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As a non-US citizen I guess this is the last money I pay to US companies for AI then. I can't help but wonder if it's now obvious that frontier AI work should

As a non-US citizen I guess this is the last money I pay to US companies for AI then. I can't help but wonder if it's now obvious that frontier AI work should not happen in the US. I can understand the KYC aspect of this, but at the same time, how can anyone trust US based AI after this? Maybe this is a continuation of the Pentagon feud, or it's revenge, or it's a KYC play. Either way, you've got a government willing to shut down companies sales over arbitrary reasons. Ironically, I mostly have a subscription to Claude for work, which is primarily for US baed companies.

ViscountPenguin 4mo ago
In my experience, US citizens are completely blind to how much stuff like this makes citizens of other countries hate their government (which often, unfortunately, bleeds over to hate for US citizens; not that I condone hating any group of people based on the actions of their state) The US has spent the last 12ish years betting that they're the only country that matters, but the end of result of that is that somehow when I talk to Australians in my age group the average person has a more positive opinion towards China even than the US.
- ronsor 4mo ago
  The default orientation of Americans toward government is already skepticism and distrust. The average person is questioning "why did you ever like the government in the first place?"
  - themacguffinman 4mo ago
    I don't believe that at all, the average person voted for this government.
    - nearlyepic 4mo ago
      The average person didn't vote.
      - themacguffinman 4mo ago
        If you're referring to voters staying home, staying home is a vote for their state's majority. There's no sense in which the average citizen in a democracy is not responsible for the outcome of a democratic vote.
      - cheesecakegood 4mo ago
        That’s not even factually true. Turnout in 2024 was 63.7%[1] of the voting age population. You’re just wrong. [1] https://ballotpedia.org/Election_results,_2024:_Analysis_of_voter_turnout_in_the_2024_general_election https://ballotpedia.org/Election_results,_2024:_Analysis_of_...
        Lionga 4mo ago
        If you include people not allowed to vote (e.g under 18) it is below 50%
        usrnm 4mo ago
        What do you think "voting age" means? The first sentence on the linked page is "The overall turnout of eligible voters in the 2024 general election was 63.7%"
        nearlyepic 4mo ago
        Huh, I must have inverted that number in my head. Thanks!
      - 9dev 4mo ago
        This is categorically wrong, but even then - those that do not vote at all bear even more responsibility, and are traitors to democracy itself. By not participating in shaping it, you're dishonouring everyone that fought and died for your freedom.
      - vrganj 4mo ago
        Not voting is a vote for the status quo. Not being politically active is a political choice itself.
- Aeolun 4mo ago
  Is that any surprise? China has been very good about not fucking with other countries even though they absolutely have the capability to.
  - ViscountPenguin 4mo ago
    I think that really depends on which country you live in. My country has only had a few relatively minor spats with China, Vietnam less so.
    - amunozo 4mo ago
      Still much less that the US.
- joxdosba 4mo ago
  The average American voter primarily uses their vote in an effort to hurt other people who might support a different team.
  - danlugo92 4mo ago
    [flagged]
    - joxdosba 4mo ago
      If you go outside, you’ll find the vast majority of Americans thought Trump would make an acceptable president. Either they voted for him or didn’t vote against him. It’s because their definition of “acceptable” mostly involves screwing over the other team.
      - cityofdelusion 4mo ago
        I go outside daily in red rural America and this is simply not true. People voted, like they always have and always will, on their wallet and expectations on who will make it a little heavier. The exact same will happen as it swings wildly back the other way if gas doesn’t come back to normal.
      - danlugo92 4mo ago
        > vast majority Trump won by 1.5 margin points, what are you on about? Give me your address I'll have the grass shipped to you my man.
        joxdosba 4mo ago
        You are forgetting to count everyone who voted for him by not voting against him.
        foo12bar 4mo ago
