not thinking through what they're doing.
I don’t think those are “learned” lessons. Only how to push harder next time.
Our biggest geopolitical rival is also the only thing standing in the way of a potential duopoly on LLMs using closed weight models. I would not say I’m a fan of the PRC by any means, but I also do not want to see closed weight models controlled by two big companies dominating what I can use. Especially since said companies arbitrarily restrict model usage and can ban users for no reason.
> It's an unfortunate truth that we're exiting a global peace era
You’re a tiny bit late on that one
No, we are in the process of an exit. This takes time
Does this sentence have any meaning at all? There are 30 Active military conflicts right now.
I keep hearing about this "we" as if it's still a coherent nation state and not just an unaccountable ruling class from both parties where the most severe consequence is failing upwards into a lobbyist provided position. I literally have no moral preference when it comes to the US or the CCP nor do I care if the entire nation state fails, let alone loses to a geopolitical rival.
> nor do I care if the entire nation state fails
You should care because of the nukes, if nothing else.
Are we even sure they still work? The last test was 34 years ago, after all.
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...
Nukes are the only thing keeping corrupt ruling class and their ambitions in check. On either side of ideological divide.
It’s the only weapon that’s going to hit them along with the foot soldiers
> both parties
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.
As I see it, one party is comprised of fascist plutocrats, and the other party is comprised of their enablers. In dictatorships the latter is called controlled opposition, I don‘t know what the latter is called in a democracy, but in absence of a better word “both parties” gets the meaning across IMO.
I don't think I would characterize this last era as one of global peace.
I’m not convinced that it’s a bad thing. What is your actual argument?
My argument is that a major world power is pushing towards global conflict by simultaneously funding the conquest of Ukraine while building its own invasion fleet for Taiwan. Allowing them to also destabilize us internally is not exactly a good idea.
Trade is funding.
> Allowing them to also destabilize us internally is not exactly a good idea.
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.
The US is building a Taiwan invasion fleet?
How is it destabilising? Do you purely mean China have exposed ill thought out investments? That’s capitalism my guy. The market is working as intended.
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.
I honestly wonder what world folks like you live in. The US is currently at war, repeatedly threatening several other places and engaged in several costly trade wars. From my Canadian perspective, you are a danger and a menace. China is a commodity supplier. Do the war crimes your country is currently committing not register for you at all? The daily threats, insults, and economic attacks on your 'allies', does that register?
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.
Or… war with China is inevitable if only to keep the gap in military capabilities. There is a thinking to mow down their military while we still can in some circles. Like those in power currently. Scary.
Ask yourself, who seems to be the destabilizing force if you take a step back and look at the state of things objectively?
There is some blame on all sides for sure, not saying it's black and white...but come on.
Almost all current world events as of now are directly tied to the fact that the west is in active freakout mode over china building a army large enough to attack the entire world. Iran and venuzuela are a direct response to it.
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.
You left out the bodypart business they are now in too.
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.
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.
Hey, we started another war and are funding the most destabilizing force in the world but look at this theoretical war …
Taiwan has been self governing for longer than almost everyone that lives there has been alive. It's also a vibrant democracy.
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.
Yeah, the US is not an incredible actor, but China is funding the most brutal war in modern history (the invasion of Ukraine) in order to provide a smokescreen for their own invasion.
Nobody is refusing to acknowledge our role in destabilizing things. This is a thread about why the US might be afraid of an also bad-actor rival funding a huge proxy war against it controlling major technology.
> who seems to be the destabilizing force if you take a step back and look at the state of things objectively?
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 proof the US propaganda is working
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.)
Wow, what happened to no holds barred American capitalism? Is it bad when the Chinese somehow do it better? The US stateowning US Steal, Intel, and possibly openai is no different than the Chinese ownership model… and before the US took stakes in the companies they were just bankrolling them as customers SpaceX Oracle etal.
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.
"what happened to no holds barred American capitalism?" you mean the strawman that never existed?
Unlike the xenophobia
> Our biggest geopolitical rival
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>.
I'm not the "hive mind" of HN or whatever. Individuals hold unique opinions.
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.
People have been claiming this since the 2000s. There are Economist articles from 2005 predicting an imminent collapse of China's economy. China has only grown more rapidly since then.
I don’t. I do read major reputed economists though, and they are not exactly bullish on China.
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.
