"Second, we encourage open source, open collaboration, and resource sharing. The Chinese government is committed to making artificial intelligence a significant driving force for promoting common prosperity and safeguarding common security. To support the construction of an open source innovation ecosystem for artificial intelligence, convenient measures such as automatic licensing will be applied to technology exports involving open source AI technologies, Chinese companies building and operating their own computing centers overseas, conducting chip fabrication overseas, utilizing overseas resources for joint research and development, and participating in the formulation of international standards, basically achieving "immediate reporting and export." Technologies that have already entered the public domain through open source or published academic papers will not be included in the export management scope, creating a favorable environment for international exchange and cooperation in artificial intelligence technology."

their official stance suggests they remain in support of open-weights

usrnm an hour ago | parent [-]

What governments do is, generally, much more important than what they say. And what they're doing here is moving in the direction of restriction

	▲	jacquesm an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		No, what they've been doing so far is changing nothing. What they are saying is that they won't be changing anything. That could of course change overnight. There are multiple aspects to this: China is cottoning on to the meaning of soft power, and besides that being a major supplier of AI related models, services and hardware further cements their place in the world economy. They may not be able to compete directly with the USA in this domain but they are able to undercut them. Of course there are risks as well. Models produced and released into the wild for which you have not seen the training and conditioning data could have payloads that you'd rather not have. But the same thing goes for service providers in other countries as well. You can't really trust hosted inference, not to tell you the truth in so far as is was present in the training data (censorship, not inference errors) and not to leak your information.
	▲	virtualritz 8 minutes ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		I think you're contradicting yourself here. What they will do remains to be seen. The document at hand is what they're saying. I.e. less important if we follow your own assessment.
	▲	Iolaum 43 minutes ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Care to substantiate that? Not that I disagree, just curious. My (not thorougly informed) take is that they are are taking measures to have the capability of restriction but are also adding provisions so that this capability does not add friction to the current practice of enabling export of open weight models. So to me it's like they are keeping their options open rather than leaning on one versus the other.
	▲	28304283409234 an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		“Mind people's actions over words.“ -Zed “Right now, your government is doing things you think only other governments do.” -Van Halen, Right Now