[HN Gopher] Framework for Artificial Intelligence Diffusion
___________________________________________________________________
Framework for Artificial Intelligence Diffusion
Author : chriskanan
Score : 145 points
Date : 2025-01-16 20:00 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.federalregister.gov)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.federalregister.gov)
| chriskanan wrote:
| The most salient thing in the document is that it put export
| controls on releasing the weights of models trained with 10^26
| operations. While there may be some errors in my math, I think
| that corresponds to training a model with over 70,000 H100s for a
| month.
|
| I personally think the regulation is misguided, as it assumes we
| won't identify better algorithms/architectures. There is no
| reason to assume that the level of compute leads to these
| problems.
|
| Moreover, given the emphasis on test-time compute nowadays and
| that it seems like a lot of companies have hit a wall with
| performance gains with trying to scale LLMs at train-time, I
| especially think this regulation isn't especially meaningful.
| HeatrayEnjoyer wrote:
| We can't let perfect be the enemy of good, regulations can be
| updated. Capping FLOPs is a decent starter reg.
| reaperman wrote:
| Counterpoint would be the $7.25 minimum wage. It _can_ be
| updated, but politicians aren 't good at doing that. In both
| cases (FLOPS and minimum wage), at least a lower bound for
| inflation should be included:
|
| Something like: 10^26 FLOPS * 1.5^n where n is the number of
| years since the regulation was published.
| Cyph0n wrote:
| I don't see an issue here, because our legislators probably
| care more about FLOPS than humans.
| tivert wrote:
| > Something like: 10^26 FLOPS * 1.5^n where n is the number
| of years since the regulation was published.
|
| Why would you want to automatically increase the cap
| algorithmically like that?
|
| The purpose of a regulation like this is _totally_
| different than the minimum wage. If the point is to keep
| and adversary behind, you want them to stay as far behind
| as you can manage for as long as possible.
|
| So if you increase the cap, you want only increase it when
| it won't help the adversary (because they have
| alternatives, for instance).
| parsimo2010 wrote:
| Traditional export control applied to advanced hardware is
| because the US doesn't want its adversaries to have access to
| things that erode the US military advantage. But most hardware
| is only controlled at the high-end of the market. Once a
| technology is commodotized, the low-end stuff is usually widely
| proliferated. Night vision goggles are an example, only the
| latest generation technology is controlled, and low-end stuff
| can be bought online and shipped worldwide.
|
| Applying this to your thoughts about AI, is that as the
| efficiency of training gets better, the ability to train models
| is commodotized, and those models would not be considered to be
| advantageous and would not need to be controlled. So maybe
| setting the export control based on the number of operations is
| a good idea- it naturally allows efficiently trained models to
| be exported since they wouldn't be hard to train in other
| countries anyway.
|
| As computing power scales maybe the 10^26 limit will need to be
| revised, but setting the limit based on the scale of the
| training is a good idea since it is actually measurable. You
| couldn't realistically set the limit based on the capability of
| the model since benchmarks seem become irrelevant every few
| months due to contamination.
| ein0p wrote:
| I wonder what makes people believe that the US currently
| enjoys any kind of a meaningful "military advantage" over
| e.g. China? After failing to defeat the Taliban and running
| from the Houthis especially. This seems like a very dangerous
| belief to have. China has 4x the population and outproduces
| us 10:1 in widgets (2:1 in dollars). Considering just e.g.
| steel, China produces about 1 billion metric tons of it per
| year. We produce 80 million tons. Concrete? 2.4B tons vs 96M
| tons. 70+% of the world's electronics. Their shipbuilding
| industry is 230x more productive (not a typo). Etc, etc.
|
| The short term profits US businesses have been enjoying over
| the past 25 years came at a staggering long term cost. The
| sanctions won't even slow down the Chinese MIC, and in the
| long run they will cause them to develop their own high end
| silicon sector (obviating the need for our own worldwide).
| They're already at 7nm, at a low yield. That is more than
| sufficient for their MIC, including the AI chips used there,
| currently and in the foreseeable future.
| parsimo2010 wrote:
| a) just because the government has policies that doesn't
| mean they are 100% effective
|
| b) export controls aren't expected to completely prevent a
| country from gaining access to a technology, just make it
| take longer and require more resources to achieve
|
| You may also be misunderstanding how much money China will
| spend to develop their semiconductor industry. Sure, they
| will eventually catch up to the West, but the money they
| spend along the way won't be spent on fighter jet,
| missiles, and ships. It's still preferable (from the US
| perspective) to having no export controls and China being
| able to import semiconductor designs, manufacturing
| hardware, and AI models trained using US resources. At
| least this way China is a few months behind and will have
| to spend a few billion Yuan to achieve it.
