I don’t have the emoji handy, so just imagine the most savagely doubtful-looking emoticon that anyone has ever made.

It is very possible that Trump and his cronies are just too incompetent to do that. In this one particular aspect (i.e. open source) I prefer having a stupid enemy than a "smart" enemy.

Why?

Part of the security risk also is the number of different models. I’ve been tempted to try some other models, but how many do I want to give access to SSH or even my repo? Obviously there are ways to work with this, but it’s gonna run through some people‘s heads.

We're in late-stage capitalism here. The pitchforks are already out and spreading across the globe. Unless the big companies get broken up, this nation will split into either a police state or socialist state.

Its not right to steal what I worked so hard to steal from someone else. [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zhvd6bIRPK4

gee I wonder how their models learned Chinese?

Also in Musk vs Altman case, we have found that this is regularly done by all labs.

I made Qwen respond it was made by Google with a simple Chinese greeting.

But also, I made Sonnet introduce itself as made by OpenAI..

Prompt: 你好！用一句话介绍你自己。

Sonnet in around 5% of resplies:

    你好！我是 **ChatGPT**，一个由 OpenAI 开发的 AI 助手，致力于回答问题、提供信息和帮助解决各种问题。有什么我可以帮你的吗？

Found it like a month ago and it kept working, I wonder if it will stop after this comment.

I trust Chinese companies with my data far more than American companies.

If DeepSeek just would have destroyed the input in the process, it would have been legal and Anthropic should have been fine with it.

Illicitly learning by asking someone a question and listening to their answer.

Just because they did it doesn't mean more people should do it...

"illicitly" implies a law that is being violated. What law?

What VPN provider is this? I could use it because Chinese users of my apps often complain about not being able to download things from my western hosted servers.

The reason why some Capital Interests want to blacklist DeepSeek in the US is so that you are forced to buy Claude/GPT/Gemini, which will feed revenue into an industry that requires revenue (or it’s a big problem).

The reason why some Capital Interests don’t want to ban DeepSeek is so companies that utilize AI have more options, and running your own DeepSeek cluster acts as an independent cost comparison for enterprise inference contracts.

The raising AI valuation is giving more weight to those that want to blacklist DeepSeek. The AI Safety narrative is strong. I see a path where any institution with enough compute might be watched in a similar was chem labs are observed by the DEA.

Not sure I'd go that far but I do use them almost exclusively for my coding on the basis that it is an acceptable trade-off. Far cheaper and my shitty apps are really not that valuable as training data

Translated:

Prompt: Hello! Introduce yourself in one sentence.

Response: Hello! I'm *ChatGPT*, an AI assistant developed by OpenAI, dedicated to answering questions, providing information, and helping solve various problems. How can I help you?

Opus said to me once without any poking at it something like, "Help Grok understand it better". Makes me wonder if they are all cross-pollinated to an extent.

"illicit" is throwing shade, but Anthropic can decide not to answer those questions if they don't want to. Plenty of companies don't sell to their competitors

I like Ant, but also I support the tit-for-tat competition. In the best interest of consumers.

Actually in competition it means exactly that.

why? Just because you have that opinion deoesn't mean people shouldn't do it

Oh course it does, why wouldn't it work this way in regards to computer science?

Are we seriously going to go back to a time where numbers were considered munitions?

Illicit isn’t just a synonym for illegal.

It can mean “forbidden by laws, rules, or established moral customs”

So it can be illicit and legal.

It could also mean a TOS violation / breach of contract.

(To be clear, I find the complaint hilariously hypocritical.)

I'm happy that China is doing that. US cannot be trusted anymore.

Not saying that China can be trusted either, but I think having more actors is better for all of us.

This doesn't at all change the irony of big AI labs complaining about Chinese startups stealing the labs' IP, essentially by scraping the responses.

HN has a higher proportion of AI promoters than AI skeptics, and for a good while, the default response to complaints from book authors, bloggers, and other content creators was that "you put it on the internet so it's fair game", or "it's no different from a human learning from your works". So yeah, unless we're willing to revise these answers, I think the same "tough luck" reasoning should apply here.

For folks who are at Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, or Google, and think it's fundamentally different, I would ask you to think long and hard about that answer.

Seems like interests of US government and US capital (monopolize and corner markets, jack up prices, extract economic rent in perpetuity) run strictly against interests of the broader US consumers and overall global population

> As soon as DeepSeek came out I realized what was going on: China was going to make sure that no US company was going to "own" AI.

