6 ms·

This is regulatory capture in action. This will make it hard/impossible for new vendors to come into the market and only established companies will get to play,

This is regulatory capture in action. This will make it hard/impossible for new vendors to come into the market and only established companies will get to play, and charge, for LLMs. What does this mean for open source? Will it become illegal to download weights? What about train your own? Are we heading to a world where GPU use is regulated to ensure that illegal LLMs aren't being processed on your machine? More broadly though, how will this stop anyone but average people? Countries outside the us will completely ignore this and keep developing and moving ahead. Maybe Europe will adopt similar things but the genie is out. I can train insainly powerful models on my laptop. If you want to stop LLMs with legislation you can't do it like this.

microgpt 4mo ago
How is this regulatory capture? Any new LLM company can just exist outside of the US and export to everyone.
- plemer 4mo ago
  You’re saying it’s not regulatory capture because it’s not enforced globally?
  - itemize123 4mo ago
    it's not regulatory capture, because they are not regulating what customers can use - it's limiting what some companies can serve. it's way less impactful to the market as a whole.
- iAMkenough 4mo ago
  Until they can’t.
  - mikestorrent 4mo ago
    Right. That's what sanctions can accomplish...
  - kdheiwns 4mo ago
    Countries who've made the mistake of allying with the US might face sanctions or some sort of threats. People will just use Chinese AI then. This is the US biting itself in the ass.
  - noisy_boy 4mo ago
    It is as if people can't imagine the concept of sanctions despite their liberal use over the years.
    - microgpt 4mo ago
      Sanctioning a data file? Did it work for the PGP source code?
foota 4mo ago
What? This is the opposite of regulatory capture. Neither anthropic nor openai are getting to choose what happens with their models.
- mediaman 4mo ago
  Regulatory capture doesn't necessarily mean the regulated get to decide what the regulators do in precise steps. It can simply mean they support and exist within a regulatory regime that greatly benefits the regulated. In fact, you generally don't want them directly telling the regulators what to do. Instead, the regulators make complex, costly rules that only large establishment players can follow. The regulators look like they're doing their job; the regulated enjoy higher margins and protection from disruption.
  - ZappoMan 4mo ago
    Exactly! The thing that squeezes out new entrants isn't only the compliance cost, it's that your whole roadmap ends up resting on access you don't control. We already saw the terms moved under us once with Fable, the retention policy changed and some requests started routing to a weaker model, none of us small operators had any say in that. Now access itself is a government decisions. For anyone building on top of these APIs that's the real barrier, not the rule-following overhead but the fact that the ground can shift mid-flight and you can't negotiate with whoever's moving it. Which is exactly why open weights start looking less like ideology and more like risk management.
  - thayne 4mo ago
    And the regulated may even publicly complain about the regulations, to increase the illusion that it isn't regulatory capture.
  - no-name-here 4mo ago
    How does this benefit the regulated? I'd say it dooms the regulated: * with the government requiring the regulated to obtain approval to add each customer, they're losing a massive number of their customers * and even if a customer gets approved, every such customer now sees that access to the regulated can (and has been) shutoff with no notice if the gov doesn’t like the provider or customer - it's now a massive supply chain risk for any customer to use a regulated provider * the regulated losing a massive part of their customer base for both of the above reasons means significant impairment of their revenue, as well as their valuation, and staying ahead of their competitors and open models requires massive ongoing investment Open models are mere months behind.
throwaw12 4mo ago
> I can train insainly powerful models on my laptop Can you?
- kreutz 4mo ago
  Correction: Can you yet?
  - throwaw12 4mo ago
    Anthropic and OpenAI: Dear Uncle Sam, it seems laptops became too powerful, can you please do something Uncle Sam: For national security reasons starting from now on every purchase of GPU model with higher than X Petaflops will need written permission by the US president Anthropic and OpenAI: Look poor citizens, we are willing to share our capacity with you in limited form, by using our LLM you can avoid spending 35 years in the waiting list to buy a GPU, by the way, to simplify pricing, here is our new pricing with 5700% increase. Enjoy
    - forshaper 4mo ago
      finally, our GPU 'Come and take it' flags will be understood
    - buran77 4mo ago
      It's the age old "Help me, politicians. You're my only hope". Anthropic, Open AI & Co. realized at some point that if they can't make money with barely any competition they sure as hell won't if the market is flooded. So here they are slamming the door behind them.
      - xeonmc 4mo ago
        > Anthropic, Open AI & Co. realized at some point that if they can't make money with barely any competition they sure as hell won't if the market is flooded. So here they are slamming the door behind them. Jokes on them, there won't be new entrants not because the door is shut but because it doesn't actually make money. The whole scheme is propped up by illusions to grift the investors, fewer competition only breaks the illusion. But I guess those folks aren't the types to understand "rising tide lifts all boats", or in this case, rising sewage buoys all rats.
rocqua 4mo ago
This isn’t about keeping people from having the power of frontier LLMs. So tricks that let others have it aren’t a defeat of this policy. This is export control, where the US government seeks to leverage the fact that these frontier models are US made. This is then leveraged against opponents, and likely also just for grift. There’s also perhaps a little legitimate worry about the implications of free access to, but that is secondary to the real goal.
boca_honey 4mo ago
> Are we heading to a world where GPU use is regulated to ensure that illegal LLMs aren't being processed on your machine? Actually that sounds pretty reasonable considering current regulations regarding almost any other important resource / material that affect the general population.
- anthk 4mo ago
