Makes sense for Microsoft. Copilot is already capable of being model agnostic (both GH Copilot, obviously, and M365 as well). They're an enterprise software & services company, they want to sell integrated AI tooling in their stack, powered by whatever models their customers want rather than any specific model.
Models are quickly becoming a dumb pipe, like an ISP. Just a commodity. The labs should rightfully be terrified, eventually the value isn't going to come from the model itself but the tools & integrations built on top. Non-tech businesses and non-tech employees don't want to buy API access to a model, they want to buy off the shelf software with its capabilities packaged up into a pretty, easy to use GUI.
I don't know about that, a lot of those bloated enterprise solutions are becoming obsolete fast, and integrations becoming a moot point as these models advance.
Maybe for startups or simple orgs, but in any regulated industry/high compliance requirements they are still useful or outright required.
Claude Team w/ Cowork still only lets you set R/W permissions globally for each MCP connector for the whole team, they still don't offer config on a per-user basis. The enterprise controls are sorely lacking first party. Maybe fine for most startups or flat orgs, but any established enterprise with strong identity & access governance is going to have an issue with that. You can make it work, but you need to make your own agent/harness and give it an identity in Entra or whatever else you use, so for a non-tech company without a dev team, right back to square one of preferring to just buy a COTS solution vs trying to hand out direct model access with minimal governance.
(M365) Copilot sucks but Microsoft is putting a ton of work into agent governance & identity that sorely lacking elsewhere.
The issue is not open weights as a whole, indeed Hegseth himself said they are important for America (if American made, presumably); the issue is Chinese models, whether open or not, and that's what's looking to be banned, and nothing in this article suggests otherwise.
> ...the issue is Chinese models, whether open or not, and that's what's looking to be banned...
Is the US planning to invade China and take away their models? Because otherwise China is still going to have the models even if the US bans them. I don't think they're going to be going with the US position on this one.
It's the same patronizing nonsense as when all the US webcos pulled out of the Chinese market in some misguided supposed protest believing the Chinese so incapable of rolling their own Google, Amazon or WhatsApp they will come begging the americans to go back. Now the western tech universe goes to China for ideas.
If by "pulled out of the Chinese market" you mean "were hacked by the Chinese government in a way that compromised their intellectual property and the safety of dissidents", then yes [0]
The point is did the US reaction work or was it completely counter productive?
Then will attempting to cutoff China again today work or do we expect that also will prove to achieve the exact opposite of what its proponents are claiming?
We didn't cut off anything. American companies would have been more than happy to continue offering products and services in the Chinese market.
The Chinese government didn't like that idea. They attacked American companies, stole the IP, and created their own analogs of American corporate offerings. If you are a company and are targeted by a totalitarian government, it's not unreasonable to pull out of that totalitarian government's jurisdiction.
Honestly, the American response to that was not nearly stout enough. Chinese goods and services had been sold in the US without issue for decades at that point, often to the detriment of both domestic and other international market players. When China was expected to play by those rules and allow American companies to do business in a mostly-unfettered way, they attacked the companies and drove them out of their market.
> When China was expected to play by those rules and allow American companies to do business in a mostly-unfettered way, they attacked the companies and drove them out of their market.
This deserves to be pinned in the eternal HN hall of shame for absolutely staggering blind hypocrisy.
Banned in the US, obviously, not worldwide. The problem is if the US wanted to, they actually could enforce such a ban nearly worldwide, by putting Chinese AI companies on a sanctions list and disallowing any US company (or anyone that does business with a US company, which is much of the world) from touching them.
The conversation going on in the industry is a bit broader than that. OpenAI's head of strategic futures just said last week that open models are inherently decelerationist, ungovernable, and will slow development on the frontier. You'll notice OpenAI does not appear as a signatory here despite their relationship with Microsoft.
>open models are inherently decelerationist, ungovernable, and will slow development on the frontier
Ungovernable makes intuitive sense, but I don’t understand how open weight models could be decelerationist or slow the development of the frontier. Was there an argument for those positions?
Open weight models challenge the "winner takes all" hypothesis, which motivates the astronomical valuations and acts as a justification for trains of cash dumped into AI development.