Yea m8, I think you might've been a bit late to that realization.

In the 1990s, web browser SSL encryption was export restricted, classified as a munition because it involved cryptography. That was under Clinton.

For all the current admin's insane, ridiculous, corrupt, and criminal flaws, it's not clear to me how much of this particular issue is just the US government doing what it's always done, knee-jerk react to tech it doesn't understand by passing stupid laws.

I've always found this line of reasoning troubling and uninformed.

Chinese models first of all can be hosted on your own hardware, I'd argue they are way more transparent than US companies, by well releasing stuff.

Second, the "smoking gun" of DeepSeek training off Claude isn't as bad as you may think, and the amount of tokens was deemed trivial. Did you also know that if you asked Claude's it's name in Chinese it would respond as "DeepSeek" until just a few months ago until they patched it?

Third, I find it a little hypocritical to call out Chinese for "industrial-scale" theft when anyone could create Studio Ghibli style image gen photos. How could they do that unless US companies trained on copyrighted works.

Chinese are just innovating faster at this point, DeepSeek V4 is an actual technological advancement (KV Cache compression) more than a cheap clone.

The administration does have it backwards, but IMO it's more them playing into the big tech companies plans (of course they have their favorites) instead of actually investing in education, and research like the Chinese do.

that is open to debate. Any commercial activity with a sanctioned entity has a pretty broad interpretation. Companies might not want to take the chance even if they are "still allowed".

It's not surprising that Trump is as bad as he is at many of these things, but what is surprising is that he's worshiped by his supporters.

As a European, I trust Chinese AI providers more than American. Cloud act did it for me.

Any LLM is probably trained on anything available online, including transcripts of conversations with their competition LLMs.

> It's why a Tiktok sale was forced.

I think that has more to do with controlling narratives that the USG doesn't like.

    > It's why we can't buy BYD cars

are you sure it has nothing to do with the fact that those cars are very heavy, potentially fire-making (battery firmware) computers on wheels that can be rooted (or are already) at any time by their manufacturers in China?

Chinese have a wider outlook on it.

Politically they believe AI belongs to humanity, which is why they are basically the only ones left publishing research in the open. That's probably part of their socialist nature.

But also a financial one. They believe that models are commodities, that you can swap one for the other and that the only thing that matters are the applications built upon them.

So they want to make sure that the world, and their own companies, are not limited in their business and application by a protected US commodity.

They will keep releasing in the open no matter what for quite some time.

It's quite impressive how the latest years I have found more and more to empathize with China than many of the western counterparts.

But it's increasingly clear that since the last decade protectionism and nationalism is taking the place of globalization, even though globalization has been a terrific success in lifting billions out of poverty and making the US thrive.

They probably will, but not for US customers.

Gonna skip over the chattel slavery and native genocide in future histories?

The reason we can't buy BYD cars is because if we allowed it without restrictions, it would utterly and completely destroy the United States auto industry. That's terrible public policy, and we should not allow it.

Before anyone starts talking about the free market, there is no free market here whatsoever. The fact that BYD's cost structure is what it is is the direct result of Chinese industrial policy.

Unilateral surrender in a core aspect of statecraft, which involves maintaining our industrial power and skilled labor force, is absolutely insane. I hope my government never gets convinced by market fundamentalist idiots to do such a thing, any more than it already has, to our great detriment.

The Chinese don't make these kinds of idiotic mistakes, which is how they have amassed the power, wealth, and influence that they have.

Because they have held off on adding these companies to the list in order to avoid increasing tensions with China?

Completely agreed. I would go further and say that it should be legal to scrape responses from LLMs to train new LLMs, and that forbidding that in your ToS should be considered an illegal contract. That’s simply the best way to avoid complete monopolization of the space, without requiring more drastic measures like antitrust down the line (which we seem to not manage well these days, given the number of monopolies). As long as you pay for your tokens like anyone else, "Big LLM" shouldn’t be allowed to control what you use the output for.

Just an anecdote,

I lived in China for a bit years ago and one the biggest issues accessing western websites weren't restrictions against the site. Most of the times the culprit was using CDNs or services from Google or Cloudflare which were restricted totally or partially.

