Comment by capevace

> Someone please enlighten me what the actual argument here is, cause I can’t see it.

> The only thing a ban would do is protect the American market from further downward price pressure on inference, protecting VC investors in the short term. But thats also an admittance that the American labs can’t compete on merit anymore

That's the argument. To be precise the publicly stated argument is that they're attacking American providers by distilling. The real aim is to eliminate competition because otherwise Anthropic and OpenAI are non viable and the US views them as crucial for winning the 'AI race' which they see as putting whoever wins it on top in terms of warfare/economic power etc.

> But thats also an admittance that the American labs can’t compete on merit anymore

This is exactly it.

Try to buy a BYD in the United States. You can't (without a complicated process) because they're so much better cars than our domestic brands that our domestic brands couldn't compete and lobbied to keep them out.

> should by itself also limit the viability of the idea that all those VC billions will ever make a return?

It just has to last until the next quarter / fundraising round.

You're not seeing it because you're thinking in terms of internal US economics, but this is a question about international economics and geopolitical leverage in the distant future.

The reason to consider the ban is because it might be the only way to preserve a fully autonomous and independent American frontier AI stack and the long-term strategic value of possessing such a stack could vastly outweigh the cost of giving up true free market competition on AI. If giving US startups and other companies access to cheaper Chinese AI means sacrificing the US's ability to own its own frontier AI stack, is that a rational trade, or would it severely and irrecoverably sacrifice the country's technological autonomy and leverage for decades to come in exchange for cheaper tokens for a little bit early on?

If the US not only gives up most of its manufacturing capability to China, but also allows itself to give up its own AI stack and become almost entirely dependent on foreign AI, then it's conceivable the combination of the two sacrifices will deal a permanent deathblow to the country in exchange for what will turn out to have been a couple decades of cheap goods and AI tokens.

> The only thing a ban would do is protect the American market from further downward price pressure on inference, protecting VC investors in the short term.

> Someone please enlighten me what the actual argument here is, cause I can’t see it.

But you did see it.

The US has invested trillions in AI that the companies involved are never going to make back. Even without competition from open models, but definitely not with it. And if those trillions turn out to be worthless, that's going to have a massive impact on the market and cause a lot of bankruptcies.

Banning those open weight models isn't going to fix everything, but it would the impossible obstacle slightly smaller.

You aren’t missing anything. There isn’t an actual argument, this is strictly an attempt at regulatory capture.

> The only thing a ban would do is protect the American market from further downward price pressure on inference, protecting VC investors in the short term

It won't even do this. Streisand effect will probably draw even more attention to the open weight models

The entire marketing narrative in AI already operates this way --- "GPT 2.0 is too dangerous to release, oh noooo!" etc

The CFO or wtv that tweeted, their argument was, if you allow cheap free competitive models, you will stop the influx of capital in frontier development of even more powerful LLMs, thus capping how far the tech could reach. Obviously, they're mostly asking for regulation to save their money, but it seems their argument is that without an environment that rewards the development of the next frontier model the tech might not evolve as fast.

it's simple.

AI labs and investors are scared, and pushing administration to ban them, because they can't compete with Chinese models soon, similar to how they banned Huawei, and Chinese cars.

When there is cheaper alternative, companies might go with self hosting option, which reduces the enterprise moat of AI labs

How would it even be stopped if you could ban it? It's not like you're banning just one company. Anyone with the resources can still obtain and run the models. Sure, big models like Kimi K3 will be less accessible until a foreign version of Openrouter with no incentive to listen to US law begins offering it. Or they offer it and obfuscate what model it actually is behind codenames.

It wouldn't surprise me if that kind of problem is partially why weights are open. Because you can't meaningfully stomp them out completely.

I don't think there actually is a congnizant argument other than to protect investments. And of course they cant say that. You are using way to much logic in this. You are witnessing powerful people who are operating way outside the scope of their own abilities thrash around. AI isn't being stopped. Definitely not by people who value money. The inertia at this point is probably even too much for those who have some sort of ideological framework against it. To those of us who value ideas and progress, especially a non human-centric idea of what progress could look like, the path looks pretty clear. there is no stopping this. We are working everyday in so many small ways, not to capture value, but to advance the machine. the idea that some decree from an ageing narcissist and a pyramid of lackey bureaucrats is at all meaningful is just hilarious. Of course it's meaningful to the "economics". But many of us could really not care a lick as we don't do it for money.

