If they want to compete with the closed models, then put some money into development and build a better model.

Pure game theory, a bunch of losers in the AI space groveling at the white house to try to stop their competition.

I'm very confused by this comment, I don't know who you're referring to.

None of the people signed this have ever produced a frontier model at a given date (Which is to say its neither Google/OAI/Ant). The ones that sign are meta, musk (who is in the shovel selling business as well), hugging face obviously and few others

Note: Just pointing out the comment intent and nothing else

OK, I guess my confusion was that the effort to ban open weights models is what I would categorize as "groveling at the white house to try to stop their competition".

Google has produced Gemini Pro, Meta produced llama3-70B/llama3-405B and now has Muse, Musk has Grok. These are very capable models and to claim that they are not frontier is to stretch the meaning unless you want to say "#1 model" Gemini Pro at one point even if for a week, was #1 model.

I included Google along with Ant and OAI. OSS models have never been the highest performing model unless you refer to benchmaxxing.

Musk didn’t sign it.

nVidia did and they released good models – same with Meta, Microsoft, IBM, Mistral – all are signatories.

I thought the whole point of open software development was anyone could take your thing and improve it.

It would seem as if the community either isn't doing that or is relying on the Chinese to do that.

I thought this would be a push for a nationwide open weights effort / initiative, but I was surprised to see this:

> Distillation ... reflects a long tradition of learning from, building upon, and improving existing technologies, a tradition that has helped drive innovation since the rise of the open-source software movement. By contrast, unlawful efforts to extract value from closed models raise legitimate concerns. Those concerns should be addressed through targeted legal and commercial frameworks rather than sweeping restrictions on techniques that play an important role in AI innovation.

Sounds like they are saying "please protect our IP theft" that created closed weight frontier models in case we arbitrarily decide to close our models. But don't get rid of distillations in general so that we can all also keep benefiting from open models. We don't want to lose the ability to benefit from the work of others as we launder IP into closed models.

Surprised Linux Foundation kept their name on it with that.

"..a tradition that has helped drive innovation since the rise of the open-source software"

i've said this in other comments but the fact that these companies are trying to align with open-source when there's no "source" included with their models is pretty damning. I think it lays bare the absence of any kind of noble or righteous motive with respect to distillation.

Regardless of the motivations behind the paper, the fact is that they are right. It's a topsy-turvy world where America closes up and China opens, and I hope it gets corrected soon.

And besides, it seems to me like the ethical choice. Given how these models are, in some very real sense, mechanical plagiators, built on the generosity of creators past and present, some of them now in danger of being replaced by the machine. I think the least the labs can do is open these models up. These and other such considerations were the reason OpenAI started with that name. Of course, it was questionable that those ideals would survive the encounter with generational wealth. Just look up what the founders of Google were saying about advertising when they were two students tinkering at an as of yet unproven tech. Same thing for OpenAI, self-interest speaks that much louder when there's real money on the table.

It just boggles the mind that people now make excuses for their all-too-predictable about-turn.

> I think the least the labs […]

Perhaps worth not calling them "labs". Are they not (for-profit) companies?

Of course but I think labs is a good term. Like a lot of terms like this it comes from history. The people working on AI at these places come predominantly from academia and predominantly do research. Of course now these companies are far more than just a “lab” and I can imagine their headcount may be more non-research folks at this point but most of the results are indeed coming from the “lab”-y areas

> It's a topsy-turvy world where America closes up and China opens

There's nothing "open" about China. Google, meta, openai, etc all blocked. Go visit and see how it goes when you try to access your gmail or open facebook. Try to use chatgpt. Try to get citizenship and see how that goes. China blocks many western companies with their great firewall and force internal similar products. This is smart, China wants to prioritize their own.

Your examples are the typical case, which is why OpenAI being closed and Kimi/DeepSeek/Qwen being open is topsy-turvy.

Im guessing parent meant more open in this particular case, i.e open weight models vs closed cloud hosted. Obviously china is not an open country.

He means specifically open vs closed AI model development, and how that’s topsy-turvy for the reasons you mention.

well let's be clear, there's nothing open about an open-weight model.

To me, "open these models up. " must mean provide all the data and supporting documentation required to reproduce the model. That would be "open". Postgres is open because you can download all the data and supporting documentation and reproduce the binary yourself. However, being able to only download a postgres binary would make it no longer open.

