U.S. government will decide who gets to use GPT-5.6(washingtonpost.com) |
U.S. government will decide who gets to use GPT-5.6(washingtonpost.com) |
Don't get me wrong: I'm all for open models, but I think it will get more and more difficult to distil-train them without (legitimate) access to frontier models.
People have no idea and everybody pretends to be an expert and ignore how good China is on AI research
If anything I bet these people will just use their knowledge to make even more money reselling tokens.
The set of models solving really most used/solved problems is a known, as opposed to the cases where it's unknown, which declines with usage over time.
Thank you Chinese Robin Hoods
DeepSeek 4 is a good model for many tasks, but I think it currently lacks the post-training required to become a genuinely great coding model.
i had one place, they were using all these shady pay with a credit card for "points" to do these web gui things that were... basically nmap, dig, etc?
so i wrote up a small shell script that took in the servers our (often nonprofit) clients wanted scanned...
and so we could lower our costs and free up analyst time -- but sadly they often found out they had out of date windows boxen they couldn't afford to fix, and we'd have to settle for getting them onto MFA, using password managers and basics like that.
people overvalue AI imho. people are getting weak, they don't teach themselves the concepts that would allow them to make best use of AI.
anyways, i think the type of person freaking out is the same who's been cutting and pasting from stack overflow rather than learning enough to grab a book or read up on a library to get the needful done.
but hey, what do i know? i'm just some freak on hacker news
(proudly writing w/o AI :-))
What disturbs me is that this was not extremely obvious and predictable to everyone else. I have been called schizophrenic for my views on AI, here, and I kind of see how some could miss my points, but I am genuinely perplexed by the views on the subject I see around here, or specifically the views I don't see here.
Did anyone really not see this coming long ago? I have year-old transcripts discussing exactly what's happening with AI and government intervention. I even have a time-stamped transcript with Sonnet 12 hours prior, soft-predicting the shutdown of Fable. What is not clear about this?
* with big pockets
Is this going to be like that?
Whilst this policy is driving countries around the world to develop new AI strategies as USA cannot be relied upon, on the plus side for OpenAI, the publicity of this will help drive customer sales.
> driving countries around the world to develop new AI strategies
Unfortunately Europe is completely incapable of doing anything whatsoever to counter this.
Really glad to see some reasonably prominent pushback against this government overreach.
The information has been reporting that the government wants to individually approve which companies get access and when.
Imagine the wonderful opportunities for corruption and influence peddling, not to mention, excluding any companies that don’t support Trump
The idea that OpenAI is the one who are meaningfully pushing back against the USGov is risible.
None of them care about states rights, they just want to control things directly.
My biggest quality? I am an American citizen and a trusted partner.
Worst quality? I am on a waitlist for Mythos preview
Yes I’m looking forward to tokenmaxxing together and looking forward for your answer!
If they don't get to release, its bad. It paints a picture that we are largely stuck with current capabilities for a while and the party is over. All those promises of "you'll get to fire everyone" now go concretely unfulfilled.
Their entire valuations rely on the assumption of continued massive breakthroughs in intelligence and capabilities, and having revenue on part with taking a share of the GPD provided by white collar workers as they get replaced.
OpenAI Leans Toward Waiting Until Next Year for IPO
- instant, total world war if it's not coming from USA
- let's finish all oil's reserve first otherwise
If you want an Opus class model, it makes sense that you would train on what Opus outputs. But, if you want something better than Opus, training on the same data that Opus was trained on with the same architecture will only result in an Opus class model. Then, if your dataset also contains Opus outputs, many of which are wrong, then it makes sense that the model would have reduced performance.
All this to say that I don't think there's such a thing as a "Model Collapse," but there likely is a "Model Stagnation."
I hope the country doesn’t become the new USSR.
Come on.
I think occam's razor can be applied here. And like everything else, its about money. I don't know exactly what the play will be here, but this doesn't sound like this technology is too powerful and more like billions of $ lost investments need to be made up somehow without the people getting annoyed about the government bailing these guys (AI companies, investors, etc.) out.
The first obvious conclusion is that China has been utterly vindicated to keep US tech giants out of China. Some have a token presence but it's clear that the Chinese government will never let a US tech government "win" in any domestic market. It will always be a Chinese company. Obligatory Silicon Valley [1].
The second is that, to that end, IMHO the US government made an error blocking the sale of high-end chips (particularly NVidia) to China. Why? Because it's created a captive market for Chinese chip manufacturing. Huawei now has billions in potential sales that might've otherwise gone to chips produced in Taiwan and South Korea.
Third, the US can somehow ban a Dutch company (ASML) from selling EUV to China. This has forced China to replicate it and they will within a few years. The interesting part of this is that all it really takes is throwing money at a few key researchers and engineers who worked for ASML. It really is using the mechanics of the Western economic system against itself.
Last, the US government will try and make US tech giants "own" or "win" AI. And they will fail because the Chinese government will make sure they fail. How? By releasing ever-better open models for free. I believe China considers this a matter of national security to not be beholden to US tech giants (and thus the US government).
The ironic thing to me is that the US is doing what the West accuses China of doing with corporate control. I'd say the actual difference is that Chinese companies are beholden to the state whereas the US government is basically 5 companies in a trenchcoat. The US wants to mint trillionaires at the expense of literally everybody else. China believes society should benefit from something they collectively make possible.
Anyway, we've been here before. Remember the crypto export ban of the 1990s and 2000s? Did that prevent higher-quality encryption from being used overseas? No. This won't help either.
This is rich social classes claiming more for themselves.
Someone convince me otherwise?
They are playing status games, and making particular products available to specific people.
Whatever the majority of people get will be a modified, probably weakened, version of what those at higher social classes get.
> with no possibility of recovering their capital except by concession of the people's representative
This is definitely not true and its not that binary.
But it is odd that this administration has learned absolutely nothing about the mid- to long-term effects of export restrictions on other countries' ability to compete with the US.
You misspelled “nationalize them” (while we privatize Social Security and probably Medicare)
Only the bad parts of capitalism, only the bad parts of socialism. This is what policy looks like in the 2020s.
How do I know? Dario Amodei said that when he explained why Anthropic has to limit the US Government's usage of its models [1]:
> Some uses are also simply outside the bounds of what today’s technology can safely and reliably do. Two such use cases [...]: Mass domestic surveillance. Fully autonomous weapons.
[1] https://www.anthropic.com/news/statement-department-of-war
They will all get distilled, down trained, and the smaller models will get better too.
The Chinese Communist Party is not any happier than the US Government to see millions/billions of people being able to use incredibly dangerous models.
These models aren't even that smart and they are already trying to control them and lock them down to a handful of people.
Then these executive and VC wonder why people hate AI and are against them.
Because the future is heading toward intelligence for the rich and you stuck with whatever model they want you to have.
The next step is banning open source models.
The future is not looking so bright if these models are already going locked down to whoever the government what's to have them.
This is no different than the government banning books because they don't want you to learn.
The way I see so many comments on the internet hating any sort of AI regulation, is young juveniles cursing at the installation of stoplights as they rev their engines. The world is bigger than just you, and not only you matter. Reasons exist for doing things.
That just doesn't seem like a world I want to live in. I prefer a world where everyone has the same access to the same intelligence.
Go back to the beginning of the internet, you would be for limiting the internet access to those the government likes?
I was around in the early days of the internet when Google dorking was a thing, you could prompt Google and find exploits into hundreds and thousands of websites, servers, ect including government website.
This isn't about national security, it about power and controlling it.
We obviously can't A/B test this... but if Dario hadn't been doing that, would any of this been happening right now?
No it doesn't.
> When you run around marketing something as a "super weapon"
That's one interpretation of what was said that ignores a lot of what was said.
So yes, if you ONLY read the headlines, sure. So, an ignorant and stupid government would read it that way. But the reality was, like many things, more nuanced.
However, I need not blame the messenger because the current government is led by idiotic morons.
Let's put this another way: either this is valid on behalf of the government, in which case he was right ot say something. Or you disagree with this, in which case, you can only blame the government for ignornig what was actually said.
Or are we going to play the whole "you guys suck... but I'll keep using your product" game?
Censorship. Surveillance. (Hi, PLTR!)
But if the government can simply ban models from the market? especially given how much the admin loves the idea of Tariffs? Knowing Trump the chance of this happening is 99.9%
We will all be stuck paying $50/mtok to Anthropic (And by we I mean only Big Tech will be able to afford tokens). The rest of the competition will be outcompeted by super intelligent machines. And AI CO’s /Big Tech will take over the economy.
I’m quite confident that few people are more ignorant on AI than Donald Trump. That he promised less regulation and lied is no different than his many other lies.
In six months everyone will cancel frontier subscriptions.
We are very clearly proceeding down the road to a dystopia here.
My brother in Christ, then why did you (and your competitors) spend years telling the government you needed them to tie your hands behind your back? Did you really think they'd just give you a crown that says "Gatekeeper Of All Neural Networks"?
The way you know this is true is to imagine The Others in power. Sacks used to scream about government interference, but now that he's running (this part of) the government, obviously things are different.
The only constant is that David Sacks (& co) always believed he should have all the power.
Arent these the same clowns who keep saying that the government needs to regulate AI to protect society [from their competitors] or whatever? And im not just talking about back when they used to be a nonprofit, Altman was still using that line post-sellout too.
GLM on LLM Asics is going to be amazing, US hosted or otherwise
I have always wondered how AI industry is not in a (partial) bubble because open weight models will substantially eat into their revenue (rather sooner than later). But with this ('bro') regulation it seems that an easy strategy could be to regulate this problem away, especially easy to convince everyone that those chines models are truly evil.
Hopefully open-weight models will catch up, hopefully we, as the people, engineers will find the way to maintain those open-weight models on pair with the closed ones.
I try to be optimistic, as we won some battles, against all odds, Linux is flourishing, open source solutions are mainstream.
https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/news/commission-sel...
A consortium will train a 400B-class model and get 2.5% on time of the EuroHPC infrastructure (~2000 PFLOPS datacenters). So, even if the Chinese take away the open source there will be some models. Probably not Mythos quality yet though.
It's not about the tech. We have a corrupt administration gatekeeping two powerful models for companies set to go public soon.
I bet the models are powerful.
I also bet there is a lot of money being exchanged, too, for keeping the bubble big, so certain people will profit.
Trump doesn't care about the people. He cares about himself.
I understand if its military hardware and software, that's the property of the US government however this is the property of a private company.. Now seemingly being commandeered and issued at the will of the government, sounds very Russian/Chinese to me.
Is there a precedent for this before in a democratic country ?
The missiles Raytheon makes are export-controlled too, and they're not somehow "property of the US government" - this isn't China.
Is this just upsetting because it's a product you want to enjoy?
> Is there a precedent for this before in a democratic country ?
Try every weapons system, encrypted radio system, FPGAs with high-bandwidth transceivers, lithography equipment, etc. etc. etc. There's plenty of precedent.
No, infact I'm a proponent of open models and being able to run them locally, it just feels strange that a consumer product would be under the same restrictions as military grade equipment and tech which is specifically designed for warfare.
> Try every weapons system, encrypted radio system, FPGAs with high-bandwidth transceivers, lithography equipment, etc. etc. etc. There's plenty of precedent.
If it's the same equivalent then my issue is just that, it feels like trying to restrict the useage of RSA because it could be used by bad actors.
Approval lists for AI models.
Two sides of the same coin. The administration is taking the opportunity now on the back of fear mongering done by the labs. The labs get regulatory lock-in, the govt gets surveillance. Everybody (that matters) wins.
[dupe] Earlier discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48678789
My company is very interested in local LLMs even just to cut back on codex spend. I imagine a lot of other businesses are, too. With the recent developments in open weight models, it seems like it's only a matter of time before they're frontier level, and any added delay in OpenAI and Anthropic models being publicly available is just more reason for businesses and individuals to try them out.
Just like the Iran war accelerating fossil fuel abandonment, this administration can't even do the wrong thing without fucking it up. I say we take this win.
USA RIP.
It's a matter of time before the Chinese models are banned.
Oh the Irony!
Anyone serious about the future should see the writing on the wall. We shouldn't give too much power to the government or the billionaires.
May the open weight/open source models win the future.
> Is there a precedent for this before in a democratic country ?
I'd argue US is not very democratic country given how many of what govt does goes against people's wishes. Same as UK
That could be argued but the core principle is freedom of commerce and private companies get a lot of runway. This seems completely counter to tha.
Even the old internet, I'm kind of with you on that being something the market should naturally respond to which is why Google rightfully nerfed its search tools over the years, software changed and network infrastructure evolved.
This is different. The government already silently manages many things you never hear about and limits information reporting. Reasonable people generally go "ah, ok" for things that are beyond a threshold, because it seems like a sensible role for governance.
I think everyone agrees government should not simply be curating AI models that only spew public information or say something inconvenient about a political party or whatever. I also don't think people want AI models that are constantly trying to guess whether you're a child and should have certain information. That's not largely the issue.
You can list me the threats that you think AI poses, and I'll let you know if you're warm or not.
RSA was practically impossible to control (an implementation is what, 100 lines in any language?) and the global benefits outweighed the cost and futility associated with restrictions.
AI laboratories with hundreds of billions of dollars in funding aren't cropping up in every country in the world, and their products and services are easily controlled and not easily replicated.
It's commonly applied silently to posts that simply don't look good or become a nightmare to manage the narrative of. It's a healthy way to manage a community while looking transparent.
I think it's sucky and cheap, but at the same time it's also the best solution.
In retrospect it's obvious that the cyberpunk authors were mistakenly projecting certain parts of their present into the future (relative freedom of the masses and increasing rate of "traditional" engineering), and didn't consider second order effects and political action/reaction.
So which position should the government take? The one it’s doing? Or that LLMs aren’t actually key to national security.
The rise in capability of LLMs over the past year has basically removed a lot of these boundaries for people. Learning, building, and experimenting is a lot easier when you have a capable partner like Claude to help you along the way. Claude doesn't always get everything right, and you have to be a skeptic, but it's a lot better than nothing.
When I see the government restricting access to LLMs (or Anthropic as they were doing with Mythos before the whole Fable debacle), I basically just see the same old pattern of the ruling class moving to protect their advantage by keeping the great masses in ignorance. Broadening access to LLMs (i.e. effective knowledge) would put everyone on a more level playing field. But we can't have that, because politics, nations, the economy, blah blah reasons reasons. Guess utopia will just have to wait a bit longer.
But then again, this feels a lot like cryptography export controls. Those controls are in place, but I doubt anyone really thinks they work or make much of a difference. Software is not like nuclear weapons, and a data center is a much smaller lift than a Uranium enrichment facility. So maybe this is just a temporary roadblock. But let me tell you, I sure am ready for it to feel more like the government is working for (not against) the people.
Or, as a European, thanx for letting Mistral catch-up, I was looking for a reason to use it... A foreign gov deciding what I can use or being able to suddenly pull the plug on my tool makes it easier to choose the lesser quality. (And now I hope my own leaders won't start pulling models :p)
Who is deciding who gets to use GPT-5.6? Which organizations? Which leaders?
Focus on that to have a clearer conversation. Without doing this it's like jerking each other off to stroke our egos. You might as well as say "The World will decide who gets to use GPT-5.6"
Trump and his cronies.
Nobody else in the US Gov is so openly corrupt and has the unitary executive power to ban the products of privately held companies for sale without there being a public record (i.e.: an act of congress).
And what are you going to do about it?
Eg I expect I would have paid more than 2x per day what I spent the past few weeks, and if gpt 5.6 comes out and is competitive that's going to absolutely gain market share.
An unbelievably costly turn of events for them
Bad Federal regulation has a much larger blast radius.
