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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.