Additional training on top of an open-weight model sounds analogous to writing mods for minecraft. You may change some behavior but that doesn't make minecraft "open".

Weights are the cake and source is the recipe. Except you aren’t going to spend millions working through the recipe to arrive at the same exact cake anyway, so why do you care?

The problem with that analogy is that compiling Postgres takes a few minutes. Training a model takes hundreds of thousands of dollars (at least) and specialized hardware.

Having a standardized training set is valuable, though.

Here here! Open weights is the term because it's close to open source but everyone thinks everyone else is an idiot and saying the model is downloadable but you can't recreate it is too difficult for our feeble minds to understand. There are actually open source models out there though, with datasets and training code.

I think it has more to do with the fact that there has to be some term to describe the concept of "model which has weights that are openly accessible"

Like, that's just a logical thing to call it. I don't believe anyone is making a judgement on the intelligence of the reader to call it "open weight" when it refers to weights that are openly available.

"Open source" would be a more appropriate term to describe a model which also includes the training source.

Indeed.

Sure, I'm all for opening the whole enchilada. But at least Chinese AI development is more open than the US one. And not just on the weights front, but AFAIK also more open when it comes to the techniques used and lessons learned in the process (DeepSeek at least is). Which is in a sense even more valuable and laudable.

It's open, with a small 'o', and no moral judgements attached to it.

1. You have the weights, so you can run the model yourself on your own hardware. 2. You have the weights, so you can do post-training and shift those weights for your own purposes. It's not the same as training the model, but for many people its fine as what we want is a quantization, or a fine tune, or to create hybrid models.

What they don't give you are the training data, and reproduction instructions but... the toolchain to create the software has never been a part of 'Open Source'.

Even though it feels like a huge loophole, it's technically open source if you deliver the source code, without having a compiler that's available so you force them to recreate the toolchain from scratch.

To me, though, a better analogy is to research science where you'll be happy when they give you the full result set they compiled even if you don't get the raw data which may have IP or privacy concerns, or their often poorly documented lab notes so you can actually reproduce.

What you want to do is run your own experiment, and get your own results... not duplicate theirs directly. Even if reproduction is your aim in science, being unable to reproduce without copious notes sometimes points out that the original experimental process must have been flawed.

LLMs have the same issue. The creation process isn't entirely well documented, and the raw data can't be released since although the company have the right to use certain sources, they can't transfer those rights to others.

ha! who is groveling to the white house to stop competition? openai, anthropic and google, they are the losers. if they want to compete, compete.

This is some bizarre victim inversion. The providers of closed models are the ones who are trying to use regulation to stop their open model competition, not the other way around.

This is how it is with all of these guys, their only principle is "what's good for me", and will twist all narratives to fit it

That's why competition is good though

I don't think that is what is happening.

Instead a bunch of tech companies are gathering to try to stop OpenAI and Anthropic fear-bouncing the White House and the Republican Congress into giving them regulatory capture and repeating the mistakes they are making around RISC-V.

Those mistakes won't just entrench two companies, they will entrench the bigger-better-faster-more model (closed companies making ever bigger cloud-bound models) when it is abundantly clear that enormous progress can still be made on smaller, even desktop-bound models (where, due to distribution, open weights are essentially inevitable).

Regulatory capture that stops open weights work will also have impacts on local and on-device AI work, as well as on academic research.

You can call out regulatory capture evwn when you would do the same if the shoe were on the other foot.

Just saw on Microsoft

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/corporate-responsibility/top...

Should probably just update the link to that; this doesn't need to be a PDF

Makes sense Microsoft is placing it self as a model host and os providing open weight models for much cheaper on their infra already.

No wonder openai and anthropic are terrified

Makes sense for Microsoft. Copilot is already capable of being model agnostic (both GH Copilot, obviously, and M365 as well). They're an enterprise software & services company, they want to sell integrated AI tooling in their stack, powered by whatever models their customers want rather than any specific model.

Models are quickly becoming a dumb pipe, like an ISP. Just a commodity. The labs should rightfully be terrified, eventually the value isn't going to come from the model itself but the tools & integrations built on top. Non-tech businesses and non-tech employees don't want to buy API access to a model, they want to buy off the shelf software with its capabilities packaged up into a pretty, easy to use GUI.

