Synthèse
The three planks: don’t sell chips to China, punish distillation, and create a regulatory process to approve models. Rory’s read: plank one is a legitimate national security debate with real arguments on both sides. Plank two is an interesting legal question. Plank three is where it gets subtle. Can you imagine a regulatory approval process that ultimately clears all of China’s open-source models? It sounds reasonable on the surface, and the likely result is dramatically restricted competition.
The three planks: don’t sell chips to China, punish distillation, and create a regulatory process to approve models. Rory’s read: plank one is a legitimate national security debate with real arguments on both sides. Plank two is an interesting legal question. Plank three is where it gets subtle. Can you imagine a regulatory approval process that ultimately clears all of China’s open-source models?
It sounds reasonable on the surface, and the likely result is dramatically restricted competition. They’re not saying they want to ban open weights. They’re advocating a sequence of steps that adds up to de facto banning, or at least slowing it way down. That’s why everyone else piled onto Jensen’s letter so fast. The letter also contains its own practical problem.
Dario is logical enough to note that if the bad actors are overseas, US-only regulation doesn’t help, so any real regime would need China’s participation. We just tore up our last strategic arms treaty. We couldn’t coordinate with China on COVID. Rory’s line was that at that point you’ve disappeared into unrealism. It works as a stall tactic, and when you’re winning as much as they’re winning, anything that locks in the current trajectory is worth doing.