[Matl]

> Someone please enlighten me what the actual argument here is, cause I can’t see it.

> The only thing a ban would do is protect the American market from further downward price pressure on inference, protecting VC investors in the short term. But thats also an admittance that the American labs can’t compete on merit anymore

That's the argument. To be precise the publicly stated argument is that they're attacking American providers by distilling. The real aim is to eliminate competition because otherwise Anthropic and OpenAI are non viable and the US views them as crucial for winning the 'AI race' which they see as putting whoever wins it on top in terms of warfare/economic power etc.

[capevace]

But isn‘t the whole argument of „winner takes all“ already dead, if china is such a big threat that the US labs need import controls?

Distilling or not, they are clearly close enough to the frontier, that the supposed „free market“ country needs market controls. That may work for US markets. But not the rest of the world.

Idea: petrodollar policy becomes „tokendollar“, enforced by US military dominance. If you force me to pay altman at gunpoint, then maybe ill stop using kimi

[Slartie]

They are simply out of ideas to keep the most expensive party in the history of mankind going.

That's it. Simple as that. When you grasp for straws in panic mode, you don't exactly spend time strategizing and weighing the pros and cons of each straw carefully.

[999900000999]

It's going to force American companies to only use inferior and more expensive models.

It's protectionism which will only extend our dominance by at most a decade.

The rest of the world will progress without us.

[HighGoldstein]

Decade? We're 4 years in since ChatGPT released publicly and have gone from "Wow this thing is stupid" to running coding agents on auto mode, and the Chinese labs have been around for even less time. The US providers may lose dominance in 1 or 2 years.

[kay_o]

> may lose dominance in 1 or 2 years

In some portions they already lost dominance. My claude will happily generate disgustingly vulnerable code then flag me for ToS violation when I ask it to make sure the code that it just made, in the same context window, in the same conversation is safe and doesn't have glaring holes. Also great to be charged $xx.xx+ amounts and then it refuses to answer without refunding it.

[ngl999]

They won't. China doesn't have the training capacity and the quality data sets, the former because of access to fabs, the latter because of internal censorship that is getting worse by day.

Simple as that.

[decimalenough]

The current panic is happening precisely because Chinese open weight models like Kimi and Qwen are demonstrably competitive with SotA models like Fable, but far cheaper.

https://fireworks.ai/blog/kimik3-fable

[ngl999]

No, the Chinese tech companies routinely super optimize for a given 'famous' or 'established' or 'mainstream' benchmarks. Any other concern is secondary.

In other words, they look good on surface, but suck whenever anyone put them to any serious use. That's why they are cheap, they have to be cheap because they suck.

[wasfgwp]

> the latter because of internal censorship

Having limited amounts of high quality Chinese data to train on doesn’t really decrease or affect the appeal of these models to the rest of the world. I don’t think the CCP is restricting or limiting the datasets that models can be trained on.

Also the models themselves don’t even seem to be censored or restricted that much. If the Chinese government is fine with the guardrails being on the API level and maybe even restricts the usage of external providers that’s again a net benefit to everyone else since they would have little incentives to force Chinese companies to lobotomize their models.

You are probably about capacity so we can only hope that Huawei and others can catch up and break Nvidia’s monopoly (since Intel and AMD suck too much too much to accomplish anything useful that’s the next best thing)

Also Chinese labs are actually still publishing research publicly which alone would accelerate and increase the competitiveness of open AI models developed in the US or even Europe.

[ngl999]

> doesn’t really decrease or affect the appeal of these models to the rest of the world

Anyone who tried using Chinese models for serious programming tasks ditch them quickly if they have a choice.

> I don’t think the CCP is restricting or limiting the datasets that models can be trained on.

What I meant was censorship limits the amount of high quality training sets by limiting the amount of all training sets from which high quality sets grow out from, e.g. the entire set of posts on Baidu forums before 2017 is gone forever.

> so we can only hope that Huawei

Chinese companies do not have access to commercial-scale advanced nodes. The impact is at best negligible.

[999900000999]

I’m talking about our overall economic dominance.

We’re still the most powerful economy on earth, but I can’t imagine this continuing forever.

[inigyou]

By what metric - GDP? That measures price level, not economic power.

[mctaylor]

Most expensive groceries, rents, and healthcare in the world!