  You Gen-Z people serously need what Free software, Free society meant. We fought against people like you and against treacherous computing. And we will do again.
  - boca_honey 4mo ago
    I'm 43 years old, dude. Stop fighting with people and learn to adapt.
rzerowan 4mo ago
As far as Europe is concerned they have recently signed up to the 'Pax Silica'[1] and willingly givrn the LLM space over to the US incumbents with buildtin legislation banning Chinese models and coperation with them. So EU will be a renter of the LLMs that the US allows them to use. In the long run OpenSource will dominate as it did in the DB(MySQL/Postgres)/ServerOS(Linux/BSDs) versus Proprietery rent seeking alts like Oracle and Microsoft et al. Would be interesting to see what the global startups using Qwen/DS/Kimi etc within the EU-US space navigate the cutting edge OpenSource LLMs vs seeking/getting a permission slip from the US gov. [1]https://archive.is/aiJiq https://archive.is/aiJiq
- jdkee 4mo ago
  europe2031.ai
  - CalRobert 4mo ago
    Was looking for this. It’s a great short story (it starts with real events and then predicts the future) leading to European fealty to US . Seems increasingly plausible.
    - pydry 4mo ago
      European fealty to the US has existed for decades.
      - specproc 4mo ago
        Number one issue of our times. I'm eternally frustrated discussion of this basic fact of our political lives is near zero in public discourse.
        embedding-shape 4mo ago
        Where you live? In both Spain and Sweden it's a fairly common topic in public discourse already, about how to move away from a bunch of US dependencies and so on.
oytis 4mo ago
So far it's only US doing this. I don't think it's in anyone else's interest to limit development of open source models or chips. Nvidia has secured a leading position in GPU market by being the best overall, but if US continues to mess up with the export, that changes the calculation and surely we'll see the alternatives
- lanthissa 4mo ago
  the only people its relevant for is the people in first. We wont know what any other state would do until someone passes the us, if that happens. it sucks that we're in a place where the us has an dishonest leadership, because the current situation would be pretty reasonable if any other admin was in charge. let models go free, until one proves dangerous in the real world then require gov approval after that. I don't think anyone rational would have the position everyone should have insta access at the same time to the highest model once it crosses the point of enabling actual dangerous things.
- ericmay 4mo ago
  Any country that developed sufficiently advanced models will pursue the same path. The EU as a regulatory body would pursue the same path, as will/is China. It’s rather straightforward to think through. If China (they’re practically the only competitor) built a sufficiently advanced AI system would they allow it to propagate on the free market? Of course not. The fact of the matter is that they are behind, even if it’s just a little bit, so the best strategy they have is to try and compete with “good enough” models with lower/subsidized cost - but that is a losing strategy because AI is and always has been a winner-take-all strategy. Likewise if, idk, France someone built an AI system that was valuable do you think they’d just hand it over for sworn enemy Donald J. Trump to utilized? Of course not. The American strategy in the context of the current geopolitical landscape is the only valid one and the obvious one. If you find yourself criticizing the American strategy it’s because you aren’t in the arena where you would, inevitably, make the same decision to restrict access.
  - janalsncm 4mo ago
    > AI is and always has been a winner-take-all strategy People claim that AGI is. AI is turning out to be a fairly competitive but “normal” product. Companies carving out niches on cost, quality, and speed. If it was a winner take all OpenAI’s head start would have been decisive. For years ChatGPT was far ahead of everyone, then Anthropic released Opus 3, then OpenAI released 4o, then in mid 2025 it seemed like everyone had strong reasoning models including Google with Gemini 2.5, and now Claude is probably the best coding model. So taking the top spot is not a guarantee you can hold it. Also the top model becomes a prime target for distillation, making it easier for competitors to keep up.
hollerith 4mo ago
>I can train insainly powerful models on my laptop Explain. The labs have been spending about $100 million in compute to train a model.
- jmward01 4mo ago
  Give me three ish months and, I hope, to show exactly what I mean!
  - hollerith 4mo ago
    I think I understand now. Don't do it for me. In fact, I'd rather you found something else to do.
  - eru 4mo ago
    Please go ahead. If you are right, you can raise billions of dollars for your startup.
nonethewiser 4mo ago
>This is regulatory capture in action. Isnt this all export control based? If so its not regulatory capture for a few reasons. If not disregard this. 1) new entrants wont get export controlled because they arent leading edge 2) a new company could just implement KYC. It could even be a competitive advantage (Anthropic wont or cant)
- thayne 4mo ago
  > Only companies approved by the government will get access. There is no process for individual users to get access to the new model. That sounds like more than just export control. This means that big company A that the president has a business interest in could get access to the most powerful AIs, while a startup competing with it doesn't.
  - gwerbin 4mo ago
    It's worth keeping in mind the broader context here politically. The president and his cabinet are generally pursuing policies of a strong unitary executive branch that centralizes "technocratic" functions under the control of politicians and political appointees. The majority in Congress doesn't appear to mind and seems to be actively sitting back from legislating on topics like this. The overall effect is that of creating a system in which the rules are deliberately uncertain and the only reliable way to get approval is by aligning yourself or your organization politically. It's a powerful technique for ensuring political compliance in the corporate world.
    - mullingitover 4mo ago
      > The president and his cabinet are generally pursuing policies of a strong unitary executive branch Or, and this is common knowledge, they're just straight up looting.
      - gwerbin 4mo ago
        Well yeah, but that's the point of the whole unitary executive thing. Thete are quick cash grabs happening all over the place of course, but they are also setting up for a long-term systemization of corruption, backed by a radicalized narrow majority voter base. It's clear that they believe they will win the midterm elections, or that the opposition won't be able or willing to stop them meaningfully, and then win the next presidential election too.