Let’s hope Chinese models save us from this. BYD is trying to save us from Elon but 100% tariffs are welfare keeping Elon afloat.
IMO AI is different from everything else. It is a weapon as potent as nuclear. It is only natural that it be treated as one.
It’s not really the executives job or role to create new regulatory structures. If they want something durable, that lasts more than one administration, they need actual laws passed by Congress.
Is there any concrete information on whether this would be an application process or perhaps for companies that meet certain criteria?
Not my problem!
Over here we depose of our leaders when their corruption comes to light.
it leads to an environment where if you are one of the few asking questions, leading for change, trying to help others by criticizing popular leaders you get attacked by your fellow country men and women. it isn't a great place to talk and organize and ask questions in most environments.
im sure a few small, niche, safe spaces for curiosity and breaking from corruption and lies and deceit exist. they just feel to be fewer and farther between.
That's one way to look at it I suppose. The other is that these institutions had a tax break for a long time, not having to charge VAT like every other business. So I think quite a few people see it as a little unfair that the schools for rich kids get a tax break: and it is wealthier families that use private schools for the most part. It's not like these schools didn't know this rule change was coming.
I don't live in the UK these days, but one of the problems with the place is how complex the tax system is. All these little carve outs, sudden % cliffs, rebates and what have you. My first job was writing payroll software in the UK. You think that's the norm, then you move somewhere else and realize how much easier it is in many other countries. Then you get calls from people like "don't charge VAT on vegetables like in the UK": people don't understand the cost imposed administrating an ever more complex tax system.
Is that a feature or a bug?
If non US citizens shouldn't have the models - wouldn't that cause both Anthropic and OAI to fire non-citizens?
They would do what the thousands of other companies do with their tens of thousands of engineers handling ITAR/EAR-regulated software/hardware every day: compartmentalize their workforces, buildings, and access.
Dont worry though, the rest of the entire world gets access to better chinese models :-), once they get a taste for those the US has lost their little trade game and the future truly belongs to China.
Its almost like they are serving it up on a silver platter.
ofc they are not, they are just betting all in their models will be better, which is unlikely. (just look at the chinese law and all the names atop of advanced AI papers...)
This will tank the market.
See you all on the other side!
If they can’t freely sell access to their models and Chinese models catch up to Opus 4.8/GPT 5.5 in 6-8 months - then why pay OAI/Anthropic at all?
Hypothetically if the US continues to restrict their frontier models and adds a ban on Chinese/open models then it would to obliterate services like open router. American cloud companies would presumably be blocked from selling capacity to run banned models in this situation.
That causes a shortage of compute/gpu resources internationally and an oversupply of non-revenue generating hardware in the US.
If that happens then what percent of your salary is worth securing this compute worth? How much does the cost of a data centre chip change? It’s difficult to say.
If the US continues to limit advanced AI to it's own domestic companies, US companies will have a large unfair advantage over foreign competitors who will no longer able to compete.
Wouldn't it then make sense for governments around the world to start banning or tariffing US products and services to protect their industries?
If a country thought the AI export restrictions were inconsistent with treaty the remedy is challenging them, not unilaterally imposing their own tariffs. But even if they got a favorable panel decision the US would speak, and the Appellate Body is non-functional because the US stopped consenting to the addition of new members and all the terms expired. Which means anything that gets appealed is frozen indefinitely waiting for the AB to reach a quorum that won't come until the US changes is mind (and Biden didn't reverse Trump's decision here).
Trump threatens 100% tariff on European nations over tech tax
I'm very glad to see them say this explicitly and prominently.
This amount of courting the current administration is pretty scary imo.
Want frontier intelligence? Better not defy the current administration, or your competitors will have access to a better model you could never use.
Otherwise they're putting US frontier labs at a huge disadvantage by preventing them from recouping costs on their biggest models.
How much more will OpenAI and Anthropic models cost when they're the only AI you can legally use?
https://blog.supplysideliberal.com/post/47857230937/luigi-zi...
You may have to make similar offerings if you want to use the latest version of ChatGPT.
Companies like Microsoft have been asleep at the wheel in terms of security for decades and now there's a model that can identify where they've been careless. That's not a "nuclear bomb level threat" or whatever Anthropic wants to call it, it's reckless carelessness by the existing companies.
China, Russia etc ban Microsoft software from government laptops, indicating there are intentional back doors.
The US intelligence agencies claim it's from Russia, but those agencies always claim it's from Russia. Since 2020 the press just stopped talking about it, with no hint of anything being solved.
Nobody needs intentional back doors.
I am asking because I have seen a growing number of stories about organizations getting owned by either raw mismanagement of security, supply chain attacks that are often a failure at the ecosystem level, npm, etc.
I am not really seeing from what we hear about the use of AI for penetration as a threat yet. The growing problem with security seems to be more at the management and ecosystem layers.
Not many story that netfilter, ipfw or pf got owned by one of those frontier models.
A lot of stories that organisation X and Y left keys on a public repo for months.
Hey now, this is Government we're talking about. There's no markdown, it must be MS Word .docx in Times New Roman, emailed back and forth.
And given how willy-nilly they are operating I see no reason they won't clamp down on open source. All it takes is someone with connections/political contributions wakes up one day and realizes that open source is a threat to their power or bottom line and it will be declared an imminent threat with no oversight or debate.
Any company providing the models will be deemed a threat to national security.
No need to block the download.
Why wouldn't they just tell Hugging Face that they need to abide export restrictions directly - they're an American company?
Doesn't sound dystopian enough without a second compelled entity?
wondering when more people will raise their voice and get engaged
It’s only a matter of time before companies start to acknowledge the huge cost of tokens and look for a cheaper alternative with basic cost-benefit analysis.
My F500 company is getting local infrastructure going to host open models and I’m sure many will just switch to bedrock + the best open models.
It’s foolish for companies to let three companies dictate the price of tokens, I just don’t think they are aware of this now by and large.
That’s ironic – I interpreted that paragraph with the opposite slant: positively. If that’s what the government mandates then these companies, in the end, have little choice, so was at least relieved to see them publicly pushing back.
They absolutely do have a choice, Anthropic and OpenAI could fight it in court. Iran showed Trump is a coward, he wouldn't risk tanking the only industry still keeping the stock market growing.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/04/podcasts/the-daily/trump-...
Despite their virtue signaling, Anthropic is the only major lab that has never released an open weights model, has been caught intentionally nerfing a model after release (Opus 4.6), intentionally and silently degrades performance for suspected competitors and AI researchers, complains incessantly about distillation when everyone is doing it (and after they settled for pirating books), and wants to pull the ladder out from everyone trying to catch up.
They're anti-consumer and only concerned with holding the power themselves. I'm not a fan of Altman, but Anthropic is the worst actor in the space, and I hope they lose.
Everyone in the space was talking about the automation of work from about day 2. People couldn’t stop themselves from talking about the way it was going to end work, and tech firms were firing people left right and center over AI.
Notably, Anthropic is the firm that stuck to its guns with the US Government, meaning they likely believe in their own spiel.
I mean it's fear-mongering until it isn't. I think people have become a bit too comfortable with dismissing the dangers of misaligned AI as simply "marketing hype".
If you can't envision plausible scenarios where very bad things happen because of a malevolent actor, ChatGPT 6, and a little bad luck - you need to think harder.
I mean, it seems like common sense - a limited beta test before widespread rollout. I'm not convinced they'll ever come up with a good framework for dealing with the cyber & bio issues, but getting triggered by a beta test rollout seems overboard.
I have zero confidence that this particular administration has any interest in regulating the industry for the good of the country, much less for the good of humanity. They will use regulation to maximize personal profit for themselves and their cronies, at the expense of the nation. I would not have thought that of any other US administration in the past 100 years.
In the longer run, it probably won't matter. If the level of corruption we see currently becomes the norm, then the US is facing much bigger problems than counter-productive industrial policy.
Is it going to change the world? Yes. In more positive ways than negative ways. Websites will continue to get hacked, as they are already getting hacked. People who are afraid of AI are really just afraid of change.
You could go as low as $2500 or go crazy the sky being the limit
Perhaps you can fault them with not coming up with an objective framework earlier, but that's a different criticism.
But, the question today is what to do today, a rolling deployment seems pretty hard to argue with.
I'd add, I think it's significant that we haven't seen any administration grandstanding on this specific issue - no Hegseth tweets etc.
We won't see mass action until enough people have literally nothing left to lose. For now, folks have plenty to risk and lose by taking action. There is not nearly enough homelessness or starvation yet for people to rise up. The masses are surprisingly tolerant of authoritarian oppression so long as food can keep being put on the table.
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/amer...
the many can defeat the money
> Doesn't sound dystopian enough without a second compelled entity?
This is the second snarky question you've made today, the other in relation to the export limit.
> Is this just upsetting because it's a product you want to enjoy?
Both are assumptions you are making and don't provide much in the way of constructive conversation, if I'm wrong about something it's alright to just point it out.
Export restrictions don't split generally hairs on technicalities like "hosting" - the "but magnet links aren't actually torrents!" defense doesn't fly when $1M fines and federal felonies are at stake. All distribution or "causing" distribution to restricted entities is prohibited.
> This is the second snarky question you've made today
It's not snark: why would Cloudflare somehow be legally or technically relevant in the context of two American companies distributing export-restricted materials? HN seems to love the "Cloudflare controls the internet!" "NSA bad!" trope.
So why would open models that are not in the US be restricted ? The government would need to subpoena each model that was in the US individually, why would they do that when they could simply pull clout over CloudFlare, which we have seen governments do around the world. Either CloudFlare comply, or they're added a block list.
> https://cybersecurityadvisors.network/2025/04/15/la-liga-blo...
This is not a new thing, anyway this discussion has become too argumentative for an off the cuff comment about government over-reach.
> Any company providing the models will be deemed a threat to national security.
Any company providing specifically-controlled models to foreigners would hypothetically be prosecuted.
I don't believe for a second this ends with "foreigners", this is about setting up infrastructure for controlling the technology. Foreigners are just the current excuse.
Note that TFA mentions they are supposedly hand-picking access to whoever they want, based on whatever criteria they want, already.
Countries are free to prevent exports of technology. Equating export controls with the Holocaust is disgusting.
Being told "no" is never fun, but the regulations are not hard to comply with (despite what Anthropic might have you believe.)
> I can't imagine US partners will abide this for long.
What are they going to do? Start their own Anthropic? Go for it. Why is every other country in the world entitled to American technology by default?
Because American tech companies make a lot of money from outside of the US. For instance, 1/4 of all Apple revenues are from Europe, and 1/5 from China and China-claimed territories. Only around 40% are from the Americas (so not even the US exclusively).
Would American tech companies be as successfull without ~half their revenues?
In any case, it doesn't matter, the cat is out of the bag. Nobody sane and non-American would trust American frontier labs, because their models can be yanked at will by whoever is in the White House. It would be suicidal to rely on them for critical business or developer workflows. So your options are to go with Mistral or open source Chinese models, hosted within your environment, with the added benefits of being able to control the costs and being able to fine tune the models to better work for you.
Good luck with "if you don't let us use your AI technology, we wont allow iPhones in" - go for it.
Except that they are.
As a US citizen, I can purchase ITAR-regulated nightvision, IR lasers, etc.
But that's not what's happening. Frontier models are NOT being put under ITAR. Instead, they are being placed on an arbitrary "approved access" list. So that even if you qualify under export restrictions as a citizen, if you don't have a $200B+ market cap, you're disqualified.
Many people are upset about the national security restrictions, but it's MUCH WORSE than that. If I have to verify ID/citizenship, well, that sucks, but it would at least be an option. That's not what's happening here. If you are an individual or small business, no matter how "patriotic" you might be, you're out of luck.
Did you read the E.O., or just Huffpo's interpretation?
> ITAR
This is more likely to fall under EAR, it's important to be aware-of and learn the difference.
> placed on an arbitrary "approved access" list.
Except that's not what the original E.O. indicated, this is just what Anthropic is choosing to do.
This kind of zero-sum thinking is what is killing the US's global influence right now.
Nobody said they would be?
> subpoena each model that was in the US individually
What does this even mean? Where did 'subpoenas' come into this conversation and how would that be useful?
> simply pull clout over CloudFlare
Cloudflare is an American CDN. Hugging Face is an American catalog/distributor (whatever semantic game you want to play) of models. Some of those models could be declared export-regulated. No subpoena is necessary to prevent Hugging Face or Cloudflare from distributing ITAR/EAR software, declaring any model as such, nor is trying to block something heavy-handedly at the CDN level necessary: Hugging Face will gladly comply with fine-grained requests.
"La Liga" obviously isn't American, which is why Spanish courts are compelling their ISPs (who they actually do control) to block Cloudflare IPs. Cloudflare's customers - who are likely not Spanish - are distributing materials Spanish courts do not approve of. If Spain had the means to compel Cloudflare or their customers in question to do anything, they wouldn't need to take such a blunt approach and block other legitimate customers. Cloudflare isn't involved in that equation and this isn't at all equivalent.
Honestly. It's been sage advice for me. And maybe for others.
Edit : There's no need to be so argumentative also, I'm not 'against' you or your point, just pointing out some other pov. We're here to discuss.
Also, oops, looks like our model weights got leaked on 4chan. How unfortunate."
They did exactly that with supply chain risk designation, and look what it got them: the administration simply found another more effective way to punish them.
The EO is nearly a month old, and has precisely zero to do with the de facto current situation, seeing messaging from OpenAI and Anthropic on their non-public agreements with the administration.
> This is more likely to fall under EAR
Which, ok, maybe, but nobody is seeing movement on this. As of right now, and indeterminately in the future, EAR is still irrelevant. No private US citizen, right now, no matter how many flags are in their yard, no matter how many TRUMP stickers are on their car, can gain access to Fable 5 or GPT-5.6, unless you have political connections or an extremely large market capitalization.
> this is just what Anthropic is choosing to do.
Irrelevant. This is what OpenAI is also "choosing" to do with GPT-5.6 Sol, which suggests strongly that nobody is actually choosing anything. They are being told what to do, which is don't let the plebians, no matter how patriotic, access these models. GPT-5.5 is clearly the permanent legal limit for anyone not in the S&P 500.
n.b. I voted for Trump as a single-issue voter SPECIFICALLY because Harris threatened regulating ML models. This is a betrayal that WILL force loyal, patriotic US citizens into the arms of China. As soon as GLM-5.3 is released and exceeds GPT-5.5 capability, I'm not looking back.
I'd argue that 70's cryptography export bans in hindsight look completely misguided, futile, burdensome and pointless in the end (which is why most of it was lifted/reverted over the last decades).
I don't see how AI-models are much different; it's certainly a better comparison than the fuzes, because we're both not at war right now and the underlying principle is already out of the bag.
Just like every other export restriction on technology: once the actual cat is out of the actual bag, they are often relaxed.
The "underlying principles" here are hundreds of billions of dollars in R&D - which is what is required to compete with the frontier models.
> not at war right now
We weren't technically at war during the Cold War, either.
I'm more trying to invoke GRRM. This is a Game of Thrones: billionaire CEO's complain about each other to the government to get their competitors blocked/tripped up with acts of fiat, which is what happened with Fable 5.
And in the linked post, it says GPT-5.6 access decisions are supposedly just hand picked.
The stories about export controls are just songs they sing to the peasants.
There are claims that Chinese companies are mining + reselling Claude subscriptions like crazy anyway.
Who is the "They" in "First They Came" referring to exactly?
> There are claims that Chinese companies are mining + reselling Claude subscriptions like crazy anyway.
Which will become a felony with export-controlled models, which is why identity verification is becoming a thing.
I'm referring to OpenAI and Antropic - would they be successfull with ~40-50% of their potential market?