China is only getting stronger. They have captured basically the entire electronics industry - except a handful of cutting-edge chips. They have captured the solar panel industry. They are significantly outperforming the traditional brands when it comes to all kinds of BEVs.
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...
> Their economy is in a lot of trouble, likely far worse than the shape of the US's currently
Source: trust me bro
> Almost 200 Silicon Valley companies, including Proton and Y Combinator…On Wednesday, the newly-formed Little Tech Association
YC is little tech? lol wut.
YC's entire business is finding little tech companies and helping them grow.
Calling YC little tech is hilarious. Billions under management and many billion+ companies.
> Little Tech Association
"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
Sorry but isn’t YCs entire goal to turn “little” tech into “big” tech?
A little bit of Googling goes a long way...
A little bit of explaining does to. What’s your point?
It worked for the bolsheviks
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> the US can “sanction” companies that engage in intellectual property theft.
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).
It's not IP theft if US courts say it isn't.
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...
The USA has stolen intellectual property from ALL AROUND THE WORLD. AI is not trained just in copyrighted USA content.
Other countries have a say about it.
And it’s not a war if Putin says so. And it’s not a possible future invasion of Taiwan if Xi says so. Who cares what US courts say.
Meanwhile, X.ai committing all of the crimes.
did you mean Xi.ai?
US's court can enforce IPs. Didn't Antrhpic just agree to pay book authors billion for the recent lawsuit settlement?
Anthropic was asked to pay book authors because it trained on pirated downloaded books.
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.
>Anthropic was asked to pay book authors because it trained on pirated downloaded books.
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.
Thanks - I didn't verify this personally, but still stand corrected.
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.
Pirating millions of dollars worth of books would land people in jail. Government went after Aaron Scwartz for "pirating" scientific journals.
I've linked this several times, but LLMs are capable of reproducing entire books. Researchers were able to extract books nearly verbatim: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.02671
I didn't think about this parallel, but that's just so sad.
The judge explicitly ruled that training on the books was fine.
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.
> They just should have bought them, rather than pirating them.
Bought, scanned and destroyed them I believe. The judge okay'd Destructive Scanning.
> The court also held that the third factor favored fair use as to the purchased library copies converted from print to digital because the purpose of the copying was to keep the books in its library but with more favorable storage and searchability properties. This purpose required copying, there was no surplus copying and the source copy was destroyed. With respect to the pirated copies, however, the court held that because “Anthropic lacked any entitlement to hold those copies” and retained them “even after deciding it would not make further copies from them for training,” this third factor weighed against Anthropic for that particular use.
https://www.loeb.com/en/insights/publications/2025/07/bartz-...
You need to destroy the _physical copy_ that you scanned.
The settlement doesn't cover the actual training on copy written material
That will never happen. Copyright is not a thing in China.
too bad hypocrisy never got in the way of people making money
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What is this socialism about using non-us open weight ai?
Dystopic.
What next? Some communist open source Finnish operating system?
Not in Trump's power.
If he can ban Chinese TikTok for alleged national security reasons, I'm sure he can also similarly ban Chinese AI.
That said, it's harder to ban a terabyte of floating point numbers under a MIT license.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. Instead, put asterisks* around it and it will get italicized. More formatting info here.*
fixed.
I vouched, not sure it will help.
he could order possession of it treason and punishable similarly to other illegal numbers.
no he can't, he doesnt make laws
Legality doesn't seem to have much effect, in his case.
executive orders?
A president cannot (legally) use an EO to create new laws that bind private citizens or businesses. EOs can only be issued to federal agencies, and only Federal Agencies & Employees (and federal contractors) are bound by direct compliance of an EO.
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.
The executive can't enforce laws that don't exist
Yes, he can do executive orders. The courts still get to judge whether they are legal, though... some months/years later.
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.
“And they warn that banning Americans from downloading Chinese open-weight models wouldn’t stop their proliferation — but would weaken U.S. startups.”
Well this doesn’t even make sense.
Weaken U.S startups = Can’t legally develop commercial products that use or remix the latest open weights models in novel/creative/cost-reducing/etc ways, while companies from the rest of the world could (including China, who this is ostensibly supposed to be punishing)
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
It does because corporations, especially smaller ones competing with bigger ones, actually do get prosecuted for violating restrictions like this a lot more than individuals do.
I think we should shut it off. It would force US companies to build open models.
