Comment by roughly
7 days ago
This has the delightful and surely unintentional side effect of all but ensuring all federal agencies who want to use LLMs have to direct their budget to one of the domestic frontier labs (OpenAI, xAI), so that’s a nice big fat pipe of taxpayer money that’ll be going to backstop those cats while they deal with the fact that they’re getting their lunch eaten by competitors who didn’t decide the way to build a sustainable future was to incur future debts to the tune of a sizable percent of the GDP of a G20 nation.
You gotta make trade-offs.
Two facets here. Economy and Security. Is current US governemnt in favor of providing cheaper, less SOTA models to Americans at the cost of exposing US content to Chinese firms? Chinese firms by Chinese law are forced to handover whenever CCP asks them to.
Given all sensitive information, the security outjustify the cost here.
There are other areas we need to look at but for my analogy, this should work.
> Chinese firms by Chinese law are forced to handover whenever CCP asks them to.
Are we pretending the same isn't true of American firms?
> Are we pretending the same isn't true of American firms?
Are we really pretending it's equivalent?
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The steel man is that American requests must be lawful, are done transparently through the courts, are appealable, and don’t come through secret agencies.
The titanium gold alloy man is that the Chinese laws are inarguably stricter and more authoritarian than the US laws, regardless of the actual implementation of either.
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The United States government needs to make tradeoffs. They are as you list.
The Chinese government also needs to make tradeoffs. You can imagine what they are.
You as an individual also need to make tradeoffs. In doing so, you ought be sure to remember you’re not a nation state, you’re an individual human being.
(You may decide “I find myself one small being in a world full of nation states, and given that, I trust the US government to keep me safe, and therefore will align myself with its interests,” at which point “ban DeepSeek” is in your interests as well as those of the US government, but you shouldn’t get the two confused, lest you miss the moments those interests diverge.)
I am an individual living in a nation state that has nurtured and protected me and made me rich, comparatively, so it is in my interest to pledge allegiance to that nation and protect it in kind. One of the ways is by not giving training data to foreign models runners which doesn't mean we can't run the foreign models locally.
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I swear that "think of the children" as the means of getting perverse laws justified has just been switched with "but... China".
Let's not fool ourselves into trying to believe this is anything other than protecting the interests of a few of Donny Tango's mates. He has already proven that he has absolutely no problem throwing the USA, its citizens or its allies under the bus for a couple quid.
Eh I don’t buy it. The framework for a US owned Deepseek is there and easy to put together. What isn’t there is the money.
My assumption is that money has been hitting the right pockets to make that not happen.
Completely disregarding security aspect without any rebuttal for my claim.
Your assumption is half-assed because it's missing that
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Absurd. Deepseek is open source. You can just self host it.
lol. Yeah just use “CCP” and “security” as bogeyman keywords you’d absolve all the crimes from closed labs and win arguments automatically
The orders bans the use of open weights provided by DeepSeek too. It bans the use of the open source inference engine DeepSeek released today.
Sure. Wayyy more secure to shovel federal data into OpenAI /s
I'd guess a lot of government agencies (globally) will end up with their own compute clusters hosting open source models. Much cheaper at that scale and much less hassle than defining which critical data cannot be fed to an external llm.
Not sure if the US will fall under that since it's slightly less risky for the US government, but I wouldn't be surprised.
A lot of government agencies already started doing this and the US government is far from the only one banning on-prem Chinese open weight models. Can't answer whether this makes sense, but I do think a lot of policy makers just figure there are mostly comparable alternatives that don't carry that vague risk.
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Two things can be true. Deepseek is a great model doing great things for democratizing AI and the federal government should never use a Chinese model for anything serious or sensitive, China will have access to literally everything. And before anyone gets upset over that, China would be crazy to use American models for anything sensitive because you have to assume the US government could access it. It goes both ways.
This ban also applies to on-prem hosting of Deepseek, and to finetunes/post-trains of Deepseek models that are provided by US-based inference providers. It's not a given that the Chinese would be able to access any of that.
It’s also not a certainty that they wouldn’t be able to access it. Verification of everything would be prohibitively expensive, it’s far cheaper to have US-based LLM companies which are compliant to whatever standard already be used, even if their tokens are more expensive.
As they say, better the devil you know.
> China will have access to literally everything
So these are open weight models. You can run them on your own hardware. How would they have “access to literally everything”? Or what is the threat model you are thinking about here?
To be fair, it is possible that an open-weight model could still hose you by exfiltrating data in response to prompt injection. Whether or not it's abliterated doesn't change that fact.
Say I'm doing advanced semiconductor fabrication research. All of the papers in the field go straight into my local model for digestion. But a lot of those papers are from the same adversarial nation that provided my model weights, and the newest one from XXX University of YYY has a particular phrase in it that lights up some activations that I didn't know about. If that system has access to anything beyond a bunch of academic papers, there is a potential risk of exfiltration or even outright sabotage. The latter could range from providing intentional misinformation to bricking expensive hardware Stuxnet-style.
Imposing your own strict data-access guardrails will probably be the best you can do, at least for a while. But it's soooo tempting to just hand-wave it away and give the model the keys to your kingdom.
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On the plus side, this should allow for more DeepSeek supply for consumers and private sector, and presumably lower prices. Which is great since DeepSeek provides like 10x more value/$ than openai an anthropic.
Mostly agreed, especially with the first part. However:
> [...] incur future debts to the tune of a sizable percent of the GDP of a G20 nation.
Whether you finance your company via debt or equity is a commercial decision. It's a finance and tax optimisation question. No need to moralise.
That's an outcome of the market strength of those companies though. A cloud provider located in the US could host only American and allied models and be a perfectly good candidate for the defense department to use.
The reason why OpenAI and Anthropic are going to get the business instead is because they are better than the open models.
> because they are better than the open models.
There is never "better". There is only "better cost/benefit for X". If you need frontier performance, then yes, a frontier model is required. If you are flagging forms for human validation, you might get away with a much simpler and less smart model.
I agree with you but government contracts are often very broad and can cover multiple departments.
The DoD is likely going to choose one provider for all purposes so frontier performance will be a requirement.
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And they can set any price because there is no way to compete.
Cheers for the unbiased regulations!