Comment by petilon
3 hours ago
Enormous amounts of money is being invested in the development of AI models. Investors expect returns on their investment or they will not continue investing. Open weights make it harder for investors to get their money back, so it harms the industry.
Once the weights are out, it makes no sense to ban them in the US while the rest of the world takes advantage of it. But that doesn't mean developers of frontier models shouldn't take steps to prevent their weights from being stolen.
Ridiculous. If investors wish to set their money on fire investing in over-valued companies, they are welcome to do so. Protectionism to preserve ROI is a dumb policy. Just look at the US car industry. We're building dinosaurs. On this trajectory we'll have 0% market share abroad in 10 years. Chinese EVs will probably get market share at a 100% tariff because US automakers fell so far behind.
Same situation in protectionism in AI. The rest of the world will simply lap us.
Another shill account I gues
How are weights stolen from the frontier model developers? What is that actual mechanism?
The weights themselves aren't stolen. The claim is that Chinese companies are using VPNs and proxies to buy massive amounts of Claude Pro and Codex subscription accounts, and then selling usage on those subscriptions as cheap white-label LLM API usage.
While selling that LLM API usage, they then capture all the prompts, outputs, and intermediate thinking the LLM does, and then sell those logs to the companies making open-weight models. The open-weight model developers then train on those logs to 'distill' a model.
The parent I replied to said frontier weights were “being stolen” which is not the literal case. I think precision is important here.
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Fantastic, thank you for the explanation!
...good for them?
We used to call that competition.
Imagine making this argument with a straight face in any other industry:
"The claim is that Japanese car companies are buying Ford vehicles, and then leasing them to American consumers at cut-rate prices. In return for the cheap cars, the customers are letting the Japanese observe their driving behavior, studying how they use their F-150 and then the Japanese car companies are applying that data to design new vehicles that will directly replace Ford!"
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