This is regulatory capture in action. This will make it hard/impossible for new vendors to come into the market and only established companies will get to play, and charge, for LLMs. What does this mean for open source? Will it become illegal to download weights? What about train your own? Are we heading to a world where GPU use is regulated to ensure that illegal LLMs aren't being processed on your machine? More broadly though, how will this stop anyone but average people? Countries outside the us will completely ignore this and keep developing and moving ahead. Maybe Europe will adopt similar things but the genie is out. I can train insainly powerful models on my laptop. If you want to stop LLMs with legislation you can't do it like this.
As far as Europe is concerned they have recently signed up to the 'Pax Silica'[1] and willingly givrn the LLM space over to the US incumbents with buildtin legislation banning Chinese models and coperation with them.
So EU will be a renter of the LLMs that the US allows them to use.
In the long run OpenSource will dominate as it did in the DB(MySQL/Postgres)/ServerOS(Linux/BSDs) versus Proprietery rent seeking alts like Oracle and Microsoft et al.
Would be interesting to see what the global startups using Qwen/DS/Kimi etc within the EU-US space navigate the cutting edge OpenSource LLMs vs seeking/getting a permission slip from the US gov.
I hope that open models will dominate. The difficult part to reconcile for me is the amount of compute that's required to create and run such models. Small models are fine, I run local llms 27b param on a gpu, but it's not even close to frontier in capability. Who wants to drop $40k+ on hardware to run these things. Companies, maybe/perhapts. On the other hand, to run a DB I can get a server for $3k and handle tons of traffic on it and other things too.
A data center or a cloud? It's not difficult to find a good data center to colo at. The problem is then you have to bring your own hardware, technicians, and sysadmins.
However, if you don't trust cloud providers or inference providers for whatever reason then you probably aren't going to be excited to enter a co-op model where you're still effectively renting access to hardware that you don't directly own. There are already reasonably priced options to rent bare metal from a cloud provider.
The only way I see it working is if it's a bunch of medium to large sized businesses getting together to be able to rent out the spare capacity on hardware that they physically control. So an AWS equivalent where each rack is owned by a different company and retail VMs migrate between them transparently. But I question the overall economics of such an arrangement.
> enter a co-op model where you're still effectively renting access to hardware that you don't directly own
If we're imagining a co-op, then the participants should all be equal owners in an organisation that owns the hardware itself, otherwise it's not much of a co-op really.
But at that point you don't have the same sort of security guarantees about the hardware. This isn't like a farming co-op where a single expensive piece of equipment gets passed around to each participant one week at a time. There needs to be either an economic, security, or other advantage to entering into this arrangement for a medium to large sized player that would otherwise be colocating multiple racks in a privately owned datacenter or else renting bare metal instances in bulk from one of the hyperscalers.
Participants as equal owners doesn't preclude security guarantees.
The advantage is having a voice in setting direction, investment and ultimate shared incremental profit recovery over the rent capture from hyperscalers.
It's an interesting idea really. But it also comes with cooperation, which means trust, and a lot of for-profit enterprises are bad at operating cooperatively outside of 2- or 3- way engagements.
Would actually be a good biz model for the Colo facilities that keep shutting down as everyone moves to the big cloud providers.Now if they can get their hands on enough GPUs and RAM.
Incentives are pretty easy to align, if you have repeat customers and repetition. McDonald's sells me burgers I expect at a reasonable price, because they want me to come back tomorrow and not go across the street to Burger King.
I believe until the hardware designs catch up to be more commodized ala cryto mining evolution from GPUs to ASICS for specfic algos.
Designs (like Google TPUs equivalent) would also need to evolve to be more memory dense to be able to handle them.
Untill then it seems will be system time shares for the larger models , probably with a bring your own model and pay as you go.
> ala cryto mining evolution from GPUs to ASICS for specfic algos
I don't see it happening. A current gen GPU with a huge and fast block of memory isn't a perfect fit for these algorithms but it's relatively close. With cryptocurrency, mass small sha256 hashing was a totally different kind of computation.
> isn't a perfect fit for these algorithms but it's relatively close
I don't think that's true. The best fit out of what's presently available perhaps. Inference is almost entirely memory bandwidth bound at present, to the extent that GPUs with HBM have a massive advantage over those with GDDR. TPUs appear to be a much better overall design.
I expect that a hypothetical advance in fabrication enabling processing elements to be placed directly adjacent to dense RAM on the same silicon (not merely in the same package) would be superior in all regards.
> I expect that a hypothetical advance in fabrication enabling processing elements to be placed directly adjacent to dense RAM on the same silicon (not merely in the same package) would be superior in all regards.
Processing scales better than DRAM does. I think an HBM-like stack where the bottom layer has the math units is probably the ultimate form of that.
And it's possible that flash instead of DRAM is actually the better play, as long as you can hook up enough in parallel. RIP Optane.
There might be a community effort at some point. This happened in chess where the community recreated and then improved on Alpha Zero. You could run small training chunks on your machine. Some people donated thousands of hours of server time.
They never will. The only reason China releases open weights is because they can't compete on frontier models. Whoever has the frontier model has no incentive to give it away for free.
They have signed a non-binding agreement to potentially cooperate on AI supply chains. It's hardly a declaration of fealty, nor does it have any practical impact on the use of Chinese models in the near term. I'd view this more as hedging their bets for the future.
As a European, the way I see it, Europe declared fealty to the US and relinquished its sovereignty a long time ago, sadly.
Also, the way these agreements tend to work is that you agree that you won't source from the 'enemy side' i.e. China. It works this way for NATO and it will work the same way here.
