Flo wants restrictions on Chinese frontier models

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 1:41:49

   God bless open source. Important for innovation, important for companies, including mine. Like, please, open source, okay? I have something against Chinese frontier models, whether they're open or closed source. And here the reasons are, number one, they're obviously distilling. It's very clear. And so you're putting American open source model companies in an unfair competition and closed source in an unfair competition because they're not allowed to distill.

2. 1:42:16

   You know, it's just contrary, at the very least contrary to the terms of service, and it may be illegal. If you've put in place technical measures to circumvent any protection that the model company put in place to prevent distilling, which the Chinese models obviously have done. So it's distilled and it's unfair, right? Now, some people say, yes, but the companies have also distilled on human data.

3. 1:42:36

   That is not what distillation means. That is just not what it means. Like if you do the training on human data, it's costing you billions of dollars, like actually billions of dollars. If you do it on AI data, it's costing you hundreds of millions at best. So it's a huge unfair advantage and it's a significant enough portion of your costs to confer you an unfair advantage. That's number one. It's unfair. Number two, very pragmatically, we don't want Chinese models operating in the U.S. Today, you know, it breaks my heart because I'm an American citizen. I'm a proud American citizen.

4. 1:43:08

   I'm a hawk. When I talk to my own product and I'm asking it what happened in Tiananmen, it tells me, I'm sorry I can't talk about that. That's a problem. You know, like these models are eventually subject at the end of the day, they are subject to ccp censorship and ccp policies you don't want those models this basically amounts to being the greatest instrument of foreign propaganda on american soil ever and there is just ask your llm of choice ask claude hey tell me the precedent we have of banning american like foreign influences in the country like the three radio acts of the 20th century like the tiktok thing that just happened last year like we we do that all the time you know then these models are not merely just an instrumental propaganda they're agentic they're actually doing stuff in the economy you

5. 1:43:55

   don't want the ccp to run chunks of the american economy duh um Then, finally, even if none of that was the case, maybe those models are playing fair and square. Maybe they're not representing foreign interests. Maybe they're just better. And so here, a lot of people are, I think, indulging. And I say that as a libertarian, that they're indulging in what I call naive liberalism. Right? It's like, well, let's beat them in the marketplace then. And I'm like, you know, like, I actually, and again, I say that as a libertarian, like, I see protectionism is not always a bad standing.

6. 1:44:29

   I think you do want to protect your domestic AI champions. Anthropic can't say that, and they claim, and I believe them, that this is not their intention when they do that. And I 100% believe that because they've been so consistent for literally the founders have been worried about X risks for 10 years. So they've been so consistent. But look, I can say that because another Anthropic, hey, we want local AI champions.

7. 1:44:52

   Duh. It's a matter of national security. We don't want to hollow out that base with hollow data or industrial base. you know so it's not about the Chinese models and it's about propaganda it's about nothing to speak for our economy it's about fairness in the market alright let me try to give you some counter arguments that you can respond to them I am a little more sympathetic I think off the top to the argument that there was some massive reappropriation of human knowledge that is upstream of all ai and you could say that's not distillation sure you could say they the american companies spent a lot more than the chinese companies are having to spend i think that's also undeniably true but if i'm just kind of what feels just and fair i'm especially because we're blocking them from using claude right we're not it's not like we're

8. 1:45:50

   saying hey you can buy all the claude you want right so we've said we've got claude the the the makers of Claude have advocated strongly for chip restrictions and they also try to refuse to sell their model into China in the first place. And the whole premise of Claude or the whole existence of Claude is based on the idea that we hovered up, hoovered up all this human knowledge in every form we could find it from digital. And you got to believe that includes the whole Chinese digitized heritage. Now we're like sucking in the books, which I don't care about the fact that some books get destroyed in this process but this wasn't something that everybody's consented to and so it does feel a little strange to me given all of those fact patterns that we would then draw the line and say okay like it's anthropics consent that's the consent that really matters

9. 1:46:37

   now i think they should be permitted to do business with who they want to do business with and if they want to put in measures to try to prevent distillation i think that's their prerogative but i'm like not at all convinced that it should be the state's job to come in and engage in sort of statecraft to try to punish or prevent this distillation. To me, it's kind of, I don't know, information wants to be free.

10. 1:47:01

    Knowledge tends to diffuse. It's not like Anthropic has a super, or any AI company has like a super moral high ground in terms of, I didn't get my check for my share of the training data. And they're getting paid for the distillation queries too, which whenever they don't want to be paid, so it's probably beside the point. But I don't know. I'm not, I don't know. I find myself a little bit on the side of the underdog Chinese here where it's like, man, you've got kind of a deck stacked against you and get some knowledge where you can get it.

11. 1:47:31

    What's wrong with that perspective? I think we do want the deck stacked against China. We don't want China to win the race to ASI. I'm not a lawyer, so I want to opine on the exact legal path that you may take to make your terms of service enforced. I'll just observe that, and I say that as someone who used to work at Uber, it's extremely hard to bring justice through the judiciary against Chinese companies almost impossible so now the lawyer I don't understand the technicalities here but I'll just observe and start with that and It may take a very long time, and by then a lot of damage is done.

12. 1:48:03

    And then I'll also observe, like, yes, companies are training on all of this corpus that is available to everyone. That is an even playing field. The problem is that once you've done that at great expense, it does cost them billions of dollars. If you can, and it creates that artifact out of this training that I set, which is called the model. Now other people can turn around, and instead of doing this, which costs billions of dollars, they turn to this.

13. 1:48:30

    which costs a lot less than that and they copy you and they catch up with you. If you do that, you kill innovation. And it's nothing new. It's just called IP and patent law. It's exactly what humans do, right? It's like you as a human, you're like a researcher, you think for like decades, you do all of that work, it costs you a lot of money in R&D. You come up with an idea which is much smaller in tokens and much more precious and much cheaper to steal as is than like all the quarters of stuff that you trained on.

14. 1:48:55

    How do you protect that idea in order to recoup your investment, in order to produce it? It's called a patent. It's called IP, right? It's nothing new. If you apply to the same standard you're applying now to, for example, the pharma industry, you would have very cheap drugs, which is awesome, and you would have no new drug ever. You would completely destroy innovation in the pharma industry. And I think this is why you're finding all of these people support open models because people like free stuff.

15. 1:49:21

    And you can't really measure the future innovation that you don't get as a result of that.