Just gotta make it a few more months now to the IPO

> it’s not stopping distillation either,

> an admittance that the American labs can’t compete on merit anymore

Small contradiction here

> I don’t get it. Am I missing something? The only thing a ban would do is protect the American market from further downward price pressure on inference, protecting VC investors in the short term.

You say you don't get it then you say exactly why they are doing it. You get it just fine.

Actual arguments are only there to make govt do something. Intent is to stop competition. With Chinese models being let's say 6 months to year behind it's quickly shrinking profit margin that even if we hit the pie in the sky AI usage numbers the American companies want us to believe, they wouldn't be able to live off with that competition

The point would be to not allow (mostly) Chinese agencies to profit from the American market by ripping off (mostly) American frontier models.

Just like unlicensed dupes of designer goods can be intercepted at the border.

I don't think we can separate out an enlightened argument from the total politics of out time. We are amidst a struggle between labor and capital, nationalism, and the commodification of humanity's most impressive engineering feat. There is a subset of humans who are romanticizing foregone times with artificial intellectualism. This group as significant control over media and are very good at oersuadion through emotions rather than reason.

Your argument about not successfully competing doesn't hold because distillation is essentially model stealing. The situation is like trying to compete on effort in school on an exam against someone who's copying your answers. Of course the person copying your answer will always have to study fewer hours.

I sympathize with the argument saying that they ripped the whole Internet and books first though of course.

The argument is that it will make $OAI and $ATHR billions of dollars because U.S. customers with deep pockets will have nowhere to go but the "vetted as safe and verified model providers" aka the duopoly. No one with two brain cells to rub together takes anything they or the current U.S. government has to say at face value.

This is a tale as old as the industrial revolution. I can only hope people see the trick for what it is this time.

It's to protect the market dominance of US providers of course, the security concerns are just an excuse.

More broadly, this is one of the things I dislike about the US political system. When executives or major shareholders can legally make very large political donations while their companies are lobbying on issues that directly affect their businesses, it creates an unavoidable perception problem.

There is no coherent reasoning here for banning open weights. The billion of dollars to train a model was supposed to be a moat so they can sell tokens. AI labs can't make money by capturing values from intelligence if any company could get the weights to build their own AI token factory.

I wonder how they would feasibly ban it. They could do so with some infrastructure offering to run it, but ultimately you would be able to run your own private instance. What am I missing here, how would the ban be implemented?

I expect this to be just posturing, but still

Same as the tariffs, more or less. Both hinge on the same argument: foreign competition will drive down profits for domestic providers, so banning the foreign competition (or making them more expensive) will benefit domestic players

It’s to try and direct investment capital into US foundational model firms and to capture that market globally. It requires the containment of China, and cutting it off from the rest of the world, which is the broader geopolitical play at work

I've said before that I think red team security researchers should be able to investigate the security of government and corporate systems without needing permission.

Currently companies say "you cannot investigate the security of our systems without our permission, because it is our system and we are responsible--also, if there's a data breach, we aren't responsible." See how that works? As a society we seem fine with this.

We are sacrificing national security for the convenience of companies.

So... to answer your question:

Probably, again, we will sacrifice national security, and even our national competitiveness in this important new AI industry--we will sacrifice it all for the convenience of companies and so they can make a few bucks.

It's more important than ever that the good guys actively monitor government and corporate systems for security flaws. These open-weight models are going to be in the hands of the bad guys; the hackers are coming whether the company is ready or not. Ideally a good hacker will find and disclose the vulnerabilities before a bad hacker pwns half the nation's personal data for the 3rd time this month--or worse.

This will require that we stop bullying security researchers. Things like the State Governor personally pushing for felony charges because somebody pressed "view source" on an HTML page shouldn't happen.

How would banning them even work anyway? Like would they say that possession of one on your computer would somehow be illegal?

There’s nothing the US gov can do to stop a Chinese company publishing the weights on a server hosted in China.

I don't know if this fallacy has a name but there's something about "it's useless to make something illegal because the bad guys will ignore the law".

