Comment by hirako2000
2 days ago
And even that is backfiring, their partner citing GLM being useful there, and available in just a spin.
A ban on open weight models is never going to be enforceable.
2 days ago
And even that is backfiring, their partner citing GLM being useful there, and available in just a spin.
A ban on open weight models is never going to be enforceable.
> A ban on open weight models is never going to be enforceable.
Just watch them try. Look up those Napster witch-burning trials where they wanted 200k $usd per mp3 downloaded. They will scare everyone into believing that open weight models are illegal and very bad.
The difference is in enforceability.
Open weight models are less like Napster and more like DeCSS -- once you have the digital artifact, there's little external evidence you're using them.
Napster was easy to target because it was an open P2P network and specific key US individuals.
If the US government banned open weight models tomorrow (national security grounds), they'd already get a lot of pushback, only increasing day by day as more 'less than SOTA' solutions using them are deployed.
The US government could likely enforce this on its own supply chain (military and federal contracts, maybe some state funding) easily enough.
Enforcing it on private companies would be more difficult... maybe they could push that through, but it would likely take Congress to pass a law. And Congress is substantially less enamored with supporting OpenAI / Anthropic / Google / Meta.
And even if that gets pushed through, enforcement is going to be a bitch on smaller companies using non-US clouds.
But did that kill music downloads?
Like that line from The Social Network, "Do you wanna buy a tower records Eduardo?"
Bans in general don't have to be and rarely will be completely enforceable in all cases. But a ban with significant enough consequences would mean most businesses wouldn't think about trying them at some point, just to avoid the risk.
It isn't even as simple as banning copyrighted copies.
Weights are fungible.
I fine-tune an open weigh model and call it legit. Good luck for authorities to prove where the base model was from, or to prove a Tor connection a few months ago was fetching suspicious bytes.
Sure, and you could also go on Tor and buy all kinds of illegal things and they could have a hard time proving that you ordered them and not your arch nemesis to frame you. Banning those things won't stop 100% of people from buying and selling them, but it probably reduces the number who will. And more importantly, companies would be more risk averse on such a thing when they can just buy a similar product with no risk. They also will mostly avoid any GPL software entirely even though the risk there is a lawsuit from the FSF, which is a much less threatening thing than getting on the wrong side of the current US government.
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Home construction information is publicly available, but it doesn’t mean you can add a room to your home without government approval, even if you do all the work yourself!
BTW - When was the last time you saw mentions of DeCSS?
I worry that there could be real DMCA style weight put behind it. People would still be able to pirate open weights models perhaps, but big penalties for ever getting caught with one, and an end to public discussion about them. That would kill development for anyone not in a big firm, for example if Reddit and Hacker News are legally forced to ban discussions or link sharing on these topics. This is where so many of us learn about these topics and keep apace of it.
That would be truly ironic: companies get big harvesting any data with questionable copyright implications, then hide behind DMCA if access to the harvest is used "inappropriately".
Oh my dear the weight here is much much heavier, only the most amount of private money ever spent on a single technology, so much money it makes the copyright holders who paid for DMCA look like really really small fish