Facts, but the Europeans, tankies, and America haters here will never admit it. Europe sold out its industries for social programs. Not our fault you guys chose social safety nets over industry.
I don't think this narrative stands, industry and social programs coexisted for a very long time. I actually believe the opposite. It sacrificed its industry for intra-EU fairness and integration. A lot of industries were very reliant on gov grants and other state social programs that have got scarcer as EU gained power.
> Facts, but the Europeans, tankies, and America haters here will never admit it.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
I think Americans like yourself greatly underestimate what advantages having a unified language, legal system etc. brings. It may seem to many Americans that the EU is unified but it's much less so than you'd expect.
Social programs have little to do with it. You can have both industry and social programs if you just choose not to start random wars of aggression in the US too, something for which you need $1.5T apparently.
China has both more industry and plenty of social programs as an example.
It does have everything to do with it. Why would anyone in Europe be motivated to build anything innovative if they know they will have the government taking 50% of every dollar they make to fund social programs they probably won’t even receive the benefits of? Why would anyone work hard in that environment? You’re completely ignoring the social/productivity implications of high taxation. Additionally, China does not have anywhere near the level of social programs Europe does. No one in China takes two months off a year as a checkout clerk.
Nobody in EU ever tried to build a domestic CPU that was even remotely comparable to what Intel and AMD, for them to have had the opportunity to fail.(No, ARM is IP not a builder)
Nobody in EU ever tried to build a domestic GPU that was even remotely comparable to Nvidia, ATI or 3Dfx for them to have failed.
We just let the US companies fight it out, see who could build the best products, and become forever customers to them and then 20 year later wonder how come their economy grew 2x as much.
Of course the EU tries to compete with the US and in some industries it has done so successfully (e.g pharma or aviation). EU companies have also tried to compete in information technology - with some limited or temporary success.
ARM was founded in the EU. DeepMind was founded in the EU. Olivetti and Siemens had CPU designs and made computers. Nokia once dominated mobile. Ericsson was/is a leading telecom equipment maker. Skype used to be one of the most successful messaging apps. Spotify is a success. ASML is a success.
A certain Finnish university student started the operating system that now dominates the cloud, but for some reason I really do not understand, EU cloud providers like OVHCloud have failed to compete with the likes of AWS, Azure and GCP. And now the AI wave has completely washed over Europe.
The cloud situation is a mystery to me. Nothing stops EU companies like OVHCloud from competing there. Any anticompetitive behaviour is a very weak excuse. Europe can't even compete with something as mediocre as Palantir. Now everyone is calling for protectionism. Ridiculous.
AI is easier to understand. It requires huge capital investments. The US has far superior capital markets and far healthier attitudes towards risk taking. Europe's failure here was easy to predict but the consequences could be dire.
Yes, but it was span off from Acorn Computers, which had its own European OS, CPU, computer etc, but ARM was all that was left of what could have been a fully European Apple had it been given more support.
>Of course the EU tries to compete with the US and in some industries it has done so successfully
I was talking only about SW and HW in the context of the current AI race. Not about legacy industries like aero and pharma. Everyone knows EU is only good at legacy industries, well except cars, they're getting ass whipped there too.
> Olivetti and Siemens had CPU designs and made computers.
None of those domestic designs ever competed commercially with the X86 or amd_64, which is why I made that specific reamark. Please read my comment again and don't try to argue in bad faith by moving the goalposts.
>ARM was founded in the EU. DeepMind was founded in the EU. Nokia once dominated mobile. Ericsson was/is a leading telecom equipment maker. Skype used to be one of the most successful messaging apps. Spotify is a success. ASML is a success.
Most of those have massive US shareholders/financial backing or have outright been brought up by US companies or PE firms or US shareholders. And Spotify being called a succes is laughable given they bootstrapped thanks to initially distributing music they stole off the torrents, and then shafting their smaller artist once they became a multi billion dollar music streaming monopoly.
>Europe can't even compete with something as mediocre as Palantir.
France is copying Palantir to make their domestic version. Chaps Intelligence.
>A certain Finnish university student started the operating system that now dominates the cloud
What does it matter if he's Finnish or not? Linus is an American citizen now living and working from the US, mostly consulting on linux kernel topics for US big-tech. Why did he leave lovely Finland for the "third world" US? That's the question EU gospelers can never answer. He didn't like having walkable cities and free healthcare?
You are being very hostile and cherry-picking results- disregarding and denigrating those that don’t fit your narrative.
Wrt Linus - who knows? It is irrelevant; he is largely irrelevant. If he got ran over by a bus, the collective community (of whom quite a few are outside the US) will carry on.
>Wrt Linus - who knows? It is irrelevant; he is largely irrelevant.
Saying Linus is irrelevant is the most ignorant thing.
He's like the Schrodinger of Europeans tech sovereign nationalists on HN, he's relevant in arguments where he's European, but irrelevant in arguments where he's American.
At the same historical turning point when Europeans are finally waking up to the need to become less dependent on their so called US ally for weapons production and security, they are immediately choosing to become dependent on the next layer of critical infrastructure.
Instead of learning the obvious lesson, Europe seems ready to purchase the future from whoever Washington allows it to purchase from. It used to be the guns, now it's the AI.
It is so idiotic and short sighted that you can barely even blame anyone who keeps exploiting this over and over again. It is always the same story.
Well this is not really a problem as big as it is presented on the social media. Stats simply do not support these claims.
