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

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.

It's going to force American companies to only use inferior and more expensive models.

It's protectionism which will only extend our dominance by at most a decade.

The rest of the world will progress without us.

> the supposed „free market“ country

Good scare quotes. The US hasn't been free market in the Adam Smith sense in ages, if ever.

US didn't have that much rational reasoning when it killed Japanese exports in cars, chips, and finally software. That in turn lead to China simply taking the seats Japan used to occupy, but as far as imposition of these protectionist means is considered, US does not need that much sophisticated justification internally.

The argument is - these models costs hundreds of billions to develop - to BOTH US and China. China is giving them for free despite not making financial sense because they want to weaken US's tech firms ability to compete - because China sees AI dominance as critical for their national security.

The US also sees AI dominance as critical for their national security, and relies on a market economy and non-state-owned labs. This means that these frontier labs are truly susceptible to "predatory pricing" (economic term for a competitor selling at a loss to eliminate you), which is illegal in the US and any other free market economy exactly because of its implications on market efficiency.

I hate it just as much as the next guy, but the fact the discussion here ignores the fact that these concerns and dynamics are real just lower the discussion level instead of actually discussing potential solutions.

With that said, what I'm worried about is that the government solution will be far more hostile than some semi-ban on open models. An example of an even worse scenario, they could take over frontier labs and restrict access to everyone in the public (which might still not solve espionage).

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

Yep. We'll steal China's IP as well so all of this really is just no big deal. Everyone is a robber in some way.

Though one must ask, why are American models banned in China? Hmmm.

> It's not that China won't come up with what the US are coming up with. Just a matter of when it would happen.

I agree. All this discussion about China releasing open weight models is amusing. It's like ok they release open weight models.... and so what? If they leapfrog ahead of the US then we'll just undercut them with our own open weight models.

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.

The cost of those output tokens is not zero or marginal.

> Is that objectively true?

objectively true. And there's zero need to factor in things like "human rights" or "environmental protection", because these are costs that have been externalized and the consumer don't pay for it (in their lifetime anyway). That's what objectively means.

Chinese cars are unavailable in the US because US manufacturers are 100% unable to compete. Japan was in the exact same position before, but because of ally status, japanese car companies (with their gov't as the proxy) managed to negotiate and have a "voluntary import restriction" in place to protect US manufacturers. This artificial restriction created a higher price for consumers than it ordinarily would have been.

The japanese car manufacturers were also able to setup shop in the US, and instead of exporting, they manufacturered directly on US soil. They're allowed to do this sole because they're an ally, and i don't expect this same to be allowed for chinese companies.

Are you saying USA is somehow a good example for environmental issues and human rights? Read the news in the past years?

The keyword in your sentence is "access". The rest of the world would have cheap access to AI, but no ownership of anything at the frontier. If the US joined the rest of the world, declined to develop frontier AI, and allowed itself to become dependent on cheap Chinese AI, once that dependency was fully realized it would eventually translate into a lack of access to the frontier. That doesn't matter until, suddenly, it becomes the single most important thing to the entire country's future.

China is making a simple bet: that the US will offshore AI in favor of cheap tokens, just like the US previously offshored manufacturing in favor of cheap goods. They're doing this because they know that if they alone possess frontier manufacturing and AI capabilities, then they alone can build the world's most powerful technologies in the future which combine the two (e.g., robotics that will revolutionize all their industries, domestic life, and military far beyond any other country).

Lots of people want this outcome. We now know that the closed-weight model isn't an effective moat, but if the closed-weight model business fails, the open-weight business has nothing to distill, and model progress slows.

I suspect this is part of why China dipped into their vast strategic oil reserves to reduce purchasing and offset the shortage caused by Trump's blunder in Iran. If energy prices get too high, training will slow. They know they can pirate our models at 95% fidelity, so they want training to continue so they can pirate the next ones also.

Is "You wouldn't distill..." the hot new Twitter meme or something?

Never underestimate the stupidity of the US government.

I remember t-shirts with the DVD encryption key on them when the authorities tried to ban that. This shit always backfires. You'd think they'd know this by now.

> This is precisely what the people worried about AI risk and job displacement want, so they should be strongly in favor of open weights then, right?

I'm getting a "gotcha" vibe from how you worded the question, but the answer -unironically - is "Yes." Anyone who is not a closed-weight AIaaS provider[0] will have their lot significantly improved by equally capable, open-weight models.