| airstrike wrote:
| Everyone also thought Russia had a strong military yet look
| how that worked out
| ein0p wrote:
| NATO is currently losing a conventional proxy war against
| it, that's how. Which only reinforces my point: there's
| zero reason to believe that either proxy or direct
| confrontation with China can be "won".
| airstrike wrote:
| NATO is not fighting that war. You're delusional. They
| are supporting Ukraine without crossing the threshold of
| actually fighting the war, as bullshit as it sounds.
| ein0p wrote:
| $250B and depleted arsenals say otherwise. It's a proxy
| war. It's been a proxy war by design all along: https://w
| ww.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_briefs/R...
| airstrike wrote:
| Spending has nothing to do with military reality. Russia
| is a paper tiger. If the US really supported Ukraine in
| this war without worrying about crossing some imaginary
| Rubicon, the war would have been over a long time ago--
| except Russia might be tempted to use their nukes, so we
| can't do that.
|
| The way to win against Russia is not via sanctions but
| rather via destabilizing the regime through guerrilla
| propaganda. The Russians, the Chinese, and the Soviets
| before them have always known this. The West is just too
| slow to catch on.
| etiam wrote:
| Could be nice with some artificial pressure to use more
| efficient algorithms though. The current game of just throwing
| in more data centers and power plants may be kind of convenient
| for those who can afford it, but it's also intellectually
| embarrassing.
| thorum wrote:
| The practical problem I see is that unless US AI labs have
| perfect security (against both cyber attacks and physical
| espionage), which they don't, there is no way to prevent
| foreign intelligence agencies from just stealing the weights
| whenever they want.
| iugtmkbdfil834 wrote:
| This. We put toasters on the internet and are no longer
| surprised, when services we use send us breach notices at
| regular intervals. The only thing this regulation would do,
| as written, is add an interesting choke point for compliance
| regulators to obsess over.
| kube-system wrote:
| Of course. They're mitigations, not preventions. Few defenses
| are truly preventative. The point is to make it difficult.
| They know bad actors will try to circumvent it.
|
| This isn't lost on the authors. It is explicitly recognized
| in the document:
|
| > The risk is even greater with AI model weights, which, once
| exfiltrated by malicious actors, can be copied and sent
| anywhere in the world instantaneously.
| thorum wrote:
| > The point is to make it difficult.
|
| Does it, though?
| permo-w wrote:
| this is like saying that regulating automatic weapons is
| misguided because someone might invent a gun that is equally
| dangerous without being automatic
| iugtmkbdfil834 wrote:
| This appears to be a very shallow take and lazy argument that
| does not capture even basic nuance of the issue at hand. For
| the sake of expanding it a little and hopefully moving it in
| the right direction, I will point out that BIS framework
| discusses use of advanced models as dual use goods ( ie. not
| automatically automatic weapons ).
|
| edit(removed exasparated sigh; it does not add anything )
| logicchains wrote:
| >The most salient thing in the document is that it put export
| controls on releasing the weights of models trained with 10^26
| operations.
|
| Does this affect open source? If so, it'll be absolutely
| disastrous for the US in the longer term, as eventually China
| will be able to train open weights models with more than that
| many operations, and everyone using open weights models will
| switch to Chinese models because they're not artificially
| gimped like the US-aligned ones. China already has the best
| open weights models currently available, and regulation like
| this will just further their advantage.
| gyre wrote:
| "consistent with its general practice, BIS will not require a
| license for the export of the model weights of open-weight
| models"
| resters wrote:
| Strong opposition to this regulation seems to be one of the main
| things that led a16z, Oracle, etc. to go all in for Donald Trump.
| It's interesting that Meta too fought the regulation by its
| unprecedented open sourcing of model weights.
|
| Regardless of who is currently in the lead, China has its own
| GPUs and a lot of very smart people figuring out algorithmic and
| model design optimizations, so China will likely be in the lead
| more obviously within 1-2 years, both in hardware and model
| design.
|
| This law is likely not going to be effective in its intended
| purpose, and it will prevent peaceful collaboration between US
| and Chinese firms, the kind that helps prevent war.
|
| The US is moving toward a system where government controls and
| throttles technology and picks winners. We should all fight to
| stop this.
| 9283409232 wrote:
| I don't think you're wrong but Big Tech is bending the knee to
| Trump because he will be picking the winners.
