Framing open-weight AI as "a nuclear reactor in every home" is the exact same paternalistic logic that drove Robespierre’s Republic of Virtue.

The underlying premise from Dario is pretty much that they are the enlightened vanguard who can be trusted with power, while the public is too foolish to have autonomy.

But people will never converge on a single definition of virtue in the standard of Robespierre's ideals. Because people naturally hold conflicting values, Robespierre had to resort to the guillotine to force ideological conformity and erase dissent. You cannot enforce a "Republic of Virtue" without becoming an authoritarian gatekeeper. When Dario demands only certain AI models that we can use, his so-called "safety" stops being a precaution and becomes a tool to impose his values on everyone else. And that, makes him dangerous and disgusting.

Or Nvidia could pull what they did with mining GPU: We want more GPU for gamer, so we release special version that can't run LLM.

Remember their "LHR" GPU

They definitely believe #2 and have been consistent about this since their founding (when they were a no name company nobody used). But HN tends to choose the most cartoonishly evil and conspiratorial takes on these matters because #2 is just boring

I'm curious how effective something like that would really be.

Nvidia can certainly put up some guardrails that will sound impressive to the dinosaurs in Congress, but can it really stop China from using those GPUs anyway?

This is a simplification, but is this not in some way similar to how the Switch 1 has hacked due to a design flaw on Nvidia's Tegra chip?

In the same way, even if their GPUs get this protection, wouldn't a state actor figure out how to get around it?

The entire article that thread references never mentions any hardware, at all, only their software platform. The "Watchdog" referred to in the (editorialized?) title is literally never mentioned, and it is not really a piece of "hardware", it is a piece of _software_ called "Sentry" that (clarified in the Nvidia blog) they run on Bluefield-4 hardware (the "chip") which is their network card. It only exists in $10mil+ clusters. Just an awful and misleading article and headline, and an awful thread filled with people who know nothing about how hardware works arguing over nothing.

Most of the hardware functionality from a GPU that models need is generic and used every time you use a GPU for any compute. You can implement language models in a GLSL shader; modern GPUs have been programmable for 20 years, that's the point of their existence. The best thing they could do is just literally nerf the consumer hardware substantially to make tokens unusable or stop selling consumer hardware. They don't need spyware to do that. It would also make their products dogshit.

More broadly, "Compute" is basically a resource that our economy relies on to a large degree, it has been that way for decades. And it turns out it's very bad when you just destroy the thing your economy relies on. And doing so doesn't solve problems like "Current computers exist today" or "Other people make computers". So who gives a shit about Jensen? Comments here talking about "taking him out"? What's actually more likely is just that really powerful people today are often corrupt and also really fucking stupid. He played a stupid game and lost.

None of this stuff is putting the current open weights genie back in the bottle IMO. Amodei using RoboStormtrooperGruppen9000 bots and going door to door to take peoples GPUs at gunpoint is a more plausible method of doing so.

Refusal to block implies a bit more: some entity is requesting that they block