And iPhones, not really. But you can bet your ass that every business purchasing software in Europe is at least considering the geopolitical risks of buying American, and thinking of alternatives. Doesn't mean they'll all stop buying American software any time soon, but the shift has already started.
You presume that every single product they sell will be restricted: this is unrealistic. The rest of the world can have the gimped models, and as so long as they're better than other offerings, the revenue will flow - which is exactly what happens with countless other dual-use goods.
Previewing GPT‑5.6 Sol: a next-generation model - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48689028
At the same historical turning point when Europeans are finally waking up to the need to become less dependent on their so called US ally for weapons production and security, they are immediately choosing to become dependent on the next layer of critical infrastructure.
Instead of learning the obvious lesson, Europe seems ready to purchase the future from whoever Washington allows it to purchase from. It used to be the guns, now it's the AI.
It is so idiotic and short sighted that you can barely even blame anyone who keeps exploiting this over and over again. It is always the same story.
open source != open weights
open weights model is like... Winamp for example. it's free, you can download it and use it however you like, you could also do some binary patching or dll injections to alter it functionality but it's not enough to develop next version.
the same is with ai models, weights are the binary final artifacts. for development and improvements you need to have training data, pipelines, RL harnesses, etc.
also of you believe Chinese companies will be releasing weights indefinitely, you are not understanding motivations.
Chinese companies spend significant amounts of money to train a model so why they are releasing it for free? they basically provide researchers starting point for developing tooling and optimizations for serving the model in return. and also get some PR. They also do not have to pay for inference of those models that much, as they probably serve them with loss anyways to gain market. they are gov sponsored so money are not issue there, so they try to speedrun their way to what US companies have. And guess what happens when they reach it. they will stop releasing weights and increase pricing or will use them for gov purposes.
What's with this hallucination? The thread is about GPT-5.6. Your laptop can't even run gemma 4 unquantized bfloat16, which is light years behind GPT-5.6, and running it is light years from training it. If something that a laptop can train is insanely powerful for you, you don't need to worry about this thread at all.
- Regulation like this is dangerous because the accessibility and capability of open-source AI training and inference are limited;
- Regulation like this is hollow because the accessibility and capability of open-source AI training and inference are unlimited.
What government wants to have their population use foreign AI. (Not many). Only issue I see is good enough is what the majority might be okay with.
US intelligence has gamed this out and sees risks at the fringe - advanced artificial intelligence moves the needle the most in countries economically & politically dominated by the USA, the Global South are the targets of this, not US startups.
It’s rather straightforward to think through. If China (they’re practically the only competitor) built a sufficiently advanced AI system would they allow it to propagate on the free market? Of course not. The fact of the matter is that they are behind, even if it’s just a little bit, so the best strategy they have is to try and compete with “good enough” models with lower/subsidized cost - but that is a losing strategy because AI is and always has been a winner-take-all strategy.
Likewise if, idk, France someone built an AI system that was valuable do you think they’d just hand it over for sworn enemy Donald J. Trump to utilized? Of course not.
The American strategy in the context of the current geopolitical landscape is the only valid one and the obvious one. If you find yourself criticizing the American strategy it’s because you aren’t in the arena where you would, inevitably, make the same decision to restrict access.
it sucks that we're in a place where the us has an dishonest leadership, because the current situation would be pretty reasonable if any other admin was in charge.
let models go free, until one proves dangerous in the real world then require gov approval after that.
I don't think anyone rational would have the position everyone should have insta access at the same time to the highest model once it crosses the point of enabling actual dangerous things.
I don't understand how you leap from "US govt. decides who gets to use GPT-5" to "limit new vendors from competing with OpenAI".
Can you walk me through the logic?
So you're a new vendor with a GPT-5.6 or Mythos class model. How do you suppose the regulations are going to work? First you need to get on the list of companies that are allowed to release models, and then you need to have a whole system for limiting access. Both are going to be hugely expensive, on top of training new models already being insanely expensive to begin with.
Thus, it's not a legal limit, but a real practical limit because it's too expensive. If only OpenAI and Anthropic and Google can afford to jump through the hoops, they've effectively gotten to "limit new vendors from competing with OpenAI".
Isnt this all export control based? If so its not regulatory capture for a few reasons. If not disregard this.
1) new entrants wont get export controlled because they arent leading edge
2) a new company could just implement KYC. It could even be a competitive advantage (Anthropic wont or cant)
That sounds like more than just export control.
This means that big company A that the president has a business interest in could get access to the most powerful AIs, while a startup competing with it doesn't.
> Are we heading to a world where GPU use is regulated
Well, there was the kerfuffle around PS3 (IIRC) and 'supercomputers'. I suppose that would be the 2020s version of that. What's old is new again. Ultimately you can just continually wire together less powerful hardware to come up with something that can do the job.
There were no export restrictions on the PS3.
The whole purpose of this is to let non-technical users say things like "make a flappy bird games" and have it succeed after using 10 million tokens. A decent engineer could build the same thing in 20 mins with a small local LLM.
Same thing with a cyberattack, someone who generally knew what they were doing could quickly surface the info to perform each step of an attack. The govt just wants to ensure random 12 year olds can't type: "how I hack fortnite?" and get a step by step guide.
See: https://kenhuangus.substack.com/p/frontier-ai-models-technic...
This is export control, where the US government seeks to leverage the fact that these frontier models are US made. This is then leveraged against opponents, and likely also just for grift. There’s also perhaps a little legitimate worry about the implications of free access to, but that is secondary to the real goal.
It is free advertising for now, but in my circle people are looking for alternatives and are surprised how viable they have become.
This is such hyperbole. You might be able to train a model that's merely useful in a single domain, but to say you can train an 'insanely powerful' model on consumer hardware is laughable.
If only he had known he could simply use his laptop to train them.
In fact, you generally don't want them directly telling the regulators what to do. Instead, the regulators make complex, costly rules that only large establishment players can follow. The regulators look like they're doing their job; the regulated enjoy higher margins and protection from disruption.
So, while OpenAI may not in a legal/technical sense, be the benefactory, that is not required for the term to apply, AND they may as well be considered party to the creation of the regulation since they have openly lobbied for it, openly inserted themselves into the government apparatus both formally and informally, and likely are co-conspirators to whatever Trump's autocratic self-enrichment scheme is.
Edit: Not saying whether AGI is right around the corner, that's a different discussion. I'm just saying that a serious possibility of AGI and an understanding of possible consequences will make a state act.
If that's impossible in any meaningful way, then yes, doesn't matter which color jersey the government is wearing, it's authoritarian.
Can you give an example or two?
Can you?
Powerful enough to shock someone in 2010 with a wikipedia chat bot? Possibly.
Powerful enough to shock jaded HN commentators right now? Possibly not.
Remember those weird conspiracies we used to have about universal surveillance; tracking and so forth? Well if you think back to those and whatever might happen with GPUs and hardware, and LLM restrictions or the likely age gating//ID’ing that is to come from this, that’s a good guiding framework for how this will proceed and affect normal people.
Explain. The labs have been spending about $100 million in compute to train a model.
With the twist that it will end up involving payments that directly benefit Trump, following the Mafia business model that he learned in the construction industry and that he's brought to the White House.
It's worrying that with no formal and transparent policy framework that the government will be picking winners and losers and stifling innovation.
There's been no public policy, executive order, legislation, or otherwise on this, I wonder if anyone has filed FOIA requests for these decisions or the conversations between the Executive Branch and AI companies.
I knew the time would come when individuals on personal subscriptions get the short end of the stick. Didn't think it would come so soon. I hope we're not too badly deprecated in the months to come.
Looks like I've got to improve my DeepSeek workflows.
This is like the battle between PostgreSQL and Oracle all over. Move up market, isolate yourself to enterprises, and watch while everyone else builds on PostgreSQL and erodes any technical advantage you had, until people just stop talking about you altogether.
Ant Group: China halted Ant’s IPO and forced a restructuring
Alibaba: China fined and politically disciplined Alibaba
Didi: China punished Didi after its US listing by removing its apps, freezing users, forcing delisting
Tutoring platforms: banned profit from core school-subject tutoring.
Tencent gaming: restricted youth gaming froze approvals
NetEase and gaming companies: licence freeze stopped game companies from shipping games.
Meituan: fined Meituan and forced changes to its labour and platform model.
Huya/DouYu: blocked Tencent’s game-streaming merger, stopping commercial consolidation in a major entertainment market.
Boss Zhipin / Full Truck Alliance: froze new users after listging in the US
Crypto companbies: banned crypto trading and mining, forcing exchanges offshore.
Think it's not happening to the US?
tourism - people afraid to visit
tariffs - wrecking ball to all businesses
defence - why would anyone buy US weapons after Greenland and Canada
internet clouds - Greenland made Europe decide that the US clouds can't be trusted, now sovereign computing matters and MS/AWS/Google are feeling it
finance - no one trusts the US not to turn people into "non members of global society" by banning them from visa and credit card and banking systems
I'm hoping this is a call to action for local AI.
There are now Asian models coming , optimized focused on cybersecurity defense at a high level, so I suspect this will be a relatively moot point soon.
LLMs are not great at creating exploits, but they are really good at detecting them. That asymmetry alone is enough to destroy the “offensive capabilities” narrative. Yes, mythos can find exploitable bugs, even write bench exploits. But real exploits require a good dose of human psychology, and most of the tools needed are off the shelf available anyway. You still need a real cybersecurity expert to effectively weaponize a zero day into a deployable exploit.
But an LLM can inspect payloads, packages, and blobs en masse and find those exploits in a way that was wholly impractical before, so the asymmetric attack advantage is dissolved by strong LLMs.
The USA is trying to protect its cyberwarfare advantage, not protect against attackers. The exact opposite, actually. Porous security is a huge advantage to technologically advanced state actors.
Source?
Look up 360 security technology tulongfeng and yitianzhen , as well as Sakana AI’s Fugu series, IIRC.
GLM5.2 is also excellent, it found things in our codebase that 5.5 and opus 4.8 both missed.
moving to open weight models is trivial now, with optimizations and stuff glm 5.2 is roughly the same price as the best models around from multiple vendors.
unless I could atleast try and see Sol perform like 10x better I don't really have a reason to switch back.
I used Fable for like what 2-3 days at most and didn't really feel it was so much better, only difference was I had to prompt it less, not to get what I want but to get to a working output. Code quality was still shit, still made bad plans and analysis and so on.
It was a lot better. I can't believe people say this.
Why do you say it was a lot better, what type of tasks were you testing it on?
“Alice is supposedly smarter than Bob, but they both take the same time to tie their shoes.”
If Fable were released as open-weights, I doubt anyone would ever consider using GLM or any other models over it.
- people pay much more for US models than Chinese models because right now they're the best. Once they're no longer the best (since you don't get access to them) why would anyone pay several times as much for the same result?
- once you get a high amount of tokens flowing into China instead of US companies, they will train on those chats and their rate of improvement will only accelerate, making US models even less attractive over time
- the sky-high IPO are dead in the water, since their story of "we will replace a good chunk of all knowledge work in the world, capturing a few % of total global spend relating to it" turns into "we will make a bunch of money out of a few dozen S&P 500 paying for the best, and some pocket money out of whoever uses our overpriced models that are as good as Chinese models" - far less money overall. Losing access to untold billions of investor money certainly won't improve performance for the US labs
- all the non-US people start asking themselves why they're funneling money to US corporations who barely share any of the secret sauce compared to Chinese corporations who share plenty when it comes to LLM, including the models themselves (at least for now)
- Chinese models have significantly less guardrails, making for better end-user experience
- there is a small but non-zero chance Euros get off their asses and invest into AI, making something halfway decent and further fracturing the market which cuts into US profits
So what's the benefit here? I thought the Mythos situation was the current admin taking revenge on Antrophic for not kissing the ring, or simply looking for a bribe, but no matter which way I look at it it's a self-own. The only way this would make any sense is if AGI is imminent, which I don't think even the boosters are arguing at this point.
Theoretically US could outlaw Chinese models, but I'm not sure what it's supposed to accomplish as the rest of the world certainly won't, especially as long as they release open weights models that you can run without phoning home.
It’s available to large companies. The WH gives them a competitive advantage against the rest of the market.
... that are friendly to this administration.
What specific externalities are you referring to? The only I can think of is high electricity usage, but consuming energy isn't an externality in itself. It depends entirely on how that electricity is generated and whether its environmental costs are already priced.
The cynic in me suspects they were salivating so much over the Spacex IPO they wanted a finger in anthropics 2026 IPO. Banning fable ~1 day after.
Now OpenAI and Anthropic are big incumbents with Trillion dollar valuations at stake, so they can’t take any risks. Unlike google they don’t really have a thriving primary business to protect though, so without being able to continue to take risks and ignore regulation startup-style, it’s going to be a lot harder for them to stay relevant.
I'm very pro-west, but at this point okay, I guess the rest of us have to side with China, not because we remotely like it, but because they don't try to be quite so antagonistic to us in everything they do.
Just because the many headed dragon is trying to bite your sailors' heads doesn't mean you should pilot your ship into the whirlpool
1. https://www.rand.org/global-and-emerging-risks/centers/ai-se...
My buying preferences have definitely shifted to "Buy not American" on digital things. Proton, bunny, hetzner, netcup etc.
Some things are harder to move, but the direction of travel is clear
Why make a product and not sell it baffles me. Especially when others are rapidly making products.
https://www.ctvnews.ca/vancouver/article/weve-been-too-depen...
/s, maybe
"wait, not like that"
Seems it blew in their faces and probably the new frontier models will be available only to a select few. Many people predicted this, only a naive person would believe that access to something with these capabilities would be decided by some dude in California.
GLM 5.2 is competitive with Opus 4.6. If the best model I'll ever get is Opus 4.8, then the choice is clear. I'll miss Opus.
BTW this isn't an opinion on the availability of GPT 5.6. I couldn't care less about that.
It's also more typical of a Reddit or YouTube comment, rather than HN, but that's a separate issue.
Would you levy the same two quote criticism of the reasonable call for regulation?
(I work at OpenAI.)
The "Plus" and higher tiers are advertised as "The latest models" but if that's not true any more then Open AI is opening themselves to investigations from organisations like: https://www.accc.gov.au/
Promising "X" for $Y to everyone and then delivering "X" only to the "chosen few" at the detriment of others opens you up to lawsuits because then your product advertisement is a lie.
For a comparison, imagine a telco selling "100 Mbps for $20/mo" and then throttling the connection for customers that aren't currently favoured by the Trump administration!
In all seriousness, I can’t believe the AI firms are abiding by this peacefully. If I truly loved my company, and I felt we were on the bleeding edge of incredible, life changing products, why would I allow my company to be set up for failure by remaining somewhere that clearly wants control over the sovereignty.
The US gov sees these AI companies as bartering power, not as innovation. Wouldn’t you as a parent always want what’s best for your child, not for yourself?
It also feels like they can’t just relocate out of the country, as the administration will surely sanction anyone from business within the country again. These firms are so over inflated with evaluations and opex, they’ve dug themselves into a corner.
This is not to say regulation does not exist in any other country, but it’s clear now after what’s happening at Anthropic + OAI that the US gov has taken these companies hostage.
This is only further playing into the hands of open source and the outside models; the US gov is going to be to blame for when they all lose the race to low cost/free.
If GLM-6 is made publicly available[1], will that change your predictions of how they will behave in the future, or your understanding of their motivations in the present?
[1] I am certainly no expert of Chinese AI policy, but I fear you are attributing US values and goals to the Chinese govt.
From where I stand, they appear to be very different though. China is seeking to increase influence, whereas the US (seems to be) seeking to become more insular. China is actively persuing the world-leader role, while the US dismantles soft-power tools like USaid, and alienates countries pursuing obviously flawed military excursions.