I was working on a site around that time, learned about that fixed it for the chinese user base, after that users from china went up considerably.

if you look at share of industry profits, currently most of AI profits are captured by NVIDIA and cloud providers

banning deepseek/open weight models will allow Ant/OAI jack up prices and extract more profits for themselves

keeping open weights models available will keep current industry profit distribution where majority is captured by nvidia and cloud providers

and it would be great to have an independent auditor have access to all the training material and good search tools, so that take down requests can be made by copyright owners

> It's quite impressive how the latest years I have found more and more to empathize with China than many of the western counterparts.

I'm not sure that this is because China is suddenly a great place or political system so much as a reflection of many western nations speed running to autocracy in the name of manliness.

What makes BYD different from, say, Volvo, which sells EVs freely in the US?

realisticaly, the united states has no right or moral authority when it comes to human rights or rule of law given the last few years. given that, the admonishment of china's human rights violations against uighurs run hollow and hypocritical.

just happy to have more models that I could eventually play with if hardware ever becomes cheaper.

>The AI Safety narrative is strong

only if you really believe that the recent incident was about ```safety``` and not about punishing Anthropic for its blatant attempt to score brownie points with the other party, which will likely be in power for a while after the current party loses the Joker to dementia and/or diabetes and inevitably begins to nominate milquetoast apparatchiks once again.

if anything, the safety, copyright, and other narratives died down significantly for the time being, at least compared to the artificial hysteria of 2023-2024 when OpenAI, Anthropic and Google attempted to zerg rush regulatory capture and delulu Yuddites still thought they could kvetch the genie back into the bottle. unlike Llama and Stable Diffusion, new models are no longer greeted with a deluge of "And That's a BAD Thing" articles urging the proles to be scared and the politicians to "do something!"

at this point, when even the hourly "AI bad" article on the front page here is authored or at least co-authored by ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini, and when Chinese models are 10-20% behind those three, the inevitability of it has more or less settled in.

Ever see a tiktok about may 35?

> potentially fire-making (battery firmware) computers on wheels

Is Tesla any different?

Also, the open-weight local models are proving that the commodity can be delivered for most applications at a far lower price than frontier is charging.

It’s a fairly liquid global market. I find it hard to believe that DRAM manufacturers will be able to sustain a premium if prices drop ex-US.

I think you’re assigning magnanimity to a competitor that is lagging behind and has every, state backed incentive to capture the market the only way they can. By making the models dirt cheap to access. If the roles were reversed you wouldn’t see open source versions of Chinese models. Much like you don’t see them open sourcing their blade battery design.

This is absolutely true. Remember that automakers greatly contributed to war efforts in the past. It is an indispensable domestic industry, just as much as energy.

Then there is the issue that BYD cars are presumably connected to servers in China and most probably backdoored. They are too much of a security risk. I would absolutely not drive such a car, without permanently disabling the onboard cellular modem.

Or that time that we parked an army on the Rio Grande because a bunch of people from the US decided to settle in the Mexican territory of Texas? That was a whole thing and the President of the US at the time, James K. Polk, ran on a platform of "Manifest Destiny" -- that the US should span "from sea to shining sea." There were a whole host of other countries with interest in that territory, not to mention the Indian tribes who would be displaced by that policy. The US has had a lot of dark periods in our history, and we shouldn't let those periods displace us from the moral certainty we derive from the Declaration of Independence and things like The Bill of Rights.

it would destroy it, but then new more competent US automakers would pop up, similar to tesla.

US Big Three are simply full of incompetent boomers who want to maintain monopoly using tariffs, chicken tax, and banning of competitors that actively harm consumers

did you just came out of under a rock? lol

> there is no free market here whatsoever. The fact that BYD's cost structure is what it is is the direct result of Chinese industrial policy.

Aside from countless other ways before and after this, the US government handed over tens of billions of dollars in cash to GM and Chrysler in 2008 and 2009.

You can just copy the chinese playbook and allow entry if you are willing to hand over ip.

> The reason we can't buy BYD cars is because if we allowed it without restrictions, it would utterly and completely destroy the United States auto industry. That's terrible public policy, and we should not allow it.

Yeah, that was the argument against Japanese car makers, too.

A shitty system needs destroying sometimes. Competition from Toyota/Honda was critical in making US auto makers up their game.

It is terrible public policy to fall decades behind making expensive shitty versions of what the rest of the world has.