wing-_-nuts 4mo ago
> I can train insainly powerful models on my laptop. This is such hyperbole. You might be able to train a model that's merely useful in a single domain, but to say you can train an 'insanely powerful' model on consumer hardware is laughable.
- hanspeter 4mo ago
  Zuckerberg has spent billions trying to keep Meta's models relevant, somewhat unsuccessfully. If only he had known he could simply use his laptop to train them.
joe_the_user 4mo ago
Nick Bostrom wondered aloud in Superintelligence (2014) why states would allow individuals and private organizations to develop AGI. If one takes the possibility seriously, AGI would a source of immense power and any state would to take that opportunity for itself. Edit: Not saying whether AGI is right around the corner, that's a different discussion. I'm just saying that a serious possibility of AGI and an understanding of possible consequences will make a state act.
- Avicebron 4mo ago
  Well states are made of individuals, and at least in the US we should be able to self determine via elections and public discourse.. If that's impossible in any meaningful way, then yes, doesn't matter which color jersey the government is wearing, it's authoritarian.
- coliveira 4mo ago
  AGI is religion invented for the stupid. There's no world in which a silly LLM can make intelligent decisions. It's all smoke and mirrors to make insane amounts of money and to maintain the sheep agreeing with the powerful.
  - cfloyd 4mo ago
    What rock have you been living under?
mannanj 4mo ago
GPUs and computer hardware prices have been on the rise. I can see a twisted perspective where it’s stated that the US government needs to closely control computer hardware that can run particular LLMs, as a national security interest. At least that idea isn’t completely wild now seeing what we have been experiencing. Remember those weird conspiracies we used to have about universal surveillance; tracking and so forth? Well if you think back to those and whatever might happen with GPUs and hardware, and LLM restrictions or the likely age gating//ID’ing that is to come from this, that’s a good guiding framework for how this will proceed and affect normal people.
glaslong 4mo ago
Warm up your VPN to zAI for the eventual banned GLM-6 I guess
- tw1984 4mo ago
  what make you believe that the Chinese gov is going to allow GLM-6 to be made publicly available?
  - mullingitover 4mo ago
    Why would the Chinese gov...spoil their rival's tulip bubble by dumping even fancier free tulips on the market?
  - bruce511 4mo ago
    Let me frame it like this; If GLM-6 is made publicly available[1], will that change your predictions of how they will behave in the future, or your understanding of their motivations in the present? [1] I am certainly no expert of Chinese AI policy, but I fear you are attributing US values and goals to the Chinese govt. From where I stand, they appear to be very different though. China is seeking to increase influence, whereas the US (seems to be) seeking to become more insular. China is actively persuing the world-leader role, while the US dismantles soft-power tools like USaid, and alienates countries pursuing obviously flawed military excursions.
colinsane 4mo ago
Buy Bitcoin. look, i'm sorry, but this is a thoroughly solved problem by now.
- eru 4mo ago
  How does owning some bitcoins let you run a powerful LLM?
  - celdon25 4mo ago
    I take it you've never known anyone who has tried to run even a small consumer AI company. Do you think that they all independently come up with the same censorship rules, despite no law mandating them? Why do you think that is? That they are just that well-thought out that everyone happens to agree with that same intersecting boundary?
    - eru 4mo ago
      For the sake of argument, let's grant that there's some conspiracy that makes them all have the same rules. And conspiracy in a loose sense: perhaps it's the government dictating the rules. I still don't understand how buying bitcoin lets me route around that. Even gold coins buried in my garden won't get you access to Fable.
      - deleted 4mo ago
        [deleted]
      - celdon25 4mo ago
        You're making straw man examples, but if you want to understand more, I suggest any paper on Bitcoin. Personally, I'm not a fan of it. But the thesis is real, and it might have delivered on its promise if the world wasn't actually full of scumbags and scammers (each one accidentally contributing to making Big Banks look like the lesser of the evils).
        eru 4mo ago
raincole 4mo ago
> I can train insainly powerful models on my laptop. What's with this hallucination? The thread is about GPT-5.6. Your laptop can't even run gemma 4 unquantized bfloat16, which is light years behind GPT-5.6, and running it is light years from training it. If something that a laptop can train is insanely powerful for you, you don't need to worry about this thread at all.
- mym1990 4mo ago
  Eh, they said models, which can mean hyperspecific domains, not necessarily a massive generalized LLM.
  - valleyer 4mo ago
    Has the US government limited access to any non-LLM ML models?
- Paracompact 4mo ago
  Indeed every AI enthusiast has to find within their heart their consistent position between the two extremes: - Regulation like this is dangerous because the accessibility and capability of open-source AI training and inference are limited; - Regulation like this is hollow because the accessibility and capability of open-source AI training and inference are unlimited.
  - jquery 4mo ago
    Regulation like this is dangerous for the US because it can kneecap our country, but I don’t think it’ll affect the pace of innovation globally. China isn’t going to slow down just because the Trump administration asked for some “ballroom donations” or whatever nonsense is going on behind the scenes here.
andsoitis 4mo ago
> This will make it hard/impossible for new vendors to come into the market and only established companies will get to play, and charge, for LLMs. I don't understand how you leap from "US govt. decides who gets to use GPT-5" to "limit new vendors from competing with OpenAI". Can you walk me through the logic?
- freakynit 4mo ago
  These frontier models are now good enough that they can assist heavily with new optimizations for future models, including, code them. Restricting their usage to a few companies takes away that advantage away from other companies, thereby, limiting new vendors from competing with OpenAI.
