6 ms·

The US government exists to defend capital interests. It's why we can't buy BYD cars. It's why we can't import any cars unless they're 25 years old. It's why a

by jmyeet 4mo ago

The US government exists to defend capital interests. It's why we can't buy BYD cars. It's why we can't import any cars unless they're 25 years old. It's why a Tiktok sale was forced. It's why the US is seeking to block states from banning prediction markets. It's why the federal government is seeking to block states from blocking data center projects. As soon as DeepSeek came out I realized what was going on: China was going to make sure that no US company was going to "own" AI. It is an issue of national security. It's why the US essentially blocks US tech companies to maintain sovereignty. I'm reminded of the browser wars of the 1990s that led to the antitrust suit against Microsoft. Microsoft used the "commoditize your complement" strategy [1] against Netscape. The US has blocked the export of not only EUV lithography but high-end chips to China. China doesn't want to be dependent on US platforms or policy. So China is going to make sure there are open source models available and the US government is going to try and stop them to protect US tech companies. [1]: https://gwern.net/complement https://gwern.net/complement

bijowo1676 4mo ago
Seems like interests of US government and US capital (monopolize and corner markets, jack up prices, extract economic rent in perpetuity) run strictly against interests of the broader US consumers and overall global population
rdudek 4mo ago
We're in late-stage capitalism here. The pitchforks are already out and spreading across the globe. Unless the big companies get broken up, this nation will split into either a police state or socialist state.
- graphime 4mo ago
  [dead]
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
bitmasher9 4mo ago
The reason why some Capital Interests want to blacklist DeepSeek in the US is so that you are forced to buy Claude/GPT/Gemini, which will feed revenue into an industry that requires revenue (or it’s a big problem). The reason why some Capital Interests don’t want to ban DeepSeek is so companies that utilize AI have more options, and running your own DeepSeek cluster acts as an independent cost comparison for enterprise inference contracts. The raising AI valuation is giving more weight to those that want to blacklist DeepSeek. The AI Safety narrative is strong. I see a path where any institution with enough compute might be watched in a similar was chem labs are observed by the DEA.
- bijowo1676 4mo ago
  if you look at share of industry profits, currently most of AI profits are captured by NVIDIA and cloud providers banning deepseek/open weight models will allow Ant/OAI jack up prices and extract more profits for themselves keeping open weights models available will keep current industry profit distribution where majority is captured by nvidia and cloud providers
  - lelanthran 4mo ago
    > keeping open weights models available will keep current industry profit distribution where majority is captured by nvidia and cloud providers With the Chinese manufacturing capacity, how long do you think this will remain true for? You can't spin up a fab in a year, that's true, but you can in five years, at which point all the protectionism in the world isn't going to help.
    - bijowo1676 4mo ago
      DeepSeek et al has contributed tremendously, not only by sharing open weights models, but also genuinely improving the SOTA in inference and training, especially given their compute-constrained situation. if China starts making cheap GPUs for the entire globe, I will say THANK YOU and will continue my work on AI. The collaborative nature of open-source (free software) is the ultimate good that benefits entire humanity. I value that more than any other benefit of protecting any company. How much I care about Nvidia or OpenAI market cap? absolutely zero How much I care about the poor, but smart and creative people on Earth being able to contribute to the state of the art of AI development? 100% more.
CPLX 4mo ago
