From my perspective, these LLM providers aren’t infrastructure providers but more like SaaS. And there are also open models that you can use to do anything you want.

These AI companies are also under a lot of scrutiny and sometimes it feels like whatever they do in this regard, they’re bound to piss someone off.

Last but not least, it seems like this is directly related to Anthropic’s latest models being blocked for export control by the US.

I would prefer if we just nationalized this stuff but if we have to let private companies control limited resources we can at least enforce anti-trust rules. That's effectively what net-neutrality is - preventing the monopolists from colluding with sites to provide uneven access.

Without that "head 'em off at the pass" collusion we'll actually stand a chance for things to get so bad legislators have to act.

With the frontier models ban, the rest of the world will just have more reasons to further detach technologically from the US, there's no way big tech, etc, can sustain such capex and valuations on US market alone.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated

(Detractors: I encourage you to turn "showdead" on in your HN settings and view its other comments before you jump to defense!)

What's going to be interesting is how the US government regulates US-based access to Chinese AI models, whether served domestically (e.g. GLM-5.2 from Amazon Bedrock, DeepInfra, etc), or from overseas.

I suppose if one fear is US domestic terrorists/hackers using AI, then restricting access to all models, regardless of country of origin, might make sense, but as far as restricting technology exports over national security concerns it wouldn't make much sense to restrict access to foreign models!

Crudely applied restrictions are likely to get worse before they potentially get better as the hype wears down and AI risk gets better assessed, but government control tends to be a one-way ratcheting up, so who knows. It's not inconceivable that the government may try to restrict use of local models too, which they could do by making it illegal to make open weights (maybe for selected models) available for download.

I have no idea about Persona though.

Meanwhile, apologia from the impartial influencer contingent is surely on its way to convince you "no! Persona IDV being allowed to train on my PII [0] is a GOOD thing! PLEASE don't vote with your wallet!"

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47777291

"These updates apply only to consumer accounts (Claude Free, Pro, and Max plans)."

Which is of course false, but you can imagine that's what the heuristics say is true 90% of the time.

We're gonna lose quite a long tail of interests and hobbies when the llms take over

The verification process started out as “just a photo of my driving licence” - turned out to be a video recording of my whole environment with no obvious previous mention or disclaimer of this. Then the requirement for a “quick selfie” suddenly appeared (pretends to be a photo but is full video again), I complied up until the “do you want your data processed by AI or the lowest bid in India?”

I noped out there, moved all the cash straight out (6 figures) and closed the account. They are now on my personal “blacklist”.

Opened a new building society account, which is all paper based for ID. I shall be opening many more such building society accounts that only deal in paper for ID purposes in the coming weeks.