  - andsoitis 4mo ago
    > Restricting their usage to a few companies takes away that advantage away from other companies, thereby, limiting new vendors from competing with OpenAI. wait, are you saying a competitor needs access to an OpenAI model in order to build a competing model?
    - m4x 4mo ago
      I agree with your point, but to play devils advocate: doesn't a competitor arguably need access to these beyond-frontier models to even become an effective competitor to OpenAI and Anthropic?
      - freakynit 4mo ago
        "Assisting", not "one-shotting", a better model.
    - freakynit 4mo ago
      Nothing new in that. Everyone pays to someone or the other to make their own product/life better. Most of the times these products do not compete, sometimes, they do. How many times you believe duckduckgo would have google'd stuff just to create a competitor to Google itself? I believe thousands of times.. could be more. OpenAI cannot claim the code their models produce as their own since their own models used codes from public internet during training to produce new code.
itemize123 4mo ago
literally the opposite of regulatory capture - it spells trouble for specifically openai and anthropic mostly
- gwerbin 4mo ago
  That's often how regulatory capture works. It seems bad for the incumbents, but it's worse for any future competitor. As long as the cost of complying with the regulation is less than your expected loss from competition entering the market, then it's net positive for the incumbent.
  - sooheon 4mo ago
    I think this is plain old regulation, not regulatory capture. For it to be the latter we'd need evidence than it was the incumbents who designed this oversight which they then asked the white house to rubber stamp.
    - gwerbin 4mo ago
      ...I think we have plenty of evidence of that
KumaBear 4mo ago
This also completely screws over U.S. businesses. American startups will be forced to pay premium prices for nerfed, heavily-censored, 'compliant' models from a few massive corporations. Meanwhile, foreign startups will be running cheaper, unrestricted open-source AI. We'll price ourselves right out of the global market. What government wants to have their population use foreign AI. (Not many). Only issue I see is good enough is what the majority might be okay with.
- engineer_22 4mo ago
  This is probably not the intent. US intelligence has gamed this out and sees risks at the fringe - advanced artificial intelligence moves the needle the most in countries economically & politically dominated by the USA, the Global South are the targets of this, not US startups.
antonvs 4mo ago
> This is regulatory capture in action. With the twist that it will end up involving payments that directly benefit Trump, following the Mafia business model that he learned in the construction industry and that he's brought to the White House.
DrBazza 4mo ago
I guess if the new model has the capability to do 'something' that's national security threat, then this makes sense. Otherwise this move makes zero sense, and actually is a drag on innovation - who wants to invest money and people to make a better model that can't actually be sufficiently sold to make a return on investment? Meanwhile other models from Europe or China that are better steal market share. Though that's not to say they won't do the same thing for the same reasons. > Are we heading to a world where GPU use is regulated Well, there was the kerfuffle around PS3 (IIRC) and 'supercomputers'. I suppose that would be the 2020s version of that. What's old is new again. Ultimately you can just continually wire together less powerful hardware to come up with something that can do the job.
- joe_mamba 4mo ago
  >Well, there was the kerfuffle around PS3 (IIRC) and 'supercomputers'. There were no export restrictions on the PS3.
  - KingMob 4mo ago
    They were probably thinking of the PS2, which Japan did, in fact, temporarily restrict: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-apr-17-fi-20482-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-apr-17-fi-20482...
  - xentripetal 4mo ago
    They meant PS2. Japan was worried the processor was powerful enough to control missiles and put restrictions on how many can be sold to a single person and banned certain countries.
    - DrBazza 4mo ago
      I probably did ;)
  - ajdegol 4mo ago
    Double precision cell chips were reserved for military, I think (or maybe also blade processors). So doing any serious physics on them was dead in the water - same with macs tbh
socialsecurrty 4mo ago
Of course. The US government inserts itself into commerce, starts picking winners and losers, and thus creates an industry for petitioning gatekeepers at all levels for access. The goodfellas profit and the public pays. OpenAI and company get manufactured scarcity to raise margins, and lawmakers get to collect an entry fee. This was doomed to happen. The US is much closer to a total state than most give it credit for.
sharpshadow 4mo ago
As I understood they will limit running those undesired llms with Remote Attestation and Trusted Execution Environments.
boppo1 4mo ago
>can train insainly powerful models on my laptop Can you give an example or two?
ericmcer 4mo ago
Is referring to these new models as "LLM"s still correct anymore? The frontier models are a more complex orchestration of LLMs and many other programming techniques, they aren't just a weight set anymore. The whole purpose of this is to let non-technical users say things like "make a flappy bird games" and have it succeed after using 10 million tokens. A decent engineer could build the same thing in 20 mins with a small local LLM. Same thing with a cyberattack, someone who generally knew what they were doing could quickly surface the info to perform each step of an attack. The govt just wants to ensure random 12 year olds can't type: "how I hack fortnite?" and get a step by step guide.
- joe_the_user 4mo ago
  I think it correct to refer to the models as LLMs. The references I can find for the techniques used seem to boil down to transformers + optimizations to make transformer-index larger/faster + chains-of-thought-optimization/the ability to add real time and other data to the context window. See: https://kenhuangus.substack.com/p/frontier-ai-models-technical-deep https://kenhuangus.substack.com/p/frontier-ai-models-technic...
raxxorraxor 3mo ago
I think in the long run this will severely hurt commercial models since they cannot reliably used in workflows and you don't want to be dependent on some trigger-happy random guy. It is free advertising for now, but in my circle people are looking for alternatives and are surprised how viable they have become.

