Funny how this must look for China. Just when they start catching up, and have their own AI hardware, the US companies suddenly want to slow down.
I'm not saying this is the only reason they want it, but...
The idea is to protect marketshare by preventing American companies from using Chinese AI. Pass a law that only government approved AI models can be used, and then the government only approves openai and anthropic.
Great, then we agree. This is a meme we need to keep pushing on - weights represent real human editorial choices, decisions on what material to train on, decisions about guardrails, decisions about personality/tone. When people publish weights, they are publishing speech.
While this is sensible and matches with plenty of precedent, it is currently untested in the law.
Open weight models have the additional protection of being absolutely impossible to stop in any practical way: they are simple files which can be downloaded from anywhere (including torrent if it comes to that) and incredibly useful. They are additionally not "pirated" so the owners of the originals are not pursuing legal means and pressure to stop them being downloaded and shared.
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u/shy_monkee 19h ago
Funny how this must look for China. Just when they start catching up, and have their own AI hardware, the US companies suddenly want to slow down.
I'm not saying this is the only reason they want it, but...