alt Hacker NewsI am saying this probably is "silly behavior by a government" and it is a milestone that points towards what the future may look like. Why can't it be both?
It's easy to wave this aside as the current administration playing political games. But I don't think there is any reason to assume that the current era of open availability of models is going to continue indefinitely. Do you think that Chinese labs will continue to release open models forever, even why they get to the level that Mythos is at now, and beyond? And do you think that a competent US government would have no interest in regulating and restricting model access in 2 years time, assuming that model capabilities continue to improve? I think we bias towards thinking the status quo is the norm and will continue, but this news invites us to question that assumption and think about different ways the future could go.
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> Why can't it be both?
Is the government going to fund all further development? Hard to imagine investors continuing to throw billions at products they aren't allowed to sell.
> I am saying this probably is "silly behavior by a government" and it is a milestone that points towards what the future may look like. Why can't it be both?
Here is why it's unlikely this is anything other than "silly behavior by a government":
- some benchmarks show GPT-5.5, Gemini 3.1, and even Claude Opus outperforming Claude Fable, and yet it's Fable which is restricted.
- some benchmarks still show the likes of Kimi 2.5 outperforming any Claude model, and DeepSeek is getting equivalent scores (a few tenths of a percent difference)
> Do you think that Chinese labs will continue to release open models forever (...)
That's immaterial to the discussion. Even if China forced Chinese labs to restrict access to all models, the truth of the matter is that Trump's administration to restrict access to US-based models does not prevent others from having access to models that are as capable or even better.
So what's exactly the point of this?
> Do you think that Chinese labs will continue to release open models forever
Yes.
I think the Chinese government either already has, or will soon, grasp that if they train the models that people use they dictate what people believe (at least around the margins where that's malleable), and they will happily throw resources at that.
And simultaneously that the only way they can actually get everyone to use their models is if it's possible for us to run them on our own hardware.
(This isn't exactly a utopian view of the future)