0. Or their investors. I'm surprised to see Y Combinator signed this letter sering their holding in OpenAI is worth billions and hasn't IPO'd yet. I suspect they crunched some numbers first before signing.

Edit: I realized another group that may be unhappy with frontier open-weight models are those who believe LLMs are inchoate super-intelligences; not only do I disagree with them, but if they are correct, I don't see why we should trust trillion-dollar corporations and their out-of-touch CEOs with that responsibility, when countless CEOs have shown time and time again, that they are not aligned with humanity's interests.

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.

VCs have been horseshit for some time and throwing money at horseshit startups to increase their AUM, their incentive structures are fundamentally misaligned with their clients.

Huawei has a long history of “borrowing” IP & source code from US companies

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.

Would it not be more logical that US billionaires simply switch sides and move to China? I am not convinced that Americans are as patriotic as they claim and willing to go down with the ship.

You are already seeing signs of this in Taiwan.

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.

Is that why Linux failed? Just imagine the world in which an open source kernel dominated almost every compute market on the planet!

> 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.

> Or how about go full plan-economy and just dictate price per token until investors get their money back?

I've heard people talk about AI as being like a utility, like electricity. My understanding is this is how electric utilities work. So it's not as impossible as you might think.

Similar market correction happened in 2008 and the the US has definitely not gone more free-market-let-the-bad-businesses-fail direction since then. Rich a-holes always find ways to build systemic risk where they can reap the rewards and socialize the losses.

> security companies are going to comb over the weights and discover every hidden secret of the model

is this even doable? it seems plausible the model can be order-66'ed without it being so obvious

Subsidizing a product to capture market share is very different from exploiting a national security attack vector.

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)

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.

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 was referenced by other legal cases. Why would they mention it if it didn’t help their case?

It isn't irrational.

The idea is that selling, or giving away art grants the consumer to sell art of his own, not a clear copy of.

So the court rationally found Anthropic guilty for acquiring copies without paying for them. But didn't charge the training, deemed fair use.

If it isn't fair use, then we may need to sue all teachers for spitting out knowledge they ultimately acquired from someone's work.

Copyright, some would say is irrational. Humans learn, that is copying, distilling in fact.

Copyright though is pragmatic: it draws a line, art will be reproduced, let's just enforce that they can't be shameless (near) identical copies. Mix it up, derive the original enough so that you aren't competing with the original author.

The only argument to ban training on copyright data is that it unfairly compete with original authors. Which stance do you take? Neither would be irrational.

Ok, but only if you also conceed that all of these AI companies were stealing to train their models in the first place.

Either everyone was stealing all along, and they should all be sued out of existence, or nobody is stealing.

Personally, I think its all fair use and support all of the training, including distilations.

Yes, but if a company publishes its trade secrets on the web you are entitled to read them and use them.

Sure, just like it’s illegal to steal the formula of Coca Cola from their documents.

But you can do an analysis of a bottle of Coke to figure out exactly what’s in it.

You can even make your own and sell it, if you call it a different name.

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?

That could effectively be the case here but your statement in isolation is an oversimplification of recent legal guidance on this matter -- AI generated things are copyrightable if there is sufficient human authorship involved in the generation process.

The copyright office's recent statement on this matter were sensationalized when they really said nothing groundbreaking at all -- this was always the standard applied when any tools are used in creating a work.

I think Grok is replacing composer now yeah? Fast mode is similar speed to composer.

You get downvoted for praising Grok because its elon company

You’re right though. It is terrific. (Btw you might want to look up what that word means.)

  OED: A (adjective)
    1.   ...
    2.a. ...
    2.b. As an enthusiastic term of commendation: superlatively good, ‘marvellous’, ‘great’.

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”.

It would become known and be blocked. You think if the EU started rebadging and reexporting Chinese EVs to the US the EU tariff wouldn't jumt up to the Chinese level very quickly?

Congress? Who cares about congress anymore? The president declares it a national security risk. Done.

You jest but this is exactly how Anna’s Archive was set up. Anyone can copy the infrastructure code’s git repository and set up a mirror of the site and trackers under a new domain relatively quickly.

Maybe a similar setup can be done for banned AI weights?

Does it have a valid signature from xAI? No? Busted!

That wouldn’t hold up in court and you would be jailed. Your intent is still to provide the illegal model.