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| > The US is moving toward a system where government controls
| and throttles technology and picks winners
|
| What else can it do? They don't want to lose their lead, and
| whatever restrictions they've been putting on China et al. have
| let the exact desired outcomes so far. The idea is to try to
| slow down the beast that has very set goals (e.g. to become
| high tech manufacturing and innovation center), and try to play
| catch up (like on-shoring some manufacturing).
|
| Personally, I'm skeptical that it will work, because by raw
| number of hands on deck, they have the advantage. And it's
| fairly hard when your institutional knowledge of doing big
| things is a bit outdated. I would argue, a good bet in North
| America would be finding a financially engineered solution to
| get Asian companies bring their workers and knowledge to ramp
| us up. Kinda like the TSMC factory. Basically the same thing as
| China did in 2000s with western companies.
| logicchains wrote:
| > They don't want to lose their lead, and whatever
| restrictions they've been putting on China et al. have let
| the exact desired outcomes so far.
|
| They absolutely have not. The best open weights LLM is
| Chinese (and it's competitive with the leading US closed
| source ones), and around 10x cheaper both to train and to
| serve than its western competitors. This innovation in
| efficiency was largely brought about by US sanctions limiting
| GPU availability.
| buyucu wrote:
| > They don't want to lose their lead
|
| What lead? The best open-source language models right now are
| Chinese. deep-seek is amazin, so is qwq.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| I agree this law won't be effective in its intended purpose,
| and that China will develop models of their own that are
| sufficiently competitive (as we've already seen). However, I
| think seeking "peaceful collaboration" between the US (or
| Europe or many others) and China - either between governments
| or private firms - is a naive strategy that will simply lead to
| the US being replaced by a more dangerous superpower that does
| not respect the values of free and democratic societies.
|
| I also think that to a great extent, we're already at war.
| China has not respected intellectual property rights, conducted
| espionage against both companies and government agencies,
| repeatedly performed successful cyberattacks, helped Russia in
| the Ukraine conflict, severed telecommunications cables, and
| more. They've also built up the world's largest navy, expanded
| their nuclear arsenal, and are working on projects to undermine
| the status of the US Dollar. All of this should have been met
| with a much stronger and forceful reaction, since clearly it
| does not fit into the notion of "peaceful collaboration".
|
| China's unpeaceful actions aren't limited to the West. China
| annexed much of its current territory illegally and through
| force (see Xinjiang and Tibet). When Hong Kong was handed back,
| it was under a treaty that China now says is not valid. China
| has been trying to steal territory from neighboring countries
| repeatedly, for example with Bhutan or India. They've also
| threatened to take over Taiwan many times now, and may do so
| soon. They're about to build a dam that will prevent water from
| reaching Bangladesh and force them to become subjugated. The
| only peaceful and just outcome is for those territories to be
| freed from the control of China - which will require help from
| the West (sanctions, tariffs, blockades, and maybe even direct
| intervention).
|
| Even _within_ China, the CCP rules with an iron fist and
| violates virtually all principles of free societies and
| classically liberal values that we value in the West. I don't
| see that changing. And if it doesn't, how can they be trusted
| with more economic and military power? That's why I don't think
| we should seek peaceful collaboration with China. We just need
| smarter strategies than this hasty AI declaration.
| almaight wrote:
| 1. Sikkim was annexed by India 2. Bangladesh has many floods
| every year
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| I am not sure why Sikkim is relevant. I am not familiar
| with it, so I read about it now. And it looks like India's
| prime minister actually pushed a resolution through noting
| that Sikkim is independent. But then Sikkim had a domestic
| movement to join India and voluntarily did that. This seems
| like the opposite of annexation.
|
| Regarding floods - if Bangladesh wants an upstream dam, why
| aren't they included as a decision maker on whether the
| Chinese dam goes ahead? Clearly this is because they would
| say no to it. The issue isn't floods - it's that China can
| withhold water for drinking and irrigation and threaten the
| country with starvation and famine. It's a huge national
| security threat.
| miohtama wrote:
| China models are not only competitive, but better, because
| they do not care about copyright violations and they do not
| need to litigate with everyone. They can use better training
| material faster.
| buyucu wrote:
| Where I'm looking from (Turkey) China is mostly harmless and
| the USA is a foreign invader that has invaded multiple
| neighboring countries. Between the two, I find the USA to be
| much more illiberal and dangerous.
| 9283409232 wrote:
| You think China is harmless? Go tell that to Tibet, India,
| or Taiwan.
| buyucu wrote:
| Less harmful than USA for sure. The list of places US and
| allies have invaded is very long.
| 9283409232 wrote:
| In recent years China does not do much blatant invading
| and prefer much more subtle means daring people to
| respond to them like in the South China Sea.
| buyucu wrote:
| still not as bad as 25 years of wars in the Middle East.
|
| I would take those subtle means over the blatant invading
| that America has been doing.
| 9283409232 wrote:
| You do know both can be bad right? You don't need to pick
| the lesser evil.
| kube-system wrote:
| > The US is moving toward a system where government controls
| and throttles technology and picks winners.
|
| Moving towards? The US has a pretty solid history of doing a
| great deal of this (and more) in the 20th century. But so did
| all of the world's powers... as they all continue to do today.
| It seems to be an inherent part of being a world power.
| neilv wrote:
| This `regulations.gov` is leaking info on who accesses what, to
| Google (via `www.google-analytics.com` tracker).
|
| There should be a federal regulation about that.
