OpenAI & Anthropic have both made calls for Chinese AI models to be banned in the US on national security grounds. While it is true countries have reason to distrust other countries' tech, I doubt this is the real reason they are upset.
Their big problem is that Open-Source AI annihilates their chances of succeeding as businesses. Silicon Valley's model of VC funding is to bet on many small start-ups, hoping one becomes a 'unicorn' – a multi-billion dollar company (like Google, Meta, etc) able to dominate an industry and rake in hundreds of billions of dollars.
Even if they succeed in banning Chinese Open-Source – does this mean they'll become unicorns? I doubt it. The Chinese Open-Source AI models are superior to theirs. Most of the rest of the world will use them, and the real AI innovation will happen in the rest of the world. Meanwhile Americans will make do with the second-best AI, that can only survive when it gets the best banned.
Outperformed by Chinese Open-Source AI, US firms want their government to ban it.
byu/lughnasadh inFuturology
12 Comments
The capitalists sure are scared of competition, it’s almost like they need government to protect their interests. No hypocrisy there
Unless you can ban it from existing at all, that seems counterproductive to the notion of innovating and regaining a compelling lead. Is this them admitting they can’t?
If this is all open source, adopt their innovations and carry them forward into your next creation so you can realize the advantage too.
I get the argument that their innovation requires OpenAI to have done “all the expensive work” ahead of them so in that sense it might seem unfair and if it wasn’t open source they could possibly pursue damages. But banning something that is openly available based on something that is openly available is not just saying “you can’t do that” is also weirdly implying “we can’t do better with it.”
You know EXACTLY why they want to ban it: loss of profits.
I thought that him and his clique were “Libertarians”?
Why are they asking the government for help?
Same deal as Chinese EVs, they’re too good for too low of a price, so just ban them and make people pay more or go without, increasingly the latter as wealth consolidates.
Any country that bans any one else’s AI is immediately at a disadvantage because AIs can be trained on each other, like I’m pretty sure Deepseek was using OpenAI’s own AI training, and then adding upon it.
Not to mention the fact that OpenAI, Anthropic (Claude.ai) and all the rest are literally being trained on stolen data anyway. They should be laughed out of the room for crying about being out performed.
hehe. All these Almans and other technobros are so far from understanding how modern information technologies work that it’s just ridiculous. Ban something on the Internet. That’s great!
Also Facebook illegally torrented copyright books for training their AI. The Chinese trained their AI on US models so haven’t broken copyright laws downloading from the torrent websites. Though of course it may still be illegal to distribute copyright material.
Hey look it’s the real communists in the room, who act just like their old
“Experts in central planning in a given field” oligarch in the USSR counterparts.
If it threatens my monopoly, ban it.
If we can steal or figure out how it works and reverse engineer it, do it.
But in the meantime until I catch up? Ban it.
Here’s a thought. Follow their white paper, and use their AI yourselves, learn from it, do it better. You have more resources than they do, use them.
Banning is never a good thing for consumers, although China is good at doing that.
The fucking nerve of this guy. He takes a previously non-profit AI company whose dedication to open source principles was was right there in the name, wants to make it for-profit and hasn’t released anything open source in years, and is arguing in open court that he should be allowed to hoover up terabytes of copyrighted material for free and with no limits or compensation of any kind. And then when someone uses his AI’s data to train another model which IS made open source, he not only conveniently gains a new appreciation for intellectual property, but he demands it be banned.
He’s right up there with the Muskrat and the Motherzucker for being among the scummiest tech bros in America if not the world.
Government was made to protect the profits of the wealthy and nobody else.