        That's an unfair way of looking at things. Many people don't vote because they don't think they can change anything. Furthermore, the way the U.S. voting system works, if you are in a deep blue or deep red state, your vote will have no effect, since all the states electorates will go towards whoever won the popular vote in that state. So it's really a waste of time unless you live in a swing state.
- 9dev 4mo ago
  > which often, unfortunately, bleeds over to hate for US citizens err... you guys voted for the administration that fucks over the rest of the world. Twice. So tell me, why would you expect the rest of humanity to show any kindness to the populace entirely responsible for what is happening right now?
  - sojournerc 4mo ago
    You do know not all of us voted for him, not even a majority. You could argue the non-voters allowed this outcome. Should we discard the whole democracy thing because we don't like a result? I lament that there wasn't a stronger candidate running against him, but the Democrats didn't have a primary, and even if they did, I'm an independent and do not vote in primaries ( this has changed in Colorado thankfully). A different, stronger candidate could have likely beaten Trump
    - 9dev 4mo ago
      Democracy means that you bear collective responsibility for the government you voted for, regardless of the choices of the individual.
      - echoangle 4mo ago
        I disagree and don’t see where you get that from. Why would that be the case?
- Wowfunhappy 4mo ago
  I agree with you that restricting access to Fable is stupid, but I'm in favor of e.g. GPU export controls. It's certainly annoying, but—well, I don't know where you live, but you don't want to make it easier for China and Russia to build weapons they can use attack to attack Taiwan and Ukraine, right? And the nice thing about the GPU restrictions is that even if they don't work completely, just making the hardware more difficult and expensive to access is useful.
- huevosabio 4mo ago
  I'm a US citizen and though I don't think you should hate people due to their government, I do think you can attribute some responsibility for the government actions to the people. If we live in a democracy, then we are responsible for the actions of our government.
  - JohnMakin 4mo ago
    You do not live in a democracy or anything close to it. It's a constitutional republic, but the representatives are bought and paid for by people who do not have the public's best interest in mind. I do not accept responsibility for things I not only have no control over whatsoever, are governed and controlled by forces much more powerful than I could ever realistically be, even if I wanted to. It's frankly a delusion many americans still hold that they can somehow vote their way out of this situation. I don't know how at all it is salvageable, I think best case for Americans and probably the world is that we slowly lose all relevance until the powers that be get bored and go prey elsewhere.
edg5000 4mo ago
So you're going to use DeepSeek, Qwen, GLM, Kimi and Mistral now? I tried them, and they really fall short of GPT and Claude. Without access to US models, I'd be limited to asking simple questions in chat interfaces and maybe some grunt work in coding CLIs, but even that the weak models will mess up. Nothing has reached Opus and GPT5 levels in my personal experience, which also aligns with what the labs themselves admit ("near-frontier").
- data-ottawa 4mo ago
  Well I am definitely not using the models that I'm not able to access. So now the question is whether the capabilities of other models are worth their far cheaper token prices. Plus, are we at all confident Opus or GPT 5.5 aren't about to get shut off?
- bean469 4mo ago
  Not all people need the SOTA. Also, many take into consideration speed, token / plan cost and many other factors when choosing a model
- ignoramous 4mo ago
  > Nothing has reached Opus and GPT5 levels in my personal experience You mean, GPT 5.5 xhigh and Claude Opus 4.8 max? At least the benchmarks / public evals / rankings show some of the new coding models (ex: Qwen 3.7 Max & Mimo v2.5 Pro) are Opus 4.7 & GPT 5.4 level (but 3x to 5x cheaper): https://artificialanalysis.ai/leaderboards/models https://artificialanalysis.ai/leaderboards/models / https://gertlabs.com/rankings https://gertlabs.com/rankings Personally speaking, in the past 1mo or so, I haven't missed GPT 5.4 / Opus 4.7 after moving to Qwen 3.7 / MiMo 2.5 / Kimi 2.6 et al.
  - edg5000 4mo ago
    That is very promising news. I will re-eval them all shortly. And you are suggesting that a higher reasoning budget can make up for weaker per-token performance? That is indeed worth evaluating. Comparisons using the vendor-specific effort is apples and oranges. Ideally the evals would use a thinking token cap or something, so we can compare per-token performance. But eval is hard enough as it is.
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]