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| It's for the government's google analytics account, which is
| open data: https://analytics.usa.gov/general-services-
| administration
| dooglius wrote:
| Parent is unhappy with the fact the data is being tracked and
| analyzed at all, not about the closed or open nature of the
| analytics.
| neilv wrote:
| I'm unhappy that: (1) Google is getting this information;
| (2) because Google is involved, who reads what is
| attributable to individuals; (3) citizens don't realize
| this.
| intunderflow wrote:
| We're sorry, an error has occurred A general error occurred while
| processing your request.
| geuis wrote:
| This smells a lot like the misguided crypto export laws in the
| 90s that hampered browser security for years.
| philjohn wrote:
| And don't forget the amazing workaround Zimmerman of PGP fame
| came up with - the source code in printed form was protected 1A
| speech, so it was published, distributed, and then scanned and
| OCR'd outside the US -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy#Criminal_i...
| mmaunder wrote:
| And don't forget Thawte which ended up selling strong SSL
| outside the US, cornering the international market thanks to
| US restrictions, and getting bought by Verisign for $600M.
| z2 wrote:
| I for one would love to see model weights published in
| hardcover book form.
| dkga wrote:
| What a throwback to the time when some edgy folks would
| share printed codes in Pascal... I even remember seeing a
| hard copy of a binary in hex which was best not to execute.
| cheald wrote:
| It might be somewhat prohibitive to print the model weights
| for any sufficiently large model, though.
| galangalalgol wrote:
| Using 2d barcodes you can fit ~20MB per page. Front and
| back you could probably fit a model that violated the rule
| on less than a thousand pages.
|
| Edit: maybe 10k pages
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Skip the barcodes - just cast it to 24bit RGB data, add
| in some error correction, and print as a high-DPI bitmap
| (or a series of them, one per page).
| galangalalgol wrote:
| Printers that can keep all the color channels lined up
| all the way down to their tightest dot pitch are few and
| far between. That is why piql used black and white for
| the boxing code they used to print out all of github. I'm
| not sure why greyscale wasn't used.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _Printers that can keep all the color channels lined up
| all the way down to their tightest dot pitch are few and
| far between._
|
| It only takes one for a PoC. It only takes few to
| establish a service. Spatial and color accuracy is going
| to be a challenge, but I imagine there already exist
| methods to correct for that - e.g. printing reference
| patterns along with the data, so the scanner/digitizer
| can calibrate to it on the fly.
| layer8 wrote:
| I'm doubtful that barcodes would qualify as free speech.
| slt2021 wrote:
| how about printing URL to download the weights file?
| rangestransform wrote:
| I hope this time we finally get a Supreme Court ruling that
| export controls on code are unconstitutional, instead of the
| feds chickening out like last time
| tzs wrote:
| I doubt that would work for model weights because they are
| generated algorithmically rather than being written by
| humans, which probably means that they are not speech.
| mbil wrote:
| Not to mention how much paper it would take to print 500B
| weights
| kube-system wrote:
| It hampered the security of a lot of things. That wasn't
| misguided -- that was the point.
|
| China, Russia, and Iran used Internet Explorer too.
| mlfreeman wrote:
| What do the regulators writing this _intend_ for this to slow
| down /stop?
|
| I can't seem to find any information about that anywhere.
| chatmasta wrote:
| Maybe they intend for it to speed up/start implementation of
| federal agencies and regulations. The intent is to exert
| control over an emerging market while it's still comprised of
| cooperative participants. Regulators want to define the
| regulatory frameworks rather than relying on self-policing
| before it's "too late."
|
| Let's see if this survives the next administration. Normally
| I'd be skeptical, but Musk has openly advocated about the
| "dangers" of AI and will likely embrace attempts to regulate
| it, especially since he's in a position to benefit from the
| regulatory capture. In fact he's doubly well-placed to take
| advantage of it. Regardless of his politics, xAI is a market
| leader and would already be naturally predisposed to
| participate in regulatory capture. But now he also enjoys
| unprecedented influence over policymaking (Mar a Lago) and
| regulatory reform (DOGE). It's hard to see how he wouldn't
| capitalize on that position.
| chronic4930018 wrote:
| > Regardless of his politics, xAI is a market leader
|
| Lol what?
|
| The only people who think this are Elon fanboys.
|
| I guess you think Tesla is the self-driving market leader,
| too. Okay.