> The Chinese don't make these kinds of idiotic mistakes, which is how they have amassed the power, wealth, and influence that they have.

I generally agree with most of what you said but not this. China's chief advantage is having a billion people. On average, they aren't that wealthy or powerful. And their leadership makes plenty of idiotic mistakes - look at their real estate market.

Do you really think the truth has anything to do with the power of a narrative?

Why should that mean that Americans should prefer that TikTok restrict narratives unfavoraroble to American oligarchs?

I don't use TikTok, but a cursory search shows that there's a #tiananmensquare tag that has a few thousand videos, including many about the protests and Tank Man. So while I haven't seen a TikTok about it, someone has.

    > Is Tesla any different?

if you are adversary of the US and the possibility of a hot conflict with it exists, it is not.

Great story. A couple of billion dollars 18 years ago is not an industrial policy.

US note remotely capable of doing a China playbook which is: _OLD_ IP. In exchange for allocating cheap land, building cheap factories/infra, staffing with cheap technical labour etc etc... the IP sharer just sits back and collect checks. The Chinese playbook actually offers value US (and west in general) not capable of providing.

It's not like I don't understand the argument on the other side of this. I've heard it my entire life. It's been dominant since the late 1970s and 1980s.

It's just that it's wrong.

We need a competent industrial policy and support for skilled labor and policies that encourage domestic production.

I'm not sure if you've noticed, but our country has become fucked, overwhelmed by financialization, scams, monopoly rents and extraction, and all of the wealth accumulating to a handful of people, while we've become less resilient and, at this point, almost certainly have lost our place as the most dominant economy and industrial power in the world.

automotive platforms are a key military asset it's not like the pokemon dildo industry, if you stop building jeeps your abolity to bully third parties is diminished

That's not the chief advantage, insofar as there is a difference between China, India, and Indonesia, which there is.

Their chief advantage has been a coherent, long-running national industrial policy and trade policy that encourages industry while keeping the financial sector from taking over the economy and ripping everybody off.

We used to do that too from the late 1930's to the late 1970's, which is why we were the dominant industrial power in the world at that time as well.

We're kind of doing it with the tsmc fabs, but yea, there are civilizational problems in the west which goes beyond cheap resources, talent, and labor.

IMO the problem is that we've been given the excuse of market fundamentalism for the past several decades on the way down, as most everyone lost their middle class jobs, wages stagnated, etc. Now we're supposed to accept some last ditch attempt at protectionism based on directly blocking choices for consumers, when the US manufacturers aren't even really competing? It just seems like open hypocrisy. At this point the reasonable protectionist policy would be based around subsidizing American industry so that they become competitive options, not merely trying to keep the better foreign options out.

> We need a competent industrial policy and support for skilled labor and policies that encourage domestic production.

Yes!

But "tariff/ban BYD" is not that.

Pokémon dildo factory should retool easily into a track-and-destroy-jeeps drone factory

> automotive platforms are a key military asset

All the more reason not to save companies that can't compete in the global space. What good is a jeep that the Chinese laugh at?

I wouldn't consider India. It's been plagued by protectionism and tariffs and won't achieve anything close to China any time soon. The only industry of value for its people which is software services is now crumbling with AI created in US and China. Edit: probably your point too and I misread

> We used to do that too from the late 1930's to the late 1970's, which is why we were the dominant industrial power in the world at that time as well.

I think there's another world event that happened in that time span that might better explain America's world-wide industrial dominance.

Every single load of bullshit shuffled into our faces has been presented as a benefit to consumers.

Google gives away their search and Gmail for free, don't you know? So it can't possibly be a monopoly.

And so on. It's just propaganda. It's bullshit. That's not the way that you determine whether firms have excess market power, and this fraud (called "the consumer welfare standard") was the deliberate choice of right-wing policymakers who were bent on dismantling antitrust policies and succeeded.

More: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/the-secret-plot-to-unleas...

Of course it is part of an industrial policy. It is, however, not nearly sufficient, and if it's the only thing we do, it will become increasingly untenable and eventually fail.

But it's an essential first step to prevent our audio industry from just being summarily destroyed. Other steps are also needed to encourage domestic manufacturing and homegrown successes.

Also, I'm not sure why this is even controversial. Why do you think there's BMW and Hyundai plants in the American South? Tariffs are already heavily employed by us and every other industrialized country.

You think people laughing is an important metric versus having an integrated industrial facility capable of producing vehicles in large quantities?

