Comment by satvikpendem
2 hours ago
It's simple, the US government will put any Chinese open model companies on the entity list which blocks any company which does business with the US from also doing business with the Chinese companies. This creates a chilling effect where even if it may be harder to tell, no US company will be able to provide or use any overt Chinese open model and won't even risk trying to go around as the punishments for trying to evade the ban are severe.
But that's just the thing with open weights: you're not doing any business with company that made the model. They might publish the weights to a, say, European host, and then you download the model from Europe and and run it on your servers in America, and suddenly it's very hard to tell where the model was originally created.
Companies, where OpenAI and Anthropic make much if not most of their revenue, will not risk it. You're thinking like an engineer not a business person, risk is fundamental to their calculus. They'll instead just use known provenance models like GPT or Claude, entrenching these companies further.
Yep, add a few blank layers, fine tune it a tiny bit and the weight checksums nor parameter counts won't match with anything, while the model will be practically the exact same. Time and time again random startups have tried passing established open models as their own.
"You made this? I made this."
Of course a conspicuous architecture would still give it away.
someone can run tests and see that models output exactly the same results, and then you are open to criminal investigation.
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It's hard to see how a statistical model can be banned, regardless of its origin. Is there a precedent for that?
Hosting and providing Chinese models wouldn't be the same as doing business with the sanctioned entities though, you don't interact with them in any capacity if you only use the weights and don't sign any contracts.
They can easily write the law such that your first part becomes illegal too.