I don't know about that, a lot of those bloated enterprise solutions are becoming obsolete fast, and integrations becoming a moot point as these models advance.

Maybe for startups or simple orgs, but in any regulated industry/high compliance requirements they are still useful or outright required.

Claude Team w/ Cowork still only lets you set R/W permissions globally for each MCP connector for the whole team, they still don't offer config on a per-user basis. The enterprise controls are sorely lacking first party. Maybe fine for most startups or flat orgs, but any established enterprise with strong identity & access governance is going to have an issue with that. You can make it work, but you need to make your own agent/harness and give it an identity in Entra or whatever else you use, so for a non-tech company without a dev team, right back to square one of preferring to just buy a COTS solution vs trying to hand out direct model access with minimal governance.

(M365) Copilot sucks but Microsoft is putting a ton of work into agent governance & identity that sorely lacking elsewhere.

I wonder what is happening behind closed doors for these companies to be issuing such a joint letter.

Different companies have different motivations. I'm sure some are genuine, but a lot of them simply lost the race (to OpenAI/Anthropic/Google) and know they can't compete anymore, so are shifting strategies. How many times has Microsoft done exactly this in the past?

looking at both openai and anthropic; they are winning something, but a sober look at their finances will make you silently mouth "but what did they win".

They want to be the successor to Enron.

Next year's archeologists will dig out their fossilized remnants.

pretty optimistic to think there'll befunded expeditions.

If there are effectively only two AI companies allowed to train or run model inference then demand for hosting, GPUs and data centers goes down, so they'd be able to squeeze their suppliers that much more too.

They are worried about OpenAI and Anthropic making their own processors and controlling the whole stack is my guess.

They really don't need to be very worried about that. Google, Microsoft, Amazon, et al have decades of experience in shipping custom hardware at scale, and it is not a simple field to pivot into

True, but Google has their own models and did not sign this either.

The other thing that comes to mind is they want to avoid the government from banning open models as has been suggested by some of the closed models providers.

Nvidia is subject to export restrictions on GPUs to China. So Chinese labs have responded by allowing American hosts to run their open-weight models in the US, where there are no restrictions. We see this in the EU too where Scaleway, and now Hetzner are getting into the inference host space serving Chinese open-weight models.

So Nvidia benefits from more inference providers running many Chinese models that they otherwise would not have been able to service.

Oh, that’s interesting. I think the general expectation was that blocking exports to China would result in companies there building their own cards competing with NVIDIA. If it has incentivized them to release open weight models instead, that seems like an unexpected win.

It's all things at once. Perhaps it's incentivized the open weight strategy. It's also prompted Huawei to ramp up production of AI chips to try and create a local competitor to Nvidia. It's also also created a grey market for Nvidia chips within China.

> I think the general expectation was that blocking exports to China would result in companies there building their own cards competing with NVIDIA.

In the long run, perhaps, but it's a lot faster to scale up the capacity and usage of existing hardware/datacenters/grid, and even add new capacity to those, than it is to develop brand new GPU hardware and the fabrication of it.

The cards are also coming... Some of the very first are already out - but it will take a couple of years before they hit their stride in full. And cards will likely be primarily for Chinese companies initially, and then go for exports later. So it will go under the radar for many western techies for a while. Seeing what China has managed with PCB production, low to mid-end semiconductors, phone manufacturing and electric I would hesitate to bet against them.

Nvidia is now lobbying to remove the export ban, to try to reduce the incentives for developing their own high-end LLM training/serving (and cash in on current demand).

Nvidia will fail in that respect. Sanctions and restrictions are too popular with the American government. Where the United States will lose, is that almost every country in the world that can will use other solutions not from the United States.

And unfortunately, we are losing credibility on all fronts in the last year and a half. I wonder why?

NVIDIA sells the tools. The more the better it is for them.

Microsoft and Meta are also-rans at this point. Their best hope of catching up is probably leveraging their infra and open models.

"leveraging their infra" is a pretty solid play, considering the scope of investments these two companies have made thus far.

It does however totally abandon the question of making a profitable mass-market AI product upon which the scale of those investments was based.