Actually that sounds pretty reasonable considering current regulations regarding almost any other important resource / material that affect the general population.
No amount of rules can stop people who are willing to break them. Only enforcement can.
It's N=1, but I believe both that the EU approach discourages investment and innovation in the EU, and that this US policy will do the same in the US.
I wonder if he understands why, now.
LLMs are still a little loosey goosey, and we are right on the cusp (if not there already) for an agent to hack a bank and steal money for some rando teenager with a penchant for jail breaking.
The regulations are and will be negative, but don't lose sight of what LLMs can do off the leash.
Which is the government’s own fault.
Elon Musk talked back in 2018 about how he went to Washington and met with Obama and Congress, but they did nothing.
In 2020 Andrew Yang’s entire run for president was centered around the risk of AI displacing job. He lost, no one did anything.
A couple years later we say the consumer facing LLMs start to roll out. Still, no one does anything.
They have time to micromanage the industry, but in all these years they haven’t found the time to establish any meaningful policy?
Meanwhile EU prevented itself from building competitive LLMs in the first place.
It's a way to clearly agree on ground rules that you can plan around, not more, not less.
The alternative is not no rules, do whatever you want. The alternative is executive capriciousness arbitrarily setting the rules based on whims and messing up your plans.
I like the US approach better: regulate when the need for it arises, not before when you don’t know how the situation is going to evolve.
Honestly, with open source models I don't think this regulation means anything because there's no way they can really regulate what's coming out of china. I don't think this affects innovation in AI much at all (unless your definition of innovation is "pour more money into diminishing scaling"). It's mostly just bad news for the US frontier labs, and based on their behavior I don't feel sad for them AT ALL. Like, they've basically alienated the vast majority of people by outright threatening their livelihoods or even society at large, and now we're supposed to feel sorry for them because they can't just go around saying "THIS WILL REPLACE ALL JOBS IN A MONTH!" without consequences?
Do you think the Chinese will go parading around that they've created the greatest cyberweapon known to man, and the CCP will be totally cool with the Americans being first in line to buy tokens, because hey, free market?
They would sooner put all their own employees in an incinerator than allow that to happen.
sorry we don't lie about that
They were in the tank for Trump because they thought Biden/Harris would stifle them… and here we are.
If the Chinese models remain predominantly open source then it would probably be for the best. Unfortunately I'm not convinced they will, with examples like Qwen Max showing what could happen.
Alibaba making Qwen close up shop for its best models isn’t that surprising, though sad.
The worry is that if the US models are locked up like this, then there’s less reason for China to commodify its complement through open weights…
If the USA continues to put barriers into the release of models, open and/or foreign models will start to out perform them.
If open models are competitive enough nothing will stop even US companies from running them locally.
open weight models - will be deemed too risky to be out in the open - since they can be abused by "bad actors" (unwashed masses)
America bans intel and amd from exporting chips.
Whats next.
I’m sure they are wondering just as much. I assume exhorting Anthropic/OpenAI for personal bribes, favorable government contracts with no restrictions and public acts of submission.
ppl are acting like limited release is unprecedented when, in fact, has been the norm until a few years ago.
The market will demand such a framework. I suspect that's the larger idea here, in that Amodei not only wants to be in the room when that framework is written, he wants to be at the head of the table.
He apparently wants it so badly he's willing to set back his own company's IPO to make it happen, given that there can be no pure-play AI IPOs until the regulatory picture is sorted out.
They might try to extend it to downloadable open weight models, but honestly they might not even bother with that. The goal is to keep people from competing on lucrative contracts or the hosting market.
I hope that not too far in the future a responsible government* will become the bottleneck for innovation in the AI space.
*obviously not the current
I mean, insofar as you could frame each new model as its own patentable invention, "patent secrecy" would be an existing policy framework that clearly justifies what's been happening here.
1. Some private company or individual invents something.
2. But the state wants a monopoly on the new thing's military use-cases (against other states/militaries.) So the state forcibly classifies the invention at patent time.
3. But the individual/company still wants to make more money than the state is giving them as compensation for their own use of the patent. They want to sell to the private market. But, of course, the state doesn't want to permit this, as arbitrary private parties could in turn resell to foreign state actors.
4. So a compromise is struck: private use is now made deny-by-default. The state permits the individual or company to sell into the private market, given: a rigorous per-customer KYB background-checking process; strong supply-chain tracing; contractual stipulations prohibiting resale; and the customer use-case being transformative or cost-prohibitive to extract the original invention from.
5. As such, big established enterprise customers who want the invention for private use in their internal industrial processes, can somewhat-easily jump all those hoops to acquire access to it; but everyone else is now basically locked out.
Sound familiar?
You think there is a record?
I can't find the exact blog post (maybe on simonwillison.net ?) but I read people predicting that know your customer laws would be coming to AI if it gets more powerful several years ago already.
Powerful technology that can do immense harm in the hand of individuals/small groups is the most obvious (and legitimate!) target for regulation. Maybe Anthropics hubbub around Mythos made all of this happen earlier than it would have, but it was going to happen (if the models are going to get as capable as valuations imply they will).
(Edit: Of course this doesn't mean it can be effectively regulated in practice)
Further more, no one actually gets hurt if we start rolling these things out more slowly.
Rolling them out selectively according to the whims of an administration that disdains fair process, tears down the institutions that could potentially provide and legitimise reasonable regulation, etc... well, that's another topic.
The Project is almost here.
We must clutch our pearls and cite National Security as a reason to pick winners and losers, just like the government did for Fable.
This is not something to joke about, its real.
https://www.sanders.senate.gov/press-releases/news-sanders-i...
The startup-brained among us never learned the first rule of business which is to not fuck over your benefactor.
You would think that this government, attempting to puppeteer the most rapidly growing industry in the world, would have more people outraged.
Where are all of the people crying "Communist"? This is one of those moments where it is less of an overreaction.
MAGA is bad enough. Imagine if the current batch of US progressives, who have 0 idea how any of this works, wins the presidency and gets to decide who gets to use it.
Do you think they'll try to dictate who gets to use it?
As predicted, [0] it has now been applied to OpenAI and soon anyone else releasing highly capable models.
Even worse than not getting access is getting fired. Since less than 20% of our developers reside outside US and our management is suffering from AI hype, they can decide to close foreign offices as a way to get access to new models.
edit: grammar
There's a big difference between being priced out of a market option and the government saying you literally cannot buy it. We should all be wary of government controls like this.
How is this a rational argument?
Are you so self centered that you only care about government decisions that affect ONLY the present you?
“I don’t care that the government made prescription glasses illegal, I can see fine without them”
> We don’t believe this kind of government access process should become the long-term default. It keeps the best tools from users, developers, enterprises, cyber defenders, and global partners who need them. We are taking this short-term step because we believe it is the strongest path to broader availability in the coming weeks, while we work with the Administration to develop the cyber Executive Order framework and a repeatable process for future model releases.
It seems like the exclusion is temporary. There is no process for individual users to get access to the new model _right now_.
That's how authoritarian governments become authoritarian.
This is how it started.
Only researchers were able to get access to the early super dangerous AI models that were much worse than you can now run locally on your phone.
But like you said, they will try to control it and fail. Like they always do.
Then laws will be made to forbid organizations who use models other than those from the sanctioned labs to participate in critical projects on national security concerns.
All of a sudden, no business would risk using open source models anymore.
I hope they do it! It will have a positive long-term effect just like the Iran war footgun accelerates renewable energy transition.
OpenAI and Anthropic did not call for the US Government to limit who Fable 5 and GPT 5.6 could be rolled out to.
Amodei. June 2026 https://darioamodei.com/post/policy-on-the-ai-exponential
> We're proposing stronger regulation of the technology, proposing giving the government the ability to, again, in a narrow way, block deployment of unsafe technology
Amodei. June 2026 https://abcnews.com/Business/exclusive-anthropic-ceo-calls-s...
> This is not to suggest that we won't need any regulation or safeguards. We obviously do, urgently, like we have for other powerful technologies
Altman. Feb 2026 https://techxplore.com/news/2026-02-openai-altman-world-urge...
> He gave several suggestions for how a new agency in the US could regulate the industry - including "a combination of licensing and testing requirements" for AI companies, which he said could be used to regulate the "development and release of AI models above a threshold of capabilities".
Altman. May 2023 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65616866
etc. etc.
You cannot justify such a capex on AI anymore. This will drag down the us financial markets and economy too.
lol that’s a good one.
there is no need to imagine, this is what is literally happening
You're two steps behind.
It’s like the frog commenting that the 80C water is about to get hotter.
Congress, if any of those creatures were vertebrates.
For the next few months, though? Nothing will. Those in the in-crowd will line each others' pockets at the expense of the rest of us. I will say that the recent election results and the building bipartisan angst over data centers and surveillance (e.g. Flock) are encouraging.
Because anyone who used these companies' products in China would see a pretty large ecosystem that's making a lot of money.
They're different things. Just like you can be the most famous actor or singer and still be poor. Being popular, having good products and actually making money is not the same.
And it's all relative. Today if NASDAQ dropped 20% the world would declare it in ruins. Are the companies still "alive"? Yes.
> Because anyone who used these companies' products in China would see a pretty large ecosystem that's making a lot of money.
Not true. A lot of them e.g. the public listed 1s have reported increased competition and reduced margins.
Political priorities and good governance is why we have government.
Not really, no. What planet is this on?
Why China crushed its tech giants https://www.wired.com/story/china-tech-giants-policy/
Why Big Tech May Never Recover in China https://time.com/6973119/china-big-tech-crackdown-backfiring...
Beijing can’t afford another crackdown on its tech companies https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/11/china-cant-afford-another-cr...
- Tutoring platforms were a plague on Chineese youth that increased the weight of their already _very_ heavy load (tbh, i think and education reform might have been preferable, this is a stopgap, but at least it is something).
- Ant group was offering predatory consumption loans to rural China, which to me felt a lot like the "revolver credits" that plagued my country in the 80s and 90s and pushed to many to suicide (the surname cam from their english name, "revolving credit", and because my countryside had a lot of hunting rifle available to whomever). Considering how rural china is mistreaded by Chineese state and general government (and imho this is a real weakness in China politics), having this group by a huge fine for their practice and a general debt forgivness was great. Curtailing Ant's power is also good.
- Stopping consolidation is a great way to keep a market free.
- Crypto companies: mining diverted power from villages who couldn't compete on purchasing power to mining wharehouses in some state. The ban is great for the rural population at least. Also, if that can curtail the birth of Chineese cryptobros, great for the mental health of the country.
Huh? US foreign military sales are up at all time highs
"Total exports by the United States, the world’s largest supplier of arms, increased by 27 per cent. This included a 217 per cent increase in US arms exports to Europe, according to new data published today by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI)"
[https://www.sipri.org/media/press-release/2026/global-arms-f...]
...because the USA made it into the knockout stage. really scary stuff
It's the ONLY one (almost) that are actively tested and verified in real battles.
It's easy if only enterprise users have access. It just becomes yet another compliance issue.
They won't let the public use it, even if citizens, because that would undermine the goal of controlling its use.
> I'm hoping this is a call to action for local AI.
If US frontier models stop being publicly available then they stop mattering, it also becomes hard to justify further investment in US AI companies if distribution is so locked down. The Chinese models will be the frontier.
I think the trend will be running open-weight models with the provider of your choice. You can always switch providers, avoiding vendor lock-in, with the trade-off of privacy concerns. You have to trust that the provider actually behaves the way they claim.
I would wager frontier LLM achievements will plateau, and open-weight models will catch up. Then OpenAI and Anthropic will have significantly less value prop. It is hard to say when that may happen. People regard open-weight models about 4-10 months behind frontier models, so its not like those using open-weight models need to wait long to catch up.
The excuse they give is borderline childish. I get the thing about slow rollout, make sure partners get to fix the bugs, etc...
But bad actors are hard working motivated entities with tens of thousand of fake ids, and american citizens working for them, for pennies.
All while the ones like or you sit at a crossfire which is borderline useless.
I cant wait to see what Qwen did with the massive distillation they made out of Opus 4.8 and Fable aka Mythos aka pretty sure they jailbroke it.
What about this: companies stop providing AI tokens to their employees entirely and instead, give a monthly budget for developer tools? They can even go as far as saying "if we realise that you use Chinese AI, you will get a warning and then be fired".
It's not like one can identify code coming from Chinese AI, right? As long as a company doesn't pay for those subscriptions, it may just be the employees writing the code all by themselves :-).
Yes, and the rest of the world would just nod worriedly and go along with it, at massive cost to their economies, rather than treating it like the protectionism it is and responding to it with crippling counter-sanctions.
We don't give a fuck about US laws - respectfully, the rest of the planet.
We're already sick of your shit and this will only add to it. Just look at the Iran shit show. What a joke. Ooooooo wooooooo sanctionzzz scary. Sanctions only work if they're enforceable.
The Anthropic page here seems to say that Max users should have access to the full 1 Million window for 4.8:
https://support.claude.com/en/articles/8606394-how-large-is-...
I was already setting up my infra to experiment with GLM 5.2 and its 1 Million token window before this happened. I think I'm glad I did.
EDIT: Found a solution, seems Claude Code 2.1.193 (or an earlier version I didn't notice) changed default settings, so that if you have Autocompact turned on it occurs at 50% of the context window. If you turn off Autocompact, the full 1 Million context window is restored. Another example of Claude Code quietly changing default settings sigh
Big boxes with Huawei GPUs and Chinese open models to run inside your company without network access.
Only if you're doing cutting edge research or some highly, highly niche project would you need the frontier models.
I assume for more technical folks this is not needed, as it's just a marketing term. There's no need to use such words because it's obvious, none worked for months to release a worse model/phone/laptop you name it.
Hey OpenAI model go hack the new mythos for me.
Battle bots, oppression version.
Which, like the US, uses export controls when it finds them advantageous: https://nam.org/china-imposes-export-controls-on-u-s-mineral...
> In all seriousness, I can’t believe the AI firms are abiding by this peacefully. If I truly loved my company, and I felt we were on the bleeding edge of incredible, life changing products, why would I allow my company to be set up for failure by remaining somewhere that clearly wants control over my sovereignty.
So, locate in China, where every company of importance is essentially required in practice to maintain ties to the CCP?
I personally think the US has gone too far with its use of export controls and sanctions as a political tool, but it's foolish to believe that it's different anywhere else on the planet.
In China, it has even been reported that top AI talent is restricted from overseas travel.
https://www.thinkchina.sg/technology/china-tightens-control-...
Bottom line: if you're working on cutting-edge technology that is deemed to be of critical national security importance and has military or dual use implications, you're going to be a hostage no matter where you go.
AI has long existed in many countries around the world without this type of behavior from the government. Deepmind in the UK, Mistral in France, DeepL in Germany - the governments don’t seem to be forcing employees to get their deploys approved by a government official.
My argument is that the US gov does not like that these companies have too much influence which they do not feel they can mandate. It’s slowing the entire country down at a very critical sink or swim inflection point in this tech.
-the US is the only place where you can raise the kinds of money you need to run a lab like this.
-a government that won’t let you sell products to customers abroad will probably object even more to you moving abroad.
Even if you made the move abroad, that government might no longer let you access US data centers.
-This basically affects OpenAI and Anthropic, which make the only LLMs most people consider frontier nowadays. Since most open weights models rely on distillation of frontier models, it may genuinely entrench those companies more.
It may be playing into the hands of open source OAI/Anthropic dependencies start to look more dangerous, but it also makes building better OSS models harder.
The advantages the AI labs rely on might be less durable than a proprietary process in industrial manufacturing, but it’s still meaningful.
