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Comment by davedx | Hacker News Reader

Meanwhile:

> China’s Ministry of Commerce has led meetings over the past month with major AI companies, including Alibaba, ByteDance, and http://z.ai/, to discuss measures that would restrict overseas access to cutting-edge AI models, including models that have not yet been released.

> The discussions reportedly include not only closed-source models but also open-weight models.

> Future regulations could take the form of a tiered framework based on technological capability. Basic open-source AI models may be managed through a filing system, high-performance models may be subject to security reviews, and the most sensitive frontier models may be banned from public release or restricted to use within China

https://www.reuters.com/world/beijing-is-looking-curbing-ove...

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Reporting/news around AI is so very interesting these days.

It's really hard to tell what's propaganda from what's not.

For examples, this Reuters that you have included here has all tells tale signs of creating fear, uncertainty, and feeding into propaganda. But then again I can't be sure.

It's completely the opposite stance to (a) the actions being taken by chinese companies and (b) the public stance taken by their govt https://english.www.gov.cn/news/202601/08/content_WS695f1b55...

> It's completely the opposite stance to (a) the actions being taken by chinese companies and (b) the public stance taken by their govt https://english.www.gov.cn/news/202601/08/content_WS695f1b55...

That source is very old, considering how fast everything is changing. It is not impossible if US actions for banning have changed something.

It absolutely blows my mind that everyone is abundantly aware that money is not shared freely, and yet they are already popping champagne that the CCP are surely going to share power freely.

They won't? They're profiting from every subscription to AI providers, because all companies are state-owned.

They're also well-positioned to control how groundbreaking US AI companies are allowed to appear to their investors, by offering open models that match what market leaders claim can only be attained with trillion-level spend. That's a strong control on US economy, considering how few stocks are propping up the US stock market, and how these stocks are all dependent on the same beliefs and factors.

Also, regarding China's tech investment in general, the five-year plan is just... available to read. It's not a secret. It explains the strategy, and you can draw a direct line from the plan to their now abundant solar infrastructures and tech achievements, including in AI, which is specifically named.

https://cset.georgetown.edu/publication/china-14th-five-year...

China's five year plan is whatever Xi wants whenever he wants it. It's just a formal guideline, not a law or constitution people can sue the CCP over.

Also, even if China decides it doesn't want to keep the crown jewels of productivity close to home, the US will ban their import. Maybe XzeRo_337 will be torrenting weights and have a VPN to access foreign providers, but Timmy and Ashley are just going to pay for their ChatGPT subs, and Mega corp will pay their Claude Legend token expenses.

You're applying US cultural logic to Chinese bureaucracy

China is an authoritarian state with a single leader who has unilateral uncontested control for life.

China has no real bureaucracy (or any other structure for that matter) because at the end of the day, it's one guy who can do whatever he wants whenever he wants. For commoners and officials there is this faux bureaucracy, but for the elite at the top making decisions, there is zero.

If Xi doesn't want models exported, he's not having a legal delegation go to the supreme court of China to fight for his ruling. It just happens, regardless of whatever anyone else or any piece of paper in the country says, and there is zero recourse anyone who doesn't like it can pursue.

More or less authoritarian than Imperial dynasties? Zhao Gao for Qin, Huang Hao for Shu Han, Yang Fugong for Tang, this list can just keep going.

The Ten Eunuchs, if you want one example. Which is to say, their bureaucracies have always worked with single leaders who ostensibly had unilateral uncontested control for life. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Attendants

> If Xi doesn't want models exported, he's not having a legal delegation go to the supreme court of China to fight for his ruling.

"Sorry you can only ship fable to American citizens"

I never thought the chinese were giving away valuable technology out of kindness. I thought having them be free and open weight was part of a strategic move to undermine US tech dominance. I suppose if that was the case something has changed or maybe they simply didn't care until recently

Makes sense. AI is a munition now, and nations tend to restrict them. Eventually there will be international open source communities building open weights (all you need's a few smart people and a lot of GPUs for training), making the restrictions moot. Until then this will become the norm.

You also need a shitton of data. People are saying that synthetic data is widely used, but pretty sure that is on top of the organic data. Both for pretraining and posttraining. That said, I do think we will see more open and collaborative approaches over time.

which is a result of the United States and other western forces (Israel) weaponizing AI to create propaganda

Yep https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48816025

And EU leadership completely destroyed Europe's future by betting on depending on US and Chinese models. https://pleias.ai/blog/fable-eu

This is pure speculation at this point tbh.

You could just as well read the european approach as a bet that frontier models will be unable to keep a significant edge over open competition (and thus not worth throwing subsidies at, because any economic advantage is fleeting at best).

Looking at the data and related past experience, this looks like a pretty solid bet (despite the "risk" being hard to quantify).

> You could just as well read the european approach as a bet that frontier models will be unable to keep a significant edge over open competition

And that's a bet they will lose 100%. Once the Chinese starts imposing export bans/controlling the access to their models, Europe would be at the mercy of US/China to allow them access or just rely on miserable mistral

Again, you are assuming that frontier models will stay meaningfully ahead long-term. Export controls/bans are pointless if this is not the case.

There is ton of strong indicators that they will not stay ahead: Assuming that technological progress of any kind follows some form of logistic function (where "gains", in this case "intelligence" become sub-linear at some point) is (long-term) a very conservative and proven assumption, and "automatically" negates your lead over time.

Similarly, purely "intellectual" advantage in disciplines like cryptography/computer chess/algorithm design never really stayed concentrated, either.

It is not about intellectual advantage, but about capabilities as well. Assuming that Europe would get all the knowledge they need on the cutting edge technology on how to train a frontier model (which they won't because US and China would guard this as national secrets), who is going to setup infrastructure to train the model? Who is building the data centers (multi-year project) and who is going to build the energy infrastructure? Just because you know how to do it doesn't mean you have the capability to do that as well.

