Don't get me wrong: I'm all for open models, but I think it will get more and more difficult to distil-train them without (legitimate) access to frontier models.
People have no idea and everybody pretends to be an expert and ignore how good China is on AI research
If anything I bet these people will just use their knowledge to make even more money reselling tokens.
If non US citizens shouldn't have the models - wouldn't that cause both Anthropic and OAI to fire non-citizens?
Dont worry though, the rest of the entire world gets access to better chinese models :-), once they get a taste for those the US has lost their little trade game and the future truly belongs to China.
Its almost like they are serving it up on a silver platter.
ofc they are not, they are just betting all in their models will be better, which is unlikely. (just look at the chinese law and all the names atop of advanced AI papers...)
They would do what the thousands of other companies do with their tens of thousands of engineers handling ITAR/EAR-regulated software/hardware every day: compartmentalize their workforces, buildings, and access.
"wait, not like that"
Seems it blew in their faces and probably the new frontier models will be available only to a select few. Many people predicted this, only a naive person would believe that access to something with these capabilities would be decided by some dude in California.
I understand if its military hardware and software, that's the property of the US government however this is the property of a private company.. Now seemingly being commandeered and issued at the will of the government, sounds very Russian/Chinese to me.
Is there a precedent for this before in a democratic country ?
> Is there a precedent for this before in a democratic country ?
I'd argue US is not very democratic country given how many of what govt does goes against people's wishes. Same as UK
That could be argued but the core principle is freedom of commerce and private companies get a lot of runway. This seems completely counter to tha.
In all seriousness, I can’t believe the AI firms are abiding by this peacefully. If I truly loved my company, and I felt we were on the bleeding edge of incredible, life changing products, why would I allow my company to be set up for failure by remaining somewhere that clearly wants control over the sovereignty.
The US gov sees these AI companies as bartering power, not as innovation. Wouldn’t you as a parent always want what’s best for your child, not for yourself?
It also feels like they can’t just relocate out of the country, as the administration will surely sanction anyone from business within the country again. These firms are so over inflated with evaluations and opex, they’ve dug themselves into a corner.
This is not to say regulation does not exist in any other country, but it’s clear now after what’s happening at Anthropic + OAI that the US gov has taken these companies hostage.
This is only further playing into the hands of open source and the outside models; the US gov is going to be to blame for when they all lose the race to low cost/free.
They literally asked for this.
Which, like the US, uses export controls when it finds them advantageous: https://nam.org/china-imposes-export-controls-on-u-s-mineral...
> In all seriousness, I can’t believe the AI firms are abiding by this peacefully. If I truly loved my company, and I felt we were on the bleeding edge of incredible, life changing products, why would I allow my company to be set up for failure by remaining somewhere that clearly wants control over my sovereignty.
So, locate in China, where every company of importance is essentially required in practice to maintain ties to the CCP?
I personally think the US has gone too far with its use of export controls and sanctions as a political tool, but it's foolish to believe that it's different anywhere else on the planet.
In China, it has even been reported that top AI talent is restricted from overseas travel.
https://www.thinkchina.sg/technology/china-tightens-control-...
Bottom line: if you're working on cutting-edge technology that is deemed to be of critical national security importance and has military or dual use implications, you're going to be a hostage no matter where you go.
Ant Group: China halted Ant’s IPO and forced a restructuring
Alibaba: China fined and politically disciplined Alibaba
Didi: China punished Didi after its US listing by removing its apps, freezing users, forcing delisting
Tutoring platforms: banned profit from core school-subject tutoring.
Tencent gaming: restricted youth gaming froze approvals
NetEase and gaming companies: licence freeze stopped game companies from shipping games.
Meituan: fined Meituan and forced changes to its labour and platform model.
Huya/DouYu: blocked Tencent’s game-streaming merger, stopping commercial consolidation in a major entertainment market.
Boss Zhipin / Full Truck Alliance: froze new users after listging in the US
Crypto companbies: banned crypto trading and mining, forcing exchanges offshore.
Think it's not happening to the US?
tourism - people afraid to visit
tariffs - wrecking ball to all businesses
defence - why would anyone buy US weapons after Greenland and Canada
internet clouds - Greenland made Europe decide that the US clouds can't be trusted, now sovereign computing matters and MS/AWS/Google are feeling it
finance - no one trusts the US not to turn people into "non members of global society" by banning them from visa and credit card and banking systems
Hopefully open-weight models will catch up, hopefully we, as the people, engineers will find the way to maintain those open-weight models on pair with the closed ones.
I try to be optimistic, as we won some battles, against all odds, Linux is flourishing, open source solutions are mainstream.
- instant, total world war if it's not coming from USA
- let's finish all oil's reserve first otherwise
But it is odd that this administration has learned absolutely nothing about the mid-term effects of export restrictions on other countries' ability to compete with the US.
Being told "no" is never fun, but the regulations are not hard to comply with (despite what Anthropic might have you believe.)
> I can't imagine US partners will abide this for long.
What are they going to do? Start their own Anthropic? Go for it. Why is every other country in the world entitled to American technology by default?
Because American tech companies make a lot of money from outside of the US. For instance, 1/4 of all Apple revenues are from Europe, and 1/5 from China and China-claimed territories. Only around 40% are from the Americas (so not even the US exclusively).
Would American tech companies be as successfull without ~half their revenues?
In any case, it doesn't matter, the cat is out of the bag. Nobody sane and non-American would trust American frontier labs, because their models can be yanked at will by whoever is in the White House. It would be suicidal to rely on them for critical business or developer workflows. So your options are to go with Mistral or open source Chinese models, hosted within your environment, with the added benefits of being able to control the costs and being able to fine tune the models to better work for you.
What are they going to do about it? Might makes right.
They've already done what little they can: pull access to their models wholesale rather than adopt an export compliance regime.
-the US is the only place where you can raise the kinds of money you need to run a lab like this.
-a government that won’t let you sell products to customers abroad will probably object even more to you moving abroad.
Even if you made the move abroad, that government might no longer let you access US data centers.
-This basically affects OpenAI and Anthropic, which make the only LLMs most people consider frontier nowadays. Since most open weights models rely on distillation of frontier models, it may genuinely entrench those companies more.
It may be playing into the hands of open source OAI/Anthropic dependencies start to look more dangerous, but it also makes building better OSS models harder.
The advantages the AI labs rely on might be less durable than a proprietary process in industrial manufacturing, but it’s still meaningful.
digitaltrees•1h ago
verdverm•1h ago
wondering when more people will raise their voice and get engaged
King-Aaron•1h ago
hdgvhicv•55m ago
helloplanets•19m ago
necovek•15m ago
small_model•49m ago
ed_balls•44m ago
Argonaut998•40m ago
It’s only a matter of time before companies start to acknowledge the huge cost of tokens and look for a cheaper alternative with basic cost-benefit analysis.
My F500 company is getting local infrastructure going to host open models and I’m sure many will just switch to bedrock + the best open models.
It’s foolish for companies to let three companies dictate the price of tokens, I just don’t think they are aware of this now by and large.
matheusmoreira•16m ago
bilekas•20m ago
15155•10m ago
Why wouldn't they just tell Hugging Face that they need to abide export restrictions directly - they're an American company?
Doesn't sound dystopian enough without a second compelled entity?
avaer•5m ago
Any company providing the models will be deemed a threat to national security.
No need to block the download.