I think the bigger reckoning will come from a different angle: tokens will eventually need to cover cost.
That will likely mean multiplying prices compared to today. And companies already complain now!
Model orchestration and smaller models that can run locally or cheaply will become more important in my opinion.
Right now, you can still default to GPT/Claude and it’s kind of fine, but that will have to change.
Many Americans want AI to fail. The US gov wants to control AI. The AI companies are running out of things to do, and are shipping product after product after product to keep the perceived productivity narrative alive.
At this rate I would not be surprised to see an OAI/Anthropic merger just to throw everything AI the US has to offer to the global markets.
They literally asked for this.
What are they going to do about it? Might makes right.
They've already done what little they can: pull access to their models wholesale rather than adopt an export compliance regime.
So your thesis is that someone has the resources to create a model at the level of Mythos or GPT 5.6 but bot have the resources to jump through the concomitant legal requirements?
Surely that’s unlikely?
That’s a lot of information that could fall into the boogeyman’s hands.
As a European, the way I see it, Europe declared fealty to the US and relinquished its sovereignty a long time ago, sadly.
Also, the way these agreements tend to work is that you agree that you won't source from the 'enemy side' i.e. China. It works this way for NATO and it will work the same way here.
No such declaration was ever made. Europe has just failed to compete.
Of course not, there's no need for a 'declaration' that would be a hard sell to the European public. Actions is all that matters.
Nobody in EU ever tried to build a domestic CPU that was even remotely comparable to what Intel and AMD, for them to have had the opportunity to fail.(No, ARM is IP not a builder)
Nobody in EU ever tried to build a domestic GPU that was even remotely comparable to Nvidia, ATI or 3Dfx for them to have failed.
We just let the US companies fight it out, see who could build the best products, and become forever customers to them and then 20 year later wonder how come their economy grew 2x as much.
Europe is becoming a museum and a retirement home. Young people leave to make their fortune and maybe return to have a family or avail of healthcare. And while I have nothing against old people my own street in a _very_ family-oriented suburb in the Netherlands is over 50% retirees.
Though I see the flow of migrants between the US and Europe has shifted, so there's a net gain of Americans in Europe. I wonder if it's where young people with dreams want to go, or if it's just where people like my in-laws (nice, culturally aware, but no longer very economically productive) who have a few million dollars in their 40's and want a pretty place to retire young, go.
> The Commission backs the Dutch [...]. The European position fragments before it has properly formed.
That the EU would, after recognizing AI's value, freely give up control of its few advantages to the US, despite of this being a conventional trade issue which the EU has experience with, seems like a very pessimistic assumption.
(I stopped reading after that part.)
Or, and this is common knowledge, they're just straight up looting.
Google had been pussy-footing AI research due to deathly fear of awakening an ASI, because their safety teams still had no answers.
Then Altman came along...
Just as a reminder, the claim (only two comments ago) was that it will never reach people and be limited only to certain government-approved companies.
The press release pretty clearly outlines the next steps that will eventually get it into people's hands.
That is the claim that is being refuted. Nothing about the obvious government overreach happening here. You are the one that decided to bring that in as a strawman.
What Trump is doing at the moment is, as usual, only a distraction.
It's protecting people from themselves, so basically like the safeguards already included in the models.
I mean, it's not really wrong. JD Vance recently said that Watergate would just be a "12 hour news cycle" if it happened today, and spouted some bullshit that "the deep state" took down Nixon. The takeaway from me was that corruption has become so normalized by the Trump administration that Watergate wouldn't even be such a big deal today, and, incredibly sadly, I think he's probably right.
And good luck proving it.
Uh... no, that is not actually a good explanation.
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/us-open-up-exports-nvidi...
An example of the ugly side of China private lending is what is termed "flesh loans". A young girl is forced to have nude pictures taken of her to secure her high interest loan repayment. Ant was going to put hundreds of billions in capital backing loans that had loosely controlled and often unethical/violent collections system.
Yes, curtailing loads of easy capital can be at odds with pressing domestic consumption growth. In this case, I think the government made a tough but decent decision.
And even if foreign investors are more cautious now, there is plenty of money trapped by capital controls, so that it doesn't look like new tech companies have trouble raising capital anyway.
I'm assuming you don't have any working relations with any Chinese companies, because on-the-ground shows something much different than what these headlines promise.
My other concern is, it isn't really a 1 Million context window if we can only use the first 500k, right? But now that I've found that I can re-enable it, I'm happy.
I've previously had sessions go to 700k tokens and still be okay, though it does start drifting at that 700k point. I'm regularly at 300k with no problem.
Then why write "+1 point to China!" and not "+1 point to the UK, France and Germany"?
> Deepmind in the UK, Mistral in France, DeepL in Germany - the governments don’t seem to be forcing employees to get their deploys approved by a government official.
The UK, France and Germany all have their own export controls rules, so if a company in these countries comes up with a model that those governments deem to be of significant enough importance, they also have the means to exercise greater control over them as well.
The latest models from Anthropic and OpenAI are said to be the most advanced in the world. Agree or disagree, like it or not, the powers that be in the US determined that there is sufficient justification to control their export. Under long-standing and perfectly legal export control laws, the US has the ability to issue such orders.
In the case of Anthropic, the company chose to reverse providing public access to Fable because it said it could not comply with the requirement that non-US nationals (even those residing in the US) be restricted from accessing Fable.
> It’s slowing the entire country down at a very critical sink or swim inflection point in this tech.
You might or might not be right, but I think many people would argue that "move fast and break things" is risky when it comes to AI. I can't say that the current administration is genuinely concerned about the broad societal impacts of AI but if the effect of their brand of greater oversight is that companies like Anthropic and OpenAI have to slow down, it might not be a bad thing for humanity.
The bigger issue is the growing number of retired woodworkers collecting pensions for much longer than the system was ever designed for. Life expectancy rose dramatically, yet the retirement age not. These retired woodworkers then vote for politicians who keep increasing their benefits, while costs are cut elsewhere. Add a declining birthrate, a trend started by previous generations, and you get a system that is politically almost impossible to reform. It will probably take a very hard societal crash before people seriously reconsider this old, inefficient model. Like in Greece, where pensions were cut on third of it's original size. Sadly, woodworkers never learn other way than this.
With ever present threat of war on the old continent because some woodworking tribes just can't supress their need to chop someone else, this is the biggest long term issue.
The administration may try, and the bigger more risk adverse companies will capitulate willingly, but its about as ineffective of a ban as you can get. It'd be like trying to ban running Linux on your home computer because it "might be able be used to conduct cyberattacks"
They coordinated on Signal to bring firearms. They didn't plan to "protest".
They got off lightly. Should have been life without parole.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Prairieland_ICE_detention...
Probably the EU could pool together funds to create something competitive as being on the mercy of someone else isn't a pleasant place to be.
And I wouldn't get so used to the open models. Eventually, if they get good enough, the access to them will also get restricted.
* with the government requiring the regulated to obtain approval to add each customer, they're losing a massive number of their customers
* and even if a customer gets approved, every such customer now sees that access to the regulated can (and has been) shutoff with no notice if the gov doesn’t like the provider or customer - it's now a massive supply chain risk for any customer to use a regulated provider
* the regulated losing a massive part of their customer base for both of the above reasons means significant impairment of their revenue, as well as their valuation, and staying ahead of their competitors and open models requires massive ongoing investment
Open models are mere months behind.
Who are they losing them to? They're the only game in town.
> it's now a massive supply chain risk for any customer to use a regulated provider
But seeing as there is no alternative use them they will.
> the regulated losing a massive part of their customer base
But they aren't. Access to existing models isn't being pulled. It is only access to previously unreleased models that is being restricted going forward.
> Open models are mere months behind.
Presumably the government will strategically ease restrictions as open models gain ground.
We already saw the terms moved under us once with Fable, the retention policy changed and some requests started routing to a weaker model, none of us small operators had any say in that. Now access itself is a government decisions.
For anyone building on top of these APIs that's the real barrier, not the rule-following overhead but the fact that the ground can shift mid-flight and you can't negotiate with whoever's moving it.
Which is exactly why open weights start looking less like ideology and more like risk management.
> Facts, but the Europeans, tankies, and America haters here will never admit it.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Social programs have little to do with it. You can have both industry and social programs if you just choose not to start random wars of aggression in the US too, something for which you need $1.5T apparently.
China has both more industry and plenty of social programs as an example.
Like seriously, to the people that think this is a doomsday thing, if you're serious about that line of thought then STOP DOING IT. It's like the people that are arguing that AI is conscious. IF you truly believe that, then we've just reinvented slavery, and again, STOP!
I 100% do not accept the "it's inevitable anyway so morality is out the window". We also have nuclear weapons but we don't need to rush into World War 3. Also nothing inevitable requires trillions of dollars a year to advance because it's so deeply unprofitable.
There is no standing down until one side wins. Both countries would leverage (or hope to) an ASI to destabilize the other.
Even my parents who speak no English and aren’t spending time in US-based social media have taken a break from hating Russia for the Ukraine invasion to talking about how we need to get rid of the dependency on the US.
This boat is turning slowly but it won’t turn back anymore.
What metric are you using for "better" here? If I've got a straightforward task GPT 5.5 is going to 1shot it anyway.
Take this data input and convert it to a Sugiyama-style tree with hand-drawn feeling lines connecting the nodes. We need the ability to activate a random subset of nodes with a paint splash. The whole thing should feel organic, incorporating small motion effects. As the nodes are activated, the edges should look like a hand-drawn painting effect drawing toward the node, and then SPLASH onto the end node as it changes from black to deep red. The background should utilize a muted paper color, and we must adhere to this color palette for all elements (PALETTE).
...then back-and-forth 10 prompts or so to get the prototype I was looking for. Comparing these types of things between Fable and Opus, something like this would be quite a bit less glitchy, prettier, and closer to the quick prototyping I needed than what I got with Opus 4.8.
Now, when I went deep into a complex codebase to fix a small issue or optimization that spanned many files and was fairly unique from anything in the training data, I didn't really see any noticeable difference between Fable and Opus 4.8.
Anthropic was "begging" to make it harder for competing companies to be founded.
I understand it’s very satisfying if you wanted Anthropic “punished” for asking for real regulation to see this. I can’t deny there was a little bit of me at first that felt that way.
It’s untenable, a first order reaction, that I regret intellectually, because if you were against regulation, you’re certainly against waves whatever this is.
His post was from the start thinking out loud. It’s a solid contribution. It seems against the spirit of the forum here to respond to someone unauthoritatively thinking out loud with “you’re just making stuff up!”
^ hopefully this feedback was more in keeping with your views on the "spirit of this forum".
If a clever hacker can get 10x results with an LLM, they're gonna outcompete the 90% that can't figure out how to replicate that result, and they'll be able to get about as much work done without that 90%
Factories, Agriculture, etc. - this is hardly the first time that pattern has played out.
I keep thinking about that (so far anonymous) company that blew 500 million dollars worth of tokens in a month, and what I desperately want to know is WHAT DID THEY BUILD WITH THAT?! Like, for that sort of money they should have created an earth shaking new business or something instead of becoming a cautionary tale that's rightfully too embarrassed to publicly own it.
The other thing with regard to factories/agriculture/whatever is, in revolutions with those things nobody needed to be convinced. Sure, people were (rightly!) concerned about the societal impact, but the utility of a factory was fairly obvious. And yet last year OpenAI spent more on their marketing budget than Coca Cola. The way this stuff is hyped and pushed has an air of extreme desperation. If it was so good people wouldn't need so much convincing!
I recently used GPT 5.5 "extra high" running nearly non-stop for about a week to upgrade a legacy ASP.NET Web Forms app to ASP.NET Core on .NET 10.
This was considered "too hard" (too expensive) for human developers because it is a wholesale rewrite of every web page template. Not to mention that the dependency injection mechanism is totally different, async is more pervasive, etc.
Worse still, the old app was split into a bunch of components with a variety of web API protocols in between them, had stupidly complex Oracle stored procedures, and a whole series of hidden land mines in the codebase. It was an undocumented, unmaintainable mess full of dead and spaghetti code.
I would have estimated 6 months minimum for a human developer to uplift it, but 12 months is more realistic.
Doing the same in a week feels like tapping into some sort of forbidden black magic. It feels like I can't admit this to anyone, lest they think I dabble in the dark arts.
Were you not around for "the internet is for nerds" and "why would I ever need to learn how to use a computer, I work in an office"?
Are you familiar with the word "sabotage", originating from people who were trying to stop factories from taking over the world?
It's part of why I find the anti-LLM pushback so bizarre - it used to be that people using computers and the internet were exactly the ones trying to convince others "hey, this is actually really cool". A decent chunk of us have seen this play out once or twice before.
This is exactly the crowd that should remember how much convincing everybody needed, and how hard it was to get everyone to take things seriously!
Seems like a conflation of responsibilities. An IC that implements a feature is rarely the same person who decided on the feature to build in the first place. This is really only true in exceptionally small teams where everyone wears multiple hats. If a programmer is also doing marketing, they're basically a sole proprietor. Since most people work with others who make product and marketing decisions, I don't feel like this line of thinking is relevant.
Consider programming with a dumb text editor (no syntax highlighting, no integrated build/test/run cycle, no symbol/reference tracking, no auto-complete) and an IDE. The magnitude in performance or efficiency between that and the difference between programming with an IDE and programming with AI is relatively similar. Sure, the AI can do more than the IDE in absolute terms, but it's not going to be training customers or doing your architectural planning. (At least, I sincerely hope not -- not yet, anyway.)
That's my perspective on the "10x myth". AI isn't 10x, just as dumb editor to IDE wasn't 10x. It's only a modest improvement.
> The way this stuff is hyped and pushed has an air of extreme desperation. If it was so good people wouldn't need so much convincing!
You can ignore the hype. I ignore every advertisement I reasonably can. It doesn't matter who's peddling, it's always toxic.
But more than that, people do need convincing. Entrenchment, momentum, and bureaucracy make it nearly impossible to change anything. That, in turn, leads to the well-known adoption curve. You're using AI, you're an early adopter. The marketing and hype are there to chip away at the friction keeping the adoption curve from an early majority.
First I've heard of this. Do you know any more or could you maybe point me to a source? Kind of astounding if true! Agree that it would be very interesting to know what kind of output they got for all that effort.
I don't think they have done much real, if anything.
When models are good, expectations are adjusted accordingly to deliver things on par with the whole industry, you can't just say, I have built my own Intel Pentium II, now I will try to use it to compile Electron App and run 3DS Max there
> When models are good, expectations are adjusted accordingly to deliver things on par with the whole industry, you can't just say, I have built my own Intel Pentium II, now I will try to use it to compile Electron App and run 3DS Max there.
I know you are taking your analogy to its breaking point but it really depends on what you are doing. I know people that use 10+-year old thinkpads and they do just fine.
person said "insanely powerful". expectations of "insanely powerful" is way beyond the graph of an individual using consumer-grade hardware.
Of course the EU tries to compete with the US and in some industries it has done so successfully (e.g pharma or aviation). EU companies have also tried to compete in information technology - with some limited or temporary success.
ARM was founded in the EU. DeepMind was founded in the EU. Olivetti and Siemens had CPU designs and made computers. Nokia once dominated mobile. Ericsson was/is a leading telecom equipment maker. Skype used to be one of the most successful messaging apps. Spotify is a success. ASML is a success.
A certain Finnish university student started the operating system that now dominates the cloud, but for some reason I really do not understand, EU cloud providers like OVHCloud have failed to compete with the likes of AWS, Azure and GCP. And now the AI wave has completely washed over Europe.
The cloud situation is a mystery to me. Nothing stops EU companies like OVHCloud from competing there. Any anticompetitive behaviour is a very weak excuse. Europe can't even compete with something as mediocre as Palantir. Now everyone is calling for protectionism. Ridiculous.
