Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI

Read this thread when you get the time:

https://x.com/_vkaku/status/2080334422231134490

Open Data+Open Models gives everyone else an advantage and bringing regulatory capture here should be appealed and brought to the FTC and the courts to challenge such regulations.

Startups need better than this whole lock down into four overvalued frontier models in the US sort of thing

Proprietary model weights are IP, their outputs are not IP and I can't imagine a court decision that would rule otherwise because that would set an extremely far reaching and dangerous precedent, even for American businesses.

I don't think distillation as 'stealing IP' has any legal legs. They can probably claim violation of ToS at best because the terms of use do prohibit use for training rival models.

If there's a "ban", it'd only really affect corporations right? It'd be difficult to stop indie devs and pirates from downloading the models

If there were ever a sign I need to get mirroring, this is it.

What are the best Chinese models on HuggingFace today? Bucket by ideal RAM: <16GB, <32GB, <96, <256, 256+

Text generation, image generation, TTS, etc

We must all hoard all available models before they get taken down. Is anyone archiving huggingface?

The point of open weight models is that this is not possible, companies will be built by taking 'contraband' chinese open weight models and marketing as something from the US

Would it even be possible to ban open weight models, given all the ways they can be used in finetuned models or online services, also in 3rd countries?

Don't model weights fall under free speech?