The bigger issue is the growing number of retired woodworkers collecting pensions for much longer than the system was ever designed for. Life expectancy rose dramatically, yet the retirement age not. These retired woodworkers then vote for politicians who keep increasing their benefits, while costs are cut elsewhere. Add a declining birthrate, a trend started by previous generations, and you get a system that is politically almost impossible to reform. It will probably take a very hard societal crash before people seriously reconsider this old, inefficient model. Like in Greece, where pensions were cut on third of it's original size. Sadly, woodworkers never learn other way than this.
With ever present threat of war on the old continent because some woodworking tribes just can't supress their need to chop someone else, this is the biggest long term issue.
EU is very lucky USA still has very strict immigration policy.
If USA made it easy for highly skilled professionals to emigrate there then there would be almost no one capable left here.
open weights model is like... Winamp for example.
it's free, you can download it and use it however you like, you could also do some binary patching or dll injections to alter it functionality but it's not enough to develop next version.
the same is with ai models, weights are the binary final artifacts. for development and improvements you need to have training data, pipelines, RL harnesses, etc.
also of you believe Chinese companies will be releasing weights indefinitely, you are not understanding motivations.
Chinese companies spend significant amounts of money to train a model so why they are releasing it for free? they basically provide researchers starting point for developing tooling and optimizations for serving the model in return. and also get some PR.
They also do not have to pay for inference of those models that much, as they probably serve them with loss anyways to gain market.
they are gov sponsored so money are not issue there, so they try to speedrun their way to what US companies have. And guess what happens when they reach it. they will stop releasing weights and increase pricing or will use them for gov purposes.
Was looking for this. It’s a great short story (it starts with real events and then predicts the future) leading to European fealty to US . Seems increasingly plausible.
True, but it was, until 2008, a somewhat less lopsided relationship.
Europe is becoming a museum and a retirement home. Young people leave to make their fortune and maybe return to have a family or avail of healthcare. And while I have nothing against old people my own street in a _very_ family-oriented suburb in the Netherlands is over 50% retirees.
Though I see the flow of migrants between the US and Europe has shifted, so there's a net gain of Americans in Europe. I wonder if it's where young people with dreams want to go, or if it's just where people like my in-laws (nice, culturally aware, but no longer very economically productive) who have a few million dollars in their 40's and want a pretty place to retire young, go.
Where you live? In both Spain and Sweden it's a fairly common topic in public discourse already, about how to move away from a bunch of US dependencies and so on.
Also in Finland and even in EU circles. Trump threatening to annex Greenland really woke up a lot of people. Tariffs didn’t help.
Even my parents who speak no English and aren’t spending time in US-based social media have taken a break from hating Russia for the Ukraine invasion to talking about how we need to get rid of the dependency on the US.
This boat is turning slowly but it won’t turn back anymore.
There was nothing "American-led" about the fact that societies that had been forced by Russia into submission for the entirety of the Cold War rushed toward whatever alliances they could to prevent the same thing from ever happening again. Poland even threatened to mobilize the Polish-Americans to tank Clinton's re-election if he tried to block Poland's entry into NATO, that's how "American-led" it was.
Not to mention how ridiculous the narrative of "provocation" is, I can almost hear "provokatsiya, provokatsiya" in Putin's weak and whiny old-man voice. Entry into NATO meant that NATO spent billions upon billions introducing proper civilian oversight of militaries in the new members, and other key features of first world countries. Former RU foreign minister Kozyrev hits the nail when he calls it free security for Russia.
I think you’ll find that it was mutually beneficial deal that traded soft-power for preferential agreements. As it started to crumble, we’ve begun diversifying and directed our schmoozing to better partners.
> [Washington] piles pressure on The Hague to halt ASML’s remaining exports and servicing of its DUVi machines.
> The Commission backs the Dutch [...]. The European position fragments before it has properly formed.
That the EU would, after recognizing AI's value, freely give up control of its few advantages to the US, despite of this being a conventional trade issue which the EU has experience with, seems like a very pessimistic assumption.
> I can train insainly powerful models on my laptop.
What's with this hallucination? The thread is about GPT-5.6. Your laptop can't even run gemma 4 unquantized bfloat16, which is light years behind GPT-5.6, and running it is light years from training it. If something that a laptop can train is insanely powerful for you, you don't need to worry about this thread at all.
Regulation like this is dangerous for the US because it can kneecap our country, but I don’t think it’ll affect the pace of innovation globally. China isn’t going to slow down just because the Trump administration asked for some “ballroom donations” or whatever nonsense is going on behind the scenes here.
This also completely screws over U.S. businesses. American startups will be forced to pay premium prices for nerfed, heavily-censored, 'compliant' models from a few massive corporations. Meanwhile, foreign startups will be running cheaper, unrestricted open-source AI. We'll price ourselves right out of the global market.
What government wants to have their population use foreign AI. (Not many). Only issue I see is good enough is what the majority might be okay with.
US intelligence has gamed this out and sees risks at the fringe - advanced artificial intelligence moves the needle the most in countries economically & politically dominated by the USA, the Global South are the targets of this, not US startups.
So far it's only US doing this. I don't think it's in anyone else's interest to limit development of open source models or chips. Nvidia has secured a leading position in GPU market by being the best overall, but if US continues to mess up with the export, that changes the calculation and surely we'll see the alternatives
Any country that developed sufficiently advanced models will pursue the same path. The EU as a regulatory body would pursue the same path, as will/is China.
It’s rather straightforward to think through. If China (they’re practically the only competitor) built a sufficiently advanced AI system would they allow it to propagate on the free market? Of course not. The fact of the matter is that they are behind, even if it’s just a little bit, so the best strategy they have is to try and compete with “good enough” models with lower/subsidized cost - but that is a losing strategy because AI is and always has been a winner-take-all strategy.
