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Comment by freakynit

10 hours ago

I will get downvoted, but fck it.

The ban on these open models is coming within weeks, if not days. As usual, the excuse will be "national security".

How exactly will they ban them?

  • By making companies using them "toxic" to touch.

    For example: no government contract to any company who uses even one vendor in it's entire chain of dependencies, who uses such open models.

    They can extend this further by laying more conditions, such as: any company dealing in this-this field can only use models "officially" approved as "safe". Rest you can guess how easy it would be to get that "safe" rating for such open models.

    • Some contractors are already barred from using Claude due to DoD designation back in March as a "supply chain risk"

    • So now the US companies will be stuck on expensive models while the rest of the world can do things much more cost effective.

      I'm not sure the outcome would be beneficial for the US as a whole here. But perhaps that is not their priority.

      1 reply →

Hell, the US doesn't even need to act.

I claim the CCP will wise up within 2 years, possibly much much sooner, and ban their own companies from open sourcing to prevent the Americans from acquiring the capabilities.

Despite all the nonsense claims of China distilling US models, the reality is that the Americans absolutely do distill these free Chinese models, and distillation when full logprobs are available (i.e. you have access to the weights of the model) is an order of magnitude better than when you don't.

Yes, Chinese open weight models in the short term harm US closed source model providers bottom line. In the slightly longer term, "showing your hand" and publishing both the architecture innovations and the models weights will be too dangerous for the CCP to allow. This is triply true if they can release a model that beats the Americans on most benchmarks.

I've already warned investors that this is probably the closest open weight models will ever get to closed access.

why would you get downvoted, that's one of the most obvious next step