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Even with US sanctions, Chinese AI companies would continue to serve users in every other country in the world (including China itself), so I don't see why they would stop releasing open weight models.
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The open weights models would be even more effective by incentivizing people and companies to switch jurisdictions. It might even break SFs monopoly on AI, or at least weaken it, everybody isn’t there exclusively to funnel money to openAI and Anthropic.

It would also boost research in non US jurisdiction. Who is going to be wooed by “come to our lab where you’re only allowed to work with closed models!”

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What researchers want to join a company that is in a race to the bottom to serve inference tokens? If any open weight companies start actually producing state of the art models then maybe, but if it's just copying what others have done for cheaper, you aren't going to find many researchers interested in that
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The Chinese AI models are certainly not copied from any US sources.

All of them have quite different structures, and the reasons for choosing those structures have been clearly explained in published research papers.

The structures of the US "SOTA" models are unknown and nothing useful has been published about them, so they certainly were not a source of inspiration for China.

Big LLMs like those published by the Chinese companies must have been trained on a huge amount of text, images etc. and the training sets cannot have anything to do with the data hoarded by OpenAI and Anthropic, though they must have been gathered by the same methods, e.g. scanning the Internet and paying "pirates".

The only thing that could have been done by the Chinese companies, though for now there exists no evidence, only allegations, is that they could have used for post-training their models results of queries to US models, made by account who have breached the ToS, which forbid the use of the AI services by competitors.

If this really happened, this is a breach of contract, but there is no way in which one may say that the Chinese have copied anything or stolen any kind of IP and the effects of such a post-training can provide only an extremely small fraction of the information embedded in the weights of a model.

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Open-weights models will be downloaded from China and run on local/corporate-owned AI hardware. You would have to ban Internet access and AI hardware next.
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