Isn't using age as a proxy for technical literacy rather fraught? It seems to me just as much an abuse of stereotypes as other sexist or racist comments.

I agree that the demographics are probably correct, but we're not supposed to assume that all individuals conform to group stereotypes. And that ought to be doubly true when we're not selecting those individuals at random, but we're (putatively) selecting them for their wisdom and other skills.

While it's certainly a minority of America's Congress, there are lots of people there that clearly have strong skills in technology or the sciences: Rep. Bill Foster (D-IL), Rep. Chrissy Houlahan (D-PA), Rep. Jay Obernolte (R-CA), all of whom are over 50 years old, just to name a few.

I thought you were making a joke but the average age of the House of Commons in Canada is also ~52 while the U.S. House is 59 and the Senate is 65.

It is typical that they conflated the website chat interface to DeepSeek-hosted inference with Amazon and other hyperscaler inference, and self-hosted / on-prem inference. Of course they also confused testing vs production, and left grey what is means when another company re-spins an open weight model (e.g. Cloudflare Clef is Alibaba Qwen derived).

They haven't officially banned Qwen, Kimi etc, but the same risks apply, and I think a ban is coming (certainly is in the USA). It is quite possible for any or all of these models to have a Ken Ritchie style self-propagating back door[1] or a simple phone home baked into the weights[2], and possibly triggerable misalignment in specific circumstances caused by poisoned training data.

[1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/358198.358210 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50159245

I can get behind Aussie governemetn on that, as well as Goldfield & Banks fragrance company (because they make great frags lol).

Not surprisingly they also sucked some US dicks during the 5G ban on Huawei back in the day: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-45281495

> highly tech literate (avg age of House of Reps ~=52yo)

Not debating your overall point, but how tech literacy and 50+some years of age are connected?

Other than "it's cheap!", what is there to giving your data to a non-deterministic program written by a geopolitical rival that has a long history of malicious intrusion on Western networks?

>"government banned Deepseek in February last year, including downloadable GGUF's - with some nebulously hand-wavy 'it's just too dangerous'"

With the latest research on backdoored weights this really isn't tinfoil hat territory at all, and trusting every individual agency to fully vet what they're hosting and not use 3rd party inference is a tall order. I can't blame them.

[flagged]

Holy stupid shit :D

First of all: kudos to Oz!

Better late than never. And this is very late.

IIRC Europe was on this as well e.g. Meloni regarding OpenAI.

Now that governments are banning remote LLMs controlled by authoritarian governments by proxy (CN, USA) it is time for companies to realize they shouldn't do that either.

The alternative? On-prem open models. Performance a little lower? Too bad, it ain't worth the risk. A privacy officer can value the risk, but that would be a case by case scenario and is expensive employee (lawyer), so not worth the effort.

Don't do it. You'll be liable.