microgpt 4mo ago

How is this regulatory capture? Any new LLM company can just exist outside of the US and export to everyone.

plemer 4mo ago
You’re saying it’s not regulatory capture because it’s not enforced globally?
- itemize123 4mo ago
  it's not regulatory capture, because they are not regulating what customers can use - it's limiting what some companies can serve. it's way less impactful to the market as a whole.
iAMkenough 4mo ago
Until they can’t.
- mikestorrent 4mo ago
  Right. That's what sanctions can accomplish...
- kdheiwns 4mo ago
  Countries who've made the mistake of allying with the US might face sanctions or some sort of threats. People will just use Chinese AI then. This is the US biting itself in the ass.
- noisy_boy 4mo ago
  It is as if people can't imagine the concept of sanctions despite their liberal use over the years.
  - microgpt 4mo ago
    Sanctioning a data file? Did it work for the PGP source code?

foota 4mo ago

What? This is the opposite of regulatory capture. Neither anthropic nor openai are getting to choose what happens with their models.

mediaman 4mo ago
Regulatory capture doesn't necessarily mean the regulated get to decide what the regulators do in precise steps. It can simply mean they support and exist within a regulatory regime that greatly benefits the regulated. In fact, you generally don't want them directly telling the regulators what to do. Instead, the regulators make complex, costly rules that only large establishment players can follow. The regulators look like they're doing their job; the regulated enjoy higher margins and protection from disruption.
- ZappoMan 4mo ago
  Exactly! The thing that squeezes out new entrants isn't only the compliance cost, it's that your whole roadmap ends up resting on access you don't control. We already saw the terms moved under us once with Fable, the retention policy changed and some requests started routing to a weaker model, none of us small operators had any say in that. Now access itself is a government decisions. For anyone building on top of these APIs that's the real barrier, not the rule-following overhead but the fact that the ground can shift mid-flight and you can't negotiate with whoever's moving it. Which is exactly why open weights start looking less like ideology and more like risk management.
- thayne 4mo ago
  And the regulated may even publicly complain about the regulations, to increase the illusion that it isn't regulatory capture.
- no-name-here 4mo ago
  How does this benefit the regulated? I'd say it dooms the regulated: * with the government requiring the regulated to obtain approval to add each customer, they're losing a massive number of their customers * and even if a customer gets approved, every such customer now sees that access to the regulated can (and has been) shutoff with no notice if the gov doesn’t like the provider or customer - it's now a massive supply chain risk for any customer to use a regulated provider * the regulated losing a massive part of their customer base for both of the above reasons means significant impairment of their revenue, as well as their valuation, and staying ahead of their competitors and open models requires massive ongoing investment Open models are mere months behind.

throwaw12 4mo ago

> I can train insainly powerful models on my laptop Can you?

kreutz 4mo ago
Correction: Can you yet?
- throwaw12 4mo ago
  Anthropic and OpenAI: Dear Uncle Sam, it seems laptops became too powerful, can you please do something Uncle Sam: For national security reasons starting from now on every purchase of GPU model with higher than X Petaflops will need written permission by the US president Anthropic and OpenAI: Look poor citizens, we are willing to share our capacity with you in limited form, by using our LLM you can avoid spending 35 years in the waiting list to buy a GPU, by the way, to simplify pricing, here is our new pricing with 5700% increase. Enjoy
  - forshaper 4mo ago
    finally, our GPU 'Come and take it' flags will be understood
  - buran77 4mo ago
    It's the age old "Help me, politicians. You're my only hope". Anthropic, Open AI & Co. realized at some point that if they can't make money with barely any competition they sure as hell won't if the market is flooded. So here they are slamming the door behind them.
    - xeonmc 4mo ago
      > Anthropic, Open AI & Co. realized at some point that if they can't make money with barely any competition they sure as hell won't if the market is flooded. So here they are slamming the door behind them. Jokes on them, there won't be new entrants not because the door is shut but because it doesn't actually make money. The whole scheme is propped up by illusions to grift the investors, fewer competition only breaks the illusion. But I guess those folks aren't the types to understand "rising tide lifts all boats", or in this case, rising sewage buoys all rats.

rocqua 4mo ago

This isn’t about keeping people from having the power of frontier LLMs. So tricks that let others have it aren’t a defeat of this policy. This is export control, where the US government seeks to leverage the fact that these frontier models are US made. This is then leveraged against opponents, and likely also just for grift. There’s also perhaps a little legitimate worry about the implications of free access to, but that is secondary to the real goal.

boca_honey 4mo ago

> Are we heading to a world where GPU use is regulated to ensure that illegal LLMs aren't being processed on your machine? Actually that sounds pretty reasonable considering current regulations regarding almost any other important resource / material that affect the general population.

anthk 4mo ago
You Gen-Z people serously need what Free software, Free society meant. We fought against people like you and against treacherous computing. And we will do again.
- boca_honey 4mo ago
  I'm 43 years old, dude. Stop fighting with people and learn to adapt.

