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

Points: 614

# Comments: 584

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614 points · 584 comments · 查看原帖

capevace
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 wi
khriss
This is such a fundamentally misguided policy. The real competition isn't where the models are today . It's where the innovation will be tomorrow and what that should look like. Trying to protect existing incumbents by banning Chinese open weight models is only going to stack the deck further in favour of Open AI and Anthropic. The real edge that the United States had was never excelling in the here and now. It was in being one step ahead in figuring out what the 'next big thing' was going to be. Propping up a duopoly that squeezes out all other competitors is the very opposite of that. Software and technology is probably the last bastion where the United States still has somewhat of an ability to out-compete the Chinese. Our lead in this area came from allowing upstarts and innovators to kill off and replace the fossilized incumbents, not by propping up the big shots. I am genuinely bew
GodelNumbering
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.
vkaku
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
cmiles74
Oh man, if you weren't sure if the administration is staffed with people who do not understand the technology they are trying to manage, doubt no more! From the article... Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Tuesday on Fox Business’ “Mornings with Maria” that the administration would investigate whether Chinese artificial intelligence companies had improperly distilled American models to power their own, saying that the U.S. can “sanction” companies that engage in intellectual property theft.
zarzavat
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.
WillPostForFood
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.
fbrncci
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 H