alt Hacker NewsAnthropic has to use this wedge (and future ones) to move regulatory action against the Chinese models or their IPO is going to be really problematic.
(Ironic, though, that I haven't heard of any Chinese models "escaping" which Anthropic and OpenAI both seem to have issues with...)
Like Chinese electric cars, the American producers cannot compete without regulatory action. Yes, I understand that the Chinese government this and that in both the automotive and AI industries.
But reality is what it is as a consumer: it's a cheaper product that's almost as good or better in some cases. And in the case of these open weight models: I can run it on my own infra and not give any data to anyone.
Replies
>haven't heard of any Chinese models "escaping"
There was this incident that seemingly flew under the radar (52 days ago): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49216185
>> And in the case of these open weight models: I can run it on my own infra and not give any data to anyone.
It's worth noting that the overwhelming majority of people who use Chinese models don't do this. Yes, it is nice to have the option, and there are US-based inference providers that claim to not send your data to China and maybe indeed don't, but in the grand scheme of things, we need to remember the adage that became popular during the social media era: if something is free (or, in this case, close to free), you are the product.
My feeling is Anthropic doesn't exactly have a lot of political capital with the Trump administration to push their policies into law.
Maybe it’s worth asking how much we should regulate and not regulate in order to compete with Chinese models.
For instance, one regulation which really puts American AI companies at a disadvantage is IP law. It shouldn’t be a surprise that most of the best of the text-to-video models are Chinese.
Similarly, the legal grey area around model distillation gives Chinese labs a major advantage. This one I feel better about relaxing.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7515521-william-roper-so-no...