The bigger problem will be if someone (such as a Chinese AI lab) releases a Fable/Mythos-class open weight model. That you can't really export control successfully. Sure, you could class it under EAR or ITAR, but that's just going to make using it difficult for American companies, not everyone else. It would be a stupid protectionist measure that would only hurt the US - so I fully anticipate the admin would try it.
Particularly if it came paired with DeepSeek pricing.
Alternatively, we could try to keep closing barn doors after the horses are already in the next county, have been hit by a car, and are on their way to the rendering plant.
weren't chinese labs training on US Ai outputs? a looot of ai power is in correct data to train for - that's pretty much like inviting workers to your factories, they won't take machines with them, but will see and consume all the processes
In any case, had that been possible in the beginning, it stopped being possible long ago, because any suspicious accounts would be banned and the cost would be prohibitive even if they were not banned.
On the other hand, anyone can train new LLMs using the open weights Chinese LLMs, or the much fewer open weights LLMs with other origins, like the NVIDIA LLMs.
So in reality it is much more plausible for a US company to use Chinese LLMs for training, than vice versa.
there's also a market for chinese labs sending checkpoints to US companies to be trained on US compute and sent back
i'm surprised that so many people take chinese tech reports about how they train their models at face value tbh
The government of the Peoples Republic of China provides massive subsidies and incentives for R&D. The cost is absolutely not prohibitive, it's not even a factor. You are massively underestimating how much capital is involved in both countries respective industries. 500 billion on indirect compute? 好!
that's... exactly the point?
make it easy to steal tech from opponent, not from you
This would blow huge damage to the US financial markets first, the insane CAPEX spending propping up gdp, but also US competitivity in the long run.
Sure, the US is the most important tech market on the planet, but according to Anthropic 80% of their revenue comes from outside of the US.
Let alone the fact that these research labs desperately need the top talent they can get globally, not just MIT-bred Leetcode ninjas.
The only way US can have a lead is by competing globally as it always had in the tech sector (albeit it resorted to export controls to assert its dominance over China), not by changing the rules of the game and with protectionism.
The exceptions are very notable, but it's a bad thing to bet on happening. They seem to have more problems due to protecting them too much than for the alternative extreme.
I do. And from my perspective, most people in tech do.
> these models [have] changed the game, and for the worse.
Yes. Also for the better.
> Capabilities that used to be available only to nation-state attackers
We (unhelpfully) draw a tight line around nation-state attackers. We don't perceive them as part of the relentless tendency of the powerful - to leverage tech against everyone they can. Particularly us.
> Capabilities ... are legitimately commodified,
Sure. Models will keep increasing in ability. The only choice is whether they're limited for the powerful to use against us - or if that power extends to us, to help us keep the powerful in check.
Local models will catch up and then you won’t be able to legally download them. I’m guessing DeepSeek 5 will be illegal to download even if it’s only opus 4.x level when it’s released.
Do you think AWS or Microsoft would be so dominant in cloud services and office productivity if the previous administrations had banned them for non-us firms?
In my opinion no, and all across the world we would be using non-us tech.
Precisely because it's a service, the US have the interest make the rest of the world continue to send their data to them.