The reason we can't buy BYD cars is because if we allowed it without restrictions, it would utterly and completely destroy the United States auto industry. That's terrible public policy, and we should not allow it. Before anyone starts talking about the free market, there is no free market here whatsoever. The fact that BYD's cost structure is what it is is the direct result of Chinese industrial policy. Unilateral surrender in a core aspect of statecraft, which involves maintaining our industrial power and skilled labor force, is absolutely insane. I hope my government never gets convinced by market fundamentalist idiots to do such a thing, any more than it already has, to our great detriment. The Chinese don't make these kinds of idiotic mistakes, which is how they have amassed the power, wealth, and influence that they have.
- ceejayoz 4mo ago
  > The reason we can't buy BYD cars is because if we allowed it without restrictions, it would utterly and completely destroy the United States auto industry. That's terrible public policy, and we should not allow it. Yeah, that was the argument against Japanese car makers, too. A shitty system needs destroying sometimes. Competition from Toyota/Honda was critical in making US auto makers up their game. It is terrible public policy to fall decades behind making expensive shitty versions of what the rest of the world has.
  - CPLX 4mo ago
    It's not like I don't understand the argument on the other side of this. I've heard it my entire life. It's been dominant since the late 1970s and 1980s. It's just that it's wrong. We need a competent industrial policy and support for skilled labor and policies that encourage domestic production. I'm not sure if you've noticed, but our country has become fucked, overwhelmed by financialization, scams, monopoly rents and extraction, and all of the wealth accumulating to a handful of people, while we've become less resilient and, at this point, almost certainly have lost our place as the most dominant economy and industrial power in the world.
    - ceejayoz 4mo ago
preommr 4mo ago
[flagged]
dakolli 4mo ago
China does not think llms are a matter of national security, they aren't as brain broken as the west.
- wagwang 4mo ago
  That's 100% untrue lmao.
  - dakolli 4mo ago
    China is far more focused on robotics. Deepseek is largely bootstrapped by the hedge fund that developed it. They received a grant from the government of China, and recently an investment. Imagine thinking text autocomplete is a matter of national security. China will flood the west with affordable robotics and watch the West eat itself alive. They know Western capital owners are so greedy they'll screw over their entire society to chase a buck and replace labor..
    - yitianjian 4mo ago
      LLMs and current AI models are absolutely top priority for the Chinese government, they’re just funding robotics as well
    - wagwang 4mo ago
      Of course its a matter of national security if there are military applications. The point of robotics is also weird because they've already widely adopted robotics within their own manufacturing and also America already replaced the majority of their labor by offshoring so I dont know how they would destroy american society by introducing robotics.
      - dakolli 4mo ago
        Show me, Chinese are not replacing their manufacturing with robots. You can't just say things off vibes alone because you think it sounds right. You're just making shit up off the top of your tongue. Show me where Chinese are replacing manufacturing labor with robots, please show me?
epolanski 4mo ago
Chinese have a wider outlook on it. Politically they believe AI belongs to humanity, which is why they are basically the only ones left publishing research in the open. That's probably part of their socialist nature. But also a financial one. They believe that models are commodities, that you can swap one for the other and that the only thing that matters are the applications built upon them. So they want to make sure that the world, and their own companies, are not limited in their business and application by a protected US commodity. They will keep releasing in the open no matter what for quite some time. It's quite impressive how the latest years I have found more and more to empathize with China than many of the western counterparts. But it's increasingly clear that since the last decade protectionism and nationalism is taking the place of globalization, even though globalization has been a terrific success in lifting billions out of poverty and making the US thrive.
- mekdoonggi 4mo ago
  Also, the open-weight local models are proving that the commodity can be delivered for most applications at a far lower price than frontier is charging.
