YHK - yet another hacker news clone

12 points vld_chk 2 hours ago 13 comments

I don’t know if it’s just me, but yesterday’s US decision to ban access to the Fable model feels like an epochal shift in the “AI race,” something on the scale of the Trinity test.

It is hard to count how many boxes were ticked yesterday:

A government shutting down an AI model it doesn’t like? A government revoking tens of billions of dollars in revenue from a barely profitable $1T startup whose entire trajectory, and in essence its survival, depends on the commercial success of that model? Access to an AI model being governed by citizenship, likely verified through rigorous ID checks?

Imagine that the model is made available again next week. Can we trust it, or trust the changes imposed by Anthropic to comply with the US? Likely not. Can we trust that the US government will not have access to the non-restricted model for its own cybersecurity operations? Likely not.

There is little doubt that China will start to follow suit. We already see Chinese companies slowly scaling back their openness, and there are rumors that this trend will continue. Now we can expect Chinese companies to start releasing redacted models or limiting access based on nationality or location.

It feels like the US government opened Pandora’s box yesterday and pushed us into the territory of a weaponized AI race, with more restrictions, control, and regulation of access. Even if, in the end, this is all another TACO story or a “marketing campaign” from Anthropic, the damage is very unlikely to be undone.

bigyabai 2 hours ago | parent

> There is little doubt that China will start to follow suit.

According to who? China loves picking up the slack that America drops. When America turns it's nose up at slave labor, China exports Xinjiang cotton. When Americans get iffy about manufacturing chemicals and refining rare earths, China does the dirty work at-cost. When Russians need weapons, China crosses the sanctions to deliver them.

My nearest estimation is that China will make some kind of announcement declaring no intention to limit AI exports. A lot of their leverage stems from undermining American control of AI research, which they can continue to escalate by offering no/low guidelines models to foreign customers. America's stance on this is overly politicized, which is a prime opportunity for China to look like the adult in the room (and get paid in the process).

kgeist 53 minutes ago | parent

I agree. China has a huge opportunity to boost its soft power globally as US companies pull back from the world stage. It would be very short-sighted of China to miss out on this. Chinese LLMs are trained with pro-CCP biases (e.g. Taiwan); when people use their official APIs, they can spy on user activity all over the world. I will be surprised if they follow suit.

russellbeattie 1 hour ago | parent

The ban is 100% politically motivated retribution because Anthropic told Trump and Hegseth to go pound sand. The US government is purposefully screwing with the company because they refused to play ball and embarrassed the administration. It's a transparent effort to take revenge on a perceived political enemy as well as promote a jingoistic agenda of "US Citizens Only" nationalism.

nimblist 8 minutes ago | parent

100% this it's the usual transparent Trump revenge tactics. The sad/scary fact is that there seem to be plenty of people who either can't or choose not to see it.

dude250711 50 minutes ago | parent

"...a barely profitable $1T startup..."

My recommendation for them would be next time to create a profitable start-up or one that is valued at less than $1T.

PeterStuer 49 minutes ago | parent

Sensing the mood here in Europe, this has been a defining moment that wil have an impact far beyond just AI.

dgellow 46 minutes ago | parent

I really hope it’s the case, so far we had so many wake up calls that are eventually just forgotten with nothing happening

zwaps 38 minutes ago | parent

It will not. We are unable.

vld_chk 18 minutes ago | parent

I live in the UK, and as much as I love Europe as place to live, our future here looks very grim. Systematic problems multiplied to national inability to fund serious projects and cooperate at scale — this is a recipe for a disaster

dgellow 46 minutes ago | parent

In a serious industry that would be the case, yes. However the software industry feels really immature and unserious. This year we’ve seen the shift to making everything agentic without understanding the associated cost and associated risks, at a ridiculous speed. I mean, the industry embraced integrating so deeply into all aspects of their business AI vendors who do not have an actual business model. I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s just brushed off by Monday

vanuatu 40 minutes ago | parent

I wouldnt be surprised if the big labs become semi-nationalized commodities a la electricity / railroads due to national security, with the best models gatekept from outsiders trying to distill it

And I'm generally bearish on Chinese models catching up at this point, American labs are pulling away especially with mythos-tier models, and early signs of RSI (not to mention the benchmaxxing going on from the chinese labs). If mythos allows users to execute agentic cybersecurity exploits at scale then the right thing to do is to guard access until you find a way to guardrail against it, which may be impossible

vld_chk 4 minutes ago | parent

I am not sure we have anything comparable with AI. Utility like electricity was hard to regulate from people because at some point anyone can build their own generator at the backyard.

AI if anything is opposite. Extremely high bar to build, and every next increment requires at best linear scale of resources.

If we imagine that AI became semi-nationalized and heavy regulated, then we enter the world where governments select companies and people to have access to capabilities which vast outlast capabilities available on the market. Company A is in “access list” and can deploy ruthless AI agent capable of advanced combined cyber operations; company B is denied. Who will win?

If we add here polarization and already historic high inequality, it reads like a straight recipe from Cyberpunk sci-fi.

HelloUsername 35 minutes ago | parent

Straight answer to your question: "No."

As soon as the bomb of the Trinity test was detonated, the whole world entered the nuclear age, from that moment, irreversible. Quite a scale of an event to compare to.