this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2025

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Bill proposed to outlaw downloading Chinese AI models. (www.hawley.senate.gov)

submitted 14 hours ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

36 comments fedilink hide all child comments

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/25011462

SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE

This Act may be cited as the ‘‘Decoupling America’s Artificial Intelligence Capabilities from China Act of 2025’’.

SEC. 3. PROHIBITIONS ON IMPORT AND EXPORT OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE OR GENERATIVE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE TECHNOLOGY OR INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

(a) PROHIBITION ON IMPORTATION.—On and after the date that is 180 days after the date of the enactment of this Act, the importation into the United States of artificial intelligence or generative artificial intelligence technology or intellectual property developed or produced in the People’s Republic of China is prohibited.

Currently, China has the best open source models in text, video and music generation.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 hour ago

I fear I've become something of an accelerationist in the past few days...

yeah, go ahead and pass this, you tech-illiterate xenophobic fucks.

we need to divide and conquer the fascist coalition. make them hate each other. make them consumed by infighting. give them more "oh I didn't realize there would be negative consequences that affected me personally" moments.

there's a whole lot of Silicon Valley techbro types who are on board with Musk and Trump because they think it's all lower taxes, less regulations for their startups, and less "wokeness". go ahead, pass a law that makes it a federal crime for them to click a GitHub download link. make it so that every Hacker News thread about AI is filled with American engineers bemoaning that they're legally prohibited from keeping up with the state-of-the-art. make their startups uncompetitive because they're required by law to pay inflated prices to subsidize OpenAI and other "American-made" plagiarism machines.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 6 hours ago

I love how we're now the crumbling evil empire trying to ban their way out of the present.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

So, I'm just kind of curious how this would even work. Lots of people in the US already have Deepseek. If they already have it that's not importing it, is it? What if someone makes a copy of Deepseek from a server that's in the US? Is that importing it? Are we just trying to block future AIs? How is it even supposed to be beneficial to the US for the people working on AI here to have no access to Chinese models, when China can still freely use ours? Won't that just give them an advantage in developing AI?

Honestly, the more I think about this, the dumber it gets, and it was already pretty stupid on a surface level. It'll probably pass though. I don't think anybody in Washington DC is even interested in thinking about the consequences of anything they're doing. It's all pure pageantry.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 6 hours ago

Just rename the model like they renamed gulf of Mexico.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 7 hours ago

BRB about to make a derivative of this shirt

[–] [email protected] 40 points 13 hours ago (4 children)

I could understand banning closed source models but open sourced models that work better than anything propriety isn't that just the free market that corporations like to pretend to be part of?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 hours ago

It's also the free market for those corporations to buy a government and use it to outlaw competition.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

Define "open sourced model".

The neural network is still a black box, with no source (training data) available to build it, not to mention few people have the alleged $5M needed to run the training even if the data was available.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 hours ago

Define “open sourced model”.

The term itself is actually shockingly simple. Source is the original material that was used to build this model, training data and all files that are needed to compile and create the model. It's Open Source, if these files are available (preferably with an Open Source compatible license). It's not. We only get binary data, the end result and some intermediate files to fine tune it.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 12 hours ago

They were only for the free market if they could force it on others.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

Well its still not Open Source.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

Is part of the code not available?

[–] [email protected] 18 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

None of the code and training data is available. Its just the usual Huggingface thing, where some weights and parameters are available, nothing else. People repeat DeepSeek (and many other) Ai LLM models being open source, but they aren't.

They even have a Github source code repository at https://github.com/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1 , but its only an image and PDF file and links to download the model on Huggingface (plus optional weights and parameter files, to fine tune it). There is no source code, and no training data available. Also here is an interesting article talking about this issue: Liesenfeld, Andreas, and Mark Dingemanse. “Rethinking open source generative AI: open washing and the EU AI Act.” The 2024 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency. 2024

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago) (1 children)

This literally took one click: https://github.com/deepseek-ai

Stop spreading FUD.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 hours ago (2 children)

Where's the training data?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

Nobody releases training data. It's too large and varied. The best I've seen was the LAION-2B set that Stable Diffusion used, and that's still just a big collection of links. Even that isn't going to fit on a GitHub repo.

Besides, improving the model means using the model as a base and implementing new training data. Specialize, specialize, specialize.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 42 minutes ago

What about these? Dozens of TB here:

https://huggingface.co/HuggingFaceFW

There is also a LAION-5B now, and several other datasets.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Does open sourcing require you to give out the training data? I thought it only means allowing access to the source code so that you could build it yourself and feed it your own training data.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

Open source requires giving whatever digital information is necessary to build a binary.