- dyauspitr 4mo ago
  I think you’re assigning magnanimity to a competitor that is lagging behind and has every, state backed incentive to capture the market the only way they can. By making the models dirt cheap to access. If the roles were reversed you wouldn’t see open source versions of Chinese models. Much like you don’t see them open sourcing their blade battery design.
- rapind 4mo ago
  > It's quite impressive how the latest years I have found more and more to empathize with China than many of the western counterparts. I'm not sure that this is because China is suddenly a great place or political system so much as a reflection of many western nations speed running to autocracy in the name of manliness.
  - antonvs 4mo ago
krunck 4mo ago
> It's why a Tiktok sale was forced. I think that has more to do with controlling narratives that the USG doesn't like.
- wbl 4mo ago
  Ever see a tiktok about may 35?
  - brendoelfrendo 4mo ago
    I don't use TikTok, but a cursory search shows that there's a #tiananmensquare tag that has a few thousand videos, including many about the protests and Tank Man. So while I haven't seen a TikTok about it, someone has.
    - thejazzman 4mo ago
      I don't (could be wrong) think other American's seeing content on American TikTok is relevant to China's censorship of what Chinese people see in China
      - brendoelfrendo 4mo ago
        I don't think that's what the person I was replying to was saying, though.
  - hgoel 4mo ago
    Why should that mean that Americans should prefer that TikTok restrict narratives unfavoraroble to American oligarchs?
    - wbl 4mo ago
      What do you think the Chinese would use Tiktok for if Taiwan heated up again?
      - 4mo ago
teravor 4mo ago
> It's why we can't buy BYD cars are you sure it has nothing to do with the fact that those cars are very heavy, potentially fire-making (battery firmware) computers on wheels that can be rooted (or are already) at any time by their manufacturers in China?
- antonvs 4mo ago
  > potentially fire-making (battery firmware) computers on wheels Is Tesla any different?
  - teravor 4mo ago
    > Is Tesla any different? if you are adversary of the US and the possibility of a hot conflict with it exists, it is not.
- wat10000 4mo ago
  What makes BYD different from, say, Volvo, which sells EVs freely in the US?
  - teravor 4mo ago
    Headquarters Gothenburg, Sweden
    - wat10000 4mo ago
      Parent Geely Holding (78.7%)
      - teravor 4mo ago
        and if you see the parent starting to replace Volvo engineers with Chinese nationals you will witness sudden change of heart by US officials; until then it really is just a financial fiction
        4mo ago
heyheyhouhou 4mo ago
I'm happy that China is doing that. US cannot be trusted anymore. Not saying that China can be trusted either, but I think having more actors is better for all of us.
gypsy_boots 4mo ago
> It's why a Tiktok sale was forced Well that and the overwhelming pro-palestine content on that platform. We certainly couldn't have that.
hereme888 4mo ago
Those data centers that "states" want to block: the CCP was directly tied to funding the protests and movements to weaken the U.S. technologically. Kevin O'Leary exposed it, in collaboration with the White House.
- inigyou 4mo ago
  Or maybe people want to be able to sleep? How the fuck did the AI bubble industry manage to take one of the cleanest industries and make it dirty again?
  - hereme888 4mo ago
    That's precisely the CCP brainwashing: the data centers in question were actually VERY clean, and would give the communities a ton of jobs. This happens all the time for people with agendas: pollution fear mongering for projects that are actually super clean and useful. Seen it happen in real life, many times.
    - inigyou 4mo ago
      Why are there audio recordings of them being very loud?
      - hereme888 4mo ago
        Noise complaints are for <10% of data centers. In the case of Loudoun, they did a good job building it to be under the county's 55 dB threshold. They followed the the standards, and still they're trying to diminish noise out of respect for residents. Prince William/Greak Oak data center from Amazon had protests since 2022 over buzzing/whirring. Amazon said it was installing acoustic shrouds, and idk any further updates. The one case that I'd acknowledge really needs fixing is Microsoft's Mount Pleasant.

