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Comment by atwrk | Hacker News Reader

IMO they hope to make AI a strongly regulated industry, with OpenAI (and Anthropic) becoming military suppliers with their stronger models, and everything Chinese or open-weight gets banned.

The competition from the open models is so strong now that this seems to be the only way to keep both companies afloat, given their dire financials. OpenAI probably hoped that they can achieve market lead and then lower the training costs (and make inference cheap enough to eventually escape the red numbers), but the opposite is happening: The competition comes closer and closer, thus training has to be kept up with full force, thus the bleeding continues.

But if they can position themselves as too important/dangerous to be available for everyone (thus this incident report and the clever mentioning of GLM 5.2), they could get the military supplier treatment and would be protected from the market.

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And even that is backfiring, their partner citing GLM being useful there, and available in just a spin.

A ban on open weight models is never going to be enforceable.

Bans in general don't have to be and rarely will be completely enforceable in all cases. But a ban with significant enough consequences would mean most businesses wouldn't think about trying them at some point, just to avoid the risk.

It isn't even as simple as banning copyrighted copies.

Weights are fungible.

I fine-tune an open weigh model and call it legit. Good luck for authorities to prove where the base model was from, or to prove a Tor connection a few months ago was fetching suspicious bytes.

Sure, and you could also go on Tor and buy all kinds of illegal things and they could have a hard time proving that you ordered them and not your arch nemesis to frame you. Banning those things won't stop 100% of people from buying and selling them, but it probably reduces the number who will. And more importantly, companies would be more risk averse on such a thing when they can just buy a similar product with no risk. They also will mostly avoid any GPL software entirely even though the risk there is a lawsuit from the FSF, which is a much less threatening thing than getting on the wrong side of the current US government.

> And more importantly, companies would be more risk averse on such a thing when they can just buy a similar product with no risk.

Not to mention that as enterprise demand for newly "illegal" LLMs dries up, so will the incentive for Chinese labs to shovel money into building them. I doubt Chinese labs are getting rich off providing inference to American business, but loosing them would be a permanent dent, along with rendering moot the perhaps more nefarious incentives Chinese labs have to release model weights in the first place.

Home construction information is publicly available, but it doesn’t mean you can add a room to your home without government approval, even if you do all the work yourself!

BTW - When was the last time you saw mentions of DeCSS?

> A ban on open weight models is never going to be enforceable.

Just watch them try. Look up those Napster witch-burning trials where they wanted 200k $usd per mp3 downloaded. They will scare everyone into believing that open weight models are illegal and very bad.

The difference is in enforceability.

Open weight models are less like Napster and more like DeCSS -- once you have the digital artifact, there's little external evidence you're using them.

Napster was easy to target because it was an open P2P network and specific key US individuals.

If the US government banned open weight models tomorrow (national security grounds), they'd already get a lot of pushback, only increasing day by day as more 'less than SOTA' solutions using them are deployed.

The US government could likely enforce this on its own supply chain (military and federal contracts, maybe some state funding) easily enough.

Enforcing it on private companies would be more difficult... maybe they could push that through, but it would likely take Congress to pass a law. And Congress is substantially less enamored with supporting OpenAI / Anthropic / Google / Meta.

And even if that gets pushed through, enforcement is going to be a bitch on smaller companies using non-US clouds.

But did that kill music downloads?

Like that line from The Social Network, "Do you wanna buy a tower records Eduardo?"

Now most people get their music through a paid service that streams content from a remote data center. OpenAI is trying to replicate the music industry's history.

See how many comments this is generating. Murdock would say that's a good publicity (even if they talk bad about you)

I worry that there could be real DMCA style weight put behind it. People would still be able to pirate open weights models perhaps, but big penalties for ever getting caught with one, and an end to public discussion about them. That would kill development for anyone not in a big firm, for example if Reddit and Hacker News are legally forced to ban discussions or link sharing on these topics. This is where so many of us learn about these topics and keep apace of it.

That would be truly ironic: companies get big harvesting any data with questionable copyright implications, then hide behind DMCA if access to the harvest is used "inappropriately".

