Trump administration reportedly builds a slow-motion ban on Chinese AI models through sanctions and soft pressure

Exact same strategy they used for Chinese EVs… head in the sand while China steals their global marketshare. I still get a chuckle when Americans paint Chinese EVs as poor/lesser quality.

Frankly, this kind of meddling just makes it more appealing to use Chinese models. Chinese models are often open-weight, meaning that they’re basically immune to foreign meddling - if China decides tomorrow to “cut you off” you just need to find some other provider that’s offering those models and buy access from them instead. Or if you’re a big enough organization, just rent or buy some hardware and run it yourself.

This sort of meddling shows that the US government is eager to weaponize access to AI, and if you’re dependent on American models there are no other places you can run them.

US was too focused on trying to force dominance, they forgot what actual competition is. They could have spent that effort in becoming better, encouraging more US based companies. Instead here we are.

Zitron is a pinnacle of you can be smart and foul mouthed. Part of the reason he succeeds at this is he actually knows where to properly put cusses in sentences and doesn’t overuse them (like me, for instance).

There was evidence part of the reason people gravitated to Trump was that his foul and odious way of speaking seemed more “honest” because of the vulgarity. As someone who worked in local television news for 10 years, I can say that I think that’s true because it was always so clear that our newscasters were putting on a show and often had very few feelings whatsoever about what they were reporting on, or worse, genuinely were dismissive and cold to people in real tragedy. People have responded to that over time by realizing that all that faux-professionalism just really comes off as covering your ass and/or just using buzzwords to sound like you know how anything works at all when you don’t. It doesn’t come off as sincere, knowledgeable or, most importantly passionate.

When we heard Bernie Sanders, AOC, or Mamdani speak, we can hear the passion they have in the way they speak. When we hear Centrist Dems like Chuck Schumer speak, we automatically hear the work of strategy to get people on their side, not that they really believe or care about what they’re doing. I don’t hear passion in Schumer’s voice for anything but Israel. Sanders, AOC, Mamdani, you can hear that passion that they have for citizens and protecting and lifting them up.

Trump is passionate about himself and his followers are passionate about him, too, I guess. It’s that their is spurred by delusion and unaddressed mental health issues.

Anyway, people need to speak more plainly and with more passion, Zitron is a prime example of doing it well. Other than Doctorow and maybe WIRED, I don’t know of any other really hard hitting evidence-based journalism on this stuff, and Doctorow is a little bit too up his own ass on coining fucking words. (In my humble opinion, Doctorow comes off as way too extremely online to connect his ideas with regular people, he’s just too much of a fucking nerd who can’t stop being a nerd long enough to jive with average people)

The Chinese models are being released as open weight models, which are what people who want to run these systems locally are using. By banning them this just means that in the US only corporate models will be available to anyone.

This sort of “it doesn’t work and it has to be stopped” perspective baffles me. If it doesn’t work you don’t need to stop it, it’s going to stop itself.