In other words, if AI models become a commodity, the "AI leaders" will not be able to burn the cash like they do today, thus resulting in a "slower" (one could say instead "more sustainable") development of AI models.
It's a copy/paste of the arguments against open source software from decades ago. The argument goes: innovation requires profit motive, and profit motive requires IP rights. Of course, this was soundly disproven in software and I don't see any reason it should be different here.
The difference might be the immense cost of physical infrastructure needed for AI training. People would make open source contributions for free, TSMC, NVIDIA and power companies seems less likely to make free contributions to AI.
Well of course OpenAI and Anthropic say those sorts of things, it's what they've always said, particularly Anthropic, but that doesn't necessarily mean that's the position of the US government. In other words the government seems to be listening to some but not all of the lobbying done by the big two.
The guy who said those things just joined OpenAI in the last month. He was previously a senior policy advisor, specifically on AI, to the current administration in the White House.
I don't know that the US government has a unified position on open source AI. But it's not like this isn't a discussion happening among policymakers.
Why anyone would care what Hegseth thinks about open weight models? What's wrong with Chinese models? The censorship? I think it's good to have diversity of opinion. Get US flavored output on sensitive subjects from US models and ZH on ZH models. That's a useful tool.
I don't personally have a horse in this race, but if you want to accurately predict the next step:
Start with the outcome you believe will be the most in line with the spirit and traditions of the open source community. This is precisely what won't happen.
It won't necessarily be the inverse. It could be, of course, but it's also likely to be a compromise between the two.
For a topical example: The companies doing "AI" layoffs aren't doing so out of a sense of having failed their staff that helped carry them so far. Often, these announcements come on the heels of record-breaking profits. They're doing it out of contempt for workers.
See https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/cory-doctoro... for Doctorow's take on centaurs vs. reverse centaurs. Broadly speaking: C-suite business leadership wants reverse centaurs. Workers want centaurs. Unless you have a union (or some other collective bargaining power structure that I'm not aware of), the C-suite calls the shots.
The same can be said of the current administration. They don't give a fuck what most of us want on any given issue. They're captured by an aggressive ideology. Their only incentive is to be able to spin their decision to make themselves look good; to posture as "strong" leadership.
Ideology? I think this administration is the least captured by ideology in the last few decades. It's mostly brazen self-interest, for both entertainment & profit.
> Start with the outcome you believe will be the most in line with the spirit and traditions of the open source community
there's nothing open source about an open weight model. It's more like the binary blobs Linux fought so hard against. If you can't compile, or in this case train, from source then you're missing the "source" part of open source.
The future will probably have most of all companies running local models, simply because the alternative would be essentially every company that uses LLMs ending up becoming completely dependent upon Anthropic et al. And that dependence would be milked to the point of absurdity once solidly established.
And as a more general point - more major competitors in a domain is very good for everybody except those competitors themselves, who would rather there be as few as possible.
Yeah I fully expect companies with lots of GPUs but not a good model like Microsoft and Amazon to just take these open weight models and make money, the GPU expense is the only moat at this point.
It’s classic commoditize your complement, nobody can replicate the cloud providers, everyone can replicate the models with open weights.
yes, this seems to me to be the reason why these three companies want open weight. everyone wins (but especially big tech) in the open weight world except anthropic and openai. i suspect even google could live with the open weight scenario; they are in a sense the only tech company that is perfectly hedged in this respect.
i suppose this is part of why openai and anthropic have not been shy about advertising the scarier strains of their models, these past few months; they basically have to force the white house's hand or risk being commoditized among the various other options in a microsoft/openrouter dropdown.
But what does that mean for the US competitive leap in AI when compared to China? Is it an admission by these companies that AI models are here to stay and the US will not “win” by being the only country with the best of models? Genuinely asking, not sure about the answer.
China will be dropping the open models blather any day now. The autonomous agential coding Ai just turned out to be way too easy to perfect. They will give Kimi K3 to the Sinaloa cartel on Monday, but that's going to be the end of it.
Nvidia is subject to export restrictions on GPUs to China. So Chinese labs have responded by allowing American hosts to run their open-weight models in the US, where there are no restrictions. We see this in the EU too where Scaleway, and now Hetzner are getting into the inference host space serving Chinese open-weight models.