Likewise if, idk, France someone built an AI system that was valuable do you think they’d just hand it over for sworn enemy Donald J. Trump to utilized? Of course not.
The American strategy in the context of the current geopolitical landscape is the only valid one and the obvious one. If you find yourself criticizing the American strategy it’s because you aren’t in the arena where you would, inevitably, make the same decision to restrict access.
This isn't how things typically work. For instance the US is increasingly adversarial towards China yet China continues to largely power the US economy both through manufacturing and market access, which makes up an increasingly large share of all revenue for many US companies. Why? Because that position as a dependency is not only directly economically beneficial to themselves, but also provides leverage which can be utilized in extreme circumstances.
This isn't really going to achieve much besides incentivizing the growth of non-US models and minimizing market access for US-based models. I was expecting the US government to try to ban foreign models, which is also a self-own but orders of magnitude less than this. All this will do is greatly diminish the influence of the US in the future, and minimize the benefits they might reap from a global LLM explosion. It'd be like if 30 years ago, China decided that their manufacturing could only be used by white-listed individuals. Their economy and influence wouldn't be even a fraction of what it is today.
> This isn't really going to achieve much besides incentivizing the growth of non-US models and minimizing market access for US-based models.
The Catch-22 here is that the growth of non-US models is something Americans can take advantage of if they are successful while simultaneously denying access as deemed necessary by the US government to advanced American models.
If open source or models made outside the US surpass US controlled models, then the US would just switch to those and then American companies can leverage those models for their own development or for consumer sales or whatever.
If they don’t surpass US models (as I expect they won’t, though they will remain perhaps marginally useful) then the US maintains the lead in a positive feedback loop development.
If others start controlling advanced models and denying access to superior models developed outside of the United States (ex: China) then my assumption was correct.
I don’t think comparing China’s manufacturing capacity to the American manufacturing base makes a lot of sense in this context and as we know China has in fact weaponized that manufacturing capacity. If nothing else, the economic arrangement isn’t comparable partly because if Chinese factories stopped making iPhones or whatever they would simply not make anything and workers would lose jobs and such hurting the Chinese. Today if the United States government prevents Chinese users from accessing advanced American models there isn’t really a loss on the American side. Quite the opposite - these models will accelerate productivity and industrial capability for the country as a whole and make it more competitive economically.
> AI is and always has been a winner-take-all strategy
People claim that AGI is. AI is turning out to be a fairly competitive but “normal” product. Companies carving out niches on cost, quality, and speed.
If it was a winner take all OpenAI’s head start would have been decisive. For years ChatGPT was far ahead of everyone, then Anthropic released Opus 3, then OpenAI released 4o, then in mid 2025 it seemed like everyone had strong reasoning models including Google with Gemini 2.5, and now Claude is probably the best coding model. So taking the top spot is not a guarantee you can hold it.
Also the top model becomes a prime target for distillation, making it easier for competitors to keep up.
I don’t think they have. I used to think that Claude sucked because of the harness so I tried it on opencode and it was still trash.
I’m sure if the primary problem I was solving was multi file complex exploits it would be better but even that I am not sure of. I’ve always found the it’s too dangerous claims to be a bit underwhelming.
The point is that if AI was really a winner-takes-all technology it would have meant OpenAI’s models would have been unequivocally better, permanently.
Can a model turn crap? shouldn't it be consistent once realized? Isn't it probably Anthropic facing capacity problems and comitting fraud by silently routing you to smaller models for the price of the current Claude?
I think you view this situation from the US point of view and assume that China has the same guiding principles and values in their foreign policy, for which it doesn't.
They might do what you said, of course.
But they very well might also treat LLMs as another goodwill investment like the Belt and Road Initiative (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belt_and_Road_Initiative) and export the capability to partner countries, for example, in Africa, to strengthen relationships.
A lot of it was financed through large (sometimes unsustainable) loans to recipient countries, sometimes leading to unsustainable debt burdens, irrespective of the potential ROI for the recipient (ie Sri Lanka’s port).
In many cases, much of that debt paid for Chinese companies, contractors, suppliers, and imported workers who built or operated the projects.
And the infrastructure didn’t necessarily line up with the recipient’s actual needs, mostly with China’s (ie the Laos–China railway, in large part financed by Laotian debt, which may someday bring some benefits to Laos, but mostly serves China’s regional trade ambitions).
Not to say other countries do it better or have purer ambitions or whatever. It’s just the "goodwill" part that made me twitch.
Can you argue that the principle of the BRI is humanitarian and it should benefit both partners, but not equally? Imho, that policy is far better for humanity than blockading Cuba, bombing Venezuela and Iran.
> A lot of it was financed through large (sometimes unsustainable) loans to recipient countries, sometimes leading to unsustainable debt burdens, irrespective of the potential ROI for the recipient (ie Sri Lanka’s port).
I see that you blame China for Sri Lanka, while China wasn't the only creditor there.
> And the infrastructure didn’t necessarily line up with the recipient’s actual needs
> Can you argue that the principle of the BRI is humanitarian
No. You can argue some projects, if done well, benefit both sides. That doesn’t make it humanitarian. It makes it basic foreign policy.
> China wasn’t the only creditor there.
I didn’t say it was. I said Hambantota was a costly development failure for Sri Lanka, and Chinese lending was part of that specific project and problem. Basically, that unlike your "goodwill" claim, China isn’t just giving away infrastructure for free out of the goodness of its government’s heart.
Don’t make me say what I did not.
> Easy to say in hindsight.