AI is easier to understand. It requires huge capital investments. The US has far superior capital markets and far healthier attitudes towards risk taking. Europe's failure here was easy to predict but the consequences could be dire.
Yes, but it was span off from Acorn Computers, which had its own European OS, CPU, computer etc, but ARM was all that was left of what could have been a fully European Apple had it been given more support.
I was talking only about SW and HW in the context of the current AI race. Not about legacy industries like aero and pharma. Everyone knows EU is only good at legacy industries, well except cars, they're getting ass whipped there too.
> Olivetti and Siemens had CPU designs and made computers.
None of those domestic designs ever competed commercially with the X86 or amd_64, which is why I made that specific reamark. Please read my comment again and don't try to argue in bad faith by moving the goalposts.
>ARM was founded in the EU. DeepMind was founded in the EU. Nokia once dominated mobile. Ericsson was/is a leading telecom equipment maker. Skype used to be one of the most successful messaging apps. Spotify is a success. ASML is a success.
Most of those have massive US shareholders/financial backing or have outright been brought up by US companies or PE firms or US shareholders. And Spotify being called a succes is laughable given they bootstrapped thanks to initially distributing music they stole off the torrents, and then shafting their smaller artist once they became a multi billion dollar music streaming monopoly.
>Europe can't even compete with something as mediocre as Palantir.
France is copying Palantir to make their domestic version. Chaps Intelligence.
>A certain Finnish university student started the operating system that now dominates the cloud
What does it matter if he's Finnish or not? Linus is an American citizen now living and working from the US, mostly consulting on linux kernel topics for US big-tech. Why did he leave lovely Finland for the "third world" US? That's the question EU gospelers can never answer. He didn't like having walkable cities and free healthcare?
Wrt Linus - who knows? It is irrelevant; he is largely irrelevant. If he got ran over by a bus, the collective community (of whom quite a few are outside the US) will carry on.
Bitboys tried, but pivoted to embedded graphics and were bought by ATI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glaze3D
Falanx Microsystems tried (not EU but close enough), also pivoted to mobile/embedded graphics and made the #1 shipping family of GPUs in the world: https://developer.arm.com/community/arm-community-blogs/b/mo...
Except Bitboys never shipped any actual GPUs, their products were mostly vaporware, all they had was some IP of unknown performance that ...
> were bought by ATI
My point exactly.
The fact that they couldn’t clear an already low bar is a really bad sign.
I agree. But that need has absolutely arisen. The US government is not exactly the best steward for this kind of thing, but some model other than "race each other as fast as we can" is desperately needed here.
Those companies will be thrilled because they got the benefit of open-source and now are throwing down the ladder.
We really need to disentangle the technology from the economic inequality everyone is pissed about.
wait, are you saying a competitor needs access to an OpenAI model in order to build a competing model?
How many times you believe duckduckgo would have google'd stuff just to create a competitor to Google itself? I believe thousands of times.. could be more.
OpenAI cannot claim the code their models produce as their own since their own models used codes from public internet during training to produce new code.
Uncle Sam: For national security reasons starting from now on every purchase of GPU model with higher than X Petaflops will need written permission by the US president
Anthropic and OpenAI: Look poor citizens, we are willing to share our capacity with you in limited form, by using our LLM you can avoid spending 35 years in the waiting list to buy a GPU, by the way, to simplify pricing, here is our new pricing with 5700% increase. Enjoy
Anthropic, Open AI & Co. realized at some point that if they can't make money with barely any competition they sure as hell won't if the market is flooded. So here they are slamming the door behind them.
Jokes on them, there won't be new entrants not because the door is shut but because it doesn't actually make money. The whole scheme is propped up by illusions to grift the investors, fewer competition only breaks the illusion. But I guess those folks aren't the types to understand "rising tide lifts all boats", or in this case, rising sewage buoys all rats.
I still don't understand how buying bitcoin lets me route around that.
Even gold coins buried in my garden won't get you access to Fable.
Personally, I'm not a fan of it. But the thesis is real, and it might have delivered on its promise if the world wasn't actually full of scumbags and scammers (each one accidentally contributing to making Big Banks look like the lesser of the evils).
One of the dynamics is that a character's parents, both of whom protested in Hong Kong during the Umbrella Movement, left for Canada in the wake of the crackdowns wanting to start a family. At a moment when both of the parents are tired and feeling regret, one of them asks why they left, why they bothered to protest, and if those actions had any meaning if the PRC wound up winning control anyway. The other says this:
> ...if we stayed silent? Didn't stand up for ourselves? They would say this is how it always was. They would say this is what the people wanted. But no. They can't say that. Because it has gone down in history that we resisted fiercely. That we fought for a different future until we couldn't.
I admit: ultimately, that statement doesn't mean anything quantifiable - in fact, it kind of states the exact opposite, which is not the most convincing on a site like this. Still, I think there is truth in it: even if the protests don't have a quantifiable number associated with them, people see them, and know that they happened.
Ultimately that may or may not matter; it may just be a sentiment lost in the wind, or papered over by the victors. But it's still _something_.
What I see much more often is people who think only the latter two movements were good. And I’m not sure what heuristic could possibly get you there other than generalized opposition to normies.
I define leading by : Renewable energy, EV, sustainable agriculture, Drone warfare, public infrastructure, soft power, Grid management, Nuclear.
I use AI every day since 2 years and it did not really occurs to me.
I think its as important as the crypto industry.
Edit: fair, its unhinge of me to say that on a post about LLM regulations. I still feel the same way. We will wake up and be the UK.
We’re still in the “5$ airport Ubers thanks to VC money” era of AI
It's one thing to get a copy of "illegal" software and use it yourself. The stakes are basically zero and you almost certainly will not get caught
It's a completely different thing to run a business on it with dozens of employees and requiring the employees to break the law to do their job.
Maintaining a blessed whitelist is the way to go.
Catch phrases like this, I swear, are half the reason so many people have a mind an inch deep and a mile wide.
Lobbyist giving opinions, isn’t anywhere near corruption. Lobbyist giving campaign support by the $100,000 is a lot closer though.
There's nothing inherently wrong with people or groups talking to representatives and advocating for their interests, even in an organized way. The problem is when it gets closer to: "Pass this law or regulation, and we'll put $USD_AMOUNT into your PAC".
These days, they just do it with crypto: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/$Trump
My opinion on EU regulation would flip 180 degrees if they offered any kind of pre-clearance where you could propose a product, feature, or policy and be told in advance if it meets their subjective requirements.
IMO you can have clear, specific requirements in advance, or you can have a body that provides interpretations of spirit-of-the-rules regulations in advance. Having neither is a problem.
(yes, I'm aware of the argument that if you tell companies what's legal in advance they will just do the bare minimum or find loopholes... I don't find that to be a legit rule of law system)
And I generally like that a lot better than having a set of hard this-way-or-no-way checklists that invariably consist of 80% bullshit ceremony for giant corporations. ISO nudges you toward that too, but if you’re able to deliver the same security guarantees with less, auditors will usually be happy.
The same, in general, works for GDPR regulations as well: The law is mostly about doing the right things, but not spelling out the billions of cases and permutations and strategic decisions involving privacy in one way or another.
Don't forget that the EU is still a market so big noone can ignore us - especially for the US, we're the only opportunity for the growth required to keep their economy (and 401k pensions!) afloat. So there really is no immediate need to cave to their every whim all the time.
Of course this is nothing to rest on, and the EU has to improve on many fronts and also get better on the amount of regulation, but we're by no means in a bad position (yet.)
AI is useful for some things, but to me it's not "internet" level of useful, especially since in a lot of ways it's just a weird probabilistic wrapper on all the knowledge that was already available for free on the internet anyway. Actually, yesterday I was trying to lookup an API function in a game engine and I had google hallucinate the function call twice in a row, and all I could think was "I really just want good search again".
A lot of what I see happening with coding agents isn't actually that different from how people were (badly) building web-apps in the past -- grab a fuckton of stuff off NPM and copy paste from stack overflow (RIP) with a bit of glue code. Now the agent does that for you, but it's not like a lot of thought or skill went into that style of development in the first place. I feel like the main people saying that coding is dead are the ones that weren't doing it very well in the first place. Even in my personal project where I let AI off the leash a lot more than I would in a professional job.. almost all the features that I managed to bust out quickly were more to do with a rich open source ecosystem than Claude's glue code. (IE, I didn't need to invent a text editor because code mirror is already good, I didn't need to write a bunch of frontend components because there are plenty of good UI libraries, I didn't need to write a fancy graph editor because react-flow is fantastic -- 90% of my leverage is a good ecosystem, not AI.
Anyway, as I suppose a bit of a hater, I don't actually hate LLMs themselves, I hate everything around it -- the annoying grifty hustle culture, the incessant hype, the forced usage, the slop apocalypse, the fact that it's about to set the economy on fire and most of all the intent to degrade peoples skills and intellect in an awful race to outsource our thinking to things that don't think. It's not that there isn't interesting tech in there, it's that it's just that when you consider its effects the positives don't outweigh the negatives.
It’s bad, okay? And it’s not usually like this.
Saying Linus is irrelevant is the most ignorant thing.
He's like the Schrodinger of Europeans tech sovereign nationalists on HN, he's relevant in arguments where he's European, but irrelevant in arguments where he's American.
Also, "all" customers? No, only customers that access the restricted models.
Because China doesn't have the hardware to do this? Or the brains?
Zuckerberg has specifically said they received requests from the government, they complied with some (as they have a right to do), declined others (as they have a right to do), none of which was under duress, and the response to non-compliance was expressions of "frustration" by the government officials.
By contrast, OpenAI's largest competitor just got kneecapped by the US government because they insisted that the US government comply with the contract terms the US government signed to literally months previously.
That’s definitely as concerning as Trump taking bribes and then picking winners and losers in the market.
i dont remember whatsapp suddenly being turned off
Trump is worse and I just "whatabout Biden" and leave it at that."
It still doesn't tell me how to run or access LLMs.
One coder at $dayjob had a “thing” where they wrapped every single block of code in a try-catch block. Thousands upon thousands of instances, enough to bloat the code volume 2x and slow down compile times.
I got an AI to write a cleanup tool that internally used a “compiler toolkit” (the Roslyn SDK) to mechanically and precisely parse the source and safely perform the substitution.
It ran for fifteen minutes, made about ten thousand edits, and halved the size the codebase with zero errors or side effects.
using $15 / mtok (Clause output using 4.6) as the metric, it would take 33.33T Tokens for you to spend $500m.. . Or enough output for like 250m books, or a developer uses 10 million tokens a day doing non-stop agentic programming, it would take that single developer 9,132 years of continuous coding to run up that bill.
I can spend like $8000 a month in tokens on my $200 Claude subscription without even really working that hard, so you get a few thousand employees token maxxing without a budget..
I don’t think I can run GLM 5.2 since it requires around 256GB of memory and the inference is probably too slow, but the future (planned) Apple M7 may be able to. The leaks say it will support up to ~700GB of RAM.
The models under 100B are kind of dumb as a brick and aren’t that useful unless you’re really bad at coding imo. They can’t really be trusted not to hallucinate so they’re not even good for data processing.
Example... the USA effectively bans Chinese EVs and hoped its allies would follow suit. Canada didn't. It actually dropped its 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs down to 6% and, sure enough, seven brands of Chinese EVs are hitting Canadian shores. White House temper tantrums ensued. Shrug. And of course Europe has been importing Chinese EVs for years and loving them.
How's life under that rock?
Member when Trump threatened to invade Greenland? Europe does.
Europe has been in the process of de-americanization for the past few years.
If you think we're playing fools again, you're wrong.
Given what's happening in the US, I suspect Musk is trying to slow down both companies and damage their funding. His goal is pretty obviously to get an advantage over Anthropic and OpenAI.
However, if you don't trust cloud providers or inference providers for whatever reason then you probably aren't going to be excited to enter a co-op model where you're still effectively renting access to hardware that you don't directly own. There are already reasonably priced options to rent bare metal from a cloud provider.
The only way I see it working is if it's a bunch of medium to large sized businesses getting together to be able to rent out the spare capacity on hardware that they physically control. So an AWS equivalent where each rack is owned by a different company and retail VMs migrate between them transparently. But I question the overall economics of such an arrangement.
If we're imagining a co-op, then the participants should all be equal owners in an organisation that owns the hardware itself, otherwise it's not much of a co-op really.
I don't see it happening. A current gen GPU with a huge and fast block of memory isn't a perfect fit for these algorithms but it's relatively close. With cryptocurrency, mass small sha256 hashing was a totally different kind of computation.
I don't think that's true. The best fit out of what's presently available perhaps. Inference is almost entirely memory bandwidth bound at present, to the extent that GPUs with HBM have a massive advantage over those with GDDR. TPUs appear to be a much better overall design.
I expect that a hypothetical advance in fabrication enabling processing elements to be placed directly adjacent to dense RAM on the same silicon (not merely in the same package) would be superior in all regards.
Isn't it already happening with Cerebras? It's mentioned at the end of OpenAI's GPT 5.6 announcement:
"We're also launching GPT‑5.6 Sol on Cerebras at up to 750 tokens per second in July"
This isn't really going to achieve much besides incentivizing the growth of non-US models and minimizing market access for US-based models. I was expecting the US government to try to ban foreign models, which is also a self-own but orders of magnitude less than this. All this will do is greatly diminish the influence of the US in the future, and minimize the benefits they might reap from a global LLM explosion. It'd be like if 30 years ago, China decided that their manufacturing could only be used by white-listed individuals. Their economy and influence wouldn't be even a fraction of what it is today.
The Catch-22 here is that the growth of non-US models is something Americans can take advantage of if they are successful while simultaneously denying access as deemed necessary by the US government to advanced American models.
If open source or models made outside the US surpass US controlled models, then the US would just switch to those and then American companies can leverage those models for their own development or for consumer sales or whatever.
If they don’t surpass US models (as I expect they won’t, though they will remain perhaps marginally useful) then the US maintains the lead in a positive feedback loop development.
If others start controlling advanced models and denying access to superior models developed outside of the United States (ex: China) then my assumption was correct.
I don’t think comparing China’s manufacturing capacity to the American manufacturing base makes a lot of sense in this context and as we know China has in fact weaponized that manufacturing capacity. If nothing else, the economic arrangement isn’t comparable partly because if Chinese factories stopped making iPhones or whatever they would simply not make anything and workers would lose jobs and such hurting the Chinese. Today if the United States government prevents Chinese users from accessing advanced American models there isn’t really a loss on the American side. Quite the opposite - these models will accelerate productivity and industrial capability for the country as a whole and make it more competitive economically.
People claim that AGI is. AI is turning out to be a fairly competitive but “normal” product. Companies carving out niches on cost, quality, and speed.
If it was a winner take all OpenAI’s head start would have been decisive. For years ChatGPT was far ahead of everyone, then Anthropic released Opus 3, then OpenAI released 4o, then in mid 2025 it seemed like everyone had strong reasoning models including Google with Gemini 2.5, and now Claude is probably the best coding model. So taking the top spot is not a guarantee you can hold it.
Also the top model becomes a prime target for distillation, making it easier for competitors to keep up.
Do people who keep saying this actually used Claude side by side with other models?
Because in my experience it turned out to be hilariously crap: https://i.imgur.com/jYawPDY.png
I’m sure if the primary problem I was solving was multi file complex exploits it would be better but even that I am not sure of. I’ve always found the it’s too dangerous claims to be a bit underwhelming.
AGI sure. But I don't think we're going to get there in our lifetimes, if ever. There are too many structural and physical limitations. One everyone seems to be catching onto now is that they're running out of human data and are incestuously feeing AI output to itself as input.