Not entirely, if models become commodity, then Microsoft's play as an infrastructure & enterprise apps company is the better bet. They don't need to make profitable mass-market AI models, they just need the best tooling on top of any model their customers pick, remaining fully model agnostic.

"AI Product" doesn't necessarily mean "We sell API access to a our models." Ton of companies out there itching to buy a commercial off the shelf product to deliver whatever AI capabilities they need packaged in a nice GUI, with enterprise governance controls, without needing a dev team/team of engineers to integrate it or develop harnesses, etc.

Buy it->have IT click a few buttons in an admin console->Deploy and have it be immediately useful is the play.

AI services becoming a commodity by definition means that the price will hover around cost to operate. That's just what commoditization means in tech. Free, as in Google creating a free browser for no profit in order to increase the size of their ad market.

The entire justification for the AI buildout, and the valuations of all the major AI labs, is that the service will be priced at some significant fraction of the knowledge work it's replacing. If you think it will become commoditized in the future, you are saying these companies are significantly overvalued at present.

> you are saying these companies are significantly overvalued at present.

I do lean toward them being significantly overvalued at present. OpenAI & Anthropic's valuations assume high margin product pricing on raw intelligence itself. Even if assume the labs will start charging value-based pricing, enterprise buyers will pay that pricing to whoever saves them engineering hours to make any cheap model work inside their compliance boundary, no guarantee that's going to be OpenAI or Anthropic.

Microsoft wins either way, proprietary, expensive models or cheap commoditized inference, because they monetize the workflow on top, not the raw intelligence. I also happen to think it's everything "on top" where a lot of value lives. Plenty of non-tech enterprises and companies out there itching for a ClickOps style AI product, especially if they don't have an engineering team, that they can buy off the shelf, meets all the compliance checkboxes, and does what they need without having to build the agents and harnesses themselves with the APIs.

There is only one problem Microsoft has spent/burnt billions of dollars on Copilot an about-face at this point is basically the end of Nadella.

Depends on what you mean by AI product. If you’re talking about a chatbot or agent, that may be true, but o think it’s less true if you’re talking about AI-run application layer tooling. If Meta decides to compete with Shopify and provide a launchpad for entrepreneurs, you can bet the platform would be rife with AI to facilitate operations, marketing, coms, etc…

Isn’t Microsoft perpetually short on capacity?

https://windowsforum.com/threads/azure-capacity-crunch-exten...

Microsoft/azure has a big advantage because companies will literally pay extra then "free market" cost of open models purely for the knowledge that the won't fuck around with their data retention policy.

Agreed for NVIDA's strategy. Saw from a previous thread but Joel's commoditize your complement essay makes a lot of sense for NVIDIA. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/

The future will probably have most of all companies running local models, simply because the alternative would be essentially every company that uses LLMs ending up becoming completely dependent upon Anthropic et al. And that dependence would be milked to the point of absurdity once solidly established.

And as a more general point - more major competitors in a domain is very good for everybody except those competitors themselves, who would rather there be as few as possible.

Is that different from how companies are reliant on cloud computing?

Yes. No law prevents you from provisioning and using your own hardware.

There absolutely are laws restricting what hardware you are allowed to use. e.g. https://www.fcc.gov/faqs-recent-updates-fcc-covered-list-reg...

This argument would make more sense if the cloud providers used these devices but you were not allowed to.

Those are routers - not general purpose computers.

Yeah I fully expect companies with lots of GPUs but not a good model like Microsoft and Amazon to just take these open weight models and make money, the GPU expense is the only moat at this point.

It’s classic commoditize your complement, nobody can replicate the cloud providers, everyone can replicate the models with open weights.

yes, this seems to me to be the reason why these three companies want open weight. everyone wins (but especially big tech) in the open weight world except anthropic and openai. i suspect even google could live with the open weight scenario; they are in a sense the only tech company that is perfectly hedged in this respect.

i suppose this is part of why openai and anthropic have not been shy about advertising the scarier strains of their models, these past few months; they basically have to force the white house's hand or risk being commoditized among the various other options in a microsoft/openrouter dropdown.

China will be dropping the open models blather any day now. The autonomous agential coding Ai just turned out to be way too easy to perfect. They will give Kimi K3 to the Sinaloa cartel on Monday, but that's going to be the end of it.