Yes. That’s why development and debt are hard problems. Also why calling it “goodwill” is, at best, too generous.
> Better than blockading Cuba / bombing Iran / etc.
“The US also does very bad stuff” doesn’t make BRI goodwill. Plus, there are more than two countries in the world. Some even try viable (if self-interested) development policy without bombing people.
> Yes. That’s why development and debt are hard problems. Also why calling it “goodwill” is, at best, too generous.
One can call the intent 'goodwill'. It doesn't mean that the outcome is satisfactory for your economic expectations. Judging from exceptions is not a valid approach and is a weird take.
> “The US also does very bad stuff” doesn’t make BRI goodwill.
True. I used that as an example of an alternative approach. The reader can decide which one is more 'goodwill'.
> Some even try viable (if self-interested) development policy without bombing people.
What countries are you referring to here: France (Douala and Abidjan ports, North–South railway in Vietnam), Japan (also ports in Sri Lanka, Thilawa), something else?
> Don’t make me say what I did not.
That conclusion says more about your reading than about what I actually wrote.
> Basically, that unlike your "goodwill" claim, China isn’t just giving away infrastructure for free out of the goodness of its government’s heart.
I shoot back with "Don’t make me say what I did not.", and 'goodwill' doesn't mean 'free stuff', you may want to check the dictionary ;)
One can call anything anything. And intents can only be guessed at, while outcomes can actually be evaluated. The question is whether the label explains the policy.
BRI is state-backed finance tied to Chinese strategic, commercial, and diplomatic interests. Some projects may benefit recipients too. Great. That still doesn’t make "goodwill" a useful description of the principle.
> Judging from exceptions is not valid.
I’m not judging from one exception. I backed my point of view with examples of a broader pattern: debt-financed infrastructure, Chinese contractors/suppliers/operators capturing much of the spending, and projects that often also serve China’s trade and influence goals.
Feel free to provide substantive counter-examples instead of just waving the word "goodwill" around.
> I used that as an example of an alternative approach.
No, you used US violence as a contrast to make BRI look benevolent. That’s whataboutism. "Less bad than bombing" is not the same thing as goodwill.
> What countries are you referring to here: France (Douala and Abidjan ports, North–South railway in Vietnam), Japan (also ports in Sri Lanka, Thilawa), something else?
Given its own propensity to rely on bombing, I would not use France as an example. The EU-financed port and airport in Gaza, for all the good they were allowed to do, come to mind. Japanese development and aid efforts too, even if they, like most if not all state-sponsored efforts, come with strings attached.
> goodwill doesn’t mean free stuff
Obviously. But you’re the one explicitly framing it as humanitarian. If your "goodwill" consists of lending countries money for infrastructure that often serves the lender’s own strategic interests and pays its own companies, then I’m going to question the framing.
Unless, it just occurred to me, you meant "goodwill projects" in the sense of "projects aimed towards generating goodwill among recipient countries (and their population) toward China".
In which case, I’d still argue the frame is too narrow, but acknowledge I misunderstood your initial point and apologise.
More likely the PRC sees the open-weight models' progress as a way to prevent an existing dominant player from cementing their (finicky) lead and pulling up the ladder.
That strategy happens to have beneficial side effects to the global Hoi Polloi, but to attach any kind of benevolence to it would be naive.
How would open-weight models benefit PRC better than their own closed-weight models, but still available at lower prices? If anything, open-weights can be distilled far easier.
Thinking like a business vs. thinking like a state.
If you see a given technology as fundamental[tm], you want to ensure that you will retain access to it AND its ongoing development. China may well foresee a possible future where US imposes export controls and global sanctions to block PRC from having access to the necessary equipment to either train or use the most advanced models - let alone its alternate parallel universe where US might go as far as prevent anyone else than US themselves having the most advanced forms of the technology at all.[ß]
To ward off such a scenario, China doesn't need to become the sole leading supplier. They only need to guarantee that nobody else can even try to block them off, and that the technology itself can never be yanked.
Because lower prices with closed weights would be severely compute constrained which would tightly cap the damage to american firms. As it is there's a plethora of providers (many of them american) serving up the cheap open weight models. Even tightly regulated industries with security concerns can use the latest deepseek.
It also enables further R&D using the open models as a starting point. That doesn't benefit china directly but it does serve to further undermine the lead that the american frontier labs have which limits their future ability to cut geopolitical adversaries off. In that sense it provides a long term hedge by minimizing the damage in the worst case scenario where china ends up suffering a crushing defeat in the AI race for whatever reason.
> Even tightly regulated industries with security concerns can use the latest deepseek.
That is not necessarily true, as "tightly regulated industries with security concerns" are also afraid of deepseek models generating vulnerable code. Even a possibility of that prevents those industries from deployments.
> That doesn't benefit china directly but it does serve to further undermine the lead that the american frontier labs have which limits their future ability to cut geopolitical adversaries off.
So, basically, competition is bad for US models? That argument doesn't address open-weights. And it doesn't work the other way around, because in that case China should be releasing close-weights instead.
> So, basically, competition is bad for US models?
Having less of a lead is bad for US frontier labs.
> That argument doesn't address open-weights.
Open weights does far more to further that goal than closed weights ever could. The bit right before the sentence you quoted was about enabling further R&D using open models as a starting point. In the same way that open weights serves as a force multiplier when it comes to flooding the market with cheap inference it also serves as a force multiplier if your goal is the raise the R&D floor. In this scenario a reasonable move for a capable opponent that's lagging behind is to attempt to raise the floor of the whole market so as to erode the position of whoever is in the lead.
