I understand why China wants to restrict exports of their models.

But I feel the only reason Chinese models have been able to gain such popularity is BECAUSE they are open source.

I wouldn’t trust models from China enough to use them in important work unless they were open.

Restricting any powerful Chinese model [that ranks in the global top 10] is going to make them very difficult to advocate for, and very hard for global users to adopt.

Feels like this could be the beginning of the end of the democratisation of powerful AI.

And yes, I appreciate the irony that Chinese models have been the ones enabling that democratisation!

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satvikpendem an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Why do they care about global usage though? This seems primarily so that they can control it for their billion plus population, they really don't need global users at all, much to our chagrin.

	▲	vintermann 32 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Probably the same reason that Meta gave: it's less important to control it, and more important to prevent someone else from controlling it entirely.
	▲	vrganj an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Soft Power, both in the obvious and the less obvious sense. A model is never neutral. A model is always also a way of disseminating an ideology, and it doesn't need to be lying for that to work. Consider the question "what caused the French revolution?" There's many ways to answer this while being technically correct. What gets prioritized, what gets omitted, that's where the ideology lives.

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willis936 15 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>I wouldn’t trust models from China enough to use them in important work unless they were open.

So you've inspected the weights for backdoors?

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Razengan 9 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Let's just hope that both US and Chinese models remain usable enough by the masses for long enough for someone in Europe or Japan or some other actual free country to make a truly open AI :')

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vkou 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I agree - some parts of this seem very much like a footgun.

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bilbo0s an hour ago | parent [-]

It's actually extremely smart.

Latest and greatest China is able to make is reserved for the use of businesses and entities in the Chinese market.

Everyone else gets access to models of more limited capabilities.

It's basically the US strategy. Obvious difference being only that the Chinese allow on prem hosting of the lesser models. So plus one to them I guess.

If we want to move China or the US on from the whole, "super intelligence models for me, more limited intelligence models for everyone else" strategy, then "everyone else" will have to come up with some models competitive with the latest and greatest from the US and China. Absent that, there's just no pressure to bring the US and China to the "share the wealth" table.

Unfortunately, "everyone else" coming up with a competitive model is not gonna happen anytime soon.

	▲	vkou an hour ago \| parent [-]
		The pressure for them to export models is that doing so super-charges the growth of the domestic industry. Same reason why they export solar panels, instead of just hoarding all of them for domestic deployment.