The issue is not open weights as a whole, indeed Hegseth himself said they are important for America (if American made, presumably); the issue is Chinese models, whether open or not, and that's what's looking to be banned, and nothing in this article suggests otherwise.

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calebkaiser 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The conversation going on in the industry is a bit broader than that. OpenAI's head of strategic futures just said last week that open models are inherently decelerationist, ungovernable, and will slow development on the frontier. You'll notice OpenAI does not appear as a signatory here despite their relationship with Microsoft.

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satvikpendem an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Well of course OpenAI and Anthropic say those sorts of things, it's what they've always said, particularly Anthropic, but that doesn't necessarily mean that's the position of the US government. In other words the government seems to be listening to some but not all of the lobbying done by the big two.

	▲	calebkaiser an hour ago \| parent [-]
		The guy who said those things just joined OpenAI in the last month. He was previously a senior policy advisor, specifically on AI, to the current administration in the White House. I don't know that the US government has a unified position on open source AI. But it's not like this isn't a discussion happening among policymakers.

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derektank an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

>open models are inherently decelerationist, ungovernable, and will slow development on the frontier

Ungovernable makes intuitive sense, but I don’t understand how open weight models could be decelerationist or slow the development of the frontier. Was there an argument for those positions?

	▲	newpavlov an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Open weight models challenge the "winner takes all" hypothesis, which motivates the astronomical valuations and acts as a justification for trains of cash dumped into AI development. In other words, if AI models become a commodity, the "AI leaders" will not be able to burn the cash like they do today, thus resulting in a "slower" (one could say instead "more sustainable") development of AI models.
	▲	calebkaiser an hour ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Here's his original post https://x.com/i/status/2078133895766114412
	▲	wat10000 28 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		It's a copy/paste of the arguments against open source software from decades ago. The argument goes: innovation requires profit motive, and profit motive requires IP rights. Of course, this was soundly disproven in software and I don't see any reason it should be different here.

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roenxi an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> ...the issue is Chinese models, whether open or not, and that's what's looking to be banned...

Is the US planning to invade China and take away their models? Because otherwise China is still going to have the models even if the US bans them. I don't think they're going to be going with the US position on this one.

	▲	fidotron an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It's the same patronizing nonsense as when all the US webcos pulled out of the Chinese market in some misguided supposed protest believing the Chinese so incapable of rolling their own Google, Amazon or WhatsApp they will come begging the americans to go back. Now the western tech universe goes to China for ideas.
	▲	satvikpendem 38 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Banned in the US, obviously, not worldwide. The problem is if the US wanted to, they actually could enforce such a ban nearly worldwide, by putting Chinese AI companies on a sanctions list and disallowing any US company (or anyone that does business with a US company, which is much of the world) from touching them.

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Freedumbs 40 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Why anyone would care what Hegseth thinks about open weight models? What's wrong with Chinese models? The censorship? I think it's good to have diversity of opinion. Get US flavored output on sensitive subjects from US models and ZH on ZH models. That's a useful tool.

	▲	satvikpendem 37 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I mean I agree with you, as what I said above is not my position, that's the US government's position.