I think it would do the opposite. They would have a monopoly just handed to them, and a large market with no options. They'd have zero incentives to provide open weight models.
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.
US labs would have even less incentive to build open if we blocked foreign open weight models, and we'd be engaging in protectionism yet again, also giving them zero incentive to compete.
> Someone please enlighten me what the actual argument here is, cause I can’t see it.
> The only thing a ban would do is protect the American market from further downward price pressure on inference, protecting VC investors in the short term. But thats also an admittance that the American labs can’t compete on merit anymore
That's the argument. To be precise the publicly stated argument is that they're attacking 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.
But isn‘t the whole argument of „winner takes all“ already dead, if china is such a big threat that the US labs need import controls?
Distilling or not, they are clearly close enough to the frontier, that the supposed „free market“ country needs market controls. That may work for US markets. But not the rest of the world.
Idea: petrodollar policy becomes „tokendollar“, enforced by US military dominance. If you force me to pay altman at gunpoint, then maybe ill stop using kimi
They are simply out of ideas to keep the most expensive party in the history of mankind going.
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.
And it's set up so you would have had a moron either way! You can have any politician you want so long as they are a moron.
Also, the moron says the elections aren't secure and that 2020 was stolen but not 2024 or 2016 for some reason.
> the supposed „free market“ country
Good scare quotes. The US hasn't been free market in the Adam Smith sense in ages, if ever.
How could you tell how close they are to the frontier if they weren't distilling? Clearly those labs think distilling is worth it despite the large effort they need to go through to bypass anti distillation techniques used by the frontier labs
I find such beauty in the fact that the robbers are getting robbed but it's all part of progress overall. 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 am sure that some other country (Mistral from France, India, Canada etc.) would have even more chances to innovate perhaps.
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.
We must prevent a mineshaft gap!
That's the real reason, that's not the actual argument.
> 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.
> 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.
> But thats also an admittance that the American labs can’t compete on merit anymore
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 can understand (not necessarily defend) protectionism for products with nonzero manufacturing cost and some required physical size and such.
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.
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You aren’t missing anything. There isn’t an actual argument, this is strictly an attempt at regulatory capture.
You wouldn't distill billions of dollars of SoftBank investment.
Is "You wouldn't distill..." the hot new Twitter meme or something?
That was not actually the ad, that was "You wouldn't steal a car. [...] Downloading Pirated Movies is stealing. [...] Piracy it's a crime."
Easily misremembered and meme-able.
The CFO or wtv that tweeted, their argument was, if you allow cheap free competitive models, you will stop the influx of capital in frontier development of even more powerful LLMs, thus capping how far the tech could reach. Obviously, they're mostly asking for regulation to save their money, but it seems their argument is that without an environment that rewards the development of the next frontier model the tech might not evolve as fast.
> it seems their argument is that without an environment that rewards the development of the next frontier model the tech might not evolve as fast.
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?
> thus capping how far the tech could reach
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.
Yeah, I agree with this take. When there's less capital floating around it will make these labs prioritize shrinking the models so less hardware (or older hardware) is needed to run a model with the same or similar capabilities. They'll have to do that simply because the cost of running the models will become more important.
It also might end up pushing us towards LLM ASICs assuming the model progress slows significantly.
> There’s still gonna be demand for stronger models.
potential issue is those will be Chinese models if they win, which could be national security matter.
> The only thing a ban would do is protect the American market from further downward price pressure on inference, protecting VC investors in the short term
It won't even do this. Streisand effect will probably draw even more attention to the open weight models
The entire marketing narrative in AI already operates this way --- "GPT 2.0 is too dangerous to release, oh noooo!" etc
it's simple.
AI labs and investors are scared, and pushing administration to ban them, because they can't compete with Chinese models soon, similar to how they banned Huawei, and Chinese cars.
When there is cheaper alternative, companies might go with self hosting option, which reduces the enterprise moat of AI labs
> similar to how they banned Huawei, and Chinese cars.
And that will go as well as it went for both
Huawei has a long history of “borrowing” IP & source code from US companies
This is less so a hedge against Chinese labs catching up to the frontier/OAI Anthropic falling in valuation, and more a hedge against a complete recession. We are overleveraged in AI investment and if tomorrow any Chinese Lab can drop a model at the frontier what was the point of all those billions. Now, if you can protect the American model from the bubble popping even for just long enough to hedge risk a little better, then you may just prevent collapse. The problem is though, that the market is heavily irrational right now and if anything this may just be the signal to investors to double down on American AI.