Oh my dear the weight here is much much heavier, only the most amount of private money ever spent on a single technology, so much money it makes the copyright holders who paid for DMCA look like really really small fish

It'll be easy to enforce for most corporate clients. I work in a profit-driven corporation that's now owned by a private equity firm. We try all sorts of things to make money. But there's no way we'd deploy a legally questionable model, even if we thought nobody on the outside would ever find out. I was our technical lead for GDPR implementation; we took all sorts of steps to make sure systems were compliant even when there was approximately zero chance of anybody on the outside ever finding out if we hadn't. The buy-cake-for-money-launderers companies flouting the law are an exception, not the rule.

thats economic suicide for the whole country. europe and china will never agree to rules that are obviously designed to put them in a permanent bad position. these regulations can only pass in america and nowhere else.

if it doesnt end in a revolution then the united states will be the first ever 5th world country. openai and anthropic will stop any real innovation and focus on extracting profits from a failing economy that depends on them because no executive wants to be the first one to cut off ai funding. ordinary americans will have to emigrate or risk living in a country spiraling into poverty and dictatorship even faster than today.

anthropics plan relies on the idea that they can convince the whole world to give up their sovereignty to the us government and destroy their own tech industry, at a time when everyone is doing the opposite. that will never happen no matter how much they threaten the rest of us with tariffs and murder drones.

Europe would absolutely be stupid and servile enough to agree to this, unfortunately.

I think a few years ago we were, but not anymore. I hope, at least, that European politicians have learned.

You simply aren't being creative enough. Imagine a no-public-proliferation type treaty among the major powers with some sort of technology sharing clause attached. That would approximately satisfy both the economic and regulatory desires of all parties involved.

> thats economic suicide for the whole country

So is starting a war to open a trade lane that isn't closed. But we already did that...

> and make inference cheap enough to eventually escape the red numbers

Besides training, we have no hard, externally audited numbers that say inference costs for SOTA models are truly sustainable. Do any OpenRouter providers have publicly audited financial numbers ?

We do know about the hardware needed for a given token speed. What that hardware costs, and electricity prices.

With that its easy calculations to get about the profit margins for a given price for a given model.

I'll plug your comment into a couple LLMs. If it's so easy, they should be able to provide the numbers.

Edit: Gemini 3.5 Pro and Opus Claude 4.8 both disagreed that it's easy to determine anything, for both the high end (Fable, Sol) or the low end (open weights). Due to competition, subsidies, etc, gross margins could be as high as 85% (extremely unlikely) to as low as 10% or even negative. And that's just for pure inference and gross margins. Even for pure inference providers this doesn't include any overhead such as rent for office space for the pesky humans operating the business, marketing expenses, etc, etc. Let alone any crazy soul that actually wants or needs to train something.

A lot of datacenter are operating their own Natural gas based power generation. Which in itself is a different dynamic than buying electricity.

I have operated such a setup, at a much lower industrial manufacturing scale. The tradeoffs are quite stark. The electricity is cheaper, but generators/turbines need to operate at 80% capacity to be feasible. In the slow hours, they become an albatross.

So they lose more money per user if less people are using the services, but they also lose money overall if more people are using them.

Why would bedrock sell at a loss?

Because Amazon needs to justify $175bn of yearly capex spending and $2.5tn of market cap? Amazon owns a big chunk of Anthropic and a bit of OpenAI.

For Magnificent 7 the AI bubble bursting will probably wipe out 30-50% of their valuations until the next tech cycle begins.

> [...] would be protected from the market.

One might step back and ask: why would a well funded company with free mining access to all the information in the world need to be protected from the market, if the market suggest less money and resources are sufficient?

Something something cathedral / bazaar? Communism / capitalism? Control / anarchy?

I think that is probably too conspiratorial, if only for the reason that Europe is not gonna go along with it.

I work in tech in Europe and we have a fair number of customers who arelike. we can accept AI, but they must keep the data in Europe. That's trivial with an open weight. We literally cannot do it with Fable.

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