I'm not saying that we should ban any models or that such bans would be effective - for the reasons that you've outlined that they're counter productive, and as a principle, I don't think government should have any say in how much intelligence I have access to.

But it is the likely path US/EU is going to take if the voices of Dario, Sam, and Elon prevail. Because that's what governments know how to do, even if they know it doesn't work.

> If a country has a choice to either use the expensive SOTA models approved by Washington or Europe only or using the cheaper and not so SOTA models, why would they use the US ones?

Depends on which entities we're talking about.

An enterprise in Turkey: they would be afraid to use a US/EU sanctioned model because they have EU/EU clients and US/EU says they will put any enterprise in a nasty list, close their bank accounts, deals and agreements if they use a Chinese model.

A random guy in random country building something in their garage: would have to buy expensive hardware to run inference, because there's no inference provider on the open web serving these models, but China. And subscribing to these Chinese services is punishable by 20 years in jail without pardon.

I'm obviously talking about hypothetical scenarios here, but all I'm saying is that US can definitely make using any non-US-approved model effectively impossible.