Comment by storus
17 hours ago
I think the window for a ban of open weight models is closing fast so let's hope US administration is going to miss it and we get Fable-level models (at least in some aspects) with open weights without infringing any newly introduced law as a long-term local baseline.
Even if the US does ban it, Europe due to its lack of European competitors, has no current similar protectionist incentives. Even if there is regulatory capture in the US, the rest of the world isn't going to follow suit until the current market leaders outright are replaced with other competitors that Europe would want to favor. The genie is out of the bottle in the West already.
> lack of European competitors
There's Mistral. Although they've been surprisingly quiet for the last 6 months.
They are profitable and active on the enterprise local model territory. You can RL a model with them for your own purposes and I heard good things about it.
2 replies →
> There's Mistral
https://trackingai.org
Mistral: eq.IQ ~70
Kimi, Claude, Grok, Gpt, Gemini: eq.IQ ~130+
France might do something mad and take that route, but EU wide ain't happening for Mistrals sake.
1 reply →
Theres a pretty big chance imho that europe will follow suit , or at least the segmenets that are fully aligned with the US on all things china even to their own detriment. Remeber rip and replace Huawei 5G because of national security , leading to some parts of europe having worse coverage than some tiny african markets. Best bet would be for europe to look at it like what it is an open source commodity that is useful to build on rather than a moat to extract rents with.
Doubt it now when US declared that Europe is an enemy, Europe is banned from the best models and that US is considering an invasion of Europe (Greenland). The days of US influence in Europe is limited.
If it was 2021, probably. But Trump has soured relations in the last 18 months enough that the soft power about technology isn't there like it once was assumed to be. What's he going to do if Europe doesn't step in? Jack up tariffs? Is it that day of the week already?
Open weights is more beneficial to Europe spring-boarding a catch up than defending Claude/Anthropic.
If CADA passes in its current state I doubt we'll be banning Chinese models any time soon. I think most people misunderstand the extent of the permanent damage caused by Trump
1 reply →
Yeah… but last 5 years happened and UE is now in the overdrive to decouple from Usania :D
well, the EU just brought down the regulatory hammer which complicates things a bit. we will have to see if it operates as a proxy ban on open models depending on how they go about enforcing all the safety, bias, transparency and data provenance requirements.
I mean there is Mistral?
I mean it’s not competitive at all?
4 replies →
>Europe due to its lack of European competitors, has no current similar protectionist incentives [...] The genie is out of the bottle in the West already.
I agree, but you are underestimating EU regulatory incompetence
Yeah, but the world is not limited to the US so who cares…
If it's fable level then I am sold. I didn't have so much success with Qwen compared to claude x supermax plus thinking, no matter what I did.
What can the US administration do about it?
Send you to jail.
Worked well with alcohol last time
1 reply →
How can the US administration send me, a citizen of Sweden, to jail?
3 replies →
No.
What they always do. Send in armed men with guns? Export Controls. Import Controls. National Security Laws.
Good luck doing that in China?
5 replies →
Import control would only affect US? Also good luck sending armed men to China.
Level 1: Anyone using unauthorized model weights in their business is prohibited from doing business with the government...
Level 2: ... or with anyone who does.
Level 3: Anyone caught with unauthorized model weights is subject to the same prosecution they could expect if they had been caught with CSAM.
Cool - how are they going to detect/police that?
9 replies →
They can't enforce a ban. Companies can just download the models and run them on MacBooks or GPUs (or the cloud) and USG has no idea. It would also hurt the administration's funding from corporate tech (companies don't like to fund politicians who restrict them). I'm not saying the administration won't do it, it would just be very dumb.