Comment by philjohn
2 days ago
And don't forget the amazing workaround Zimmerman of PGP fame came up with - the source code in printed form was protected 1A speech, so it was published, distributed, and then scanned and OCR'd outside the US - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy#Criminal_i...
And don’t forget Thawte which ended up selling strong SSL outside the US, cornering the international market thanks to US restrictions, and getting bought by Verisign for $600M.
I hope this time we finally get a Supreme Court ruling that export controls on code are unconstitutional, instead of the feds chickening out like last time
I doubt that would work for model weights because they are generated algorithmically rather than being written by humans, which probably means that they are not speech.
Not to mention how much paper it would take to print 500B weights
I for one would love to see model weights published in hardcover book form.
What a throwback to the time when some edgy folks would share printed codes in Pascal… I even remember seeing a hard copy of a binary in hex which was best not to execute.
It might be somewhat prohibitive to print the model weights for any sufficiently large model, though.
Using 2d barcodes you can fit ~20MB per page. Front and back you could probably fit a model that violated the rule on less than a thousand pages.
Edit: maybe 10k pages
Skip the barcodes - just cast it to 24bit RGB data, add in some error correction, and print as a high-DPI bitmap (or a series of them, one per page).
2 replies →
I’m doubtful that barcodes would qualify as free speech.
how about printing URL to download the weights file?