How would it even be stopped if you could ban it? It's not like you're banning just one company. Anyone with the resources can still obtain and run the models. Sure, big models like Kimi K3 will be less accessible until a foreign version of Openrouter with no incentive to listen to US law begins offering it. Or they offer it and obfuscate what model it actually is behind codenames.
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.
The interest to target large corps who pay for LLMs. I don't think Antrhopic/OAI care what you or me are running in basement.
It will force US companies (and EU probably) to buy only from OpenAI/Anthropic.
Just gotta make it a few more months now to the IPO
The point would be to not allow (mostly) Chinese agencies to profit from the American market by ripping off (mostly) American frontier models.
Just like unlicensed dupes of designer goods can be intercepted at the border.
> But thats also an admittance that the American labs can’t compete on merit anymore
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.
> Do you know what happens if that goes up in flames
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.
> then they could’ve also put a stop-gap on investment volume to protect the economy against over-reliance?
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.
'we must protect the bubble from popping by blowing more air into the bubble'
Suppose a foreign actor deliberately builds an unaligned model, and dumps it at a very low cost through subsidies. Since the cost is lower, everyone integrates it into their business. But now the foreign actor has control; perhaps the model checks for instructions to execute, perhaps it has backdoors, perhaps... who knows?
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".
The problem with this argument is that sharing model weights only has downsides for said foreign actor compared to providing a cloud service. Since the suspicion exists, security companies are going to comb over the weights and discover every hidden secret of the model, while with a cloud provider you send your most sensitive data to a remote server, and trust the AI lab wont train on your data, with the only shield being a TOS. While with a local modal, even sending a peep about your internal data without cause would be scandalous.
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.
> an unaligned model
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.
This is literally what all AI is right now. Anthropic has been paying companies to use its product to form that dependency and maybe they're not misaligned but there's no regulation in the US that'd in anyway deter them from purposefully misaligning their model.
Subsidizing a product to capture market share is very different from exploiting a national security attack vector.
Sorry, to clarify - this isn't just "offering it at a loss" Anthropic is directly paying PE firms to enroll their held companies in their services[1]. When it comes to a question of whether this is a national security attack vector I think there isn't a cut and dry argument and people could go either way but... private companies are not necessarily aligned with the US government even when contracted with the US government (see Starlink Ukraine shenanigans) and the steps the US government usually would take with highly critical infrastructure to ensure alignment haven't been taken - in my opinion at least, this is definitely a very subjective area.
1. https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anthropic-in-talks-to-invest-200...
So some kind of „sleeper agent“ model?
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.
It is much more difficult to embed a "sleeper agent" in an LLM than it is to do the same in any closed-source program. Any proprietary program, e.g. from Microsoft, is much more likely to contain hard-to-detect "sleeper agents", than any LLM.
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.
I'm not advocating for the policy, I'm just saying that there is a legitimate argument that's not so easy to dismiss.
> 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)
> With models 10000x more powerful, we would need to be extremely conservative
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)
> Suppose
By supposing, you can try to justify taking just about anything away.
I am not supposing a low-risk event. This is an obvious attack vector that an adversary would almost certainly exploit. I would exploit it if I were them.
Imagine a model that's 10000x more intelligent than any human. You integrate that model into a sensitive industry. You now effectively have an extremely powerful foreign agent running e.g. your energy sector. This is qualitatively very different than a backdoor in Redis.
I agree this is science fiction-y, but given the pace of progress I don't think it's so easy to dismiss.
I don't think there actually is a congnizant argument other than to protect investments. And of course they cant say that. You are using way to much logic in this. You are witnessing powerful people who are operating way outside the scope of their own abilities thrash around. AI isn't being stopped. Definitely not by people who value money. The inertia at this point is probably even too much for those who have some sort of ideological framework against it. To those of us who value ideas and progress, especially a non human-centric idea of what progress could look like, the path looks pretty clear. there is no stopping this. We are working everyday in so many small ways, not to capture value, but to advance the machine. the idea that some decree from an ageing narcissist and a pyramid of lackey bureaucrats is at all meaningful is just hilarious. Of course it's meaningful to the "economics". But many of us could really not care a lick as we don't do it for money.