| chatmasta wrote:
| I don't even use it. But in terms of funding, it's in the
| top 5, according to Crunchbase data [0].
|
| [0] https://news.crunchbase.com/ai/startup-billion-dollar-
| fundra...
| cheonic516442 wrote:
| > But in terms of funding, it's in the top 5.
|
| WeWork had more funding than xAI.
|
| Not saying xAI will die, but you can't look at funding.
| chatmasta wrote:
| You can look at funding to see who will benefit most from
| regulatory capture, a phenomenon that raises the cost of
| entry into a market. Obviously the most well-funded
| participants will have the greatest motivation to
| increase barrier to entry.
|
| If anything, a well-funded company with a bad product is
| _more_ likely to engage in regulatory capture because it
| limits their risk of exposure to a new entrant with a
| good product.
| bilbo0s wrote:
| In this particular market though it's a bit useless
| because _only_ well funded entities are really able to
| play here.
|
| Where are any of us gonna get 10,000 H100's?
|
| So it's not like you're overwhelming small players by
| throwing up regulations. Those players are extremely
| unlikely to get the compute they'd need to even
| experiment in the first place.
| miohtama wrote:
| It's also quite decent, giving a lot of free request so I
| have switched from Claude.
| DSingularity wrote:
| Hard to take comments like this seriously when you can't
| even be bothered to be associated with it from your primary
| account.
| HeatrayEnjoyer wrote:
| Obviously to prevent proliferation of dual-use technologies to
| potentially adversarial actors. The same intent behind
| restricting high-fidelity infrared camera and phased radar
| equipment.
| slt2021 wrote:
| China is leading AI race with their open source deepseek-v3.
| It is laughable to think they this regulation with stop them.
| USA should actually collaborate, not isolate.
|
| China engineers have capability to get around these silly
| sanctions, by renting cloud GPUs from USA companies for
| example, to get access to as many compute as they want. or to
| use consumer grade compute, or their homegrown Chinese
| CPUs/GPUs.
|
| USA should actually embrace open source and collaborate
| together, as we are still in the very beginning of AI
| revolution
| kube-system wrote:
| The _entire point_ is to not collaborate, because this tech
| is being used for military purposes. The US wants to throw
| up roadblocks to make it more difficult. Obviously, against
| a foreign military, anything is a mitigation and not a
| prevention.
|
| > China engineers have capability to get around these silly
| sanctions, by renting cloud GPUs from USA companies for
| example
|
| That's why they're also moving towards KYC for cloud
| providers.
|
| https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2024/01/29/2024-0
| 1...
| bilbo0s wrote:
| Also when you look at the list of nations targeted it's
| easy to see that this is not necessarily only about
| China. I think on HN people get China blindness and maybe
| have a hard time seeing other threats out there.
|
| The list is controversial obviously, but I have to think
| nations wouldn't be on any tier of the list except the
| no-restrictions tier if there wasn't something our intel
| people weren't worried about. Maybe the concerns are not
| legitimate, but there's definitely a reason we don't want
| those nations having access to SOTA AI models.
| slt2021 wrote:
| Yes, USA wants to ensure global domination of large big
| tech in AI world so that openai/anthropic/etc did not
| have competitors
| chriskanan wrote:
| I have no idea if comments actually have any impact, but here is
| the comment I left on the document:
|
| I am Christopher Kanan, a professor and AI researcher at the
| University of Rochester with over 20 years of experience in
| artificial intelligence and deep learning. Previously, I led AI
| research and development at Paige, a medical AI company, where I
| worked on FDA-regulated AI systems for medical imaging. Based on
| this experience, I would like to provide feedback on the proposed
| export control regulations regarding compute thresholds for AI
| training, particularly models requiring 10^26 computational
| operations.
|
| The current regulation seems misguided for several reasons.
| First, it assumes that scaling models automatically leads to
| something dangerous. This is a flawed assumption, as simply
| increasing model size and compute does not necessarily result in
| harmful capabilities. Second, the 10^26 operations threshold
| appears to be based on what may be required to train future large
| language models using today's methods. However, future advances
| in algorithms and architectures could significantly reduce the
| computational demands for training such models. It is unlikely
| that AI progress will remain tied to inefficient transformer-
| based models trained on massive datasets. Lastly, many companies
| trying to scale large language models beyond systems like GPT-4
| have hit diminishing returns, shifting their focus to test-time
| compute. This involves using more compute to "think" about
| responses during inference rather than in model training, and the
| regulation does not address this trend at all.
|
| Even if future amendments try to address test-time compute, the
| proposed regulation seems premature. There are too many unknowns
| in future AI development to justify using a fixed compute-based
| threshold as a reliable indicator of potential risk. Instead of
| focusing on compute thresholds or model sizes, policymakers
| should focus on regulating specific high-risk AI applications,
| similar to how the FDA regulates AI software as a medical device.