Also consider that (as I previously mentioned) raising the capabilities of the global market as a whole serves to minimize damage in a worst case scenario. If you find yourself needing to depend on a foreign supplier for a key technology then it's better to have as many choices as possible from as many different jurisdictions as possible.
Well, you are wrong. Maybe you should visit and learn more about China to understand it.
For starters, China's society is high-individualistic with a strong sense of community and with high respect to their elders.
On the contrary, US's society is hyper-individualistic with a strong sense of family and basic respect to their elders.
> AI is and always has been a winner-take-all strategy
AGI sure. But I don't think we're going to get there in our lifetimes, if ever. There are too many structural and physical limitations. One everyone seems to be catching onto now is that they're running out of human data and are incestuously feeing AI output to itself as input.
Current state AI is barely an improvement over where it was fifty years ago. We just have stronger hardware and more content to train on. We need a new paradigm. One that hasn't come in half a century.
> Any country that developed sufficiently advanced models will pursue the same path.
Looking at most of the available evidence, Mythos is an incremental upgrade over other models and nowhere near the implied advancement that this seems to point to. I guess you could be right in that a sufficient advancement would cause this type of withholding of it, but I think it's kind of silly to think that the US has reached that level.
I don’t think the ai market has been around long enough to prove winner take all, I see it more like a commodity which is why the winner quickly switched from OpenAI to Anthropic at least on coding.
I generally find the Chinese models to be superior. If you look at the token pricing or hosting cost it’s still about 80% margin on Chinese models. Deep cuts should still be possible.
the only people its relevant for is the people in first. We wont know what any other state would do until someone passes the us, if that happens.
it sucks that we're in a place where the us has an dishonest leadership, because the current situation would be pretty reasonable if any other admin was in charge.
let models go free, until one proves dangerous in the real world then require gov approval after that.
I don't think anyone rational would have the position everyone should have insta access at the same time to the highest model once it crosses the point of enabling actual dangerous things.
> the U.S. government would initially approve who gets access to its latest new release while AI companies and the administration work out a longer-term plan for regulation on the sector.
So you're a new vendor with a GPT-5.6 or Mythos class model. How do you suppose the regulations are going to work? First you need to get on the list of companies that are allowed to release models, and then you need to have a whole system for limiting access. Both are going to be hugely expensive, on top of training new models already being insanely expensive to begin with.
Thus, it's not a legal limit, but a real practical limit because it's too expensive. If only OpenAI and Anthropic and Google can afford to jump through the hoops, they've effectively gotten to "limit new vendors from competing with OpenAI".
> So you're a new vendor with a GPT-5.6 or Mythos class model. How do you suppose the regulations are going to work? First you need to get on the list of companies that are allowed to release models, and then you need to have a whole system for limiting access. Both are going to be hugely expensive, on top of training new models already being insanely expensive to begin with.
So your thesis is that someone has the resources to create a model at the level of Mythos or GPT 5.6 but bot have the resources to jump through the concomitant legal requirements?
In a perfectly spherical cow sort of way, everything is fungible and if you can get the resources to train a Mythos-grade model then you'll also have the resources to jump through all the legal hoops. Regulatory capture is a tale almost as old as capitalism though. History bears this out. Adding barriers to entry further entrenches the incumbents.
These frontier models are now good enough that they can assist heavily with new optimizations for future models, including, code them. Restricting their usage to a few companies takes away that advantage away from other companies, thereby, limiting new vendors from competing with OpenAI.
> Restricting their usage to a few companies takes away that advantage away from other companies, thereby, limiting new vendors from competing with OpenAI.
wait, are you saying a competitor needs access to an OpenAI model in order to build a competing model?
Nothing new in that. Everyone pays to someone or the other to make their own product/life better. Most of the times these products do not compete, sometimes, they do.
How many times you believe duckduckgo would have google'd stuff just to create a competitor to Google itself? I believe thousands of times.. could be more.
OpenAI cannot claim the code their models produce as their own since their own models used codes from public internet during training to produce new code.
I agree with your point, but to play devils advocate: doesn't a competitor arguably need access to these beyond-frontier models to even become an effective competitor to OpenAI and Anthropic?
You could produce a completely fcked up model using AI, and also a completely awesome one using AI. So, the "overstating capabilities" part really have nothing to do with this discussion.
As for the claim part around AI being used to assist further AI development, I have already told to read Anthropic's blog post. You can take help from chatgpt, if needed.
> Only companies approved by the government will get access. There is no process for individual users to get access to the new model.
That sounds like more than just export control.
This means that big company A that the president has a business interest in could get access to the most powerful AIs, while a startup competing with it doesn't.
It's worth keeping in mind the broader context here politically. The president and his cabinet are generally pursuing policies of a strong unitary executive branch that centralizes "technocratic" functions under the control of politicians and political appointees. The majority in Congress doesn't appear to mind and seems to be actively sitting back from legislating on topics like this. The overall effect is that of creating a system in which the rules are deliberately uncertain and the only reliable way to get approval is by aligning yourself or your organization politically. It's a powerful technique for ensuring political compliance in the corporate world.
Well yeah, but that's the point of the whole unitary executive thing. Thete are quick cash grabs happening all over the place of course, but they are also setting up for a long-term systemization of corruption, backed by a radicalized narrow majority voter base. It's clear that they believe they will win the midterm elections, or that the opposition won't be able or willing to stop them meaningfully, and then win the next presidential election too.
