> Someone please enlighten me what the actual argument here is, cause I can’t see it.

> The only thing a ban would do is protect the American market from further downward price pressure on inference, protecting VC investors in the short term. But thats also an admittance that the American labs can’t compete on merit anymore

That's the argument. To be precise the publicly stated argument is that they're attacking American providers by distilling. The real aim is to eliminate competition because otherwise Anthropic and OpenAI are non viable and the US views them as crucial for winning the 'AI race' which they see as putting whoever wins it on top in terms of warfare/economic power etc.

> The only thing a ban would do is protect the American market from further downward price pressure on inference, protecting VC investors in the short term.

> Someone please enlighten me what the actual argument here is, cause I can’t see it.

But you did see it.

The US has invested trillions in AI that the companies involved are never going to make back. Even without competition from open models, but definitely not with it. And if those trillions turn out to be worthless, that's going to have a massive impact on the market and cause a lot of bankruptcies.

Banning those open weight models isn't going to fix everything, but it would the impossible obstacle slightly smaller.

> But thats also an admittance that the American labs can’t compete on merit anymore

This is exactly it.

Try to buy a BYD in the United States. You can't (without a complicated process) because they're so much better cars than our domestic brands that our domestic brands couldn't compete and lobbied to keep them out.

> should by itself also limit the viability of the idea that all those VC billions will ever make a return?

It just has to last until the next quarter / fundraising round.

You aren’t missing anything. There isn’t an actual argument, this is strictly an attempt at regulatory capture.

The CFO or wtv that tweeted, their argument was, if you allow cheap free competitive models, you will stop the influx of capital in frontier development of even more powerful LLMs, thus capping how far the tech could reach. Obviously, they're mostly asking for regulation to save their money, but it seems their argument is that without an environment that rewards the development of the next frontier model the tech might not evolve as fast.

> The only thing a ban would do is protect the American market from further downward price pressure on inference, protecting VC investors in the short term

It won't even do this. Streisand effect will probably draw even more attention to the open weight models

The entire marketing narrative in AI already operates this way --- "GPT 2.0 is too dangerous to release, oh noooo!" etc

> I‘m not even sure what the argument for banning Chinese models/open weights even is supposed to be?

Easy: you're a traitor, if you use foreign AI for the fraction of the cost. It's unamerican not to fill the American billionaires pockets. Free markets exist, as long as you buy America first!

it's simple.

AI labs and investors are scared, and pushing administration to ban them, because they can't compete with Chinese models soon, similar to how they banned Huawei, and Chinese cars.

When there is cheaper alternative, companies might go with self hosting option, which reduces the enterprise moat of AI labs

How would it even be stopped if you could ban it? It's not like you're banning just one company. Anyone with the resources can still obtain and run the models. Sure, big models like Kimi K3 will be less accessible until a foreign version of Openrouter with no incentive to listen to US law begins offering it. Or they offer it and obfuscate what model it actually is behind codenames.

It wouldn't surprise me if that kind of problem is partially why weights are open. Because you can't meaningfully stomp them out completely.

This is less so a hedge against Chinese labs catching up to the frontier/OAI Anthropic falling in valuation, and more a hedge against a complete recession. We are overleveraged in AI investment and if tomorrow any Chinese Lab can drop a model at the frontier what was the point of all those billions. Now, if you can protect the American model from the bubble popping even for just long enough to hedge risk a little better, then you may just prevent collapse. The problem is though, that the market is heavily irrational right now and if anything this may just be the signal to investors to double down on American AI.

Just gotta make it a few more months now to the IPO

It will force US companies (and EU probably) to buy only from OpenAI/Anthropic.

I don't think there actually is a congnizant argument other than to protect investments. And of course they cant say that. You are using way to much logic in this. You are witnessing powerful people who are operating way outside the scope of their own abilities thrash around. AI isn't being stopped. Definitely not by people who value money. The inertia at this point is probably even too much for those who have some sort of ideological framework against it. To those of us who value ideas and progress, especially a non human-centric idea of what progress could look like, the path looks pretty clear. there is no stopping this. We are working everyday in so many small ways, not to capture value, but to advance the machine. the idea that some decree from an ageing narcissist and a pyramid of lackey bureaucrats is at all meaningful is just hilarious. Of course it's meaningful to the "economics". But many of us could really not care a lick as we don't do it for money.

Suppose a foreign actor deliberately builds an unaligned model, and dumps it at a very low cost through subsidies. Since the cost is lower, everyone integrates it into their business. But now the foreign actor has control; perhaps the model checks for instructions to execute, perhaps it has backdoors, perhaps... who knows?

I don't have a view on whether this is a sufficient argument to ban models from potential adversaries, but it's not as trivial as "regulatory capture".

> But thats also an admittance that the American labs can’t compete on merit anymore

Merit was never competitive. Mass consumption habits select hard for cost, and this is an industry driven entirely by scaling factors. If you can scale for cheaper, you win. Ivy League-decorated researchers aren't doing RnD for free. The frontier labs can only go so cheap before they're so far in the red that VC gets cold feet. Leaving the expensive frontier research up to private enterprise wasn't a long-term strategy.

> I don’t get it. Am I missing something? The only thing a ban would do is protect the American market from further downward price pressure on inference

What's not to get? Do you understand how much money is tied up in the industry? Do you know what happens if that goes up in flames? In the middle of a massive asymmetric economic depression? Why on earth do you think they would just sit there and watch it happen? Because of political virtue signaling about free markets? You know, I have a bridge to sell you if you're interested.

The point would be to not allow (mostly) Chinese agencies to profit from the American market by ripping off (mostly) American frontier models.

Just like unlicensed dupes of designer goods can be intercepted at the border.

>Someone please enlighten me what the actual argument here is, cause I can’t see it.

These people paid a lot of money to Trump and now they want to cash in on that bought influence.

> But thats also an admittance that the American labs can’t compete on merit anymore

It’s more an admittance that the capitalist model can lose to a more socialist approach, unless you “fight fire with fire” and use the government to distort the market for you.

They will not actually shut it down. Rather, they will simply continually posture in that direction and release a statement that the wrong lawyer can interpret the wrong way. This will make it a soft no-no for anyone involved in government procurement which is most big companies thus ensuring american AI companies have the market, while also ensuring startups, etc still have access to the structurally lower-cost chinese models (otherwise, they will simply resort to the black market which is why they will never enforce a full ban). In most US-adjacent countries like India, anyone that sells to US companies I see avoiding chinese model providers for the same reason. The exception is fine tuning and running it on their own hardware, which naturally everyone is completely fine with since no money flows to the chinese model company.

Tl;dr, it's purely an economic argument. Every major argument in the world is about money and thus power, don't bother analysing it technically.

The problem isn't so much investors losing money, it's if this kills the economy.

A lot of elites are now unemployed with nothing better to do thanks to AI. Historically speaking, populist uprising are easily squashed except when you have a group of counter-elites supporting the movement. We're finally starting to see the results of that with the Deflock movement cutting down cameras.

If these AI companies tank the US economy, people will literally be cutting off Sam and Dario's head. For good reason.

[dead]