One of the best example is nuclear reactors. By now the know how and technology is fairly mature and open, but not every country gets to build nuclear reactors. Same would be with the frontier models as well.

EU should have already started investing in the infrastructure side in-case they obtain the know how, but your politicians are still bickering on pension reforms and Ukrainian war, etc.

So Deepmind/Meta/etc... would all have to cut off their EU offices even though they hold incredible talent? I'm just not finding this scenario likely.

Does meta has an AI training data center in EU?

They can just operate and provide normal access to their services, just block AI access. This is already happening, apple would not release new Siri in EU (granted it's due to a regulation clash) but this would be a testing point.

If Europeans are still paying the same prices for sub par services/products to their American counter parts, it's win-win situation for those companies. Just sell a dumbed down non-AI version of service/product in EU for an inflated price.

Meta's FAIR has several R&D offices in the EU, yes. So you are saying their labs can conduct R&D on models in the EU, potentially even train them there, they just can't have production LLM inference serving or release the model weights? I'm just not seeing it.

A not-insignificant portion of the AI/ML research community is in the EU.

What you’re failing to understand is that meta is ultimately a US company. If meta unveils a powerful frontier model tomorrow and US impose a ban of its exports, regardless of how many research, data centres, meta has in EU, they will restrict access to the model for EU citizens, same way Anthropic did.

Regarding the open weights, I don’t see meta doing that for their future models, especially once they have their own frontier models. Open weight models are kinda marketing strategy where they use it as a bait and switch. A lot of Chinese companies became popular with their open wight models and once they build that reputation they have no incentive to keep on releasing new open weighted models

meta researchers from eu will create new company and build model using knowledge they have.

In an imaginary world yes. Just because they know how, doesn’t mean that they can. It’s not like you can code a new model, you need compute power to train it, which they don’t have in EU.

Also meta could just take the best mind in EU research centres to US with millions of dollars as yearly payments

I agree is that money is an issue, but not geo-boundaries. If EU decides to commit XXXB they may have a chance to catch up eventually.

EU already has supercomputers and data centers. Some examples: https://www.eurohpc-ju.europa.eu/supercomputers/our-supercom...

The goal is to triple the number of data centers over the next years. It is not like there is nothing going on...

Again, super computers are not used to train frontier models. Please do your own research before blobbing just random links. By the time they triple those data centres the AI race is already lost

GB200 and GB300 are decent for training LLMs? H100 can be used also? Though the current European deployments are rather small, even the biggest are just some thousand GPUs.

I would take the other side of this bet. While I agree that the impact of any given advance is likely to resemble a sigmoid curve, I think there is a material chance of "stacking sigmoids" creating something that looks exponential.

To take a simple example, look at the progress of technology over the last ~500 years - it seems to me that the rate of change continues to accelerate despite many of the logistic curves flattening along the way.

There are still huge unanswered questions about whether or not the stacking sigmoids will favor the incumbents. But I would not definitively bet against the people with the most compute data, talent and money.

I'm unsure what exactly you mean by sigmoid stacking.

I'd argue that a lot of important technologies (like circuit design!) started at basically zero in the last century, and the progress was actually exponential for a significant time (=> because we started so low on the curve).

But if you reduce things to a single metric (wealth per person? total energy available to humanity? global industrial/construction output in tons?) I can't think of anything where such "stacking" successful subverted the sigmoid trend (or looks like it will, long-term).

Open source is currently entirely reliant on Chinese models.

So basically EU will be left behind unless we start doing something about it now. imo Mistral isn't enough by itself.

Pretty sure there would be a number of EU states who'd happily pump some money in if the EU were to mandate the ECB to (incentivise intermediary banks to) buy their corresponding long dated sovereign debt cheaply to fund it.

Perhaps, but in the same breath, from the limited things I've seen and heard, they're extremely reluctant to take any risk with these types of funding schemes when disbursing, so unless it's tried and tested it's not getting off the ground i.e. it's unlikely to lead anywhere considering current state of market.

I mean we can barely get EU to host with EU providers. Nevermind something so speculative.

There's potentially a virtuous circle of increased EU tech investment and increased EU tech provider adoption but given the risk aversion sclerosis that affects the european private investment community this does need to be government led. I'd agree the US private debt fuelled $1Tn build out is mostly unsustainable but when you look at what China was able to achieve with govt support on a ˜120bn AI sector investment it behoves the EU to take a stand, the first 100bn is probably the least risky.

EU's leadership doesn't have much power that way, the EU is a thin layer on the countries.

In the US the federal government has much more power but nobody is attributing the term good fortunes of the AI industry to the recent federal policy there. (There's long term stuff that does make a difference in hoovering up the global R&D talent and concentrating capital, but that's a different kettle)

EU budget is about 1% of the GDP of the countries (from https://commission.europa.eu/topics/budget_en)

There's very little betting on any particular AI models going on by the commission/EP. The Pleias article claims a 2020 eurocrat whitepaper determined how things go, but that's fantastical.

Why? Worst se we are 10 years behind them. Second mover advantage will also be there, it this is so critical indeed.

What happened to China because they were third movers in the race to the nuclear weapons? Nothing. They were pretty behind for a while technologically. The wheels have turned. Stop looking at the world as a short strategy game match, or like a Hollywood movie where everything is all-or-nothing. Many parts of south America are way behind in IT, automotive, space, yet many people have meaningful and happy lives there.

I'm yet to accept that the power-block I'm living within being first in the AI race provides a meaningful life to me.

If anything the first movers would theoretically be the first to destroy their own labor markets and economies.

yep, first-mover disadvantage so-to-speak

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