rzerowan 4mo ago

As far as Europe is concerned they have recently signed up to the 'Pax Silica'[1] and willingly givrn the LLM space over to the US incumbents with buildtin legislation banning Chinese models and coperation with them. So EU will be a renter of the LLMs that the US allows them to use. In the long run OpenSource will dominate as it did in the DB(MySQL/Postgres)/ServerOS(Linux/BSDs) versus Proprietery rent seeking alts like Oracle and Microsoft et al. Would be interesting to see what the global startups using Qwen/DS/Kimi etc within the EU-US space navigate the cutting edge OpenSource LLMs vs seeking/getting a permission slip from the US gov. [1]https://archive.is/aiJiq https://archive.is/aiJiq

jdkee 4mo ago
europe2031.ai
- CalRobert 4mo ago
  Was looking for this. It’s a great short story (it starts with real events and then predicts the future) leading to European fealty to US . Seems increasingly plausible.
  - pydry 4mo ago
    European fealty to the US has existed for decades.
    - specproc 4mo ago
      Number one issue of our times. I'm eternally frustrated discussion of this basic fact of our political lives is near zero in public discourse.
      - embedding-shape 4mo ago
        Where you live? In both Spain and Sweden it's a fairly common topic in public discourse already, about how to move away from a bunch of US dependencies and so on.

oytis 4mo ago

So far it's only US doing this. I don't think it's in anyone else's interest to limit development of open source models or chips. Nvidia has secured a leading position in GPU market by being the best overall, but if US continues to mess up with the export, that changes the calculation and surely we'll see the alternatives

lanthissa 4mo ago
the only people its relevant for is the people in first. We wont know what any other state would do until someone passes the us, if that happens. it sucks that we're in a place where the us has an dishonest leadership, because the current situation would be pretty reasonable if any other admin was in charge. let models go free, until one proves dangerous in the real world then require gov approval after that. I don't think anyone rational would have the position everyone should have insta access at the same time to the highest model once it crosses the point of enabling actual dangerous things.
ericmay 4mo ago
Any country that developed sufficiently advanced models will pursue the same path. The EU as a regulatory body would pursue the same path, as will/is China. It’s rather straightforward to think through. If China (they’re practically the only competitor) built a sufficiently advanced AI system would they allow it to propagate on the free market? Of course not. The fact of the matter is that they are behind, even if it’s just a little bit, so the best strategy they have is to try and compete with “good enough” models with lower/subsidized cost - but that is a losing strategy because AI is and always has been a winner-take-all strategy. Likewise if, idk, France someone built an AI system that was valuable do you think they’d just hand it over for sworn enemy Donald J. Trump to utilized? Of course not. The American strategy in the context of the current geopolitical landscape is the only valid one and the obvious one. If you find yourself criticizing the American strategy it’s because you aren’t in the arena where you would, inevitably, make the same decision to restrict access.
- janalsncm 4mo ago
  > AI is and always has been a winner-take-all strategy People claim that AGI is. AI is turning out to be a fairly competitive but “normal” product. Companies carving out niches on cost, quality, and speed. If it was a winner take all OpenAI’s head start would have been decisive. For years ChatGPT was far ahead of everyone, then Anthropic released Opus 3, then OpenAI released 4o, then in mid 2025 it seemed like everyone had strong reasoning models including Google with Gemini 2.5, and now Claude is probably the best coding model. So taking the top spot is not a guarantee you can hold it. Also the top model becomes a prime target for distillation, making it easier for competitors to keep up.

hollerith 4mo ago

>I can train insainly powerful models on my laptop Explain. The labs have been spending about $100 million in compute to train a model.

jmward01 4mo ago
Give me three ish months and, I hope, to show exactly what I mean!
- hollerith 4mo ago
  I think I understand now. Don't do it for me. In fact, I'd rather you found something else to do.
- eru 4mo ago
  Please go ahead. If you are right, you can raise billions of dollars for your startup.

nonethewiser 4mo ago

>This is regulatory capture in action. Isnt this all export control based? If so its not regulatory capture for a few reasons. If not disregard this. 1) new entrants wont get export controlled because they arent leading edge 2) a new company could just implement KYC. It could even be a competitive advantage (Anthropic wont or cant)

thayne 4mo ago
> Only companies approved by the government will get access. There is no process for individual users to get access to the new model. That sounds like more than just export control. This means that big company A that the president has a business interest in could get access to the most powerful AIs, while a startup competing with it doesn't.
- gwerbin 4mo ago
  It's worth keeping in mind the broader context here politically. The president and his cabinet are generally pursuing policies of a strong unitary executive branch that centralizes "technocratic" functions under the control of politicians and political appointees. The majority in Congress doesn't appear to mind and seems to be actively sitting back from legislating on topics like this. The overall effect is that of creating a system in which the rules are deliberately uncertain and the only reliable way to get approval is by aligning yourself or your organization politically. It's a powerful technique for ensuring political compliance in the corporate world.
  - mullingitover 4mo ago
    > The president and his cabinet are generally pursuing policies of a strong unitary executive branch Or, and this is common knowledge, they're just straight up looting.
    - gwerbin 4mo ago
      Well yeah, but that's the point of the whole unitary executive thing. Thete are quick cash grabs happening all over the place of course, but they are also setting up for a long-term systemization of corruption, backed by a radicalized narrow majority voter base. It's clear that they believe they will win the midterm elections, or that the opposition won't be able or willing to stop them meaningfully, and then win the next presidential election too.

wing-_-nuts 4mo ago

> I can train insainly powerful models on my laptop. This is such hyperbole. You might be able to train a model that's merely useful in a single domain, but to say you can train an 'insanely powerful' model on consumer hardware is laughable.

hanspeter 4mo ago
Zuckerberg has spent billions trying to keep Meta's models relevant, somewhat unsuccessfully. If only he had known he could simply use his laptop to train them.

joe_the_user 4mo ago

Nick Bostrom wondered aloud in Superintelligence (2014) why states would allow individuals and private organizations to develop AGI. If one takes the possibility seriously, AGI would a source of immense power and any state would to take that opportunity for itself. Edit: Not saying whether AGI is right around the corner, that's a different discussion. I'm just saying that a serious possibility of AGI and an understanding of possible consequences will make a state act.