by jmyeet 4mo ago

bijowo1676 4mo ago

Seems like interests of US government and US capital (monopolize and corner markets, jack up prices, extract economic rent in perpetuity) run strictly against interests of the broader US consumers and overall global population

rdudek 4mo ago

We're in late-stage capitalism here. The pitchforks are already out and spreading across the globe. Unless the big companies get broken up, this nation will split into either a police state or socialist state.

graphime 4mo ago
[dead]

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

bitmasher9 4mo ago

The reason why some Capital Interests want to blacklist DeepSeek in the US is so that you are forced to buy Claude/GPT/Gemini, which will feed revenue into an industry that requires revenue (or it’s a big problem). The reason why some Capital Interests don’t want to ban DeepSeek is so companies that utilize AI have more options, and running your own DeepSeek cluster acts as an independent cost comparison for enterprise inference contracts. The raising AI valuation is giving more weight to those that want to blacklist DeepSeek. The AI Safety narrative is strong. I see a path where any institution with enough compute might be watched in a similar was chem labs are observed by the DEA.

bijowo1676 4mo ago
if you look at share of industry profits, currently most of AI profits are captured by NVIDIA and cloud providers banning deepseek/open weight models will allow Ant/OAI jack up prices and extract more profits for themselves keeping open weights models available will keep current industry profit distribution where majority is captured by nvidia and cloud providers
- lelanthran 4mo ago
  > keeping open weights models available will keep current industry profit distribution where majority is captured by nvidia and cloud providers With the Chinese manufacturing capacity, how long do you think this will remain true for? You can't spin up a fab in a year, that's true, but you can in five years, at which point all the protectionism in the world isn't going to help.
  - bijowo1676 4mo ago
    DeepSeek et al has contributed tremendously, not only by sharing open weights models, but also genuinely improving the SOTA in inference and training, especially given their compute-constrained situation. if China starts making cheap GPUs for the entire globe, I will say THANK YOU and will continue my work on AI. The collaborative nature of open-source (free software) is the ultimate good that benefits entire humanity. I value that more than any other benefit of protecting any company. How much I care about Nvidia or OpenAI market cap? absolutely zero How much I care about the poor, but smart and creative people on Earth being able to contribute to the state of the art of AI development? 100% more.

CPLX 4mo ago

The reason we can't buy BYD cars is because if we allowed it without restrictions, it would utterly and completely destroy the United States auto industry. That's terrible public policy, and we should not allow it. Before anyone starts talking about the free market, there is no free market here whatsoever. The fact that BYD's cost structure is what it is is the direct result of Chinese industrial policy. Unilateral surrender in a core aspect of statecraft, which involves maintaining our industrial power and skilled labor force, is absolutely insane. I hope my government never gets convinced by market fundamentalist idiots to do such a thing, any more than it already has, to our great detriment. The Chinese don't make these kinds of idiotic mistakes, which is how they have amassed the power, wealth, and influence that they have.

ceejayoz 4mo ago
> The reason we can't buy BYD cars is because if we allowed it without restrictions, it would utterly and completely destroy the United States auto industry. That's terrible public policy, and we should not allow it. Yeah, that was the argument against Japanese car makers, too. A shitty system needs destroying sometimes. Competition from Toyota/Honda was critical in making US auto makers up their game. It is terrible public policy to fall decades behind making expensive shitty versions of what the rest of the world has.
- CPLX 4mo ago
  It's not like I don't understand the argument on the other side of this. I've heard it my entire life. It's been dominant since the late 1970s and 1980s. It's just that it's wrong. We need a competent industrial policy and support for skilled labor and policies that encourage domestic production. I'm not sure if you've noticed, but our country has become fucked, overwhelmed by financialization, scams, monopoly rents and extraction, and all of the wealth accumulating to a handful of people, while we've become less resilient and, at this point, almost certainly have lost our place as the most dominant economy and industrial power in the world.
  - ceejayoz 4mo ago

preommr 4mo ago

[flagged]

dakolli 4mo ago

China does not think llms are a matter of national security, they aren't as brain broken as the west.

wagwang 4mo ago
That's 100% untrue lmao.
- dakolli 4mo ago
  China is far more focused on robotics. Deepseek is largely bootstrapped by the hedge fund that developed it. They received a grant from the government of China, and recently an investment. Imagine thinking text autocomplete is a matter of national security. China will flood the west with affordable robotics and watch the West eat itself alive. They know Western capital owners are so greedy they'll screw over their entire society to chase a buck and replace labor..
  - yitianjian 4mo ago
    LLMs and current AI models are absolutely top priority for the Chinese government, they’re just funding robotics as well
  - wagwang 4mo ago
    Of course its a matter of national security if there are military applications. The point of robotics is also weird because they've already widely adopted robotics within their own manufacturing and also America already replaced the majority of their labor by offshoring so I dont know how they would destroy american society by introducing robotics.
    - dakolli 4mo ago
      Show me, Chinese are not replacing their manufacturing with robots. You can't just say things off vibes alone because you think it sounds right. You're just making shit up off the top of your tongue. Show me where Chinese are replacing manufacturing labor with robots, please show me?

epolanski 4mo ago

Chinese have a wider outlook on it. Politically they believe AI belongs to humanity, which is why they are basically the only ones left publishing research in the open. That's probably part of their socialist nature. But also a financial one. They believe that models are commodities, that you can swap one for the other and that the only thing that matters are the applications built upon them. So they want to make sure that the world, and their own companies, are not limited in their business and application by a protected US commodity. They will keep releasing in the open no matter what for quite some time. It's quite impressive how the latest years I have found more and more to empathize with China than many of the western counterparts. But it's increasingly clear that since the last decade protectionism and nationalism is taking the place of globalization, even though globalization has been a terrific success in lifting billions out of poverty and making the US thrive.