Of course. The US government inserts itself into commerce, starts picking winners and losers, and thus creates an industry for petitioning gatekeepers at all levels for access. The goodfellas profit and the public pays. OpenAI and company get manufactured scarcity to raise margins, and lawmakers get to collect an entry fee. This was doomed to happen. The US is much closer to a total state than most give it credit for.
I guess if the new model has the capability to do 'something' that's national security threat, then this makes sense. Otherwise this move makes zero sense, and actually is a drag on innovation - who wants to invest money and people to make a better model that can't actually be sufficiently sold to make a return on investment? Meanwhile other models from Europe or China that are better steal market share. Though that's not to say they won't do the same thing for the same reasons.
> Are we heading to a world where GPU use is regulated
Well, there was the kerfuffle around PS3 (IIRC) and 'supercomputers'. I suppose that would be the 2020s version of that. What's old is new again. Ultimately you can just continually wire together less powerful hardware to come up with something that can do the job.
They meant PS2. Japan was worried the processor was powerful enough to control missiles and put restrictions on how many can be sold to a single person and banned certain countries.
Double precision cell chips were reserved for military, I think (or maybe also blade processors). So doing any serious physics on them was dead in the water - same with macs tbh
Is referring to these new models as "LLM"s still correct anymore? The frontier models are a more complex orchestration of LLMs and many other programming techniques, they aren't just a weight set anymore.
The whole purpose of this is to let non-technical users say things like "make a flappy bird games" and have it succeed after using 10 million tokens. A decent engineer could build the same thing in 20 mins with a small local LLM.
Same thing with a cyberattack, someone who generally knew what they were doing could quickly surface the info to perform each step of an attack. The govt just wants to ensure random 12 year olds can't type: "how I hack fortnite?" and get a step by step guide.
I think it correct to refer to the models as LLMs. The references I can find for the techniques used seem to boil down to transformers + optimizations to make transformer-index larger/faster + chains-of-thought-optimization/the ability to add real time and other data to the context window.
This isn’t about keeping people from having the power of frontier LLMs. So tricks that let others have it aren’t a defeat of this policy.
This is export control, where the US government seeks to leverage the fact that these frontier models are US made. This is then leveraged against opponents, and likely also just for grift. There’s also perhaps a little legitimate worry about the implications of free access to, but that is secondary to the real goal.
I think in the long run this will severely hurt commercial models since they cannot reliably used in workflows and you don't want to be dependent on some trigger-happy random guy.
It is free advertising for now, but in my circle people are looking for alternatives and are surprised how viable they have become.
> I can train insainly powerful models on my laptop.
This is such hyperbole. You might be able to train a model that's merely useful in a single domain, but to say you can train an 'insanely powerful' model on consumer hardware is laughable.
If GLM-6 is made publicly available[1], will that change your predictions of how they will behave in the future, or your understanding of their motivations in the present?
[1] I am certainly no expert of Chinese AI policy, but I fear you are attributing US values and goals to the Chinese govt.
From where I stand, they appear to be very different though. China is seeking to increase influence, whereas the US (seems to be) seeking to become more insular. China is actively persuing the world-leader role, while the US dismantles soft-power tools like USaid, and alienates countries pursuing obviously flawed military excursions.
Regulatory capture doesn't necessarily mean the regulated get to decide what the regulators do in precise steps. It can simply mean they support and exist within a regulatory regime that greatly benefits the regulated.
In fact, you generally don't want them directly telling the regulators what to do. Instead, the regulators make complex, costly rules that only large establishment players can follow. The regulators look like they're doing their job; the regulated enjoy higher margins and protection from disruption.
How does this benefit the regulated? I'd say it dooms the regulated:
* with the government requiring the regulated to obtain approval to add each customer, they're losing a massive number of their customers
* and even if a customer gets approved, every such customer now sees that access to the regulated can (and has been) shutoff with no notice if the gov doesn’t like the provider or customer - it's now a massive supply chain risk for any customer to use a regulated provider
* the regulated losing a massive part of their customer base for both of the above reasons means significant impairment of their revenue, as well as their valuation, and staying ahead of their competitors and open models requires massive ongoing investment
> they're losing a massive number of their customers
Who are they losing them to? They're the only game in town.
> it's now a massive supply chain risk for any customer to use a regulated provider
But seeing as there is no alternative use them they will.
> the regulated losing a massive part of their customer base
But they aren't. Access to existing models isn't being pulled. It is only access to previously unreleased models that is being restricted going forward.
> Open models are mere months behind.
Presumably the government will strategically ease restrictions as open models gain ground.
That's just vanilla regulation. Yes it tends to create market inefficiencies, by definition. Capture entails industry corrupting and directing regulatory bodies.
Exactly! The thing that squeezes out new entrants isn't only the compliance cost, it's that your whole roadmap ends up resting on access you don't control.
We already saw the terms moved under us once with Fable, the retention policy changed and some requests started routing to a weaker model, none of us small operators had any say in that. Now access itself is a government decisions.
For anyone building on top of these APIs that's the real barrier, not the rule-following overhead but the fact that the ground can shift mid-flight and you can't negotiate with whoever's moving it.
Which is exactly why open weights start looking less like ideology and more like risk management.
The other answers are also valid, but lest we not forget, Sam is openly a fascist supporter and is clearly in bed with the regime in that he funded 47's campaign and jumped in to rescue Hegseth's automated kill list with OpenAI's GPT when Anthropic refused. Furthermore they are likely operating on some kind of quid pro quo agreement even if it's not public knowledge, because that's how all this bribery stuff works. Bezos agreed to use his media empire including WaPo to spout MAGA propaganda, for example. It's trump's one and only MO so to assume it doesn't apply here would be insane.
