alt Hacker NewsThe discrepancy you're recognizing is surely due to astroturfing. I know it's an unsavory thing to point out, but it's also very obvious.
The US government should not be sending its data to a foreign adversary. Doesn't matter if we're talking about AI services or just general compute and data hosting. This is an obvious choice for obvious reasons.
When I worked with government agencies as a cloud engineer, we had to use AWS GovCloud. Like, we were forbidden from using non-GovCloud despite AWS being a US company. So with that level of security scrutiny being in-place well before LLMs became a thing, it is no surprise that allowing government employees to send sensitive information directly to the Chinese government wouldn't be allowed lol
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Given thats the obvious and rational choice for any gov anywhere to make. Considering the sensitivity of data flows as well as potential leaks/sabotage.
This however goes beyonnd that as its been written to be as vaguely worded and anbigously as to spread the maximum amount of FUD, catching in its net even a locally running DS llm or any 'derivatives' i take that to mean any quantized/distilled models even touching on DS.
This is basically the same play that was done in regards to Huawei , next step as was in that case would be the US gov going around the planet and intimidating other govs to drop DS. THen tack the same allegations to the rest of the Chinese OS models , rinse and repeat.
With OSS locally hosted models the anology is more akin to the Hallowee Documents by Microsoft from the 90-20's in regard to linux and attempts to kneecap its spread.
> The US government should not be sending its data to a foreign adversary.
I agree. Wholeheartedly. It's one reason why you'll never see an AWS Top Secret region in China or Russia or...
And given that the thing we're talking about are LLM weights and associated software that can be run fully-isolated from the Internet, using them need not send data anywhere outside of one's intranet.
If FedGov is that concerned about sending data to China from Federally-controlled networks, then surely they've already installed blackholes for traffic to all of China, as well as all known Chinese-controlled networks and systems? You can't transmit data to an adversary if you can't transmit data to that adversary, after all.