mekdoonggi 4mo ago
Also, the open-weight local models are proving that the commodity can be delivered for most applications at a far lower price than frontier is charging.
dyauspitr 4mo ago
I think you’re assigning magnanimity to a competitor that is lagging behind and has every, state backed incentive to capture the market the only way they can. By making the models dirt cheap to access. If the roles were reversed you wouldn’t see open source versions of Chinese models. Much like you don’t see them open sourcing their blade battery design.
rapind 4mo ago
> It's quite impressive how the latest years I have found more and more to empathize with China than many of the western counterparts. I'm not sure that this is because China is suddenly a great place or political system so much as a reflection of many western nations speed running to autocracy in the name of manliness.
- antonvs 4mo ago

krunck 4mo ago

> It's why a Tiktok sale was forced. I think that has more to do with controlling narratives that the USG doesn't like.

wbl 4mo ago
Ever see a tiktok about may 35?
- brendoelfrendo 4mo ago
  I don't use TikTok, but a cursory search shows that there's a #tiananmensquare tag that has a few thousand videos, including many about the protests and Tank Man. So while I haven't seen a TikTok about it, someone has.
  - thejazzman 4mo ago
    I don't (could be wrong) think other American's seeing content on American TikTok is relevant to China's censorship of what Chinese people see in China
    - brendoelfrendo 4mo ago
      I don't think that's what the person I was replying to was saying, though.
- hgoel 4mo ago
  Why should that mean that Americans should prefer that TikTok restrict narratives unfavoraroble to American oligarchs?
  - wbl 4mo ago
    What do you think the Chinese would use Tiktok for if Taiwan heated up again?
    - 4mo ago

teravor 4mo ago

> It's why we can't buy BYD cars are you sure it has nothing to do with the fact that those cars are very heavy, potentially fire-making (battery firmware) computers on wheels that can be rooted (or are already) at any time by their manufacturers in China?

antonvs 4mo ago
> potentially fire-making (battery firmware) computers on wheels Is Tesla any different?
- teravor 4mo ago
  > Is Tesla any different? if you are adversary of the US and the possibility of a hot conflict with it exists, it is not.
wat10000 4mo ago
What makes BYD different from, say, Volvo, which sells EVs freely in the US?
- teravor 4mo ago
  Headquarters Gothenburg, Sweden
  - wat10000 4mo ago
    Parent Geely Holding (78.7%)
    - teravor 4mo ago
      and if you see the parent starting to replace Volvo engineers with Chinese nationals you will witness sudden change of heart by US officials; until then it really is just a financial fiction
      - 4mo ago

heyheyhouhou 4mo ago

I'm happy that China is doing that. US cannot be trusted anymore. Not saying that China can be trusted either, but I think having more actors is better for all of us.

gypsy_boots 4mo ago

> It's why a Tiktok sale was forced Well that and the overwhelming pro-palestine content on that platform. We certainly couldn't have that.

hereme888 4mo ago

Those data centers that "states" want to block: the CCP was directly tied to funding the protests and movements to weaken the U.S. technologically. Kevin O'Leary exposed it, in collaboration with the White House.

inigyou 4mo ago
Or maybe people want to be able to sleep? How the fuck did the AI bubble industry manage to take one of the cleanest industries and make it dirty again?
- hereme888 4mo ago
  That's precisely the CCP brainwashing: the data centers in question were actually VERY clean, and would give the communities a ton of jobs. This happens all the time for people with agendas: pollution fear mongering for projects that are actually super clean and useful. Seen it happen in real life, many times.
  - inigyou 4mo ago
    Why are there audio recordings of them being very loud?
    - hereme888 4mo ago
      Noise complaints are for <10% of data centers. In the case of Loudoun, they did a good job building it to be under the county's 55 dB threshold. They followed the the standards, and still they're trying to diminish noise out of respect for residents. Prince William/Greak Oak data center from Amazon had protests since 2022 over buzzing/whirring. Amazon said it was installing acoustic shrouds, and idk any further updates. The one case that I'd acknowledge really needs fixing is Microsoft's Mount Pleasant.