Mind elaborating instead of vague posting? Are you saying that China is already doing that vetting or that China will benefit because they can release models faster without having to be blocked by WH vetting?
- China is the largest open weight provider, with Mistral and Cohere delivering a few other models. There isn’t much else internationally
- (I think OP is suggesting) this would effectively ban Chinese models in the US, which would be an interesting case. Who knows if they could have theirs reviewed, or if we’ll see another FCC approved router situation.
- that Chinese models are censored is a very common criticism. If American models are also censored that looks bad.
- this will be awful for self hosters and local inference. Imagine if HuggingFace had to drop non-American model weights. That would effectively kill them.
> - that Chinese models are censored is a very common criticism. If American models are also censored that looks bad.
It's even worse than that for American models.
As an American, if I want to run a model locally and have to choose a censored model I will choose a Chinese censored model over an American censored model especially if it is the Trump administration doing the American censoring.
Chinese censorship is mostly directed at things that would not reduce the usefulness of the model for my applications. I doubt that would be the case with Trump censorship.
Same for products that spy on me. If a car for example is sending my travel log to Korea or the EU or China it is annoying but none of them are realistically going to do anything with the data that would seriously harm me. The risk is orders of magnitude higher if US governments or US law enforcement gets it.
I feel like it’s just as likely that China and MAGA mutually censor each others sensitive answers. Who in MAGA benefits from a Tiananmen focus? Who under Xi benefits from calling Jan 6 a failed coup?
Also not the OP, but my read is that China can release a model without the US president's approval. If the US models need approval and China's don't, then advantage China.