So Nvidia benefits from more inference providers running many Chinese models that they otherwise would not have been able to service.
Oh, that’s interesting. I think the general expectation was that blocking exports to China would result in companies there building their own cards competing with NVIDIA. If it has incentivized them to release open weight models instead, that seems like an unexpected win.
It's all things at once. Perhaps it's incentivized the open weight strategy. It's also prompted Huawei to ramp up production of AI chips to try and create a local competitor to Nvidia. It's also also created a grey market for Nvidia chips within China.
The cards are also coming... Some of the very first are already out - but it will take a couple of years before they hit their stride in full. And cards will likely be primarily for Chinese companies initially, and then go for exports later. So it will go under the radar for many western techies for a while. Seeing what China has managed with PCB production, low to mid-end semiconductors, phone manufacturing and electric I would hesitate to bet against them.
Nvidia is now lobbying to remove the export ban, to try to reduce the incentives for developing their own high-end LLM training/serving (and cash in on current demand).
Nvidia will fail in that respect. Sanctions and restrictions are too popular with the American government. Where the United States will lose, is that almost every country in the world that can will use other solutions not from the United States.
And unfortunately, we are losing credibility on all fronts in the last year and a half. I wonder why?
> I think the general expectation was that blocking exports to China would result in companies there building their own cards competing with NVIDIA.
In the long run, perhaps, but it's a lot faster to scale up the capacity and usage of existing hardware/datacenters/grid, and even add new capacity to those, than it is to develop brand new GPU hardware and the fabrication of it.
Microsoft/azure has a big advantage because companies will literally pay extra then "free market" cost of open models purely for the knowledge that the won't fuck around with their data retention policy.
Not entirely, if models become commodity, then Microsoft's play as an infrastructure & enterprise apps company is the better bet. They don't need to make profitable mass-market AI models, they just need the best tooling on top of any model their customers pick, remaining fully model agnostic.
"AI Product" doesn't necessarily mean "We sell API access to a our models." Ton of companies out there itching to buy a commercial off the shelf product to deliver whatever AI capabilities they need packaged in a nice GUI, with enterprise governance controls, without needing a dev team/team of engineers to integrate it or develop harnesses, etc.
Buy it->have IT click a few buttons in an admin console->Deploy and have it be immediately useful is the play.
AI services becoming a commodity by definition means that the price will hover around cost to operate. That's just what commoditization means in tech. Free, as in Google creating a free browser for no profit in order to increase the size of their ad market.
The entire justification for the AI buildout, and the valuations of all the major AI labs, is that the service will be priced at some significant fraction of the knowledge work it's replacing. If you think it will become commoditized in the future, you are saying these companies are significantly overvalued at present.
> you are saying these companies are significantly overvalued at present.
I do lean toward them being significantly overvalued at present. OpenAI & Anthropic's valuations assume high margin product pricing on raw intelligence itself. Even if assume the labs will start charging value-based pricing, enterprise buyers will pay that pricing to whoever saves them engineering hours to make any cheap model work inside their compliance boundary, no guarantee that's going to be OpenAI or Anthropic.
Microsoft wins either way, proprietary, expensive models or cheap commoditized inference, because they monetize the workflow on top, not the raw intelligence. I also happen to think it's everything "on top" where a lot of value lives. Plenty of non-tech enterprises and companies out there itching for a ClickOps style AI product, especially if they don't have an engineering team, that they can buy off the shelf, meets all the compliance checkboxes, and does what they need without having to build the agents and harnesses themselves with the APIs.
Depends on what you mean by AI product. If you’re talking about a chatbot or agent, that may be true, but o think it’s less true if you’re talking about AI-run application layer tooling. If Meta decides to compete with Shopify and provide a launchpad for entrepreneurs, you can bet the platform would be rife with AI to facilitate operations, marketing, coms, etc…
Different companies have different motivations. I'm sure some are genuine, but a lot of them simply lost the race (to OpenAI/Anthropic/Google) and know they can't compete anymore, so are shifting strategies. How many times has Microsoft done exactly this in the past?
looking at both openai and anthropic; they are winning something, but a sober look at their finances will make you silently mouth "but what did they win".
They've seen the government officials parroting OpenAI and Anthropic lobbies talking points, and they have smart enough people to see the signs of upcoming regulatory capture.