ViscountPenguin 4mo ago

In my experience, US citizens are completely blind to how much stuff like this makes citizens of other countries hate their government (which often, unfortunately, bleeds over to hate for US citizens; not that I condone hating any group of people based on the actions of their state) The US has spent the last 12ish years betting that they're the only country that matters, but the end of result of that is that somehow when I talk to Australians in my age group the average person has a more positive opinion towards China even than the US.

ronsor 4mo ago
The default orientation of Americans toward government is already skepticism and distrust. The average person is questioning "why did you ever like the government in the first place?"
- themacguffinman 4mo ago
  I don't believe that at all, the average person voted for this government.
  - nearlyepic 4mo ago
    The average person didn't vote.
    - themacguffinman 4mo ago
      If you're referring to voters staying home, staying home is a vote for their state's majority. There's no sense in which the average citizen in a democracy is not responsible for the outcome of a democratic vote.
    - cheesecakegood 4mo ago
      That’s not even factually true. Turnout in 2024 was 63.7%[1] of the voting age population. You’re just wrong. [1] https://ballotpedia.org/Election_results,_2024:_Analysis_of_voter_turnout_in_the_2024_general_election https://ballotpedia.org/Election_results,_2024:_Analysis_of_...
      - Lionga 4mo ago
        If you include people not allowed to vote (e.g under 18) it is below 50%
        usrnm 4mo ago
        What do you think "voting age" means? The first sentence on the linked page is "The overall turnout of eligible voters in the 2024 general election was 63.7%"
      - nearlyepic 4mo ago
        Huh, I must have inverted that number in my head. Thanks!
    - 9dev 4mo ago
      This is categorically wrong, but even then - those that do not vote at all bear even more responsibility, and are traitors to democracy itself. By not participating in shaping it, you're dishonouring everyone that fought and died for your freedom.
    - vrganj 4mo ago
      Not voting is a vote for the status quo. Not being politically active is a political choice itself.
Aeolun 4mo ago
Is that any surprise? China has been very good about not fucking with other countries even though they absolutely have the capability to.
- ViscountPenguin 4mo ago
  I think that really depends on which country you live in. My country has only had a few relatively minor spats with China, Vietnam less so.
  - amunozo 4mo ago
    Still much less that the US.
joxdosba 4mo ago
The average American voter primarily uses their vote in an effort to hurt other people who might support a different team.
- danlugo92 4mo ago
  [flagged]
  - joxdosba 4mo ago
    If you go outside, you’ll find the vast majority of Americans thought Trump would make an acceptable president. Either they voted for him or didn’t vote against him. It’s because their definition of “acceptable” mostly involves screwing over the other team.
    - cityofdelusion 4mo ago
      I go outside daily in red rural America and this is simply not true. People voted, like they always have and always will, on their wallet and expectations on who will make it a little heavier. The exact same will happen as it swings wildly back the other way if gas doesn’t come back to normal.
    - danlugo92 4mo ago
      > vast majority Trump won by 1.5 margin points, what are you on about? Give me your address I'll have the grass shipped to you my man.
      - joxdosba 4mo ago
        You are forgetting to count everyone who voted for him by not voting against him.
        foo12bar 4mo ago
        That's an unfair way of looking at things. Many people don't vote because they don't think they can change anything. Furthermore, the way the U.S. voting system works, if you are in a deep blue or deep red state, your vote will have no effect, since all the states electorates will go towards whoever won the popular vote in that state. So it's really a waste of time unless you live in a swing state.
9dev 4mo ago
> which often, unfortunately, bleeds over to hate for US citizens err... you guys voted for the administration that fucks over the rest of the world. Twice. So tell me, why would you expect the rest of humanity to show any kindness to the populace entirely responsible for what is happening right now?
- sojournerc 4mo ago
  You do know not all of us voted for him, not even a majority. You could argue the non-voters allowed this outcome. Should we discard the whole democracy thing because we don't like a result? I lament that there wasn't a stronger candidate running against him, but the Democrats didn't have a primary, and even if they did, I'm an independent and do not vote in primaries ( this has changed in Colorado thankfully). A different, stronger candidate could have likely beaten Trump
  - 9dev 4mo ago
    Democracy means that you bear collective responsibility for the government you voted for, regardless of the choices of the individual.
    - echoangle 4mo ago
      I disagree and don’t see where you get that from. Why would that be the case?
Wowfunhappy 4mo ago
I agree with you that restricting access to Fable is stupid, but I'm in favor of e.g. GPU export controls. It's certainly annoying, but—well, I don't know where you live, but you don't want to make it easier for China and Russia to build weapons they can use attack to attack Taiwan and Ukraine, right? And the nice thing about the GPU restrictions is that even if they don't work completely, just making the hardware more difficult and expensive to access is useful.
huevosabio 4mo ago
I'm a US citizen and though I don't think you should hate people due to their government, I do think you can attribute some responsibility for the government actions to the people. If we live in a democracy, then we are responsible for the actions of our government.
- JohnMakin 4mo ago
  You do not live in a democracy or anything close to it. It's a constitutional republic, but the representatives are bought and paid for by people who do not have the public's best interest in mind. I do not accept responsibility for things I not only have no control over whatsoever, are governed and controlled by forces much more powerful than I could ever realistically be, even if I wanted to. It's frankly a delusion many americans still hold that they can somehow vote their way out of this situation. I don't know how at all it is salvageable, I think best case for Americans and probably the world is that we slowly lose all relevance until the powers that be get bored and go prey elsewhere.

