Comment by montroser
13 hours ago
This was always where this was heading, but we got here much faster than expected.
Once western governments declare it to be a "national security" risk for citizens to have access to open-weight frontier models, and once they classify using these models as acts of terrorism, what will that world be like?
Will using Kimi K3 come to be like how napster was in the olden days? Everybody knew it was technically illegal, but come on -- any track at your fingertips? But surveillance is quite more evolved now.
Or it will be like cannabis, where a guy in the neighborhood will low key rent you metered access to the 8x5090 rig in his basement he cobbled together from parts on ebay? Or everyone will flock to VPNs?
Or will the oppressors actually succeed? The same way that napster is long gone, and everyone accepts that they must pay spotify for a homogenized collection, where artists must take only a minuscule cut (more than napster though)... We'll be stuck with nerfed Cohere or Mistral models for open-weight options, as if they need more lobotomizing. Or else we can pay through the nose for Anthropic/OpenAI for "American Frontier" models which will fall increasingly far behind China.
Or else, like how Kindle Fire was subsidized by ads, we'll have "Kindle AI" where influence is sold to the highest bidder, where the LLM will tell us that smoking is actually healthy if big tobacco can engineer its renaissance by turning its lobbying dollars to pay-to-play, pumping its propaganda into the training pipeline for Amazon's extra commercialized line of ultra budget LLMs.
Basically a new iron curtain didving the world into digiatl blocks.The era of open internet/science is on its last legs with the potential forr bifurcation into incompatible ecosystems high , the onger the exchange is disrupted. As recently as this month the USgov has donce a Wolf Amendment style declaration for the Scientific collaboration NSF while shifting its purview under the military. To add to that its trying to rope as many countries into its Pax Silica idea intentionally to exclude China while simultaneosly coercing its 'allies' into using its nerfed offerings [1]
So maybe some isolated switzrland/singapore type locales would exist for US/EUusers to be able to dip their toes across the curtain legally without reprucursions.
[1] https://nitter.net/RnaudBertrand/status/2069574934972797089
At this point, the United States will lose that battle most Countries in the world are going end up using electronics from Asia, that ship has sailed Japan, China, Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Vietnam, dominate that area, China already dominates EVs, Drones and many other electronic devices, and with the way Donald Trump has picked fights, Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Mexico and many others are looking for other business partners.
If you need infrastructure done, China is dominating that area too. Rail, High-speed rail, Nuclear reactors, (near future Thorium reactors), Dams, Highway roads, bridges, Ocean ports, airports you name it, and they can roll it out, Transport ships, And if they don’t do it, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and Taiwan do.
Is it too late? No, not necessarily, but America needs a regime change…
[flagged]
3 replies →
If they outlaw open source models that'll just handicap American companies, the rest of the world will be running open source and have an arbitrage against US companies.
Exactly. It's an incredibly stupid idea to restrict access to open source models if your want your nations economy to succeed.
The disappearance of high ram Mac studio rigs is probably just a coincidence, right? :/
More like the pricing was too turbulent. Apple doesn’t really do rapidly changing prices and there isn’t any stable price for that much ram.
> western governments
Are you talking about the US, specifically?
Why would other countries, that don't share the same anxiety about China as the US, would be troubled with the this?
"Why would other countries, that don't share the same anxiety about China as the US, would be troubled with the this?"
It's the other way around.
There is a high likelihood that many countries of the "west" (the "global north"?) will outlaw, restrict, or otherwise control LLMs and the tools that enable them.
The US, however, is blessed with the first amendment which makes it extremely difficult to restrain speech in any form - including code.
Ahhahahhahahhahaha. aaahhahhahhhaahahrggnmg. lol.
The US might pressure them?
US pressure is worth a lot less than it used to be; that's why other developed countries are urgently prioritizing digital sovereignty after years of technological sclerosis where they were happy to run on US-managed cloud infrastructure.
It's not just the tariffs and imperialist/autocratic aspirations of the current President; it's also the fecklessness of the federal legislature and the revelation via social media that a large cohort of the public hold a negative-sum worldview and enthusiastically endorse bad faith dealing.
EU countries are homeshoring their digital stacks as fast as they possibly can, and the reason is precisely because of the pressure that the US government is exerting via its (temporary) dominance in technology.
Those days are gone. Look no further than the occupant in the White House. IE the Swedish jet industry is about to get bigger, future drone expertise, if the Ukraine can hold on if you want to learn the ins and outs, you don’t need the United States. If you’re serious about learning and building drones.
It’s going to be a different world, a world where many former allies are not gonna look to the United States first they can no longer afford to.
Not sure if you noticed, European countries are distancing themselves from the US. They couldn't be pressured to offer logistic support to the US shitshow in Iran, why would they be pressured to help the US in its protectionism of its AI bubble?
Well, many EU countries like Italy and Germany officially freaked out about DeepSeek, ordering it to be banned from app stores etc.
That's about the mobile apps specifically, and it is related to personal data of EU citizens being transferred to servers in China.
It has nothing to do with running open models, especially in hardware within Europe.
even 8x rtx pro 6000 is only 768GB of VRAM. IDK how anyone is going to run k3
This is why God gave us 1.58-bit ternary quants?
1-trit*
Free server racks for everyone when the bubble bursts!
No they will ship it to China as ewaste and then sell it back to us.
2 replies →
"Free server racks for everyone when the bubble bursts!"
I actually have this trophy from the previous bursting bubble ... a Sun microsystems rack populated with three e4500.
$750k + of equipment at original list price ...