I'm partial to their proud 100% European competitor Doopsook

Sure, but if you are a business in the US, you might not be able to use it legally.

And, through the US exercising extraterritorial jurisdiction, businesses in Europe doing business with the US might not be able to use it either, for fear of reprisals. Even though the model is Chinese and hosted in Europe.

This sort of thing happens all the time, especially in the finance and defence sectors.

No they cannot, legally speaking, and companies do not want to face sanctions avoidance charges, so practically speaking no American company will touch the European model hosts either.

And we can quickly see that the real problem is not the models, but HW to run them. You can build whole Enterprise on Gemma 4 31B full precision without significant problems. If you can afford not to lobotomise it by quantisation.

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!”

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.

That all depends on what the law actually says and the resources and will to enforce it.

Speech/information is difficult to control, but given a draconian enough law and enforcement posture, and there can be a very significant result. You can't stop everyone, but at some point you throw enough people in prison that you've effectively suppressed it.

Not that I think that would actually happen here, but it's certainly possible.

This is only if you're using the cloud version hosted in China. If you run these models locally, you don't get that

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?

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

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?

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?"

If you're only accepting crypto, you're effectively not serving the US market and the policy would be considered 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.

[1]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74DAI2hr9Kk&t=159s

Well, depends if you want to call OpenAI "respectable"

Yes, breaking the terms of use is fraud. And, no, no self-respecting company would do this deliberately.

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...

You can just remove the “old.” And view it on the JS invested “New Reddit” without logging in.

In English, that is roughly translated to "I've already depicted you as the Soyjak and me as the Chad"

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/depicted-as-a-soyjak

> US real median household income has been steadily rising[1] for the last 40+ years.

Compare it to the Consumer Price Index:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUUR0000SA0R

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.

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.

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.

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!

>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.

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.

Whether or not it's illegal is typically determined a few months after the act in question.

Since 2024, SCOTUS has sided with Trump about 90% of the time, so most likely it's legal.

Still, even if it's later determined to be illegal, since the law presumes the president has legal immunity to all crimes committed in a presidential capacity, there's no legal risk, so the damage can be done long before the court makes it illegal. For example, Trump's global tarrifs were determined to be illegal a year after the fact, long after the damage had been done.

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.

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.

It's the Americans that aren't asking these questions that worry me. It is a significant percentage of the population.

> 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.

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.

Proverbial “you”. You laugh, hopefully your leg doesn’t slip before it truly does not matter anymore.

I vouched, not sure it will help.

Legality doesn't seem to have much effect, in his case.

executive orders?

If this was ruled ok why are they paying billions to book publishers?

As if scraping the entire internet doesn't break thousands of TOSes?

It's still the pot calling the kettle black.

pay the rich for their services then lawfully use what you paid for to compete with the rich -> national security issue?

>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.

yep, theft but not plagiarism.

Distillation does not violate copyright law.

It violates contractual terms of use.

But no Chinese company has copied and distributed an American LLM.

Even if they had wanted that, it would have been impossible, because Anthropic et al. do not let anyone access them directly.

Querying the available API can be used to extract only an extremely small part of the information stored in an LLM.

That part can be used for the post-training of another LLM, to obtain some desirable properties, but the extracted information is far too little to be called "copying" or "distributing". Moreover, after the post-training it does not appear anywhere in the weights verbatim, so its use is at least as transformative as the training of the original American model.

Besides these facts, there is no evidence that the Chinese companies have actually done this, even if it sounds plausible.

> 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.

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.

> its a simple case of no honour amongst thieves

Which is why making an honour-based argument to said thieves is silly.

Sure. Great. OP’s argument focuses on the outrage. That’s focusing on the first bit.

Sure. The American electorate isn’t really principled right now. If the best argument we can surface is this tripe, we’ll lose access.

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.

I don't believe anything is being sold here :)

No, they've merely infringed copyright. Theft is a well understood concept and it does not pertain to information.

Okay, but that's not what happened as far as I'm aware. Who did they sell their copies of the books to?

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

> Disney still gets upset

Why do you care about Disney's emotional outbursts in the first place though?

> The problem is that it is now explicitly reserved for the rich.

That's not new - it has always served entrenched interests at the cost of actual artists and entertainers. John Perry Barlow laid this out with great clarity throughout his time with The Grateful Dead, perhaps best here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLbqgG6o1n8

The solution is straightforward -- be rich!

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.

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.