edg5000 4mo ago

So you're going to use DeepSeek, Qwen, GLM, Kimi and Mistral now? I tried them, and they really fall short of GPT and Claude. Without access to US models, I'd be limited to asking simple questions in chat interfaces and maybe some grunt work in coding CLIs, but even that the weak models will mess up. Nothing has reached Opus and GPT5 levels in my personal experience, which also aligns with what the labs themselves admit ("near-frontier").

data-ottawa 4mo ago
Well I am definitely not using the models that I'm not able to access. So now the question is whether the capabilities of other models are worth their far cheaper token prices. Plus, are we at all confident Opus or GPT 5.5 aren't about to get shut off?
bean469 4mo ago
Not all people need the SOTA. Also, many take into consideration speed, token / plan cost and many other factors when choosing a model
ignoramous 4mo ago
> Nothing has reached Opus and GPT5 levels in my personal experience You mean, GPT 5.5 xhigh and Claude Opus 4.8 max? At least the benchmarks / public evals / rankings show some of the new coding models (ex: Qwen 3.7 Max & Mimo v2.5 Pro) are Opus 4.7 & GPT 5.4 level (but 3x to 5x cheaper): https://artificialanalysis.ai/leaderboards/models https://artificialanalysis.ai/leaderboards/models / https://gertlabs.com/rankings https://gertlabs.com/rankings Personally speaking, in the past 1mo or so, I haven't missed GPT 5.4 / Opus 4.7 after moving to Qwen 3.7 / MiMo 2.5 / Kimi 2.6 et al.
- edg5000 4mo ago
  That is very promising news. I will re-eval them all shortly. And you are suggesting that a higher reasoning budget can make up for weaker per-token performance? That is indeed worth evaluating. Comparisons using the vendor-specific effort is apples and oranges. Ideally the evals would use a thinking token cap or something, so we can compare per-token performance. But eval is hard enough as it is.

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]