Winning!

[frostyel]

> By what metric

imperial

[mcv]

> the supposed „free market“ country

Good scare quotes. The US hasn't been free market in the Adam Smith sense in ages, if ever.

[andrekandre]

well free markets meant something very different in adam smith's time; what they meant by free was 'free from rents' whereas today its usually mean in the milton freedman terms as 'free from any interference' which is how i interpret the parent poster...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_market#Classical_Economic...

[einpoklum]

D: "I want to be free" by Milton Schulman.

H: Milton Friedman.

D: Why are they all called Milton? Anyway, I've only got as far as Milton Keynes.

H: Maynard Keynes.

D: I'm sure there's a Milton Keynes.

H: Yes, there is, but it's... [appears quite miffed]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgUemV4brDU

[wasfgwp]

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

Coincidentally it’s where the British version of the Office is set

[yunnpp]

It's not free from interference either. It requires enforcing antitrust, for example, which the US seems to have forgotten. Literally what you quoted:

> the term free market refers to a market free from all forms of economic privilege, monopolies and artificial scarcities.

[andrekandre]

yep, to keep them "free" you have to "interefere" with them

as an aide, the overloading of the term free is really annoying because it muddles things so much...

[wasfgwp]

> free from any interference

That’s even less true in the US these days, though

[chabska]

This Schroedinger's Freedom is getting tired now. They happily label themself as free-market democratic liberal progressive when you're justifying bombing a poor third-world country, but suddenly claim to be unfree undemocratic oligarchic whenever anyone asks them to act on that principle.

[one33seven]

Adam Smith himself knew you had to constrain the market in ordner to protect capitalism from capitalists. His work didn't end with his first book.

[wasfgwp]

Yes, it’s freedom both from state interference but also from monopolies, oligopolies and trusts using their position to suppress the competitiveness of other market participants. Which is generally impossible to prevent without the state interfering in the markets.

[mcv]

Which is why a free market requires regulation, but only for the purpose to break up trusts, cartels and monopolies, and to ensure equal access to the market and a level playing field.

It's not a trivial problem to solve and probably requires constant readjustment, and there's probably plenty of room for ambiguity in assessing which decision would make the market more free or whether something is or isn't hurting market freedom. But some regulation is undeniably necessary.

[wasfgwp]

I would include consumer rights protection and regulating uneven and unbalanced contracts. To an extent one might expect that sufficient competition could solve this but often it doesn’t. You usually are forced to buy goods/services as a bundle and don’t get to pick the terms and conditions.

While there might be other companies offering better terms the product quality of the first company might outweigh that from the perspective of the consumer. Of course one might argue that if a company is in a position to do that it’s effectively a monopoly and if all major market participants are engaging in that it’s effectively an oligopoly (or a case of implicit collusion)

And another (maybe less controversial example) is establishing minimal quality standards for at least certain products like food and drugs (i.e. the laissez faire offhands approach to that e.g. in the early 1900s resulted in some severe issues) because effectively that means that companies are selling products with hidden defects.

[IncreasePosts]

How could you tell how close they are to the frontier if they weren't distilling? Clearly those labs think distilling is worth it despite the large effort they need to go through to bypass anti distillation techniques used by the frontier labs

[etdznots]

Anthropic is “distilling chinese models”. Everyone uses outputs from every other frontier model in both pre training and post training, hilarious to give it this name and pretend like it’s an attack. Fable is just a distillation of stolen copyrighted works, etc.

[capevace]

You‘re reading it wrong.

I’m saying it doesn’t matter wether they did or not, because now they clearly have models which can compete.

[gpt5]

The argument is - these models costs hundreds of billions to develop - to BOTH US and China. China is giving them for free despite not making financial sense because they want to weaken US's tech firms ability to compete - because China sees AI dominance as critical for their national security.

The US also sees AI dominance as critical for their national security, and relies on a market economy and non-state-owned labs. This means that these frontier labs are truly susceptible to "predatory pricing" (economic term for a competitor selling at a loss to eliminate you), which is illegal in the US and any other free market economy exactly because of its implications on market efficiency.

I hate it just as much as the next guy, but the fact the discussion here ignores the fact that these concerns and dynamics are real just lower the discussion level instead of actually discussing potential solutions.

