Comment by sofixa | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sofixa | Hacker News Reader

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> What are they going to do? Start their own Anthropic? Go for it. Why is every other country in the world entitled to American technology by default?

Because American tech companies make a lot of money from outside of the US. For instance, 1/4 of all Apple revenues are from Europe, and 1/5 from China and China-claimed territories. Only around 40% are from the Americas (so not even the US exclusively).

Would American tech companies be as successfull without ~half their revenues?

In any case, it doesn't matter, the cat is out of the bag. Nobody sane and non-American would trust American frontier labs, because their models can be yanked at will by whoever is in the White House. It would be suicidal to rely on them for critical business or developer workflows. So your options are to go with Mistral or open source Chinese models, hosted within your environment, with the added benefits of being able to control the costs and being able to fine tune the models to better work for you.

> Would American tech companies be as successfull without ~half their revenues?

Good luck with "if you don't let us use your AI technology, we wont allow iPhones in" - go for it.

Needlessly patriotic and confrontational.

I'm referring to OpenAI and Antropic - would they be successfull with ~40-50% of their potential market?

And iPhones, not really. But you can bet your ass that every business purchasing software in Europe is at least considering the geopolitical risks of buying American, and thinking of alternatives. Doesn't mean they'll all stop buying American software any time soon, but the shift has already started.

> I'm referring to OpenAI and Antropic - would they be successfull with ~40-50% of their potential market?

You presume that every single product they sell will be restricted: this is unrealistic. The rest of the world can have the gimped models, and as so long as they're better than other offerings, the revenue will flow - which is exactly what happens with countless other dual-use goods.

Except the frontier models are the only reason to use them. Why would they use GPT-export when they can use the latest GLM or Kimi?

It's probably too late, but my understanding is that those Chinese models would be nowhere near as good as they are currently if they weren't trained on billions of Claude/GPT tokens. Anthropic and OpenAI are still able to produce models that lead in every category but the separation between their models and open weights shrunk because of the free for all access.

I'm not presuming, I flat out said: nobody sane would trust them with their business. They've been shown as unreliable suppliers due to arbitrary decisions by the White House. Nobody would want for their business automation processes to stop working because someone woke up pissy and banned the model they were using.

At this point, for Europe, it might not be such a bad idea to make a deal with China and give them full access to ASML again. And maybe, just maybe, review Intel's access to ASML?

Yep, we all can play tit for tat.

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