Avicebron 4mo ago
Well states are made of individuals, and at least in the US we should be able to self determine via elections and public discourse.. If that's impossible in any meaningful way, then yes, doesn't matter which color jersey the government is wearing, it's authoritarian.
coliveira 4mo ago
AGI is religion invented for the stupid. There's no world in which a silly LLM can make intelligent decisions. It's all smoke and mirrors to make insane amounts of money and to maintain the sheep agreeing with the powerful.
- cfloyd 4mo ago
  What rock have you been living under?

mannanj 4mo ago

GPUs and computer hardware prices have been on the rise. I can see a twisted perspective where it’s stated that the US government needs to closely control computer hardware that can run particular LLMs, as a national security interest. At least that idea isn’t completely wild now seeing what we have been experiencing. Remember those weird conspiracies we used to have about universal surveillance; tracking and so forth? Well if you think back to those and whatever might happen with GPUs and hardware, and LLM restrictions or the likely age gating//ID’ing that is to come from this, that’s a good guiding framework for how this will proceed and affect normal people.

glaslong 4mo ago

Warm up your VPN to zAI for the eventual banned GLM-6 I guess

tw1984 4mo ago
what make you believe that the Chinese gov is going to allow GLM-6 to be made publicly available?
- mullingitover 4mo ago
  Why would the Chinese gov...spoil their rival's tulip bubble by dumping even fancier free tulips on the market?
- bruce511 4mo ago
  Let me frame it like this; If GLM-6 is made publicly available[1], will that change your predictions of how they will behave in the future, or your understanding of their motivations in the present? [1] I am certainly no expert of Chinese AI policy, but I fear you are attributing US values and goals to the Chinese govt. From where I stand, they appear to be very different though. China is seeking to increase influence, whereas the US (seems to be) seeking to become more insular. China is actively persuing the world-leader role, while the US dismantles soft-power tools like USaid, and alienates countries pursuing obviously flawed military excursions.

colinsane 4mo ago

Buy Bitcoin. look, i'm sorry, but this is a thoroughly solved problem by now.

eru 4mo ago
How does owning some bitcoins let you run a powerful LLM?
- celdon25 4mo ago
  I take it you've never known anyone who has tried to run even a small consumer AI company. Do you think that they all independently come up with the same censorship rules, despite no law mandating them? Why do you think that is? That they are just that well-thought out that everyone happens to agree with that same intersecting boundary?
  - eru 4mo ago
    For the sake of argument, let's grant that there's some conspiracy that makes them all have the same rules. And conspiracy in a loose sense: perhaps it's the government dictating the rules. I still don't understand how buying bitcoin lets me route around that. Even gold coins buried in my garden won't get you access to Fable.
    - deleted 4mo ago
      [deleted]
    - celdon25 4mo ago
      You're making straw man examples, but if you want to understand more, I suggest any paper on Bitcoin. Personally, I'm not a fan of it. But the thesis is real, and it might have delivered on its promise if the world wasn't actually full of scumbags and scammers (each one accidentally contributing to making Big Banks look like the lesser of the evils).
      - eru 4mo ago

raincole 4mo ago

> I can train insainly powerful models on my laptop. What's with this hallucination? The thread is about GPT-5.6. Your laptop can't even run gemma 4 unquantized bfloat16, which is light years behind GPT-5.6, and running it is light years from training it. If something that a laptop can train is insanely powerful for you, you don't need to worry about this thread at all.

mym1990 4mo ago
Eh, they said models, which can mean hyperspecific domains, not necessarily a massive generalized LLM.
- valleyer 4mo ago
  Has the US government limited access to any non-LLM ML models?
Paracompact 4mo ago
Indeed every AI enthusiast has to find within their heart their consistent position between the two extremes: - Regulation like this is dangerous because the accessibility and capability of open-source AI training and inference are limited; - Regulation like this is hollow because the accessibility and capability of open-source AI training and inference are unlimited.
- jquery 4mo ago
  Regulation like this is dangerous for the US because it can kneecap our country, but I don’t think it’ll affect the pace of innovation globally. China isn’t going to slow down just because the Trump administration asked for some “ballroom donations” or whatever nonsense is going on behind the scenes here.

andsoitis 4mo ago

> This will make it hard/impossible for new vendors to come into the market and only established companies will get to play, and charge, for LLMs. I don't understand how you leap from "US govt. decides who gets to use GPT-5" to "limit new vendors from competing with OpenAI". Can you walk me through the logic?