I agree that many of the rich and powerful are not at all as ingenious, creative or capable as they like to make themselves out to be, but I don't see a clear/easy way to escape the economic ramifications of the fact that they own and control virtually all physical resources and all political power. If, say, Chinese develop AGI, and that makes US tech companies obsolete - I see them banning Chinese AGI, even going to war, rather than ceding power (realistically there may be some backroom deal), they would grind the population into dust if it let them retain their wealth and power.
Sounds familiar, I used to think the same about the Internet and free software. Turned out, the old world digested the unstoppable march of progress just fine.
Is that why Linux failed? Just imagine the world in which an open source kernel dominated almost every compute market on the planet!
You mean, a world where we could modify the OS and drivers on our phones?
> And of course they cant say that
That’s what I don’t get tho, I think in today’s world they totally could?
„We need to protect US investments as our entire economy depends on this market sector“ seems like something that would be soothing to me as an investor?
It’s not like the big money givers can’t see that china is close, it’s been the news multiple times already. But taking active policy steps to protect against that should boost market confidence, no?
Instead we get alibi arguments to accomplish the same thing in the end?
I think you are confusing the tiny amount of people who are actually investors or stand to directly benefit from these companies with the overall population - the overall population being generally against AI at this point.
'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.
Nobody would be surprised, and something like that is what's bound to happen to some extent. But I think the current tech/VC cronyism and corruption is becoming more and more evident to the masses, and opposition is growing. There's also the economic factor of US tech being dominant in the world, if US decides to ban better tech because it is too competitive, then US companies cannot really compete globally anymore - they can't outwardly signal that they are being outcompeted.
Working so far keeping Chinese EVs out of the U.S.: U.S. car company CEOs say publicly that allowing them in will destroy the domestic auto industry overnight.
> And of course they cant say that.
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".
Well, that's them doing the same thing, yeah? They can't say that they want voter picture IDs for the real reason (partisan electoral strategy), so they have to constantly litigate electoral fraud and the whole parade.
Saying you value “ideas and progress” is an empty platitude. What ideas? Progress towards what?
What does a "non-human-centric idea of progress" even mean here. I have an inkling :) but I'd like to get your actual thoughts
> But thats also an admittance that the American labs can’t compete on merit anymore
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.
>Someone please enlighten me what the actual argument here is, cause I can’t see it.
These people paid a lot of money to Trump and now they want to cash in on that bought influence.
Don’t even need to look into Trump’s pockets. The entire US economy and the bet on AI depend on OpenAI & co. doing well. If you can download a Chinese model and run it on your own hardware instead of giving money to an American corp, a large part of their valuation vanishes into thin air, and so does the rest of the US economy that desperately needs AI to do well.
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.
They will not actually shut it down. Rather, they will simply continually posture in that direction and release a statement that the wrong lawyer can interpret the wrong way. This will make it a soft no-no for anyone involved in government procurement which is most big companies thus ensuring american AI companies have the market, while also ensuring startups, etc still have access to the structurally lower-cost chinese models (otherwise, they will simply resort to the black market which is why they will never enforce a full ban). In most US-adjacent countries like India, anyone that sells to US companies I see avoiding chinese model providers for the same reason. The exception is fine tuning and running it on their own hardware, which naturally everyone is completely fine with since no money flows to the chinese model company.
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.
> In most US-adjacent countries like India, anyone that sells to US companies I see avoiding chinese model providers for the same reason
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?
Nothing will be truly banned. As in, you can always run and use all the chinese models. Startups will use them. Like I said, they will simply use soft regulations to ensure that all the major players who due to power law will form a majority of the economy, will be using OAI/Ant. If JP Morgan wants to run their own Deepseek V4 on their own hardware, why would the US government care? They simply don't want them using chinese model providers. That is all. However, today, the fact of the matter is that frontier model self-hosting in Fortune companies is DOA, everyone is using APIs. I am not saying this can never change in the future, but seeing past trends, people don't even host their own frikkin source control, so I find it hard to believe JPMC is going to host Deepseek V7 or whatever. You might, and I might, but only the top few thousand mega enterprise deals matter economically speaking. Doordash using qwen for dish classification is completely irrelevant in the grand scheme of things (which is not to say it won't be profitable for alibaba).
It is not clear that "model self-hosting in Fortune companies is DOA".
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.
The problem isn't so much investors losing money, it's if this kills the economy.
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.
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