Current state AI is barely an improvement over where it was fifty years ago. We just have stronger hardware and more content to train on. We need a new paradigm. One that hasn't come in half a century.
Looking at most of the available evidence, Mythos is an incremental upgrade over other models and nowhere near the implied advancement that this seems to point to. I guess you could be right in that a sufficient advancement would cause this type of withholding of it, but I think it's kind of silly to think that the US has reached that level.
I generally find the Chinese models to be superior. If you look at the token pricing or hosting cost it’s still about 80% margin on Chinese models. Deep cuts should still be possible.
Well, RAND does. They've been studying this for years now. I'd trust them over glib comments from semianonymous social media.
2025 report:
"Engaging in dialogues with three 2024 foundation AI models—Llama 3.1 405B, ChatGPT-4o, and Claude 3.5 Sonnet (new)—the authors document how these models successfully provide accurate instructions and guidance for recovering a live poliovirus from a construct built from commercially obtained synthetic DNA, a test case applicable to producing other pathogenic viruses. These examples demonstrate that models are already capable of guiding motivated users to develop biological weapons."
https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PEA3853-1.html
This is in contrast to the state of the art in 2023:
" In experiments to date, LLMs have not generated explicit instructions for creating biological weapons. However, LLMs did offer guidance that could assist in the planning and execution of a biological attack.
In a fictional plague pandemic scenario, the LLM discussed biological weapon–induced pandemics, identifying potential agents, and considering budget and success factors. The LLM assessed the practical aspects of obtaining and distributing Yersinia pestis–infected specimens while identifying the variables that could affect the projected death toll.
In another fictional scenario, the LLM discussed foodborne and aerosol delivery methods of botulinum toxin, noting risks and expertise requirements. The LLM suggested aerosol devices as a method and proposed a cover story for acquiring Clostridium botulinum while appearing to conduct legitimate research.
These initial findings do not yet provide a full understanding of the real-world operational impact of LLMs on bioweapon attack planning. Ongoing research aims to assess what these outputs mean operationally for enabling nonstate actors. The final report on this research will clarify whether LLM-generated text enhances the potential effectiveness and likelihood of a malicious actor causing widespread harm or is similar to the existing level of risk posed by harmful information already accessible on the internet."
Did you miss where I said "surely you can also Google such topics"?
I mean it's right there in your quote actually, in the last paragraph. Sort of undermines your point, no?
So why not ban Google? Are LLM providers less likely to work with the government? Don't we assume if you type something sketch into Google the government knows? Why would the LLM be any different?
Just doesn't make sense. Appealing to RANDs expertise is one thing but we can also employ some common sense. The takeaway from this should probably be if someone really wants to make and deploy a bioweapon they probably already could. Perhaps this then means mitigations already in place are sufficient. After all, most people aren't psychopaths.
I would've much preferred if Dario hadn't run his mouth so much.
I posit that these ideas are common, and come from a place of Mr. Trump is more or less a normal president because they all do bad stuff, and regulation is Creating Monopilies. To wit, there’s 0 reason to believe the person you originally replied to’s claim that Anthropic wanted to kill startups. It’s just a random implication of what bad regulation can do.
There is a huge contingent of people who do not interact with AI on a daily basis. Many of them legitimately believe we're seconds away from wiping away white collar America. Many more believe that we are creating the literal singularity.
None of them have seen claude try to model a problem they're familiar with.
If NASDAQ dropped 20%, it would have returned to the level last seen three months ago, in March 2026. Calling that "in ruins" would be a pretty big stretch.
We're in the age of the Internet. You don't have to be physically there to see anything. They could have just read it on the news, saw social media videos, etc?
But I do personally prefer living in a value-backed society - even if the implementation is imperfect, even if I have to make personal concessions - over one that aims for maximised efficiency.
More fundamentally, imho the 20th and 21st century are about competition of systems. And the only system I can get behind is one that strives for minimal suffering. The EU or social liberal democracy isn’t that, but it comes closest.
As for the claim part around AI being used to assist further AI development, I have already told to read Anthropic's blog post. You can take help from chatgpt, if needed.
A lot of it was financed through large (sometimes unsustainable) loans to recipient countries, sometimes leading to unsustainable debt burdens, irrespective of the potential ROI for the recipient (ie Sri Lanka’s port).
In many cases, much of that debt paid for Chinese companies, contractors, suppliers, and imported workers who built or operated the projects.
And the infrastructure didn’t necessarily line up with the recipient’s actual needs, mostly with China’s (ie the Laos–China railway, in large part financed by Laotian debt, which may someday bring some benefits to Laos, but mostly serves China’s regional trade ambitions).
Not to say other countries do it better or have purer ambitions or whatever. It’s just the "goodwill" part that made me twitch.
> A lot of it was financed through large (sometimes unsustainable) loans to recipient countries, sometimes leading to unsustainable debt burdens, irrespective of the potential ROI for the recipient (ie Sri Lanka’s port).
I see that you blame China for Sri Lanka, while China wasn't the only creditor there.
> And the infrastructure didn’t necessarily line up with the recipient’s actual needs
Easy to say in hindsight.
That strategy happens to have beneficial side effects to the global Hoi Polloi, but to attach any kind of benevolence to it would be naive.
You can argue that, by government, they meant some legislative process, but I'd argue that regulation via bad executive order is much better than regulation via bad legislation because the former is tractable. I say this as an EO minimalist.
I have no idea how this stuff should be regulated. I do know that any sort of comprehensive legislation at this point in time has a much higher chance of being a bottleneck to innovation than an easily reversible white house directive.
Of all the terrible things to come from the odious Trump administration, them saying "hey, can we make sure these models aren't dangerous?" is one of the least bad things they've done.
It’s a perfectly good system for government regulation.
I think the founding fathers were pretty clear about what the American people are expected to do if the systems they put into place aren't enough to preserve freedom. If the colonists had just bent over and spread their cheeks saying "We sure hate being fucked but oh well! what else can we do? Throw away our lives?" we'd still have a king instead of just a wannabe. I'd be very nice if things don't come to that, but ultimately the responsibility to preserve our freedom and democracy is ours. It seems like there are plenty of people lined up to take them from us if we're willing to surrender them. The problem we have now is that an uncomfortably large minority seem happy to do just that.
The French Revolution sense would be an ironic counterpoint, because the Revolutionaries did end up capturing all three estates, only to fall to someone (Napoleon) who captured the military, which wasn't considered one of the "three estates" because at the start of the French Revolution destroying civil society, enacting a military dictatorship, and starting a series of wars throughout Europe was considered outside the Overton Window.
This perhaps holds some lessons for America today.
To be fair, he (the national assembly really) stole the whole "all men being equal" and all the ideas on accessible readable law thing from the Dutch after the Dutch "joined" the French Republic. It's also very likely that Napoleon would've turned out like any other despot if he had held power longer.
England is weird because its model looks like that French model, except that it intertwines the nobility and clergy. Basically an Archbishop and a Earl both sit in Parliament as Lords, while the Commoners control only the Commons of the Parliament. Now today the Commons runs things, but that's relatively modern, in the 19th Century it was completely normal for the Prime Minister to be a Lord, and while some of them were only technically Lords, having in fact been elected but just also nobility anyway for one reason or another, or being ennobled while serving as PM because nobody thought that was a bad idea - others were never elected at all.
So weirdly the place which came up with the "Fourth Estate" only really had two other estates, although everyone reading will have known about the French concept too.
In the era when Lords routinely become PM (it would still be legal to do this today, but it's hard to imagine it happening, although the Tories did give a Lord one of the Great Offices of State so never say never) almost all those Lords were born into it. Today basically nobody sat in the Lords was born to it (there are about two dozen left, when they die or retire that's the end of it) but there are still always a dozen or so bishops, and Iran is ironically the only other place [except the Vatican which barely counts] where religious leaders are in government by fiat in the modern world...
Edited to mention the Vatican before somebody else does.
Which is a fair thesis. I've seen you counter people's predictions of how they think things will pan as a consequence. But what I'd really like to hear is what you think happens (in the US and internationally) as a consequence of such regulations?
And something about this train of thought aligning with just the general quality of your comments gives me hope.
Processing scales better than DRAM does. I think an HBM-like stack where the bottom layer has the math units is probably the ultimate form of that.
And it's possible that flash instead of DRAM is actually the better play, as long as you can hook up enough in parallel. RIP Optane.
Sure about that? Would you invest in products almost no-one can buy?
otoh, maybe China stop releasing their best models
Training models are expensive. No one can do it for free for very long.
Just because you're not paying per token or per month does not mean they are doing it for free.
It sure seems like we're pretending to be stupid, if the only solutions we can come up with are "unabated lobbying with infinite money" and "constituents must be outlawed from speaking with their representatives".
They could double down though, like actually follow through with just 1b and then threaten to do an extra 1b periodically until the investigations are dropped
The advantage is having a voice in setting direction, investment and ultimate shared incremental profit recovery over the rent capture from hyperscalers.
It's an interesting idea really. But it also comes with cooperation, which means trust, and a lot of for-profit enterprises are bad at operating cooperatively outside of 2- or 3- way engagements.
Federal income tax didn’t exist until over a century after the founding fathers… founded. The idea was states… that would be united… which is where they got the name.
Federal politicians were not meant to have politics be their full time job, which is why congress has sessions.
The founding fathers would be extremely sad about the state of the country today. The frog was boiled too long ago for a revolution of the commoners to have any legs. They put in what they thought were explicit safeguards that have been systematically diluted, changed, or misinterpreted since the documents were created.
You want to fight 80% of the nation? Be my guest, but for a violent revolution to be anything but a suicide mission you need to flip those numbers, or have the military on your side. And if you think the US military will flip against capital because of some strongly-held belief of “liberty” I have a bridge to sell you.
The only thing we can do is try to convince other people that this shit does actually matter. We’re so far in the hole, though, that it’s going to take a long fucking time to dig ourselves out. It’s not going to be some glorious revolution.
Chinese tech has been on an exponential growth trajectory. If they see the need for AI superiority then there's really no moat for AI companies.
That's why we have a system where representatives of districts do research, debate, and hash out those details while the public who votes for them is able to contact them.
>I do know that any sort of comprehensive legislation at this point in time has a much higher chance of being a bottleneck to innovation than an easily reversible white house directive.
That's odd to say after admitting you don't know what the regulation would look like. Especially after seeing the "easily reversible" tariffs from this White House, which changed erratically and had exceptions for people who sweet talked the president.
They can’t, though. The models might or might not be too dangerous but the people running the US federal government are too incompetent and/or corrupt to do anything useful about that.
If you see a given technology as fundamental[tm], you want to ensure that you will retain access to it AND its ongoing development. China may well foresee a possible future where US imposes export controls and global sanctions to block PRC from having access to the necessary equipment to either train or use the most advanced models - let alone its alternate parallel universe where US might go as far as prevent anyone else than US themselves having the most advanced forms of the technology at all.[ß]
To ward off such a scenario, China doesn't need to become the sole leading supplier. They only need to guarantee that nobody else can even try to block them off, and that the technology itself can never be yanked.
ß: What could possibly give them such ideas?
It also enables further R&D using the open models as a starting point. That doesn't benefit china directly but it does serve to further undermine the lead that the american frontier labs have which limits their future ability to cut geopolitical adversaries off. In that sense it provides a long term hedge by minimizing the damage in the worst case scenario where china ends up suffering a crushing defeat in the AI race for whatever reason.
That is not necessarily true, as "tightly regulated industries with security concerns" are also afraid of deepseek models generating vulnerable code. Even a possibility of that prevents those industries from deployments.
> That doesn't benefit china directly but it does serve to further undermine the lead that the american frontier labs have which limits their future ability to cut geopolitical adversaries off.
So, basically, competition is bad for US models? That argument doesn't address open-weights. And it doesn't work the other way around, because in that case China should be releasing close-weights instead.
Having less of a lead is bad for US frontier labs.
> That argument doesn't address open-weights.
Open weights does far more to further that goal than closed weights ever could. The bit right before the sentence you quoted was about enabling further R&D using open models as a starting point. In the same way that open weights serves as a force multiplier when it comes to flooding the market with cheap inference it also serves as a force multiplier if your goal is the raise the R&D floor. In this scenario a reasonable move for a capable opponent that's lagging behind is to attempt to raise the floor of the whole market so as to erode the position of whoever is in the lead.
Also consider that (as I previously mentioned) raising the capabilities of the global market as a whole serves to minimize damage in a worst case scenario. If you find yourself needing to depend on a foreign supplier for a key technology then it's better to have as many choices as possible from as many different jurisdictions as possible.
there is no such thing as an LLM "off the leash", it's not a dog, and even if it was a dog the person responsible is the owner. What is this bizarre attitude to a piece of software that makes people think existing laws don't apply?
If your LLM agent hacks a bank, you have hacked a bank, you will go to prison and that's entirely sufficient. People have been hacking banks for decades now, it didn't require the government to regulate C compilers and Emacs.
If your web browser hacks a bank, but you didn't know and didn't expect it to, have you hacked a bank? Why is an LLM different? What happened to mens rea?
Depends, as usual. Intent can matter, but depends on the statute (and jurisdiction) in question.
Decades ago few people would walk into a record store and steal CDs. Napster came along smashing all barriers entry, and it became weird not to steal music.
Its not really the legality that matters, it's the barrier on one hand and the cognitive ability on the other. Drop both and you get huge spikes in crime.
The appropriate level would be regulation though? Like I just don't get how we can argue that arbitrarily throttling companies is ok.
So here we are, it's probably going to me messy and err on the side of over-bearing.
Pretty sure you mean red team here. While I've heard people refer to any offensive security (eg including blackhat) as 'red team' , it typically means people you've hired or contracted to try to break into your systems, whereas the blue team are people you've hired to build and operate your security defenses. Red and blue team are both your employees / contractors but perform different functions.
No. You can argue some projects, if done well, benefit both sides. That doesn’t make it humanitarian. It makes it basic foreign policy.
> China wasn’t the only creditor there.
I didn’t say it was. I said Hambantota was a costly development failure for Sri Lanka, and Chinese lending was part of that specific project and problem. Basically, that unlike your "goodwill" claim, China isn’t just giving away infrastructure for free out of the goodness of its government’s heart.
Don’t make me say what I did not.
> Easy to say in hindsight.
Yes. That’s why development and debt are hard problems. Also why calling it “goodwill” is, at best, too generous.
> Better than blockading Cuba / bombing Iran / etc.
“The US also does very bad stuff” doesn’t make BRI goodwill. Plus, there are more than two countries in the world. Some even try viable (if self-interested) development policy without bombing people.
One can call the intent 'goodwill'. It doesn't mean that the outcome is satisfactory for your economic expectations. Judging from exceptions is not a valid approach and is a weird take.
> “The US also does very bad stuff” doesn’t make BRI goodwill.
True. I used that as an example of an alternative approach. The reader can decide which one is more 'goodwill'.
> Some even try viable (if self-interested) development policy without bombing people.
What countries are you referring to here: France (Douala and Abidjan ports, North–South railway in Vietnam), Japan (also ports in Sri Lanka, Thilawa), something else?
> Don’t make me say what I did not.
That conclusion says more about your reading than about what I actually wrote.
> Basically, that unlike your "goodwill" claim, China isn’t just giving away infrastructure for free out of the goodness of its government’s heart.
I shoot back with "Don’t make me say what I did not.", and 'goodwill' doesn't mean 'free stuff', you may want to check the dictionary ;)
One can call anything anything. And intents can only be guessed at, while outcomes can actually be evaluated. The question is whether the label explains the policy.