With that said, what I'm worried about is that the government solution will be far more hostile than some semi-ban on open models. An example of an even worse scenario, they could take over frontier labs and restrict access to everyone in the public (which might still not solve espionage).

[runako]

> China is giving them for free despite not making financial sense because they want to weaken US's tech firms ability to compete - because China sees AI dominance as critical for their national security.

Nobody is making this argument because this is a normal thing that companies do. It's so common it is named in business strategy: "commoditize your complements."

There's a 2002 Joel On Software post explaining this using tech examples that were already old in 2002[1].

In the present, Meta is doing exactly the same thing with Ollama as Alibaba (who is funding some of the Chinese labs). Alibaba needs advanced models internally, and does not want to have a dependence on US models that can be arbitrarily shut off by Washington. Alibaba also wants to drive usage of its cloud among companies who are now demanding competitive AI models (which Alibaba may be locked out of providing). However, selling AI is not its core business. Putting cheap AI in the world creates demand for cloud services, which is part of Alibaba's core business.

Not only does this make financial sense for Alibaba, it is fairly basic.

Google gives away consumer software like Chrome and Android (not their core business) to drive search, which is their core business.

et cetera. The frontier labs are exposed in exactly the same has been way every pure play tech company before them. The US labs chose quality as their moat; remains to be seen whether that was a good choice, or if they can add another moat in time.

1 - https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/

[ngl999]

> Putting cheap AI in the world creates demand for cloud services

No, Alibaba doesn't have the right amount of hardware to serve these models.

The part that benefits Alibaba in these open models is to maintain its public reputation so as to maintain its stock price. The core that drives everything else inside Alibaba is its e-commerce.

[blackqueeriroh]

> Nobody is making this argument because this is a normal thing that companies do. It's so common it is named in business strategy: "commoditize your complements."

It is common in business strategy, far less so in nation-state governance.

The reason you, me, and so many people in the United States still have a far better quality of life and level of freedom than most people in China is because it’s bad to run a country like a business, full stop. When you do so, you kill far more people.

[runako]

> It is common in business strategy, far less so in nation-state governance.

It is not clear why this is bad for Alibaba or China, could you expand on that?

> it’s bad to run a country like a business

The "Chinese miracle" resulting from China's integration with the global economy has lifted ~800 million people out of poverty and raised standards of living quite rapidly overall. A lot has been written on the topic, but suffice to say that it's a fairly unorthodox argument to make that the Chinese have not been well-served by the arrangement.

> level of freedom

The context of this discussion is whether the US government should prevent US citizens from accessing yet another product that is freely available in the rest of the world, to benefit a tiny handful of rich people in California.

Let me be clearer: if you do not hold stock in OpenAI or Anthropic, you likely stand to benefit from more AIs being provided by more providers. Imagine if the government had banned MySQL and PostgreSQL, so we all had to buy databases from Oracle and Microsoft. That would be strictly worse for everybody except employees of Oracle and Microsoft. This is exactly the same thing.

[rapidaneurism]

Great points, but I think that banning open source databases would have been better not for employees, but for shareholders.

[LtWorf]

> The reason you, me, and so many people in the United States still have a far better quality of life and level of freedom than most people in China

I think it's because every single time the farmers in south america or the philippines try to organise and get out of poverty you guys either bomb them or arm some terrorist to kill them.

But sure tell yourself otherwise if that makes you feel better.

[allarm]

> you, me, and so many people in the United States still have a far better quality of life and level of freedom than most people in China

Whether this is true or not is still open to debate, but the fact that it’s presented as some kind of absolute truth that needs no substantiation is simply ridiculous.

[brookst]

Quality of life seems clear enough to assert:

https://www.numbeo.com/quality-of-life/rankings_by_country.j...

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/standard-...

Freedom is harder to quantify and certainly the US is regressing quickly, so China may well become more free without any domestic policy changes.

[wasfgwp]

Well no.. regardless of anything else the median American generally has q higher standards of livin than the resident of pretty much any major country (including Europe). While compared to e.g. Germany or France those in the lower percentiles are probably doing worse China specifically still has a huge amount of poverty. Even if you happen to be legally allowed to live in one of the major cities and have a decent job.. well 966 is still a thing and you don’t get paid $500k like the OpenAI employees allegedly forced to sleep under their desks.