So, while OpenAI may not in a legal/technical sense, be the benefactory, that is not required for the term to apply, AND they may as well be considered party to the creation of the regulation since they have openly lobbied for it, openly inserted themselves into the government apparatus both formally and informally, and likely are co-conspirators to whatever Trump's autocratic self-enrichment scheme is.
it's not regulatory capture, because they are not regulating what customers can use - it's limiting what some companies can serve. it's way less impactful to the market as a whole.
Countries who've made the mistake of allying with the US might face sanctions or some sort of threats. People will just use Chinese AI then. This is the US biting itself in the ass.
Nick Bostrom wondered aloud in Superintelligence (2014) why states would allow individuals and private organizations to develop AGI. If one takes the possibility seriously, AGI would a source of immense power and any state would to take that opportunity for itself.
Edit: Not saying whether AGI is right around the corner, that's a different discussion. I'm just saying that a serious possibility of AGI and an understanding of possible consequences will make a state act.
AGI is religion invented for the stupid. There's no world in which a silly LLM can make intelligent decisions. It's all smoke and mirrors to make insane amounts of money and to maintain the sheep agreeing with the powerful.
Anthropic and OpenAI: Dear Uncle Sam, it seems laptops became too powerful, can you please do something
Uncle Sam: For national security reasons starting from now on every purchase of GPU model with higher than X Petaflops will need written permission by the US president
Anthropic and OpenAI: Look poor citizens, we are willing to share our capacity with you in limited form, by using our LLM you can avoid spending 35 years in the waiting list to buy a GPU, by the way, to simplify pricing, here is our new pricing with 5700% increase. Enjoy
It's the age old "Help me, politicians. You're my only hope".
Anthropic, Open AI & Co. realized at some point that if they can't make money with barely any competition they sure as hell won't if the market is flooded. So here they are slamming the door behind them.
> Anthropic, Open AI & Co. realized at some point that if they can't make money with barely any competition they sure as hell won't if the market is flooded. So here they are slamming the door behind them.
Jokes on them, there won't be new entrants not because the door is shut but because it doesn't actually make money. The whole scheme is propped up by illusions to grift the investors, fewer competition only breaks the illusion. But I guess those folks aren't the types to understand "rising tide lifts all boats", or in this case, rising sewage buoys all rats.
its not about whether you can shock anyone, if anyone is driving cars outside, you can't say you have SOTA-horse to go from A to B.
When models are good, expectations are adjusted accordingly to deliver things on par with the whole industry, you can't just say, I have built my own Intel Pentium II, now I will try to use it to compile Electron App and run 3DS Max there
You don't need SOTA-level LLMs to create value with AI. Hell, you can build good solutions with a simple small finetuned models.
> When models are good, expectations are adjusted accordingly to deliver things on par with the whole industry, you can't just say, I have built my own Intel Pentium II, now I will try to use it to compile Electron App and run 3DS Max there.
I know you are taking your analogy to its breaking point but it really depends on what you are doing. I know people that use 10+-year old thinkpads and they do just fine.
I agree with you but to be fair I also think that even 10 year old hardware is insanely powerful by any reasonable metric. Modern computers are truly ridiculous when considered in historical context.
GPUs and computer hardware prices have been on the rise. I can see a twisted perspective where it’s stated that the US government needs to closely control computer hardware that can run particular LLMs, as a national security interest. At least that idea isn’t completely wild now seeing what we have been experiencing.
Remember those weird conspiracies we used to have about universal surveillance; tracking and so forth? Well if you think back to those and whatever might happen with GPUs and hardware, and LLM restrictions or the likely age gating//ID’ing that is to come from this, that’s a good guiding framework for how this will proceed and affect normal people.
That's often how regulatory capture works. It seems bad for the incumbents, but it's worse for any future competitor. As long as the cost of complying with the regulation is less than your expected loss from competition entering the market, then it's net positive for the incumbent.
I think this is plain old regulation, not regulatory capture. For it to be the latter we'd need evidence than it was the incumbents who designed this oversight which they then asked the white house to rubber stamp.
With the twist that it will end up involving payments that directly benefit Trump, following the Mafia business model that he learned in the construction industry and that he's brought to the White House.
I take it you've never known anyone who has tried to run even a small consumer AI company. Do you think that they all independently come up with the same censorship rules, despite no law mandating them? Why do you think that is? That they are just that well-thought out that everyone happens to agree with that same intersecting boundary?
For the sake of argument, let's grant that there's some conspiracy that makes them all have the same rules. And conspiracy in a loose sense: perhaps it's the government dictating the rules.
I still don't understand how buying bitcoin lets me route around that.
Even gold coins buried in my garden won't get you access to Fable.
You're making straw man examples, but if you want to understand more, I suggest any paper on Bitcoin.
Personally, I'm not a fan of it. But the thesis is real, and it might have delivered on its promise if the world wasn't actually full of scumbags and scammers (each one accidentally contributing to making Big Banks look like the lesser of the evils).
please don’t answer in questions. state specifically what you mean so we can discuss what your point is, not guess what it is you’re implying with vague questions.
Listen to yourself. I'll write in my style, you write in yours. In what world is it anything less than obnoxious to say that? Time to hit the logout button for me permanently I say. https://imgur.com/a/L8hoqhp
> Are we heading to a world where GPU use is regulated to ensure that illegal LLMs aren't being processed on your machine?
Actually that sounds pretty reasonable considering current regulations regarding almost any other important resource / material that affect the general population.
You Gen-Z people serously need what Free software, Free society meant. We fought against people like you and against treacherous computing. And we will do again.
