Comment by resters
1 day ago
Strong opposition to this regulation seems to be one of the main things that led a16z, Oracle, etc. to go all in for Donald Trump. It's interesting that Meta too fought the regulation by its unprecedented open sourcing of model weights.
Regardless of who is currently in the lead, China has its own GPUs and a lot of very smart people figuring out algorithmic and model design optimizations, so China will likely be in the lead more obviously within 1-2 years, both in hardware and model design.
This law is likely not going to be effective in its intended purpose, and it will prevent peaceful collaboration between US and Chinese firms, the kind that helps prevent war.
The US is moving toward a system where government controls and throttles technology and picks winners. We should all fight to stop this.
> The US is moving toward a system where government controls and throttles technology and picks winners
What else can it do? They don’t want to lose their lead, and whatever restrictions they’ve been putting on China et al. have let the exact desired outcomes so far. The idea is to try to slow down the beast that has very set goals (e.g. to become high tech manufacturing and innovation center), and try to play catch up (like on-shoring some manufacturing).
Personally, I’m skeptical that it will work, because by raw number of hands on deck, they have the advantage. And it’s fairly hard when your institutional knowledge of doing big things is a bit outdated. I would argue, a good bet in North America would be finding a financially engineered solution to get Asian companies bring their workers and knowledge to ramp us up. Kinda like the TSMC factory. Basically the same thing as China did in 2000s with western companies.
> They don’t want to lose their lead
What lead? The best open-source language models right now are Chinese. deep-seek is amazin, so is qwq.
> They don’t want to lose their lead, and whatever restrictions they’ve been putting on China et al. have let the exact desired outcomes so far.
They absolutely have not. The best open weights LLM is Chinese (and it's competitive with the leading US closed source ones), and around 10x cheaper both to train and to serve than its western competitors. This innovation in efficiency was largely brought about by US sanctions limiting GPU availability.
> The US is moving toward a system where government controls and throttles technology and picks winners.
Moving towards? The US has a pretty solid history of doing a great deal of this (and more) in the 20th century. But so did all of the world's powers... as they all continue to do today. It seems to be an inherent part of being a world power.
I agree this law won’t be effective in its intended purpose, and that China will develop models of their own that are sufficiently competitive (as we’ve already seen). However, I think seeking “peaceful collaboration” between the US (or Europe or many others) and China - either between governments or private firms - is a naive strategy that will simply lead to the US being replaced by a more dangerous superpower that does not respect the values of free and democratic societies.
I also think that to a great extent, we’re already at war. China has not respected intellectual property rights, conducted espionage against both companies and government agencies, repeatedly performed successful cyberattacks, helped Russia in the Ukraine conflict, severed telecommunications cables, and more. They’ve also built up the world’s largest navy, expanded their nuclear arsenal, and are working on projects to undermine the status of the US Dollar. All of this should have been met with a much stronger and forceful reaction, since clearly it does not fit into the notion of “peaceful collaboration”.
China’s unpeaceful actions aren’t limited to the West. China annexed much of its current territory illegally and through force (see Xinjiang and Tibet). When Hong Kong was handed back, it was under a treaty that China now says is not valid. China has been trying to steal territory from neighboring countries repeatedly, for example with Bhutan or India. They’ve also threatened to take over Taiwan many times now, and may do so soon. They’re about to build a dam that will prevent water from reaching Bangladesh and force them to become subjugated. The only peaceful and just outcome is for those territories to be freed from the control of China - which will require help from the West (sanctions, tariffs, blockades, and maybe even direct intervention).
Even within China, the CCP rules with an iron fist and violates virtually all principles of free societies and classically liberal values that we value in the West. I don’t see that changing. And if it doesn’t, how can they be trusted with more economic and military power? That’s why I don’t think we should seek peaceful collaboration with China. We just need smarter strategies than this hasty AI declaration.
China models are not only competitive, but better, because they do not care about copyright violations and they do not need to litigate with everyone. They can use better training material faster.
Where I'm looking from (Turkey) China is mostly harmless and the USA is a foreign invader that has invaded multiple neighboring countries. Between the two, I find the USA to be much more illiberal and dangerous.
You think China is harmless? Go tell that to Tibet, India, or Taiwan.
4 replies →
1. Sikkim was annexed by India 2. Bangladesh has many floods every year
I am not sure why Sikkim is relevant. I am not familiar with it, so I read about it now. And it looks like India’s prime minister actually pushed a resolution through noting that Sikkim is independent. But then Sikkim had a domestic movement to join India and voluntarily did that. This seems like the opposite of annexation.
Regarding floods - if Bangladesh wants an upstream dam, why aren’t they included as a decision maker on whether the Chinese dam goes ahead? Clearly this is because they would say no to it. The issue isn’t floods - it’s that China can withhold water for drinking and irrigation and threaten the country with starvation and famine. It’s a huge national security threat.
I don't think you're wrong but Big Tech is bending the knee to Trump because he will be picking the winners.