"This is not a serious article" - it's by Dr. Bengio - one of 3 so-called Godfather's of AI and Turing prize winner.

He's definitely not 'pro SOTA' lab, he's kind of fighting against them.

That said, yes - it absolutely does play into the narrative.

I don't give a fuck who wrote it.

They're lying through their teeth and they know it.

If they have those credentials you speak of, they should know better.

> Because they're enabled and suggested to do that in their coding harness.

How do you know this?

> All of this "AI is going to kill us" marketing

The "marketing" this week came from someone that had given up their stake in OAI (Coxon), so I'm more inclined to believe them.

> pull the ladder up

From what I've seen (e.g., Dario's latest essay), AI safety registration proposals aim to target frontier labs whose models have reached a certain threshold. It doesn't seem like trying to pull up any ladder, just making sure the ladder doesn't go too high too fast.

And they've been trained on user data where users have been trying to set up effective coordination flows since the very first harness.

And given nigh-unlimited compute for free.

Open research and open weights from China are not contributions to China only.

If you can secure compute, there's a whole lot you can do as a US firm with this research and weights.

So it's a simple strategy:

1. Ban big players from entering market with METR breathing down their neck, which is controlled by Anthropic

2. Ban Chinese models so that small players can't do optimizations on them

How are you going to ban Chinese models from India? Or Israel? Russia? Brazil? Or of course China?

By treating models the same way drugs are treated.

That alone will dissuade many organizations from going anywhere near them.

If that doesn't work, there's a whole lot you can do - sanctions, hell, even war.

You can't treat models like drugs. One is physical and the other is digital.

To your point, the war on drugs is a colossal failure which has achieved none of the objectives it set out to do. You can now order drugs from your mobile phone in any major city in the west and the purity is often higher and they deliver it to your door sometimes faster than Uber eats.

See also for example digital piracy where the entertainment industry has lobbied, cajoled and convinced many governments around the world to criminalize the distribution of their content over the internet for free.

What was the result? After 20 years of DMCA takedowns, countless celebrations that torrents were dead, and many other self congratulations in the media, you can now find 10 different pirate streaming websites where all the episodes of pretty much any show that was ever created are available for free in 5 five minutes flat and the image quality is as good as on your Netflix or Paramount account.

The only way such a ban of open weights model would work is if you were to replicate the great firewall of China in the US and in Europe and even that doesn't work completely.

As for sanctions, China and India are buying Russian oil in enormous quantities as we speak and they don't really care that Europe and the US have put sanctions on Russia and I suspect you will see the same results with models coming from China.

If a country has a choice to either use the expensive SOTA models approved by Washington or Europe only or using the cheaper and not so SOTA models, why would they use the US ones? Why would it be in there interest?

I'm not saying that we should ban any models or that such bans would be effective - for the reasons that you've outlined that they're counter productive, and as a principle, I don't think government should have any say in how much intelligence I have access to.

But it is the likely path US/EU is going to take if the voices of Dario, Sam, and Elon prevail. Because that's what governments know how to do, even if they know it doesn't work.

> If a country has a choice to either use the expensive SOTA models approved by Washington or Europe only or using the cheaper and not so SOTA models, why would they use the US ones?

Depends on which entities we're talking about.

An enterprise in Turkey: they would be afraid to use a US/EU sanctioned model because they have EU/EU clients and US/EU says they will put any enterprise in a nasty list, close their bank accounts, deals and agreements if they use a Chinese model.

A random guy in random country building something in their garage: would have to buy expensive hardware to run inference, because there's no inference provider on the open web serving these models, but China. And subscribing to these Chinese services is punishable by 20 years in jail without pardon.

I'm obviously talking about hypothetical scenarios here, but all I'm saying is that US can definitely make using any non-US-approved model effectively impossible.

> and the image quality is as good as on your Netflix or Paramount account.

Actually better, because Netflix and Paramount limit the availability of best quality video to a narrow set of devices and operating systems that may run on them, while torrents don't.

Sanctions and war against China, India, etc? Lmao. We already saw how the world reacted to high tariffs by the US.

10 years ago the Us had enough global leadership to actually influence the world and at the very least stop China. It’s amazing, and sad, how quickly it’s thrown it all away.

It is amazing but i wouldn't call it sad.

yep we did, they bent the knee.

sure they did

You are absolutely right. It could be:

* Pull up the ladder (probably this)

* Gulf of Tonkin/Yellow Cake false flag premise for war (economic or kinetic)

* Fear of the big bad, space race we need public funding research grift AI Manhattan Project

Whenever there is fear pr0n or a national affront in the news, I assume another screw job is underway.

Source?