alt Hacker NewsThe assertion that it's in the United States Government's best interests ban Chinese open weight models is a very strong opinion that is not a consensus even at the fringe of Thiel-adjacent psycho thought: Alex Karp is on record about open weight models being necessary, the fucking "we bombed a bunch of kids with Claude doing rubber stamp target selection" guy. He thinks "trust OpenAI and Anthropic" is a radical position.
Peter Hegseth, another really pro-America being powerful guy, he's dealing with a lawsuit because he doesn't want Anthropic in his military, he calls it a supply chain risk (he's right).
There is no evidence of any kind that a complex attack vector can be trained into model weights and survive all the crazy slicing and dicing that happens between published weights and running model. These things get quantized and run on mathematically imprecise kernels and sampled and LoRA-tuned and Dolphin/Orca de-tuned. Go look at what the ComfyUI community comes up with, those guys know more about WAN 2.2 than the people who trained it. Because those models run for real on a desktop, so there's mad innovation at light speed.
There is no one who wants a capriciously expensive black box run by extremely creepy people, not once the capability crosses over (in about November).
But don't take my word for it, you just had a chance at one AI IPO, and I'm sure you'll get another, so if you like how that goes, you don't need to convince me!
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Again, none of what you're saying will make the US government, especially the current administration, care, as they have not cared about many things with consequences either; you're applying logic where there may not be any heed to it.
As well, it is a false equivalence to say that local models are only Chinese and otherwise we would use cloud models, but there are American or European ones, so a ban would simply force companies to use these, even if they are inferior to Chinese ones. It's simply a matter of national security to the US government, and they will not care what random people in media say.
I run local models every day.
We are in a race to superintelligence. The first country to AGI will be the first to superintelligence, and the first to superintelligence will have de facto control over the world and the future of humanity. They will also be able to prevent others from reaching superintelligence.
Of course it's in the US's best interest to slow down China. You aren't zooming out and looking at the big picture, you're taking models as slightly useful tool, not what they will soon turn into.