alt Hacker News> Open weight models are basically immune to that
Somewhat. The US Gov can make it illegal to transact with, download, use, etc. foreign open weight models.
Of course, enforcement will be difficult for individuals (businesses will comply by default, and they would all be pulled off Github and other US based hosting locations if they went the sanctions route). But, we are also quickly going down the road of frightening levels of mass surveillance, which could aid enforcement.
The Fable situation sets a very dangerous precedent, and I'm not looking forward the future here. We are losing the fight for information and computing freedom.
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Since I am not familiar with the law, can you expand on the mechanism by which the US government could making downloading openly licensed files illegal? How would the government avoid denying people their first amendment rights by doing this?
Just like we can’t allow Chinese EVs in the USA, because we can’t and don’t want to compete.
VPN usage would go up, to get the banned models.
Maybe, but the world and the internet isn’t just the US.
Businesses outside of the US, like the EU, might have significant competitive advantages.
I doubt it, you can easily distill it into "made in USA" model. They're MIT after all.
A lot more expensive thought, but the added benefit is that you can train on your companies data improving performance of the model.
> Somewhat. The US Gov can make it illegal to transact with, download, use, etc. foreign open weight models.
Presumably you mean in the USA (otherwise foreign means nothing)
You seem to forget that there is a rather large world outside of the US - and we very much would be better off with non-gated, open weights models.
One more entry in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number
Honestly, banning SOTA LLM services is the best thing the US could do for AI.
It’d force people to run inference locally, and that’d expose the actual $/perf of the models instead of keeping it secret then propping it up with circular revenue and blatant securities fraud.
If we don’t do something like that, we won’t have much of an AI industry post-bubble.
Anyone else remember solyndra?
I think that this is what OpenAI/Anthropic want but they wont say it publicly. The will be OK with the US banning regulating and banning open source models as it let's Anthropic and OpenAI charge huge premiums to American business clients for their models.
Also the marketing of them getting to say "our models are so dangerous" only a few companies or select users are allowed to use (benchmark) them would help keep their valuations high.