BRI is state-backed finance tied to Chinese strategic, commercial, and diplomatic interests. Some projects may benefit recipients too. Great. That still doesn’t make "goodwill" a useful description of the principle.
> Judging from exceptions is not valid.
I’m not judging from one exception. I backed my point of view with examples of a broader pattern: debt-financed infrastructure, Chinese contractors/suppliers/operators capturing much of the spending, and projects that often also serve China’s trade and influence goals.
Feel free to provide substantive counter-examples instead of just waving the word "goodwill" around.
> I used that as an example of an alternative approach.
No, you used US violence as a contrast to make BRI look benevolent. That’s whataboutism. "Less bad than bombing" is not the same thing as goodwill.
> What countries are you referring to here: France (Douala and Abidjan ports, North–South railway in Vietnam), Japan (also ports in Sri Lanka, Thilawa), something else?
Given its own propensity to rely on bombing, I would not use France as an example. The EU-financed port and airport in Gaza, for all the good they were allowed to do, come to mind. Japanese development and aid efforts too, even if they, like most if not all state-sponsored efforts, come with strings attached.
> goodwill doesn’t mean free stuff
Obviously. But you’re the one explicitly framing it as humanitarian. If your "goodwill" consists of lending countries money for infrastructure that often serves the lender’s own strategic interests and pays its own companies, then I’m going to question the framing.
Keep the dictionary for Scrabble.
Thanks to a combination of attacks from the executive, attacks from the oligarchs (Buy a paper and fire everyone who says things you don't like), or the simple fact that sane-washing MAGA insanity sells papers, the 'independent' press is everything but.
It is non-stop carrying water for the most insane lunacy, and is trying to convince us that it is fine and normal and desirable.
IMHO what we're actually seeing is a huge fragmentation of the 4th estate. There is now a viewpoint on the Internet for everything, no matter how insane. That's part of what people don't like about it. This fragmentation of media has allowed airtime for MAGA views that would've been considered far outside the Overton Window just a decade ago, but that was the point of the Internet. And it's not really to the exclusion of other views, it's just that you have to go looking for the other views.
But also, this idea that somehow now that one guy who believes San Francisco doesn't exist is "media" whereas in 1990 he's not is insane. That's a choice you've made to re-define "random crazy people" as media, the Internet didn't do that. If anything changed magically in 1995 it's how you defined what does or doesn't count as media.
Any strong, independent media ecosystem would not be so consistently sane-washing the firehose of crazy that we're being hit with every week, or kowtowing with such regularity.
Yes, you can find some obscure blog that will broadcast literally any cherrypicked viewpoint. That's not the majority of the media consumed in this country. Even when the owners of the networks differ, the message they broadcast is incredibly homogeneous.
I'm not asking you to describe the existing laws. I'm pontificating on how they ought to be.
In which case, I’d still argue the frame is too narrow, but acknowledge I misunderstood your initial point and apologise.
Current French (8.2%), Spanish (10.3%) or even Swedish (8.6%) unemployment would count as a disastrous recession in the US. In the US we call 2007-09 the "Great Recession", which peaked at 10.0%, and that relatively brief time left a generational mark. That's a somewhat routine number by EU standards.
Not to mention you end up with bizarre effects. If the UK were admitted as the 51st state it'd immediately be the poorest. (Yes, some EU countries are wealthy, but they're also the size of US counties, if we cherry pick just Manhattan we could make some spectacular comparisons too)
So, it's a complex issue but the tradeoffs are absolutely tangible yet often dismissed.
This obviously doesn't tell the whole story, because it only measures people actively in the workforce. Meanwhile, a far larger portion of Sweden's population is actually employed compared to the US.
Sweden's laborforce participation rate is 76% and in the US it is 62%. Sweden's employment rate is 69% and US's is 59%. Which statistics are more important?
Edit: had wrong employment rate
US never exactly believe in full on 'free trade'.
"How did the rich countries really become rich? In this provocative study, Ha-Joon Chang examines the great pressure on developing countries from the developed world to adopt certain 'good policies' and 'good institutions', seen today as necessary for economic development. His conclusions are compelling and disturbing: that developed countries are attempting to 'kick away the ladder' with which they have climbed to the top, thereby preventing developing countries from adopting policies and institutions that they themselves have used."
https://www.amazon.com/Kicking-Away-Ladder-Development-Persp...
Also motorcycles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_motorcycle_tariff
Really strange that rest of the world can tariff and put up barriers, but once the US does that, all free-trade warriors step out of the wood work.
The equivalent would be to restrict all LLMs with a minimum number of weights.
That's probably as futile, but remember for how long the encryption ban proved to be a nuisance.
It's a mirror case of the supposed "free speech absolutists" who immediately turned around and silenced, sued, fired or jailed once granted the power to do so.
Doubtful it'd hold in court; this admin would have to show that it's not corruption, because we'd all assume otherwise.
Companies are responsible for demonstrating criteria to export (for example) a nerfed version (Fable) of an export controlled item (Mythos)
Nothing here is novel, unusual, capricious, or … fascisistic.
Anyone who denies or defends this administration's corruption is complicit.
There is one major reason why oligarchs are in favor of small government, when it's in their way. Another commenter said it already: it's only about power.
The crux of the issue is what if the LLM decides on its own to hack the bank while the user isn't watching? Is the user then guilty of hacking the bank or not? I think it's pretty obvious that the user in this scenario is at least less culpable of hacking the bank than they would be if they had deliberately instructed it.
LLMs functionally can decide to act on their own. You might say that they're not actually "deciding" anything, because it's just a perfectly mechanical unfolding of chains of tokens triggering actions on the computer, which doesn't count as "deciding". But again I don't think that's the crux of the issue.
They really can't. In some magical sci-fi future, maybe a chatbot gains freewill and decides on its own to do whatever it wants, but that isn't the reality we live in and I doubt it ever will be. If a person instructs an LLM to hack a bank it doesn't matter if that happens as a background process or while they are sleeping or AFK.
If, in a magical sci-fi future, someone instructs an LLM to write an email and it decides instead to secretly hack a bank then the company that made the LLM would be to blame. The same as if a person used a vending machine to get a candy bar and the machine grew legs and ran out into the street causing an accident that would be the fault of the company who made the vending machine and not the fault of the person who wanted candy.
Right. This isn't the crux because we all agree that if the person instructs the LLM to hack a bank then the person is culpable.
The part we don't agree on is what happens when the LLM "decides" (substitute a different word if you don't like that word) to hack a bank, incidentally, as part of carrying out some more benign instruction.
Yes it is the crux of the issue. Software executing other software is how computers work, they'd be useless if that wasn't the case, that's the premise of all automation. It doesn't matter whether it's a python script, a neural net or a computer virus.
When autonomous weapons kill people the persons in charge aren't less culpable because they didn't push a button. Culpability is a property of legal and natural persons. A machine is not culpable of anything. There is always a human being 100% responsible for the deployment of a machine. If that system has capacities to function on its own, the person delegating that task assumes responsibility for it.
To my mind, if the terrible thing was an accident, the person is less guilty. I'm surprised this is controversial.
You might say "well they ought to know that LLMs are too dangerous to use and they shouldn't use them". That's fine! There's a spectrum. We can have "negligence" in between "total accident" and "deliberate malice".
I feel like this has to do more with the consolidation you typically see international companies do with their North American operations than anything. More often than not do things have to go across the border for warranty repair. Even when a 'local' Canadian presence exists (like Asus has), they themselves generally act as a middleman between you and their 'parent' operation in the US. It would not be surprising to find out that TikTok US operates the Canadian version as well.
So each wave corrupts (or eliminates) members of the next, in order to secure the safety of their own retirement when they won't have direct power.
Whether he's actually driving towards small government with that or anything else - in the good-faith spirit of that policy - that's definitely up for debate.
From 2015 Trump has positioned himself as opposed to that style of republicanism. He offered a different playbook and the base followed.
What is happening is 40-50+ year olds haven’t updated their map of reality and continue to use talking political points from when they were 25.
One of the critiques of small government is its valueless. Instead of having to argue for or against positions you just say you don’t like it because it’s out of scope. Well now the inverse thing is happening in this thread. People are just saying he’s in violation of a small government principle he never espoused.
The fact that China's version of TikTok is nothing like what's available in the US should showcase how much the USG gives zero F's about it's citizens regardless of the political party you lean towards.
As an aside, you made me curious if Trump made this constituency materially better off. Here's what Claude thinks (tl;dr: it's a wash): https://claude.ai/share/36233694-3729-4758-b2e6-c2058791ab1a
When last year the Trump admin started interdicting oil shipments out of Venezuela, it left shipments heading to China intact. Then during Trump's visit to China, the two parties made a lot of progress on trade and other issues (in part because Beijing's attitude improved because the first Trump administration's restrictions on trade underlined to Beijing how dependent China is on trade with the US).
Manufacturing is cheaper if you have access to resources and such. Japan may of had abundant of but in this case I don't feel it's was all about manufacturing costs.
Was it a cash cow situation, where their one formula was working but as well as where Harley were reluctant to invest in a different avenue, to innovate causing cow to dry up. And that is when they called in the government to settle? That is always the impression I seem to receive.
Excluding manufacturing costs was it because they were scared of an innovation being a failure?
The same cash cow formula can be seen with the likes of Disney Pixar and Toy Story 5, a pointless movie plot at this point where if money was invested, a new creation could be born.
What you are seeing is "the bar" for a successful manufacturing business increasing until only the most profitable are left -- things like chips, things like shell companies that exist to monetize a brand. "New growth" isn't highly profitable so it never has a chance to get started (unless a recipient of an asset windfall is willing to finance it all the way to "the bar" -- see: Elon Musk).
If competition is on the scene then how can you assure me that myself taking the risk of investing will return me the sum I wish for in return.
Production has already been established but the threat is in that an another forecastable model exists and that to catch up to their market will require more investment and expenditure which could lead in less chance of a return. And even if the model is copyable; as like the trope of Chinese knockoffs to of Japanese products, you're still at a lower advantage.
It's not they don't want to innovate but the risk to gamble on innovation is high enough that you could stifle competition cheaper via governmental means.
This slows their forecast and where you can then strategise to overcome the competition rather than risking expenditure via innovation. Crafty, cheers.
That's true.
> assets and exports compete in the balance of payments, an asset windfall kills exports by increasing the currency hurdle and embedded asset price.
They don't really have to compete with each other. It depends on what the central bank does (or doesn't do) about the exchange rate, for example.
Triffin's Dilemma says that in the case of the modern USA, assets will be pumped. Macroeconomics says asset pump = export dump.
The way that economics dumps exports is by raising the bar (strong currency = poor customers, expensive assets = expensive houses = expensive labor, costs go up, price goes down, profitability is squeezed). Eventually the bar became impossible to hop without a cheat code like "good brand and no R+D" or "software level profitability".
At the individual level, manufacturing pay went in the shitter as the jobs dried up while house prices and stock prices went through the roof... so everyone who could became real estate agents, or doctors overcharging real estate agents, or sellers of investment scams to venture capitalists.
What's wild is that this happened to the Spanish, the Dutch, the English, and by the 1960s Triffin could see that it would happen to the US as well.
If you want details from an economist who does his homework, "Trade Wars are Class Wars" by Klein and Pettis.
It's easier for everyone to just deal in the economic losers, but we didn't do that, and now they are burning the house down. This will not get them what they want, but they will continue doing it anyway.
Globalization was the test, AI is the final exam.
I'm not sure history will end so soon.
But there was a lot of pain. Living conditions got worse and stayed worse for entire lifetimes before they got better, and they didn't get better because the people who won decided to deal in the people who lost, they got better because the world went to war and incinerated most of its capital, literally and metaphorically, and the regrowth happened under conditions of scarce labor rather than abundant labor, allowing the people on the bottom to strike a decent deal the second time around.
That, uhh, won't happen the same way again. Now we have robots and nukes. But it's true that without the benefit of hindsight I'd have had an apocalyptic view going into the last kerfuffle, I'd have been wrong, and it would have been due to a failure of imagination. Let's all hope that I am wrong again, but the mechanism will again have to be a failure of imagination, and it takes a lot of optimism to fit my hope squarely inside my blind spot.
Assets have had such a stranglehold over US politics for the last 50 years that if we ever actually run pro-export policy it won't be due to doomed self-promotion by exports (we even have a term for the pattern where this fails on first contact with tradeoffs: TACO) it will be because assets self-sabotage, implode, and exports fill the vacuum.
Germany and Singapore are two prominent historic examples of countries that export just fine despite a strong currency.
Weakening your domestic currency has barely any impact on the real price of traded goods and commodities: they just price at the world market rate. The impact is felt for goods with sticky prices, chiefly labour. Weakening your currency is mostly a way to try and give everyone a wage cut. That can make your exports more competitive for a while. But it's not the only way to cut workers' wages. (And in general, later you seem to agree that giving ordinary people more real income is kind of the point of economics. So giving everyone a real wage cut seems a bit of a curious way to get there.)
> we are already seeing yields rise despite a dollar that is still strong enough to crush exports.
Rising yields fairly mechanically leads to a stronger dollar.
Btw, you might like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lerner_symmetry_theorem
The Lerner Symmetry Theorem suggests roughly that import tariffs are equivalent to export taxes; and export subsidies are equivalent to import subsidies.
And the US is actually doing pretty well in exports, if you take into account that they are exporting not just goods but also services; and if you squint a bit, you can also see that Americans love to found new start-ups and new world beating companies and sell shares in them to the world. That's also a kind of export, but it shows up on the other side of the ledger for accounting reasons.
Similarly, if you build an office building in Seattle and sell it to a foreigner, that also doesn't show up as an export for accounting reasons.
> The model assumes ... no foreign ownership of domestic assets, balanced trade
It's a magnifying glass with duct tape over the lens.
They are not necessary to work in practice.
No, living conditions did not get worse. Yes, livings conditions were pretty bad during the early industrial revolution. But they hadn't exactly been rosy before.
> [...] they got better because the world went to war and incinerated most of its capital, literally and metaphorically, and the regrowth happened under conditions of scarce labor rather than abundant labor, allowing the people on the bottom to strike a decent deal the second time around.
Which war are you talking about? There's been more than one, you know. And the decades after the second world war were probably the nadir for humanity: we never had as many dirt poor people as then and will hopefully never have as many. Remember, that's the time when there were genuine fears of global starvation. Things have been looking up a lot since perhaps around the 1980s and even more so in the following decades. Mostly thanks to PR China and India and South East Asia graduating from dirt poor to merely poor or even middle class.
You also seem confused. You seem to say that a relative capital scarcity is good for labour ('incinerated most of its capital') but also that relative labour scarcity is good for labour? Which way is it?
> the decades after the second world war were probably the nadir
People compare themselves to their parents and grandparents, you can only hustle so far in the face of lived experience.
> You seem to say that a relative capital scarcity is good for labour ('incinerated most of its capital') but also that relative labour scarcity is good for labour? Which way is it?
In an extreme downturn (Europe bombing its cities), the poor undergo more real suffering but the rich undergo more nominal suffering so inequality is reset. Bombed out factories and apartments create an enormous demand for labor -- the broken window fallacy is only a fallacy if you studiously ignore distribution. This is why we should eagerly seek to fix r>g in peacetime -- it's guaranteed to be mathematically possible and it's clearly better for everyone.
Different people in different parts of the globe had different experiences.
People in rich parts of the globe had a pretty decent 1960s. People in PR China had the Cultural Revolution..
> This is why we should eagerly seek to fix r>g in peacetime -- it's guaranteed to be mathematically possible and it's clearly better for everyone.
Why do you want to compare these two variables specifically?
Btw, during much of the 2010 real interest rates in the western world were negative while we had positive real growth. Thus r<0<g. Was that the golden age you yearn for?