alt Hacker NewsThis 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.