| This approach targets the actual use of AI systems rather than
| their development, which is more aligned with addressing real-
| world risks.
|
| Without careful refinement, these rules risk stifling innovation,
| especially for small companies and academic researchers, while
| leaving important developments unregulated. I urge policymakers
| to engage with industry and academic experts to refocus
| regulations on specific applications rather than broadly
| targeting compute usage. AI regulation must evolve with the field
| to remain effective and balanced.
|
| ---
|
| Of course, I have no skin in the game since I barely have any
| compute available to me as an academic, but the proposed rules on
| compute just don't make any sense to me.
| behnamoh wrote:
| You wrote three separate comments for this course. Can you just
| combine them?
| p1necone wrote:
| The three comments are communicating three separate things, I
| think it's clearer that way.
| ben_w wrote:
| > First, it assumes that scaling models automatically leads to
| something dangerous.
|
| The impression I had is with reversed causation: that it can't
| be all that dangerous if it's smaller than this.
|
| Assuming this alternative interpretation is correct, the idea
| may still be flawed, for the same reasons you say.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| I also suspect that the only real leverage the U.S. has is on
| big compute (i.e. requires the best chips), and less capable
| chips are not as controllable.
| tivert wrote:
| > Even if future amendments try to address test-time compute,
| the proposed regulation seems premature. There are too many
| unknowns in future AI development to justify using a fixed
| compute-based threshold as a reliable indicator of potential
| risk.
|
| I'm disinclined to let that be a barrier to regulation,
| especially of the export-control variety. It seems like letting
| the perfect be the enemy of the good: refusing to close the
| barn door you have, because you think you might have a better
| barn door in the future.
|
| > Instead of focusing on compute thresholds or model sizes,
| policymakers should focus on regulating specific high-risk AI
| applications, similar to how the FDA regulates AI software as a
| medical device. This approach targets the actual use of AI
| systems rather than their development, which is more aligned
| with addressing real-world risks.
|
| How to you envision that working, specifically? Especially when
| a lot of models are pretty general and not very application-
| specific?
| iugtmkbdfil834 wrote:
| << It seems like letting the perfect be the enemy of the
| good: refusing to close the barn door you have, because you
| think you might have a better barn door in the future.
|
| Am I missing something? I am not an expert in the field, but
| from where I sit, there literally is no barn door at this
| point to even close too late..
| energy123 wrote:
| "First, it assumes that scaling models automatically leads to
| something dangerous"
|
| The regulation doesn't exactly make this assumption. Not only
| are large models stifled, the ability to serve models via API
| to many users, and the ability to have many researchers working
| in parallel on upgrading the model is also stifled. It
| wholesale stifles AI progress for the targeted nations.
|
| This is an appropriate restriction on what will likely be a
| core part of military technology in the coming decade (eg drone
| piloting).
|
| Look, if Russia didn't invade Ukraine and China didn't keep
| saying they wanted to invade Taiwan, I wouldn't have any issues
| with sending them millions of Blackwell chips. But that's not
| the world we live in. Unfortunately, this is the foreign policy
| reality that exists outside of the tech bubble we live in. If
| China ever wants to drop their ambitions over Taiwan then the
| export restrictions should be dropped, but not a moment sooner.
| babkayaga wrote:
| right. China. but Switzerland? Israel? what is going on here?
| jagrsw wrote:
| It could be related to 14eyes with modifications (finland
| and ireland, plus close asian allies).
|
| https://res.cloudinary.com/dbulfrlrz/images/w_1024,h_661,c_
| s... (from https://protonvpn.com/blog/5-eyes-global-
| surveillance).
|
| Israel, Poland, Portugal and Switzerland are also missing
| from it
| gunian wrote:
| As someone who is in the verge of being killed with no
| side in this entire reality it's cool that in addition to
| trade and economics we now get compute as a geopolitical
| indicator maybe it can really all be automated
| energy123 wrote:
| > Switzerland? Israel?
|
| I hope someone with a better understanding of the details
| can jump in, but they are both Tier 2 (not Tier 3)
| restricted, so maybe there are some available loopholes or
| Presidential override authority or something. Also I
| believe they can still access uncapped compute if they go
| via data centers built in the US.
| thatcat wrote:
| Israel is a known industrial espionage threat to the us,
| how'd you think they got nuclear weapons? some analysts say
| they're the largest threat after china. Not to mention
| theyre currently using ai in targeting systems while under
| investigation for war crimes.
| ben_w wrote:
| > how'd you think they got nuclear weapons?
