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montroseryesterday at 7:08 PM5 repliesview on HN

This was always where this was heading, but we got here much faster than expected.

Once western governments declare it to be a "national security" risk for citizens to have access to open-weight frontier models, and once they classify using these models as acts of terrorism, what will that world be like?

Will using Kimi K3 come to be like how napster was in the olden days? Everybody knew it was technically illegal, but come on -- any track at your fingertips? But surveillance is quite more evolved now.

Or it will be like cannabis, where a guy in the neighborhood will low key rent you metered access to the 8x5090 rig in his basement he cobbled together from parts on ebay? Or everyone will flock to VPNs?

Or will the oppressors actually succeed? The same way that napster is long gone, and everyone accepts that they must pay spotify for a homogenized collection, where artists must take only a minuscule cut (more than napster though)... We'll be stuck with nerfed Cohere or Mistral models for open-weight options, as if they need more lobotomizing. Or else we can pay through the nose for Anthropic/OpenAI for "American Frontier" models which will fall increasingly far behind China.

Or else, like how Kindle Fire was subsidized by ads, we'll have "Kindle AI" where influence is sold to the highest bidder, where the LLM will tell us that smoking is actually healthy if big tobacco can engineer its renaissance by turning its lobbying dollars to pay-to-play, pumping its propaganda into the training pipeline for Amazon's extra commercialized line of ultra budget LLMs.


Replies

rzerowanyesterday at 7:29 PM

Basically a new iron curtain didving the world into digiatl blocks.The era of open internet/science is on its last legs with the potential forr bifurcation into incompatible ecosystems high , the onger the exchange is disrupted. As recently as this month the USgov has donce a Wolf Amendment style declaration for the Scientific collaboration NSF while shifting its purview under the military. To add to that its trying to rope as many countries into its Pax Silica idea intentionally to exclude China while simultaneosly coercing its 'allies' into using its nerfed offerings [1]

So maybe some isolated switzrland/singapore type locales would exist for US/EUusers to be able to dip their toes across the curtain legally without reprucursions.

[1] https://nitter.net/RnaudBertrand/status/2069574934972797089

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merelydevyesterday at 9:40 PM

If they outlaw open source models that'll just handicap American companies, the rest of the world will be running open source and have an arbitrage against US companies.

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narratoryesterday at 9:13 PM

The disappearance of high ram Mac studio rigs is probably just a coincidence, right? :/

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surgical_fireyesterday at 8:18 PM

> western governments

Are you talking about the US, specifically?

Why would other countries, that don't share the same anxiety about China as the US, would be troubled with the this?

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mips_avataryesterday at 7:41 PM

even 8x rtx pro 6000 is only 768GB of VRAM. IDK how anyone is going to run k3

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