freakynit 4mo ago
These frontier models are now good enough that they can assist heavily with new optimizations for future models, including, code them. Restricting their usage to a few companies takes away that advantage away from other companies, thereby, limiting new vendors from competing with OpenAI.
- andsoitis 4mo ago
  > Restricting their usage to a few companies takes away that advantage away from other companies, thereby, limiting new vendors from competing with OpenAI. wait, are you saying a competitor needs access to an OpenAI model in order to build a competing model?
  - m4x 4mo ago
    I agree with your point, but to play devils advocate: doesn't a competitor arguably need access to these beyond-frontier models to even become an effective competitor to OpenAI and Anthropic?
    - freakynit 4mo ago
      "Assisting", not "one-shotting", a better model.
  - freakynit 4mo ago
    Nothing new in that. Everyone pays to someone or the other to make their own product/life better. Most of the times these products do not compete, sometimes, they do. How many times you believe duckduckgo would have google'd stuff just to create a competitor to Google itself? I believe thousands of times.. could be more. OpenAI cannot claim the code their models produce as their own since their own models used codes from public internet during training to produce new code.

itemize123 4mo ago

literally the opposite of regulatory capture - it spells trouble for specifically openai and anthropic mostly

gwerbin 4mo ago
That's often how regulatory capture works. It seems bad for the incumbents, but it's worse for any future competitor. As long as the cost of complying with the regulation is less than your expected loss from competition entering the market, then it's net positive for the incumbent.
- sooheon 4mo ago
  I think this is plain old regulation, not regulatory capture. For it to be the latter we'd need evidence than it was the incumbents who designed this oversight which they then asked the white house to rubber stamp.
  - gwerbin 4mo ago
    ...I think we have plenty of evidence of that

KumaBear 4mo ago

This also completely screws over U.S. businesses. American startups will be forced to pay premium prices for nerfed, heavily-censored, 'compliant' models from a few massive corporations. Meanwhile, foreign startups will be running cheaper, unrestricted open-source AI. We'll price ourselves right out of the global market. What government wants to have their population use foreign AI. (Not many). Only issue I see is good enough is what the majority might be okay with.

engineer_22 4mo ago
This is probably not the intent. US intelligence has gamed this out and sees risks at the fringe - advanced artificial intelligence moves the needle the most in countries economically & politically dominated by the USA, the Global South are the targets of this, not US startups.

antonvs 4mo ago

> This is regulatory capture in action. With the twist that it will end up involving payments that directly benefit Trump, following the Mafia business model that he learned in the construction industry and that he's brought to the White House.

DrBazza 4mo ago

I guess if the new model has the capability to do 'something' that's national security threat, then this makes sense. Otherwise this move makes zero sense, and actually is a drag on innovation - who wants to invest money and people to make a better model that can't actually be sufficiently sold to make a return on investment? Meanwhile other models from Europe or China that are better steal market share. Though that's not to say they won't do the same thing for the same reasons. > Are we heading to a world where GPU use is regulated Well, there was the kerfuffle around PS3 (IIRC) and 'supercomputers'. I suppose that would be the 2020s version of that. What's old is new again. Ultimately you can just continually wire together less powerful hardware to come up with something that can do the job.

joe_mamba 4mo ago
>Well, there was the kerfuffle around PS3 (IIRC) and 'supercomputers'. There were no export restrictions on the PS3.
- KingMob 4mo ago
  They were probably thinking of the PS2, which Japan did, in fact, temporarily restrict: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-apr-17-fi-20482-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-apr-17-fi-20482...
- xentripetal 4mo ago
  They meant PS2. Japan was worried the processor was powerful enough to control missiles and put restrictions on how many can be sold to a single person and banned certain countries.
  - DrBazza 4mo ago
    I probably did ;)
- ajdegol 4mo ago
  Double precision cell chips were reserved for military, I think (or maybe also blade processors). So doing any serious physics on them was dead in the water - same with macs tbh

socialsecurrty 4mo ago

Of course. The US government inserts itself into commerce, starts picking winners and losers, and thus creates an industry for petitioning gatekeepers at all levels for access. The goodfellas profit and the public pays. OpenAI and company get manufactured scarcity to raise margins, and lawmakers get to collect an entry fee. This was doomed to happen. The US is much closer to a total state than most give it credit for.

sharpshadow 4mo ago

As I understood they will limit running those undesired llms with Remote Attestation and Trusted Execution Environments.

boppo1 4mo ago

>can train insainly powerful models on my laptop Can you give an example or two?

ericmcer 4mo ago

Is referring to these new models as "LLM"s still correct anymore? The frontier models are a more complex orchestration of LLMs and many other programming techniques, they aren't just a weight set anymore. The whole purpose of this is to let non-technical users say things like "make a flappy bird games" and have it succeed after using 10 million tokens. A decent engineer could build the same thing in 20 mins with a small local LLM. Same thing with a cyberattack, someone who generally knew what they were doing could quickly surface the info to perform each step of an attack. The govt just wants to ensure random 12 year olds can't type: "how I hack fortnite?" and get a step by step guide.

joe_the_user 4mo ago
I think it correct to refer to the models as LLMs. The references I can find for the techniques used seem to boil down to transformers + optimizations to make transformer-index larger/faster + chains-of-thought-optimization/the ability to add real time and other data to the context window. See: https://kenhuangus.substack.com/p/frontier-ai-models-technical-deep https://kenhuangus.substack.com/p/frontier-ai-models-technic...

raxxorraxor 3mo ago

I think in the long run this will severely hurt commercial models since they cannot reliably used in workflows and you don't want to be dependent on some trigger-happy random guy. It is free advertising for now, but in my circle people are looking for alternatives and are surprised how viable they have become.