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points by 3eb7988a1663 4 days ago | 0 comments

Just wait until the government ban on the dangerous open models materializes.

It won’t be a ban, it will be some “certified safe” badge from a federal agency. Companies will be scared into not using anything that is not “certified safe” and business insurance will even require it. Whoever (openAI or Anthropic) gets to the politicians first will be the only certified safe model provider.

Maybe the FDA is a good analogy, you wouldn’t want to buy meat at the store not FDA certified would you? OpenAI and Anthropic want you to feel the same about AI.

[–] ern 4 days ago

I'm not an American, but I thought the FDA didn't certify stores

[–] verdverm 4 days ago

I do not expect an outright ban. (1) the bots are too useful, open is the way, re: HF handling the incident (2) you can train without certain capabilities, see Kimi K3.1 (3) reminiscent of the encryption is dangerous debate of the '90s

There will likely be requirements like registering with the government (China already does this, every business already does everywhere), certain usages require more or have deeper regulations (this is already done with most technologies, depending on application)

[–] 3eb7988a1663 4 days ago

I think it will not technically be a ban, but a de facto one.

Some variation on, "Open weight models must be A) trained in the USA B) have a public training dataset + training pipeline C) be reviewed by a government 'safety council', etc" Something which technically leaves a crack open for someone to release a less capable model than the commercial ones.

[–] verdverm 4 days ago

That kind of policy will hold a country back, and why I don't think it will happen. There are already many companies already using Chinese models.

Another confounding factor, if a US company fine-tunes a Chinese model, or vice versa, what is that country that should be assigned to that model.

You also have to consider the competition between the US and China. If the US did something like this, the world will move to Chinese hardware and Ai. The think tanks that talk with legislators understand this.

[–] throw10920 3 days ago

> If the US did something like this, the world will move to Chinese hardware and AI

Hardware? Why would anyone change their hardware based on this? That's completely unrelated.

And as for Chinese LLMs - there's already evidence that the Chinese are training malicious behavior into their models. I think most countries would rather train their own models than risk that.

[–] 3eb7988a1663 4 days ago

You have more faith than I do. It would be bad policy, but hardly a first for a government who wielded tariffs like a cudgel in spite of obvious repercussions.

[–] vikramkr 4 days ago

honestly the surprising thing at this point would be if america did actually pass a policy of any sort, good or bad, vs just relying on the president to yolo some executive orders now and then that change every 2 years. Plus at least for the next couple years nvidia likes open source models and the president likes the ceo of nvidia. There could be a falling out but nvidia has deep pockets to ... discourage ... a falling out.

It's worth remembering that the tariff stuff is not any sort of durable policy. It's one guy sort of doing whatever until 9 other guys a year later go 'hey wait' and then the first guy does whatever again anyway. The whole thing is just a recipe for whiplash. maybe congress remembers that they're supposed to do stuff in a few months and steps in. maybe they don't and then every 4 years we have wild swings in enforced based on which half of a percent of the voters in georgia had rainy weather where they lived in early november. More of a simultaneous "All of the above and also none of the above" deal until the dynamics of american government fundamentally shift

[–] verdverm 4 days ago

There are people in Trump's inner most circle that know this. I'm not worried about it. People trust those calling for regulatory capture (Dario / Altman) the least. (HN is not a good representation of the general population and AI userbase)

[–] dannyw 4 days ago

NVIDIA won't be too happy about that; alongside Micron, etc.

US commercial interest =/= OpenAI and Anthropic.

[–] mike_hearn 4 days ago

NVIDIA would love it. They themselves make available open weight models trained in the USA with open data sets, because they don't really care whose models are used as long as they run on NVIDIA hardware. The idea that only China makes open weight models isn't true, there are many other providers and some of them are quite good.

[–] CamperBob2 4 days ago

There will likely be requirements like registering with the government

Sadly, my GPUs were lost in a tragic boating accident.

[–] pixl97 4 days ago

Not just models, won't be long before hardware is regulated too.

[–] shwaj 4 days ago

Sounds like an eventual Supreme Court case.