But what does that mean for the US competitive leap in AI when compared to China? Is it an admission by these companies that AI models are here to stay and the US will not “win” by being the only country with the best of models? Genuinely asking, not sure about the answer.

Probably a real effort to push for some kind of sanctions or commerce block on Chinese models. Anthropic just doubled their political spending to $40 mil for the midterms to push for "AI Safety."

I suspect that whatever Musk has agreed to spend on the midterms in exchange for those sweetheart deals the SpaceX IPO got will make that look absolutely comical, but we’ll see.

I don't see why convincing people to overpay for something based on hype and artificial scarcity required any "sweetheart deals" via congress.

They've seen the government officials parroting OpenAI and Anthropic lobbies talking points, and they have smart enough people to see the signs of upcoming regulatory capture.

If I were cynical, I'd say it isn't helped by the current US administration.

Probably the fact that they don't want Anthropic or Google or OpenAI to have access to their data theoretically, and that they do want to use good AI, and that they don't want to spend the money themselves to make a good model...

Nvidia benefits no matter what because their hardware is being used. Microsoft and Meta benefit by making sure that the gap between "Anthropic/OpenAI" and "everyone else" doesn't widen, or they'll be hopelessly dependent on those frontier labs.

I'm not certain about this statement because Huawei created their own chip.

Almost certainly these companies are using similar strategies as the Chinese models which they fear will be made illegal.

It's also the case that it makes it hard to attract customers if your openweight model is banned. A major reason the likes of Qwen, Kimi, GLM, and Deepseek are popular (well, at least highly talked about) is because of the open weight models they gave away.

I think Meta would love nothing more than to throw a very large wrench into the works of OpenAI/Anthropic. Open models could mean one or both go bankrupt which is good for them.

Nvidia sells the hardware.

Microsoft sells the hosting.

They're trying to bring down Anthropic. There's been a huge smear campaign happening all year.

Reassuring to see this backed by major players.

This is the correct stance, hopefully this is the stance that prevails.

I'm finding the list of signatories on this letter really interesting and somewhat confusing, looking purely through the lens of economic interest.

It makes sense to see Meta, the startups, and the VC firms on this list. And it makes sense to see OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google all missing. Microsoft is somewhat unexpected to me. I don't think of them as having a focus on open weight models (no more than Google), and they have a large stake in OpenAI. Maybe they're looking at this from the angle of Azure providing compute. But then why is Amazon missing, when it has AWS?

And of course, we don't see DeepSeek, Moonshot, or Z.ai on here. The letter is about American technological leadership after all. But then we _do_ see the French company Mistral! Mistral who released [a playbook](https://europe.mistral.ai/) for Europe becoming a self-reliant AI powerhouse.

I assume all of this is in the context of influencing the Trump administration's thinking on Chinese open weights models. But the letter is really about _American_ open weights models. The call to action is all about keeping the American open weights ecosystem competitive. I didn't even realize that was under threat, so I feel like I'm missing something.

Signatories appear to group into

(a) sellers of hardware (Nvidia, IBM) and those who rent hardware out to others (Amazon, Microsoft)

They want open models because they don't have to license it to run it on their hardware, so they can offer lower cost and inspect what they are offering to clients

(b) open model creators (Arcee, Perplexity, Mistral, IBM, Microsoft)

...who would be unable to work if open-weight models are banned

(c) Software-heavy companies ( Mozilla, The Linux Foundation , ServiceNow, Microsoft, IBM, heck all of them)

...who want models that are cheap to run because that reduces the cost of running an LLM (whether you are trying to replace a software developer or just assist them, the value of a reduced cost LLM is directionally the same)

My hunch is they are all seeing the problems at OpenAI and some other collateral damage on the horizon. They don’t want the US government intervening to try to save OpenAI. A little controlled burn is probably good for the industry long term.

Google and Amazon both have incredibly large compute deals with frontier labs and GovCloud. They may not want to sour on that cash.

It helps if you understand there are multiple factions within the white house and trump admin. One faction is very hawkish towards allies and enemies, especially China. Another is the one sending ICE to invade American cities, the Christian nationalism and such. Another is very focused on wealth expansion for friends and family. There is an amount of Venn to these groups.

> The call to action is all about keeping the American open weights ecosystem competitive. I didn't even realize that was under threat, so I feel like I'm missing something.