[pbgcp2026]

"you, me, and so many people in the United States still have a far better quality of life and level of freedom" LOL - are you sure about this?

[wasfgwp]

That’s extremely American centered, though? Despite the constant complaining the median American is still very well off compared to almost everyone else. If you go to the top 10 percentile or so them maybe only Switzerland and some very small countries (tax havens, petro states and such) can really compete.

[chii]

The words of george orwell has never been so accurate.

"War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength"

[Lio]

Sometimes sure, sometimes unsure but always free to say it publicly. ;)

[emacdona]

> The US also sees AI dominance as critical for their national security, and relies on a market economy and non-state-owned labs.

[...]

> but the fact the discussion here ignores the fact that these concerns and dynamics are real just lower the discussion level instead of actually discussing potential solutions.

We had this problem solved for DECADES. Build the best post-secondary education system in the world. Lure all of China's (and the rest of the world's) best and brightest. Educate them. Give them well deserved, high paying jobs doing what they love and invite them to build a life and stay here.

Now we appear to be busy dismantling that system.

[econ]

Took me a while but for the west the value of education isn't primarily in jobs but in democracy. It puts the bar much higher than we've ever accomplished. People are supposed to run th county (believe it or not)

[Otterly99]

I think the misconception here is that they "give them away".

Sure, you can download the weights and run it yourself, but to run a 1T+ parameters you need roughly 2TB of VRAM (for full precision). That costs around $500k to $1M, not including electricity and rent.

In reality, they provide their models priced via API or subscription just like any other company. The "free weights" are only useful for other research labs. It seems that China understands that research should be shared and open, which is one of the reason that AI has been able to develop that fast in the last 10 years.

[wasfgwp]

> free weights" are only useful for other research labs

No, they are useful for any compute provider who can host these models and sell inference. Which effectively puts a cap on whatever the Chinese companies can charge. So longterm that means that their margins are limited to cost + some low margin.

If they are making money by selling tokens then anyone who has sufficient compute to host their models can make more than the Chinese labs since they don’t have any R&D costs.

[fennecbutt]

I mean I think the primary reason is really the attention is all you need paper and meta's "leaking" of meta's llama.

China is plenty happy to steal IP and just say "this is just how business is done in China it's a cultural thing" but quickly run to defend their own IP in western courts when stolen by western businesses. It works one way.

And I have experienced this firsthand when having something manufactured there. Exact clones appearing on Alibaba just days after.

[wasfgwp]

> costs hundreds of billions to develop - to BOTH US and China

OpenAI and Anthropic are extremely bloated compared to the Chinese labs. They have thousands of extremely well paid people working for them. Deepseek I think has a couple of hundred and I doubt they are paid a lot.

Of course compute for training is expensive but I doubt that’s necessarily the overwhelming majority of the operating costs for Anthropic/OpenAI

> on a market economy and non-state-owned labs

Sure the private companies developing these models are heavily interlinked with and even maybe partially owned by the government. But its a matter of degree. Since that’s the situation in the US similar in how these companies both shape government policy directly and in how the government is constantly intervening and shaping their behavior outside of any regulatory framework.

The US government is both heavily protectionist and interventionist these days.

> next guy

Good try GPT-5…

[glaslong]

> "predatory pricing" (economic term for a competitor selling at a loss to eliminate you), which is illegal in the US

It is very funny that this was/is the playbook of a huge number of successful, VC-funded, "disruption" plays.

Cheap cabs that undercut the market, wait for taxi companies to die, raise your rates now that your "rideshare" app got everyone hooked on the subsidized rate, IPO!

[twobitshifter]

The software landscape is full of free products that are used to upsell other services. In this case the upsell is inference at data centers. China has built a big advantage in Green energy and is working at the GPU issue both on the hardware and model level. Those are the two main cost inputs into AI and should allow China to compete. The exact model being used is not going to matter as much as the cost that companies must pay.

[SkiFire13]

> This means that these frontier labs are truly susceptible to "predatory pricing" (economic term for a competitor selling at a loss to eliminate you)

OpenAI and Anthropic were losing money too until recently, when they started focusing more on increasing revenue (which is also part of why companies are now looking more at Chinese models to reduce costs).

