Comment by tptacek
10 days ago
I see it too, but worth noting that this is basically unprecedented at least within the last 25 years; I think you have to go back to export controlled cryptography for another example of this kind of abrupt and targeted regulation.
We’ve seen more examples recently. TikTok, wireless routers, polestar cars…
Huawei, Foreign gambling sites were banned on dubious reasons in 2006 (in reality American companies weren't as competitive and las Vegas needed to be protected), Japanese electronic tariffs in the 80s/90s ...
US never exactly believe in full on 'free trade'.
The US believed in free trade precisely when the politically connected needed labor arbitrage, and protectionism exactly when the politically connected needed protection. The pretense of underlying ideals was never more than a political tool - political economy was always political.
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"Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective by Ha-Joon Chang"
"How did the rich countries really become rich? In this provocative study, Ha-Joon Chang examines the great pressure on developing countries from the developed world to adopt certain 'good policies' and 'good institutions', seen today as necessary for economic development. His conclusions are compelling and disturbing: that developed countries are attempting to 'kick away the ladder' with which they have climbed to the top, thereby preventing developing countries from adopting policies and institutions that they themselves have used."
https://www.amazon.com/Kicking-Away-Ladder-Development-Persp...
> Japanese electronic tariffs in the 80s
Also motorcycles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_motorcycle_tariff
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The entire US auto industry is predicated on protectionism. Without it the Japanese would have wiped out GM/Ford/Chrysler in the 1980s, and now the Chinese in the 2020s-2030s.
Also, radar technology has been under export controls of various kinds by Washington continuously since WWII.
US never championed free trade if by free trade you mean "anything goes."
Really strange that rest of the world can tariff and put up barriers, but once the US does that, all free-trade warriors step out of the wood work.
See the Chicken tax for trucks for a not so recent example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax
I think that's a bit different. The crypto-wars were about restricting strong encryption IN GENERAL. Not targeting a specific vendor.
The equivalent would be to restrict all LLMs with a minimum number of weights.
That's probably as futile, but remember for how long the encryption ban proved to be a nuisance.
TikTok ban was the worst one because it was about speech, not trade or security. If the bill said "China banned our social media so we're gonna ban theirs in reciprocity," that'd be a way more valid reason.
It's also super annoying being collateral damage in America's war on free speech. Canadian TikTok is now also being similarly moderated for content unfriendly of your administration. I guess we're still in a position of privilege where we can grow domestic social platforms to compete while American simply have no alternatives - anything that grows sufficiently large will be turned towards similar propaganda aims.
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China didn't even blanket ban them. They established laws that Internet companies have to follow and most U.S. tech companies refused to comply. Some did (e.g. Bing) and aren't banned.
Instagram is just as worse.
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DJI, Huawei and the list goes on. Definitely no need to go back "25 years". The USG is turning into a joke of a surveillance state. As if any of the US based tech is truly any less backdoor'd? Cisco and Flock and Google and Facebook and Microsoft, oh what amazing technology companies that could never be used for... Oh wait, what a fantastic endgame we're on course for! I wonder why other nations are actively moving away from US tech?
A real headscratcher isn't it? And from a government that is supposedly priding itself on small government. How should companies navigate this? What's the framework they should operate within?
Claiming the mantle of "small government" was simply an exercise in marketing to relax regulation meant to prevent bribery and corruption. In practice, the current slate of government officials believes in absolute control of whatever they want whenever they want.
It's a mirror case of the supposed "free speech absolutists" who immediately turned around and silenced, sued, fired or jailed once granted the power to do so.
When has Trump or his administration said they were about small government? Are you confusing them with Paul Ryan?
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Small governments don't deploy thousands of military troops into their own cities.
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One of the few roles a "small government" should actually take on is defending from invaders.
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It's only small government when they are trying to not give money to some group they don't like.
Not a headscratcher at all, if you understand how our economy and politics are actually run.
It's almost like he expects bribes to release the model, but I'm just being paranoid.
The most important part of the mafia state is making everyone else a participant. It enforces your personal power and once in the system those parties will do things they would never imagine doing when they were outside of it.
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This whole administration is absolutely rampant with corruption. Just yesterday we had JD Vance on TV saying that if Watergate happened today, it would just be a 12 hour news story, because they are getting away with so much worse.
Anyone who denies or defends this administration's corruption is complicit.
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Anthropic peace prize coming up next.
I don't think Trump has ever said he's in favor of a small govt
Doge and project 2025 ...
There is one major reason why oligarchs are in favor of small government, when it's in their way. Another commenter said it already: it's only about power.
Munitions exporting. I fondly remember the PGP feasco. I spent years using PGP to encrypt my emails to several people who refused to use email without it. Good times.
release the weights! freedom of speech!
Whose speech? Nobody with the weights is trying to speak them.
it was a joke.
Yeah, that's what we need, frontier intelligence models open in the wild that, if a jailbreak is reliably established, there's no possibility for anyone to ever patch at the API layer. Because there is no API layer.
"This stack of 15.3 million t-shirts is a munition."
I was thinking more the first amendment, but second works too.
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I still have mine :)
Competent government wouldn't do this either... ...also why I think it won't last.
Doubtful it'd hold in court; this admin would have to show that it's not corruption, because we'd all assume otherwise.
Between $5-10T of the US economy is subject to export controls. Nobody disputes that Mythos is dual-use technology, which means it has been export controlled since the day it was created.
Companies are responsible for demonstrating criteria to export (for example) a nerfed version (Fable) of an export controlled item (Mythos)
Nothing here is novel, unusual, capricious, or … fascisistic.
We saw what happened with banning nvidia flagship compute GPU exports to China; it just spurred them to develop a domestic semiconductor industry while still importing black market GPUs at a minor markup. The US would do well to keep the world dependent on American products that are under the jurisdiction of the US government, and can therefore be regulated or killswitched. All this will do is allow China to have flagship model capabilities without being subject to the US at all.
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Nazism?