OpenAI and Anthropic can bring American open-weight model providers like Meta to court but not the Chinese. Chinese companies breaking American IP law (whether the law is correct or not) are basically immune. This has been going on forever, I guess enough is at stake finally for the federal government to care.

Both the CEO of Palantir and the CEO of Microsoft have recently criticized very strongly the business model of OpenAI and Anthropic.

Therefore it is no surprise that both companies are among the signatories.

The motivation of Palantir is very transparent, they have launched a product created in cooperation with NVIDIA, which is a turnkey system (Sovereign AI) that includes all hardware (i.e. a rack with servers full of NVIDIA GPUs) and all software needed by a company to run on its premises LLM inference and also training/fine tuning.

Thus the Palantir product competes with OpenAI and Anthropic and it benefits from the existence of open weights LLMs.

The motivation of Microsoft is more obscure for now, but because its criticism was very similar to that of Palantir, about how dangerous it is for corporations to delegate the processing of their AI needs to external entities like OpenAI and Anthropic, I assume that Microsoft is also going to propose an alternative to using remotely the OpenAI and Anthropic APIs.

Unlike Palantir, Microsoft is not likely to suggest self-hosting on premises, but I suppose that they might promote self-hosting on some kind of instances rented from Azure.

> but I suppose that they might promote self-hosting on some kind of instances rented from Azure.

Yeah, Microsoft wants to sell Azure compute. They also want to sell their upcoming surface ultra hardware with the Nvidia chip in it. They preached hard on "unmetered intelligence" at this year's BUILD conference, went hard on local AI, and Azure Foundry, Windows Foundry Local, etc.

Copilot, both GH and M365, are also made to be model agnostic. Microsoft sells enterprise services and software, they'd prefer (I'm assuming) to not be locked in and dependent on any 1 or 2 model providers and would prefer plenty of options and competition in that space because they can just easily offer a model agnostic harness, integrated with the rest of their stack.

> Microsoft is somewhat unexpected to me

MS is playing literally all the sides in this whole AI thing. They are a massive investor in oAI, and have lots of rights to use their models for a long time. They also have the cloud where they offer inference w/ all the benefits of already being there, data retention, etc. They also have a research wing that can build models (rumours are they're aiming for frontier-ish). I don't think there's currently an angle in this AI thing that MS hasn't aimed for.

Commoditization of the model layer is to Azure's benefit. It would help to avoid the model layer becoming a platform that commoditizes cloud into a pure bare metal business. It also redistributes 'consumer' surplus back to the end user via a lower effective price, which would conceivably increase demand for IaaS and/or PaaS which are complements.

> But the letter is really about _American_ open weights models.

AI models don’t really have nationality. They don’t have race/ethnicity fields on their model cards. It’s impossible to determine the country of origin of a model by looking at their weights. There is no DNA test for AIs. They exist in a mathematical space where human-made borders make no sense.

This means IF there is a regulation for open weight models, it has to apply to ALL open weight models. There is no any other option, since you can always train/fine-tune a model to change it’s weights and rebrand it as a new model.

People certainly don't act that way. A lot of the talk is about how great free Chinese models are. Like, they're grouped by the fact that they're Chinese.

How much of that is organic versus something a agitprop agent is commenting in places like HN would be interesting to know, but people very much talk about that from a nationality perspective.

It makes a ton of sense to see this sort of joint effort being made by these enormous companies, but man, there's some part of me that can't help but feel grossed out knowing the best way to get the US to make the right choice is to have a handful of elite business people say it'd be bad for them.

Yeah, this letter is just proof of (the by now long standing fact) of corporate power/corporate capture of American governance. Tons of popular protests against big AI? Makes no difference. Joint corporate letter about big AI? Possibly the government will do something.

People unfortunately keep voting for “corporate power” politicians, so corporations continue to be in charge.

If you support the ideas described in Nvidia's letter, you're going against popular opinion. Most Americans do not want to "make advanced AI more accessible, adaptable, and widely available". Indeed, many areas of the country including the entire state of New York have enacted datacenter moratoriums, responding to the widespread public concern that if we have too much AI it's going to drink all our water.

Yeah hard to imagine why people would object to rising electricity and gas bills, negative environmental impact on their area for the privilege of ultimately losing their job.