|
| I rather assumed they were able to re-invent them from
| scratch by the work of their own scientists. I mean, the
| US did it before the invention of the transistor and what
| I've heard about the USSR project is their espionage only
| helped them know the critical mass without needing so
| many test runs, so it doesn't seem like it would be
| implausible that Israel could do it themselves about 20
| years later.
| thatcat wrote:
| Whether it is plausible or not is unrelated to what
| happened.
|
| In 1965 NUMEC owner, Zalman Shapiro - in coordination
| with israeli intelligence, diverted 100 kg of 95%
| enriched uranium from the facility and shipped it to
| Israel. Enriching the material to weapons grade is the
| technically difficult part - which I would think israel
| would certainly not have the budget for given the size of
| its economy.
| ben_w wrote:
| Thanks for the specifics.
|
| > which I would think israel would certainly not have the
| budget for given the size of its economy.
|
| Hmm.
|
| I'll buy that. I've seen a lot of wildly different cost
| estimates for separation work units, so I can only guess
| how much it might have cost at the time.
|
| If it would have otherwise been the full Manhattan
| Project, I don't even need to guess, you're definitely
| correct they couldn't have afforded it:
| https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=gdp+israel+1965
| logicchains wrote:
| Limiting US GPU exports to unaligned countries is completely
| counterproductive as it creates a market in those countries
| for Chinese GPUs, accelerating their development even faster.
| Because a mediocre Huawei GPU is better than no GPU. And it
| harms the revenue of US-aligned GPU companies, slowing their
| development.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Interesting theory. Any evidence that this is how the world
| really works? (And, is there a catchy name for the
| phenomenon?)
| jampekka wrote:
| Import substitution. Before the free trade ideology it
| was quite a popular and (usually) deliberate method for
| industrialisation and technological progress.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Import_substitution_indus
| tri...
| tartoran wrote:
| But also no external competition causes no pressure to
| improve.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| That's why the Huawei story seems different.
|
| I think it's about this attempt to block that actually
| makes the opponent stronger. The export restrictions were
| designed to weaken their competitiveness not enhance!
|
| The restrictions blocked asml and Samsung and others from
| trading with China. Now China can just replace them. It
| seems.
| jampekka wrote:
| Seemed to work for the space and arms races for example.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| While your critiques most likely have some validity (and I am
| not positioned to judge their validity), you failed to offer a
| concrete policy alternative. The rules were undoubtedly made
| with substantial engagement from the industry and academic
| researchers, as there is too much at stake for them not to
| engage, and vigorously. Likely there were no perfect policy
| solutions, but decided to not let the perfect stop the good
| enough since timeliness matters as much or more than the policy
| specifics.
| logicchains wrote:
| Doing nothing is a better alternative, because these
| restrictions will just encourage neutral countries to
| purchase Chinese GPUs, because their access to US GPUs is
| limited by these regulations. This will accelerate the growth
| of Chinese GPU companies and slow the growth of US-aligned
| ones; it's basically equivalent to the majority of nations in
| the world placing sanctions on NVidia.
| 15155 wrote:
| > these rules risk stifling innovation
|
| These rules _intentionally_ "stifle innovation" for foreigners
| - this is a feature, not a bug.
| chriskanan wrote:
| I'm not sure why the link no longer works, but this one works.
| The link should be updated to this one:
| https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/01/15/2025-00...
| cshimmin wrote:
| @dang
| layer8 wrote:
| "@dang" doesn't do anything. You need to email
| hn@ycombinator.com.
| dang wrote:
| Fixed. Thanks!
| cube2222 wrote:
| It's worth noting that this splits countries into three levels -
| first without restrictions, second with medium restrictions,
| third with harsh restrictions.
|
| And the second level, for some reason, includes (among others) a
| bunch of countries that would normally be seen as close US allies
| - e.g. some NATO countries (most of Central/Eastern Europe).
| inglor_cz wrote:
| _includes (among others) a bunch of countries that would
| normally be seen as close US allies - e.g. some NATO countries
| (most of Central /Eastern Europe)._
|
| Yeah, this is really a bit insulting.
| tivert wrote:
| >> And the second level, for some reason, includes (among
| others) a bunch of countries that would normally be seen as
| close US allies - e.g. some NATO countries (most of
| Central/Eastern Europe).
|
| > Yeah, this is really a bit insulting.
|
| So you're insulted some country of other wasn't included in:
|
| > First, this rule creates an exception in new SS 740.27 for
| all transactions involving certain types of end users in
| certain low-risk destinations. Specifically, these are
| destinations in which: (1) the government has implemented
| measures to prevent diversion of advanced technologies, and
| (2) there is an ecosystem that will enable and encourage
| firms to use advanced AI models to advance the common
| national security and foreign policy interests of the United
| States and its allies and partners.
