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Comment by fluffybucktsnek

7 days ago

Indeed, but Chinese AI model companiea are harder to held accountable by the US than US companies, so there's some sense for the US to prefer national models over international ones.

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fluffybucktsnek

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aceazzameen  7 days ago

A Chinese company has less incentive to use US customer's data than a US company does. Does a Chinese company have an incentive to steal national secrets or cause disruption? 100%. But any firm or project that has national secrets should be vetting everything and using in-house software anyway. And if not, then if I were China I'd be trying to breach the makers of the software (in this case Anthropic,OpenAi,etc).

For the average person, China doesn't care about you or me. For a US company, US citizens are their gold mine.

If anything, the competition from a Chinese company will reduce a US company's possible profits. That's the threat. That's why Chinese EVs are banned in the US and why Chinese LLMs are next.

Just because something is made in China does not make it a threat to the US. The US trades all sorts of goods, produce, etc with China. The traded goods can be poisoned at any time. At what cost? Well we wouldn't be able to trade anymore. And that hurts both sides. But once a foreign nation does something better than a US firm, the US will put up a ban to protect its own stock market. This isn't new.

  • fluffybucktsnek  7 days ago

    We are talking about a ban on Chinese AI on federal agencies. The concern isn't about the general citizen data, but private federal information and secrets, some of which could pertain to critical IT infrastructure. This is absolutely of interest to Chinese companies, but also, primarily, the CCP (or any potential enemy, really).

    Restricting national secrets to only in-house software isn't guaranteed to provide better security (you still need to hire security specialists), but is guaranteed to spend resources in hiring sufficiently qualified personnel to maintain said software while ignoring the pool of potentially better qualified teams already hired by national companies. So, an alternative, is to use private contractors with different levels of secret sharing. This kind of choice isn't trivial to make.

    You seem to forgetting the bonus side of "The traded goods can be poisoned at any time." If the exfiltrated data is more worth than the repercussions that are going to emerge out of it, then it's absolutely worth it. And this isn't specific to China. China holds a similar perspective to US in this regard, but with foreign services in general (arguably more strict, given it affects the entire populace). You just can't know when a third party will go rogue, do they take a more conservative approach of producing "locally", with private companies they can punish if they go against their interest. The current US government, ironically, is good evidence of this.

bs7280  7 days ago

If the US had comparable open models as the chinese ones, I would love to see more investment into them. But instead our government is operating a lot more in line with how individuals who stand to profit from the private frontier models would operate...

  • fluffybucktsnek  7 days ago

    Personally, I agree. Still, it's not surprising that the government is choosing the safer option to itself. On itself, it's quite reasonable.

    I believe most people complaining about this decision are really just have grievances towards the state of US AI companies rather than the decision itself.

holgerschurig  6 days ago

> are harder to held accountable

Well, that is not an issue. The US companies that hacked other seem to not be prosecuted at all.

Also, no state attorney doesn't seem to prosecute them on the large scale intellectual theft. Instead content creators like movie companies or the kids book author that made the Grüffelo need to start one-after-the-other civil claims onto them.

So US companies in the LLM area can be ruthlessly criminal. No one holds them accountable.

There are rumors that they stole chat logs from mathemiticians running problems through them for their own math findings. Again, no one holds them accountable.

The "hold accountable" is IMHO just CEO speach: fluff and empty air, but nothing behind it. If my opinion is true, then it doesn't matter if I can NOT hold an european company, a US company, or a chinese company accountable.

Also, currently the US is more and more aggresive towards other countries. Haven't heard of China raising tariffs for no reason at all, but random amounts. Or bullying e.g. european companies if they want to control the the market might (and abuse of it, see e.g. their uncontractual price raises or what they did to Ukraine --- with Starlink terminals payed for by european countries!).

China is no one friends ... don't get me wrong. But it isn't as vile as the USA currently is.

  • fluffybucktsnek  6 days ago

    Like I have stated elsewhere, the US gov. only cares about accountability towards itself, not towards others. If OpenAI decides to "accidentally" reveal state secrets to foreign agents, the US will come after them.