If I were cynical, I'd say it isn't helped by the current US administration.
They really don't need to be very worried about that. Google, Microsoft, Amazon, et al have decades of experience in shipping custom hardware at scale, and it is not a simple field to pivot into
True, but Google has their own models and did not sign this either.
The other thing that comes to mind is they want to avoid the government from banning open models as has been suggested by some of the closed models providers.
If there are effectively only two AI companies allowed to train or run model inference then demand for hosting, GPUs and data centers goes down, so they'd be able to squeeze their suppliers that much more too.
Probably a real effort to push for some kind of sanctions or commerce block on Chinese models. Anthropic just doubled their political spending to $40 mil for the midterms to push for "AI Safety."
I suspect that whatever Musk has agreed to spend on the midterms in exchange for those sweetheart deals the SpaceX IPO got will make that look absolutely comical, but we’ll see.
Almost certainly these companies are using similar strategies as the Chinese models which they fear will be made illegal.
It's also the case that it makes it hard to attract customers if your openweight model is banned. A major reason the likes of Qwen, Kimi, GLM, and Deepseek are popular (well, at least highly talked about) is because of the open weight models they gave away.
Nvidia benefits no matter what because their hardware is being used. Microsoft and Meta benefit by making sure that the gap between "Anthropic/OpenAI" and "everyone else" doesn't widen, or they'll be hopelessly dependent on those frontier labs.
Probably the fact that they don't want Anthropic or Google or OpenAI to have access to their data theoretically, and that they do want to use good AI, and that they don't want to spend the money themselves to make a good model...
I think Meta would love nothing more than to throw a very large wrench into the works of OpenAI/Anthropic. Open models could mean one or both go bankrupt which is good for them.
> Open source did more than lower the cost of software; it created a shared foundation of knowledge on which generations of American engineers and entrepreneurs built their institutional sovereignty
Hey nvidia, what about making your full set of linux drivers open source?
I mean, I do agree that being open is important but you're hijacking the narrative here, and I suspect being open have nothing to do with any of this.
i'm glad someone else sees this too. There's nothing open source about an open-weight model. I feel like they're just trying to associate themselves with open source and the positive impacts it has had on software technolgoy.
I agree with the message, but I'm not going to accept it from this particular crowd.
Microsoft, NVIDIA, Meta, Palantir, IBM...They have all been actively hostile to open source for decades, and have a history of embracing it only when convenient and profitable.
Microsoft benefited from its close partnership with OpenAI for years right up until it went sour. Where was this enthusiasm for open weights then?
Meta was developing open models and then abandoned that effort in search for profits. Muse Spark is now fully closed.
All these companies have the resouces to train and release frontier open weights models today, but choose not to. So spare me the marketing and virtue signaling.
I’ll never forgive Microsoft for their hostile actions against open source and open standards in the 90s. I’ll never believe any endorsement from them of open-anything.
Yeah, the endorsement logos at the bottom are majority bad actors with regards to openness in code. Many are bad actors with regards to openness in _society_.
It makes a ton of sense to see this sort of joint effort being made by these enormous companies, but man, there's some part of me that can't help but feel grossed out knowing the best way to get the US to make the right choice is to have a handful of elite business people say it'd be bad for them.
Yeah, this letter is just proof of (the by now long standing fact) of corporate power/corporate capture of American governance. Tons of popular protests against big AI? Makes no difference. Joint corporate letter about big AI? Possibly the government will do something.
If you support the ideas described in Nvidia's letter, you're going against popular opinion. Most Americans do not want to "make advanced AI more accessible, adaptable, and widely available". Indeed, many areas of the country including the entire state of New York have enacted datacenter moratoriums, responding to the widespread public concern that we can't have too much AI or it'll drink all our water.
Yeah hard to imagine why people would object to rising electricity and gas bills, negative environmental impact on their area for the privilege of ultimately losing their job.
It's easy to imagine! What I find hard to imagine is someone who opposes the construction of AI datacenters while also having detailed opinions about open weights and identifying "American AI Leadership" as a laudable goal. We're not talking about local AI here, competitive open-weight models can't be run effectively on consumer hardware.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/corporate-responsibility/top...