In this case, the "binary" are the network weights, and "whatever is necessary" includes both training data, and training code.

DeepSeek is sharing:

NO training data
NO training code
instead, PDFs with a description of the process
binary weights (a few snapshots)
fine-tune code
inference code
evaluation code
integration code

In other words: a good amount of open source... with a huge binary blob in the middle.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

Is there any good LLM that fits this definition of open source, then? I thought the "training data" for good AI was always just: the entire internet, and they were all ethically dubious that way.

What is the concern with only having weights? It's not abritrary code exectution, so there's no security risk or lack of computing control that are the usual goals of open source in the first place.

To me the weights are less of a "blob" and more like an approximate solution to an NP-hard problem. Training is traversing the search space, and sharing a model is just saying "hey, this point looks useful, others should check it out". But maybe that is a blob, since I don't know how they got there.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 minutes ago

There are several "good" LLMs trained on open datasets like FineWeb, LAION, DataComp, etc. They are still "ethically dubious", but at least they can be downloaded, analyzed, filtered, and so on. Unfortunately businesses are keeping datasets and training code as a competitive advantage, even "Open"AI stopped publishing them when they saw an opportunity to make money.

What is the concern with only having weights? It's not abritrary code exectution

Unless one plugs it into an agent... which is kind of the use we expect right now.

Accessing the web, or even web searches, is already equivalent to arbitrary code execution: an LLM could decide to, for example, summarize and compress some context full of trade secrets, then proceed to "search" for it, sending it to wherever it has access to.

Agents can also be allowed to run local commands... again a use we kind of want now ("hey Google, open my alarms" on a smartphone).

[–] [email protected] 14 points 12 hours ago

Oh ffs. Fuck right off congress.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 14 hours ago (2 children)

Can you prevent someone from setting up local instances of Deepseek? It's open source. How would this define Chinese models?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago) (1 children)

Nobody cares about you and your cheap AI-generated tentacle porn. The point here is at entreprise-level. Businesses will be legally locked down with expensive US vendors, it's all that matters.

Infuriating thing above all that cretin protectionism is that pro use of AI stuff will consume a planet-destroying ~~10~~ 30 times as much energy than needed.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 12 hours ago (2 children)

This model would not exist without the work done by OpenAI though, given that the Chinese company secretly used ChatGPT to train it.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 7 hours ago

Every AI model has been incestuously training off every other AI model for years. OpenAI has done it just as much as everyone else. They're just throwing a tantrum about it now because they're butthurt that a Chinese company beat them on the cheap, and they're trying to save face.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 12 hours ago

It would still have happened at some point, chatgpt is not the only AI. I hate we called it AI.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 14 hours ago

They can criminalize downloading it for example.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago) (1 children)

the importation into the United States of artificial intelligence or generative artificial intelligence technology or intellectual property developed or produced in the People’s Republic of China is prohibited.

This guy might get a bill through that bans Chinese AI stuff, though I think that enforcement is gonna be a pain, but as per the text, this is banning all Chinese intellectual property, AI or not. That's a non-starter; it's not going to go anywhere in Congress. Like, you couldn't even identify all instances of Chinese intellectual property if you wanted to do so.

EDIT: Okay, they define the phrase elsewhere to specifically be "technology or intellectual property that could be used to contribute to artificial intelligence or generative artificial intelligence capabilities", which is somewhat-narrower but still not going anywhere, because pretty much any form of intellectual property meets that bar; you can train an AI on whatever to improve its capabilities.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 hours ago

You think that the bill being completely moronic is a reason congress wouldn’t pass it? Oh sweet summer child…

[–] [email protected] 7 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

Streisand Effect engage!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

Not really, given the media frenzy surrounding this model.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago)

I lost interest enough to delete the models I had before and this headline made me look into deepseek.

EDIT: Not quite the Streisand Effect considering I already knew about it, but still an unintended source of pressure. Like someone stockpiling before a ban of something, even if they weren't too avid about it before. I've had a similar thought when it comes to taking down free streaming sites.

Though this seems to have traded compute for data, so I don't have the VRAM for it... even running through RAM, I don't feel like downloading a lesser version with my slow-ish internet.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 13 hours ago (2 children)

Get your DeepSeek3 and r1 weights before it's illegal!

[–] [email protected] 7 points 12 hours ago

They would be illegal in the US only, not the rest of the world. Meaning you can get it somewhere else.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 hours ago

Print it on a t shirt!

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

Just use a small font. /s