It's simple, the US government will put any Chinese open model companies on the entity list which blocks any company which does business with the US from also doing business with the Chinese companies. This creates a chilling effect where even if it may be harder to tell, no US company will be able to provide or use any overt Chinese open model and won't even risk trying to go around as the punishments for trying to evade the ban are severe.

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amarant an hour ago | parent | next [-]

But that's just the thing with open weights: you're not doing any business with company that made the model. They might publish the weights to a, say, European host, and then you download the model from Europe and and run it on your servers in America, and suddenly it's very hard to tell where the model was originally created.

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moffkalast an hour ago | parent [-]

Yep, add a few blank layers, fine tune it a tiny bit and the weight checksums nor parameter counts won't match with anything, while the model will be practically the exact same. Time and time again random startups have tried passing established open models as their own.

"You made this? I made this."

Of course a conspicuous architecture would still give it away.

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andriy_koval an hour ago | parent [-]

someone can run tests and see that models output exactly the same results, and then you are open to criminal investigation.

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xprnio 36 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

On something that is inherently non-deterministic? Something which is also to a great extent distilled from other frontier models, meaning it has the possibility to generate similar outputs to those meaning that just pattern detection might also not be as effective? Easier to ban everything that’s open, than try to figure out which one of them is Chinese

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andriy_koval 33 minutes ago | parent [-]

Now imagine prosecutor found expert, who said there is benchmark which while performing 100k test questions found it is the same model with 98% probability, and then you need under oath testify where did you get this model.

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m11a 17 minutes ago | parent [-]

Step 1: Chinese company publishes open weights on HF

Step 2: European company distills or just adjusts the model slightly, and publishes its model on HF

Step 3: American company uses model from step 2. Has to testify under oath where they got it from. "We got it from these French guys"

	▲	andriy_koval 4 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		That French guy takes risk to be forever under US warrants for breaking American law, denied access to financial institutions even in Europe and will quickly go to some KYC entity list, and you will be notified as his clients to stop using his model. Or you think all kind of fraud can be committed through some "french guy"?

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clhodapp 39 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Models don't even agree with themselves in terms of returning identical results

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wyrdcurt 37 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Except that even the exact same model won't output the exact same results, that's a fundamental aspect of how LLMs work. They're probabilistic/stochastic, not deterministic.

	▲	andriy_koval 31 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Models are weights for matrix operations, they are determenistics.

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EMIRELADERO an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Hosting and providing Chinese models wouldn't be the same as doing business with the sanctioned entities though, you don't interact with them in any capacity if you only use the weights and don't sign any contracts.