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> But thats also an admittance that the American labs can’t compete on merit anymore This is exactly it. Try to buy a BYD in the United States. You can't (wi
by treyd 2mo ago
> But thats also an admittance that the American labs can’t compete on merit anymore
This is exactly it.
Try to buy a BYD in the United States. You can't (without a complicated process) because they're so much better cars than our domestic brands that our domestic brands couldn't compete and lobbied to keep them out.
> should by itself also limit the viability of the idea that all those VC billions will ever make a return?
It just has to last until the next quarter / fundraising round.
- cobbzilla 2mo agoI can understand (not necessarily defend) protectionism for products with nonzero manufacturing cost and some required physical size and such. I am befuddled when the same policies are applied to products with marginally zero manufacturing cost, no real physical size, and such. Regulating ideas is hard folks.
- TurdF3rguson 2mo agoThe cost of those output tokens is not zero or marginal.
- cobbzilla 2mo agoThe first token on a new AI rig costs $X (full capex cost) then every token after that costs virtually zero. Over time the cost/token trends towards zero (modulo opex). That said, AI does have higher opex than general SaaS so it can’t get as close to zero. But that’s kind of a different question, the running of some service. The “product”, the model, is a collection of files. The “manufacturing” required to add another customer is “send them the files” and has ~zero marginal cost.
- TurdF3rguson 2mo agoThere is a finite number of tokens that a rig will turn out over it's lifetime. Divide the cost of the rig plus electricity by that number and you have your cost per token. Yes providers can screw up on scheduling and end up paying more than they should, but that's not magic.
- cobbzilla 2mo agoThe AI rigs cost money, sure. But no one is talking about regulating those. We are talking about regulating models, which do have zero cost of reproduction. It’s like banning the leaked DeCSS key. Good luck.
- TurdF3rguson 2mo agoWell, no. We're mostly talking about banning access to models running on someone else's infra. I don't think many people in this thread have the resources to run a frontier model in their living room.
- cobbzilla 2mo agoHow do you do that without banning the model itself. It doesn't matter who can or can't run it. They are trying to ban something that can be represented entirely by a sequence of bytes. An illegal number, like the DeCSS key. The fact that money is involved does not change the free speech aspects. This isn't CSAM or torture porn. It's data.
- TurdF3rguson 2mo agoIt's not the model weights people are panicking over losing access to though. It's the compute.
- cobbzilla 2mo agoIf you mean being forced to overpay for no-longer-SOTA closed models, that’s I guess the protectionist motive here: impossible to enforce, enforcement uneven and political, illegality rampant, I suppose all by design too. I’d say it’s brilliant if it weren’t so evil. I have hope saner minds will prevail.
- aembleton 2mo agoYou could run the inference locally using the open weight models. Then you'd still get to use the models without sending money overseas
- johnnyanmac 2mo ago>I am befuddled when the same policies are applied to products with marginally zero manufacturing cost, no real physical size, and such. Because it's not about perfect obstructionism, it's about adding red tape to businesses that end up relenting and going to a frontier model. If this gets these frontier models an extra few million dollars in exchange for greasing some palms, that's a business success.
- throwaway29812 2mo ago[dead]
- thesmtsolver2 2mo ago> because they're so much better cars than our domestic brands Is that objectively true? True after factoring in harms they do to human rights and the environment? Nope. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2026/may/12/china-first-electric-car-plant-europe-allegations-worker-abuse https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2026/may/12/c... https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/10/human-rights-ranking-electric-vehicle-industry/ https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/10/human-rights-... Remember, even EU despite claiming to be morally superior to the US, heavily tariffs BYD (much more than the tariffs that the globe mocks Trump for). https://thenextweb.com/news/byd-rejects-hungary-environmental-violations-szeged-factory https://thenextweb.com/news/byd-rejects-hungary-environmenta...
- chii 2mo ago> Is that objectively true? objectively true. And there's zero need to factor in things like "human rights" or "environmental protection", because these are costs that have been externalized and the consumer don't pay for it (in their lifetime anyway). That's what objectively means. Chinese cars are unavailable in the US because US manufacturers are 100% unable to compete. Japan was in the exact same position before, but because of ally status, japanese car companies (with their gov't as the proxy) managed to negotiate and have a "voluntary import restriction" in place to protect US manufacturers. This artificial restriction created a higher price for consumers than it ordinarily would have been. The japanese car manufacturers were also able to setup shop in the US, and instead of exporting, they manufacturered directly on US soil. They're allowed to do this sole because they're an ally, and i don't expect this same to be allowed for chinese companies.