|
| ?
|
| IMHO, it's silly to get insulted over something like that.
| Your feelings are not a priority for an export control law.
|
| Taiwan, even though it's a US ally, is only allowed limited
| access to certain sensitive US technology it deploys (IIRC,
| something about Patriot Missile seeker heads, for instance),
| because their military is full of PRC spies (e.g.
| https://www.smh.com.au/technology/chinese-spies-target-
| taiwa...), so if they had access the system would likely be
| compromised. It's as simple as that.
| surfingdino wrote:
| Someone still sees Eastern Europe as a provider of cheap
| brainpower. This is insulting.
| Chance-Device wrote:
| But is it untrue?
| 15155 wrote:
| The value of a service is whatever someone is willing to pay
| for it - and conversely, the price someone is willing to
| render the service for.
|
| These folks aren't "forced" to provide "cheap brainpower:"
| they are offering services at their market rate.
| pjmlp wrote:
| I see the return of cold war computing model, where many
| countries had their own computer platforms and programming
| languages.
|
| Which apparently might be a good outcome to FOSS operating
| systems, with national distributions like Kylin.
|
| As European I vote for SuSE.
| consumer451 wrote:
| This smells about as well informed as the genius move that
| forced Ukrainian owner, Max Polyakov, to divest from Firefly
| Aerospace. A US government position that was widely derided by
| space industry watchers, and has now been reversed.
|
| This might be a product of the USA being a gerontocracy.
| wslh wrote:
| This feels like deja vu from the crypto wars (1990s). If that
| experience helps, it is impossible to repress knowledge without
| violence, and it motivates more people to hack the system. Good
| times ahead "PGP released its source code as a book to get around
| US export law" <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7885238>
| Hizonner wrote:
| Not the same situation at all. PGP would run on any computer
| you happened to have around. The source code was small enough
| to fit in a book. The people who already had the code _wanted_
| to release it. Lots of people could have rewritten it
| relatively quickly.
|
| The ML stuff they're worried about takes a giant data center to
| train and an unusually beefy computer even to run. The weights
| are enormous and the training data even more enormous. Most of
| the people who have the models, especially the leading ones,
| treat them as trade secrets and also try to claim copyright in
| them. You can only recreate them if you have millions to spend
| and the aforementioned big data center.
| wslh wrote:
| > The ML stuff they're worried about takes a giant data
| center to train and an unusually beefy computer even to run.
|
| Now, consider this: the Palm [1] couldn't even create an RSA
| [2] public/private key pair in "user time" The pace of
| technological advancement is astonishing, and new techniques
| continually emerge to overcome current limitations. For
| example, in 1980, Intel was selling mathematical coprocessors
| [3] that were cutting-edge at the time but would be laughable
| today. It's reasonable to expect that the field of machine
| learning will follow a similar trajectory, making what seems
| computationally impractical now far more accessible in the
| future.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_(PDA)
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_(cryptosystem)
|
| [3] https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_8087
| clhodapp wrote:
| One interesting geopolitical fact about this document that's not
| being discussed much is the way it includes Taiwan in lists of
| "countries".
|
| Usually, the US government tries not to do that.
| kube-system wrote:
| Only in some diplomatic contexts.
|
| https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/taiwan/
| veggieroll wrote:
| The compute limit is dead on arrival, because models are becoming
| more capable with less training anyways. (See DeepSeek, Phi-4)
| pjmlp wrote:
| It is going to be like it was in the 1990s with PGP and such all
| over again.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Related:
|
| _WH Executive Order Affecting Chips and AI Models_
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42683251
| United857 wrote:
| It seems some EU countries are unrestricted but others are. How
| is this compatible with the EU single market/customs union?
| djoldman wrote:
| More information here:
|
| https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/01/15/2025-00...
| PostOnce wrote:
| Looks down to me.
|
| https://archive.is/F78tf
| miovoid wrote:
| Perhaps this regulation will be a major force for next gen
| symbolic AI systems.
| saberience wrote:
| What's the point in this? Isn't Trump going to just cancel this
| immediately on Monday?
|
| I don't see how we can assume it will be enacted at all.
| casebash wrote:
| Most of the comments here only make sense under a model where AI
| isn't going to become extremely powerful AI in the near term.
|
| If you think upcoming models aren't going to be very powerful,
| then you'll probably endorse business-as-usual policies such as
| rejecting any policy that isn't perfect or insisting on a high
| bar of evidence before regulating.
|
| On the other hand, if you have a world model where AI is going to
| provide malicious actors with extremely powerful and dangerous
| technologies within the next few years, then instead of being
| radical, proposal like this start appearing extremely timid.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| Unblocked:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20250117042813if_/https://www.fe...
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