It's easy to imagine! What I find hard to imagine is someone who opposes the construction of AI datacenters while also having detailed opinions about open weights and identifying "American AI Leadership" as a laudable goal. We're not talking about local AI here, competitive open-weight models can't be run effectively on consumer hardware.

Related:

China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48979269

The arguments against open source AI are bad

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49024643

AI Kill Switch Act: Official Bill Text by Reps. Lieu and Moran

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49028757

The issue is not open weights as a whole, indeed Hegseth himself said they are important for America (if American made, presumably); the issue is Chinese models, whether open or not, and that's what's looking to be banned, and nothing in this article suggests otherwise.

The conversation going on in the industry is a bit broader than that. OpenAI's head of strategic futures just said last week that open models are inherently decelerationist, ungovernable, and will slow development on the frontier. You'll notice OpenAI does not appear as a signatory here despite their relationship with Microsoft.

Well of course OpenAI and Anthropic say those sorts of things, it's what they've always said, particularly Anthropic, but that doesn't necessarily mean that's the position of the US government. In other words the government seems to be listening to some but not all of the lobbying done by the big two.

The guy who said those things just joined OpenAI in the last month. He was previously a senior policy advisor, specifically on AI, to the current administration in the White House.

I don't know that the US government has a unified position on open source AI. But it's not like this isn't a discussion happening among policymakers.

>open models are inherently decelerationist, ungovernable, and will slow development on the frontier

Ungovernable makes intuitive sense, but I don’t understand how open weight models could be decelerationist or slow the development of the frontier. Was there an argument for those positions?

Open weight models challenge the "winner takes all" hypothesis, which motivates the astronomical valuations and acts as a justification for trains of cash dumped into AI development.

In other words, if AI models become a commodity, the "AI leaders" will not be able to burn the cash like they do today, thus resulting in a "slower" (one could say instead "more sustainable") development of AI models.

Tough shit welcome to capitalism

Well maybe they should find better training methods or architectures

Here's his original post https://x.com/i/status/2078133895766114412

It's a copy/paste of the arguments against open source software from decades ago. The argument goes: innovation requires profit motive, and profit motive requires IP rights. Of course, this was soundly disproven in software and I don't see any reason it should be different here.

Chinese providers are actively debunking that argument by innovating on and releasing open weight models.

The difference might be the immense cost of physical infrastructure needed for AI training. People would make open source contributions for free, TSMC, NVIDIA and power companies seems less likely to make free contributions to AI.

Surprised to see I partially agree. They are indeed ungovernable and that is the best part.

> ...the issue is Chinese models, whether open or not, and that's what's looking to be banned...

Is the US planning to invade China and take away their models? Because otherwise China is still going to have the models even if the US bans them. I don't think they're going to be going with the US position on this one.

It's the same patronizing nonsense as when all the US webcos pulled out of the Chinese market in some misguided supposed protest believing the Chinese so incapable of rolling their own Google, Amazon or WhatsApp they will come begging the americans to go back. Now the western tech universe goes to China for ideas.

If by "pulled out of the Chinese market" you mean "were hacked by the Chinese government in a way that compromised their intellectual property and the safety of dissidents", then yes [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Aurora

The point is did the US reaction work or was it completely counter productive?

Then will attempting to cutoff China again today work or do we expect that also will prove to achieve the exact opposite of what its proponents are claiming?

We didn't cut off anything. American companies would have been more than happy to continue offering products and services in the Chinese market.

The Chinese government didn't like that idea. They attacked American companies, stole the IP, and created their own analogs of American corporate offerings. If you are a company and are targeted by a totalitarian government, it's not unreasonable to pull out of that totalitarian government's jurisdiction.

Honestly, the American response to that was not nearly stout enough. Chinese goods and services had been sold in the US without issue for decades at that point, often to the detriment of both domestic and other international market players. When China was expected to play by those rules and allow American companies to do business in a mostly-unfettered way, they attacked the companies and drove them out of their market.

> When China was expected to play by those rules and allow American companies to do business in a mostly-unfettered way, they attacked the companies and drove them out of their market.

This deserves to be pinned in the eternal HN hall of shame for absolutely staggering blind hypocrisy.

Okay, how? Show sources please.