They will not actually shut it down. Rather, they will simply continually posture in that direction and release a statement that the wrong lawyer can interpret the wrong way. This will make it a soft no-no for anyone involved in government procurement which is most big companies thus ensuring american AI companies have the market, while also ensuring startups, etc still have access to the structurally lower-cost chinese models (otherwise, they will simply resort to the black market which is why they will never enforce a full ban). In most US-adjacent countries like India, anyone that sells to US companies I see avoiding chinese model providers for the same reason. The exception is fine tuning and running it on their own hardware, which naturally everyone is completely fine with since no money flows to the chinese model company.

Tl;dr, it's purely an economic argument. Every major argument in the world is about money and thus power, don't bother analysing it technically.

> But thats also an admittance that the American labs can’t compete on merit anymore

Merit was never competitive. Mass consumption habits select hard for cost, and this is an industry driven entirely by scaling factors. If you can scale for cheaper, you win. Ivy League-decorated researchers aren't doing RnD for free. The frontier labs can only go so cheap before they're so far in the red that VC gets cold feet. Leaving the expensive frontier research up to private enterprise wasn't a long-term strategy.

> I don’t get it. Am I missing something? The only thing a ban would do is protect the American market from further downward price pressure on inference

What's not to get? Do you understand how much money is tied up in the industry? Do you know what happens if that goes up in flames? In the middle of a massive asymmetric economic depression? Why on earth do you think they would just sit there and watch it happen? Because of political virtue signaling about free markets? You know, I have a bridge to sell you if you're interested.

Freedom means having choice. So we gave you two choices, and you're going to use both and you're going to love it.

> I‘m not even sure what the argument for banning Chinese models/open weights even is supposed to be?

Easy: you're a traitor, if you use foreign AI for the fraction of the cost. It's unamerican not to fill the American billionaires pockets. Free markets exist, as long as you buy America first!

The official reasoning they use is sanctioning 'intellectual theft' due to distillation.

You get it that it is to protect two american labs and the ego of the orange man?

They dont want dollars that could be used to grow US frontier labs to fund Chinese instead

The first that comes to mind is that they want the surveillance to stay in the region.

It will force US companies (and EU probably) to buy only from OpenAI/Anthropic.

answer to #1:

murder is already illegal, but we also heavily regulate explosives because the public can't be trusted.

This is less so a hedge against Chinese labs catching up to the frontier/OAI Anthropic falling in valuation, and more a hedge against a complete recession. We are overleveraged in AI investment and if tomorrow any Chinese Lab can drop a model at the frontier what was the point of all those billions. Now, if you can protect the American model from the bubble popping even for just long enough to hedge risk a little better, then you may just prevent collapse. The problem is though, that the market is heavily irrational right now and if anything this may just be the signal to investors to double down on American AI.

OpenAI and Anthropic valuation crashing would crash the entire AI story, which would crash the market.

This is why Dario has always wanted more regulation on AI. So that Anthropic would benefit from it.

Suppose a foreign actor deliberately builds an unaligned model, and dumps it at a very low cost through subsidies. Since the cost is lower, everyone integrates it into their business. But now the foreign actor has control; perhaps the model checks for instructions to execute, perhaps it has backdoors, perhaps... who knows?

I don't have a view on whether this is a sufficient argument to ban models from potential adversaries, but it's not as trivial as "regulatory capture".

It’s got electrolytes

just protectionism argument would suffice no?

It's to give unfair advantage to Anthropic and OpenAI who would then be expected to shower Donald Trump personally with hundreds of billions of dollars in cash, airplanes and tacky golden things.

The arguments come ex post facto. Their motivation is profit, because OpenAI is pitching the Trump admin on a 5% stake.

If the bubble pops before the midterms that will be bad. Everything must be used to ensure that doesn’t happen.

The problem isn't so much investors losing money, it's if this kills the economy.

A lot of elites are now unemployed with nothing better to do thanks to AI. Historically speaking, populist uprising are easily squashed except when you have a group of counter-elites supporting the movement. We're finally starting to see the results of that with the Deflock movement cutting down cameras.

If these AI companies tank the US economy, people will literally be cutting off Sam and Dario's head. For good reason.

>Someone please enlighten me what the actual argument here is, cause I can’t see it.

These people paid a lot of money to Trump and now they want to cash in on that bought influence.

> But thats also an admittance that the American labs can’t compete on merit anymore

It’s more an admittance that the capitalist model can lose to a more socialist approach, unless you “fight fire with fire” and use the government to distort the market for you.

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