Honestly, AI progress suffers because of these export restrictions. An open source model that can compete with Gemini Pro 2.5 and o3 is good for the world, and good for AI
Your views on this question are going to differ a lot depending on the probability you assign to a conflict with China in the next five years. I feel like that number should be offered up for scrutiny before a discussion on the cost vs benefits of export controls even starts.
I'm not American. Ever since I've been old enough to understand the world, the only country constantly at war everywhere is America. An all-powerful American AI is scarier to me than an open source Chinese one
As Russian I only recently started to understand that russian government was at wars for a lot of its existence from USSR times: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_Russia#.... Many invasions and wars in places Russia should have no business in. Most of them not publicized in the country. Unlike US it was not spreading liberal values of individual freedom and against violent dictatorships, actually maybe the other way around
Then look up Latin America’s history, where the US actively worked to install and support such violent dictatorships.
Some under the guise of protecting countries from the threat of communism - like Brazil, Argentina and Chile, and some explicitly to protect US company’s interests - like in Guatemala
Well, at least protecting Latin American countries from the threat of communism was a nice thing for us to do, wasn't it? Communism would certainly have done more harm than we did.
The lesson of present-day America is that democracy is too important to be left to the people.
Ehhh… don’t forget that I wrote “under the guise”.
Lots of US companies got a lot of money out of those US-supported dictatorships, while destroying local businesses and torturing and killing people. Those were also the era of closed-off economies, hyperinflation and environmental destruction, so what the local people got out of it?
So yeah, thanks for protecting us from the dictatorship of the proletariat and fucking up our economies for decades. And I’m not also defending USSR and their imperialistic practices disguised as making the people as equal as possible - fuck them as well!
There’s an old book called “Confessions of an Economic Hitman” that gets into some details of how the US supported those dictatorships under Project Condor and other CIA programs. Is it 100% truthful? Maybe not, but the gist of it is.
The proles have let us both down. All my life, I was led to believe that a "dictatorship of the proletariat" would involve a bunch of morons wearing red hats, casting one last vote against their own interests to tear down the established order. So at least that turned out to be technically correct.
You don't have to hold a gun to someone's head to get them to practice capitalism. People will trade labor, goods and services voluntarily unless you go out of your way to stop them.
And spare us the false equivalence bullshit that we all know is coming.
capitalism is using capital (money, materials, and employees/work) as inputs to produce finished products with the goal of re-investing those profits into said production or into other markets
simply trading or rendering services can be done without the need for constant growth/profits or investment as capital over time (e.g coops, traditional businesses etc)
> You don't have to hold a gun to someone's head to get them to practice capitalism. People will trade labor, goods and services voluntarily unless you go out of your way to stop them.
This is an important point. The only way communism "works" is top down enforcement.
> probability you assign to a conflict with China in the next five years. I feel like that number should be offered up for scrutiny before a discussion
Might as well talk about the probability of a conflict with South Africa, China might not be the best country to live in nor be country that takes care of its own citizens the best, but they seem non-violent towards other sovereign nations (so far), although of course there is a lot of posturing. But from the current "world powers", they seem to be the least violent.
What is the security competition between South Africa and the US that would justify such an analogy?
China is peaceful recently, at least since their invasion of Vietnam. But (1) their post-Deng culture is highly militaristic and irredentist, (2) this is the first time in history that they actually can rollback US influence, their previous inability explains the peace rather than lack of will (3) Taiwan from a realist perspective makes too much sense, as the first in the island chain to wedge between Philippines and Japan, and its role in supplying chips to the US.
The lesson we should learn from Russia's invasion of Ukraine is to believe countries when they say they own another country. Not assume the best and design policy around that assumption.
The general consensus seems to be around a 20-25% chance of an invasion of Taiwan within the next 5 years. The remaining debate isn't about whether they want to do it, it's about whether they'll be able to do it and what their calculation will be around those relative capabilities.
Are you saying that large-model capabilities would make a substantial difference in a military conflict within the next five years? Because we aren’t seeing any signs of that in, say, the Ukraine war.
We do see the signs and reports, you just have to look. LLMs are being adopted to warfare, with drones or otherwise, there is progress there, but it's not currently at the level of "substantial difference". And 5 years is huge time from progress perspective in this domain - just try to compare LLMs of today with LLMs of 2020.
It’s not impossible, but also highly nontrivial. Apart from the actual AI implementation, power supply might be a challenge. And there is a multitude of anti-drone technology being continuously developed. Already today, an autonomous drone would have to deal with RF jamming and GPS jamming, which means it’s easily defeated unless it has the ability to navigate purely visually. Drones also tend to be limited to good weather conditions and daytime.
In terms of countermeasures, what's the difference between having a human drone pilot and having an AI (computer vision plus control) do it over cloud? I know I'm moving the goalposts away from edge compute, but if we are discussing the relevance of GPU compute for warfare it seems relevant.
Assuming human-level AI capabilities, not much of a difference, obviously. But I also don’t think that human operators are a bottleneck currently. Cost, failure rate, and technical limitations of drones is. If you are alluding to superhuman AI capabilities, that’s highly speculative as well with regard to what is needed for drone piloting, and also unclear how large the benefits of that would be in terms of actual operational success rate.
> Honestly, AI progress suffers because of these export restrictions. An open source model that can compete with Gemini Pro 2.5 and o3 is good for the world, and good for AI
DeepSeek is not a charity, they are the largest hedge fund in China, nothing different from a typical wall street funds. They don't spend billions to give the world something open and free just because it is good.
When the model is capable of generating decent amount of revenues, or when there is conclusive evidence of showing being closed would lead to much higher profit, it will be closed.
DeepSeek refuses to acknowledge Tiananmen Square. I don’t want to use a model that’s known to heavily censor historical data. What else is it denying or lying about that’s going to affect how I use it?
(In before “whatabout”: maybe US-made models do the same, but I’ve yet to hear reports of any anti-US information that they’re censoring.)