Here's mine. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Aurora

How about the entire history of US-Japan trade relations?

Or are you really as oblivious as you are claiming?

Banned in the US, obviously, not worldwide. The problem is if the US wanted to, they actually could enforce such a ban nearly worldwide, by putting Chinese AI companies on a sanctions list and disallowing any US company (or anyone that does business with a US company, which is much of the world) from touching them.

This is the most insightful comment on this subject I've read yet. I hadn't put those pieces together.

It's been talked about before, it's what essentially happened to Huawei.

Why anyone would care what Hegseth thinks about open weight models? What's wrong with Chinese models? The censorship? I think it's good to have diversity of opinion. Get US flavored output on sensitive subjects from US models and ZH on ZH models. That's a useful tool.

I mean I agree with you, as what I said above is not my position, that's the US government's position.

China is doing open models better. I think there's little going in Hagueseth's head other than the usual reactionary nationalism reflex.

What is a "Chinese model"?

If I change one weight in Kimi, is it still a Chinese model?

If I fine-tune Kimi on pro-America nationalistic freedom loving anti-Chinese propaganda, is it still a Chinese model?

If I distill Kimi from one server to the next without ever directly transferring any weights, is it still a Chinese model?

If Claude accidentally trains on some of Kimi's output, is Claude then considered to be a Chinese model?

If China's next open-weight model is released secretly through a European company, is it still a Chinese model?

I agree with the message, but I'm not going to accept it from this particular crowd.

Microsoft, NVIDIA, Meta, Palantir, IBM...They have all been actively hostile to open source for decades, and have a history of embracing it only when convenient and profitable.

Microsoft benefited from its close partnership with OpenAI for years right up until it went sour. Where was this enthusiasm for open weights then?

Meta was developing open models and then abandoned that effort in search for profits. Muse Spark is now fully closed.

All these companies have the resouces to train and release frontier open weights models today, but choose not to. So spare me the marketing and virtue signaling.

I’ll never forgive Microsoft for their hostile actions against open source and open standards in the 90s. I’ll never believe any endorsement from them of open-anything.

Yeah, the endorsement logos at the bottom are majority bad actors with regards to openness in code. Many are bad actors with regards to openness in _society_.

Yeah, never ask a fox to count your chickens.

> Open source did more than lower the cost of software; it created a shared foundation of knowledge on which generations of American engineers and entrepreneurs built their institutional sovereignty

Hey nvidia, what about making your full set of linux drivers open source?

I mean, I do agree that being open is important but you're hijacking the narrative here, and I suspect being open have nothing to do with any of this.

i'm glad someone else sees this too. There's nothing open source about an open-weight model. I feel like they're just trying to associate themselves with open source and the positive impacts it has had on software technolgoy.

I don't personally have a horse in this race, but if you want to accurately predict the next step:

Start with the outcome you believe will be the most in line with the spirit and traditions of the open source community. This is precisely what won't happen.

It won't necessarily be the inverse. It could be, of course, but it's also likely to be a compromise between the two.

For a topical example: The companies doing "AI" layoffs aren't doing so out of a sense of having failed their staff that helped carry them so far. Often, these announcements come on the heels of record-breaking profits. They're doing it out of contempt for workers.

See https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/cory-doctoro... for Doctorow's take on centaurs vs. reverse centaurs. Broadly speaking: C-suite business leadership wants reverse centaurs. Workers want centaurs. Unless you have a union (or some other collective bargaining power structure that I'm not aware of), the C-suite calls the shots.

The same can be said of the current administration. They don't give a fuck what most of us want on any given issue. They're captured by an aggressive ideology. Their only incentive is to be able to spin their decision to make themselves look good; to posture as "strong" leadership.

Ideology? I think this administration is the least captured by ideology in the last few decades. It's mostly brazen self-interest, for both entertainment & profit.

It's a mix of grifts, gaffes, and Project 2025.

> Start with the outcome you believe will be the most in line with the spirit and traditions of the open source community

there's nothing open source about an open weight model. It's more like the binary blobs Linux fought so hard against. If you can't compile, or in this case train, from source then you're missing the "source" part of open source.

To be clear: This isn't a technical discussion, it's a political one.

While your point is valid on its own merits, it isn't relevant here.

Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49035303, which was posted a bit earlier