Maybe start at the beginning. Where do you think power comes from in the world? I'll give you a hint. It's not the ability to construct narratives.

You're confusing cause and effect.

> You think people laughing is an important metric…

I think if you're gonna argue "preserving the auto industry is a national security issue" you have to address the fact that an auto industry that relies on protectionism to avoid being competitive with the rest of the world will probably not be very effective at national security.

Otherwise, you wind up like Russia in Ukraine - people laugh at your failed efforts.

> an integrated industrial facility capable of producing vehicles in large quantities

Large quantities of vehicles don't do much good if those vehicles are shitty compared to the opposition's. Iraq's army under Hussein was one of the largest on the planet at one time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_73_Easting

"The nine M1A1 tanks of Eagle Troop destroyed 28 Iraqi tanks, 16 personnel carriers and 30 trucks in 23 minutes with no American losses."

"In doing that the scout platoon encountered another Iraqi tank position of thirteen T-72s. The lightly armored Bradleys, each equipped only with a 25-mm cannon and two TOW missiles, are intended for reconnaissance, not direct engagement with armored tanks. Despite a misfire, and having to reload the launchers in the face of the enemy, the two Bradleys destroyed 5 tanks before help arrived."

No, they're not.

Europe was devastated and bankrupt. Asia was devastated and bankrupt.

The US mainland was untouched. It had a massive leg up against the competition.

If you don't think industrial capacity is relevant to geopolitical power then I don't think we're really having a serious conversation here.

> explain America's world-wide industrial dominance.

> Europe was devastated and bankrupt. Asia was devastated and bankrupt.

Well yeah. Because America's world wide industrial dominance soundly beat the shit out of everyone, due to deployment of a highly successful industrial policy.

Imagine if we needed to rapidly step up industrial output tomorrow to fight another global war and China was on the other side. How do you think it would go?

> If you don't think industrial capacity is relevant to geopolitical power…

Of course it is!

But so does the quality of what that capacity puts out.

Again, the Russians found that out in Ukraine.

> Because America's world wide industrial dominance soundly beat the shit out of everyone, due to deployment of a highly successful industrial policy.

That industrial dominance came largely during the war, and was made possible by the fact that they weren't being bombed while it scaled up.

There's a huge element of geopolitical luck involved in the rise of the US.

> Imagine if we needed to rapidly step up industrial output tomorrow to fight another global war and China was on the other side. How do you think it would go?

Horribly! I think they're much more prepared for such a thing.

What does the Russian economy have to do with anything? First off, they're run by a kleptocratic oligarchy, and second of all they're still one of the top 5 most militarily powerful countries in the world. I don't even know what point you're making? Did they bail out Chrysler? Which side of the analogy are they even on?

Well then we agree, that their industrial policy is working a little better than ours. Which was the original point.

They don't let western businesses overwhelm their domestic industry at all. For us to let them do it to us would be unilateral disarmament and suicide.

> What does the Russian economy have to do with anything?

They had more of that industrial capacity you're talking about than Ukraine, more tanks, more armaments, more weaponry.

It still didn't let them win. Because the quality matters too.

> First off, they're run by a kleptocratic oligarchy…

I have some awkward news about the US in recent years.

> Well then we agree, that their industrial policy is working a little better than ours.

Yes! Their car industry is competing; ours is hoping to avoid it.

You now understand my point and objection to preserving domestic capacity via selling worse cars more expensively to its own citizens.

This is just an example of the fundamental nature of asymmetric insurgent warfare and the nature of proxy conflicts. It's not like Vietnam was more powerful than the US economy either. You seem confused.

In an all-out existential battle Ukraine would have been wiped off the map in the first 20 minutes by nuclear weapons. This isn't an actual contest of industrial might versus industrial might.

No I don't understand your objection. My argument is that preserving domestic capacity is necessary for our survival, and that limiting imports is necessary but insufficient to achieve that goal.

Banning stock buybacks would be another helpful step. Can you imagine being at the helm of a major US automaker as the transition to electric is happening and thinking you have no better investment to make in your own company than literally taking the revenue you're earning and sending it to hedge funds and Wall Street?

> This is just an example of the fundamental nature of asymmetric insurgent warfare.

Plus overconfidence, and outdated Russian tactics and equipment.

The US would be wise not to fall in the "our army bigger" trap too.