[coliveira]

That's nonsense, people pretend that a "frontier model" is the most important technology ever, but we know for sure it cannot be because several companies are doing copycats of one another. It is not China that is doing much effort to copy-cat, it's the US companies that are copying one another. The only real barrier in this technology is how many Nvidia chips you can buy and how much data you can get to train your LLM. All these models are basically moving in the same trajectory, it is essentially a very expensive copy-paste job they're doing.

[numpad0]

US didn't have that much rational reasoning when it killed Japanese exports in cars, chips, and finally software. That in turn lead to China simply taking the seats Japan used to occupy, but as far as imposition of these protectionist means is considered, US does not need that much sophisticated justification internally.

[barbazoo]

I find such beauty in the fact that the robbers are getting robbed but it's all part of progress overall. It's not that China won't come up with what the US are coming up with. Just a matter of when it would happen.

[Imustaskforhelp]

I am sure that some other country (Mistral from France, India, Canada etc.) would have even more chances to innovate perhaps.

and because Chinese models are open-weights, the distillations effects of them could be easier done as well ;)

In my opinion, its a win-win plus even within worst case scenario*, I already believe that the current open weights models are in general speaking good enough perhaps for my and other use cases as well and I feel like we will probably most likely get more open-weights model for a long time in general as well perhaps.

[Onavo]

The other countries don't have cheap capital, cheap infra, or scale. The talent is not the bottleneck. Look at how many SV companies are helmed by Indian executives. If the Europeans cared an iota about AI progress, Huggingface wouldn't have been headquartered in NYC.

[expedition32]

Europe doesn't want to be a superpower it already done that and it's really not worth it.

[eklavya]

Sure buddy, they gave it up because it was not worth it.

[godwinson__4-8]

Be nice to Europe its tired.

[ericmay]

Yep. We'll steal China's IP as well so all of this really is just no big deal. Everyone is a robber in some way.

Though one must ask, why are American models banned in China? Hmmm.

> It's not that China won't come up with what the US are coming up with. Just a matter of when it would happen.

I agree. All this discussion about China releasing open weight models is amusing. It's like ok they release open weight models.... and so what? If they leapfrog ahead of the US then we'll just undercut them with our own open weight models.

[echaozh]

> Though one must ask, why are American models banned in China? Hmmm.

Because they're not? But the American government and Anthropic don't want American models to be used by the Chinese. Anthropic is notorious for its effort to tell if the user is within China.

[ngl999]

China is taking the moral high ground when Anthropic bans users from China. But if Anthropic didn't do it, the GFW would have surely banned Anthropic because Claude will say lots of things that do not agree with the official narrative.

[yunnpp]

> Though one must ask, why are American models banned in China? Hmmm.

Because the models are behind a gate and the data goes overseas. The same is not true for open weight models. One should avoid the former and prefer the latter simply based on principle, not on country of origin.

[inigyou]

If you ask in Chinese, Claude Opus tells you it's Qwen.

[lambdaone]

Does this imply that Claude Opus was trained on Qwen output?

[inigyou]

Yes. This is called a distillation attack.

[jpalawaga]

genuine question, what IP does america presently steal from China?

[inigyou]

AI models. If you ask Claude Opus in Chinese which model it is, sometimes it says Qwen.

[fennecbutt]

That's just conjecture though surely. Like not saying you're wrong but the same thing would result from crawling and using results from Chinese Web for training along with everything else. If the most prevalent model people are posting responses from online in Chinese is qwen then of course that would happen. There's no evidence to say either way really.

[inigyou]

It's the exact same reason people conjecture that Qwen distills Claude.

[etdznots]

All models are trained on outputs from all other frontier models at training time.

[LtWorf]

So you mean that they have no problem distilling but are crybabies and also accuse the chinese of doing it?

[ericmay]

If it’s a question for me I’m not sure. I guess I’d like to ask what prompted this question?

[jpalawaga]

I read 'we' (present tense) rather than 'we'll' (future tense). So, nevermind!

[m4rtink]

We must prevent a mineshaft gap!

[lizardking]

That's the real reason, that's not the actual argument.

[bicepjai]

So basically the argument is we have taken too much debt to afford failure, we might bring down the economy of top 1% so ban Chinese models :)

[glaslong]

wow if they're that crucial, but economically nonviable, we should probably just nationalize them and fund the superproject with taxes, then put the results into the public domain!