Reed’s view
For weeks, there have been murmurs in DC about a coming White House move to address the inevitability of powerful, open-source Chinese AI models being used by people and businesses across the globe.
Such government intervention could take a number of forms, but none address the true problem with them: American AI labs view the models as essentially stolen goods, built with the help of American frontier models to generate synthetic training data — a process known as distillation.
AI companies and the US government have called out Chinese firms for distilling US models. And while US companies have tried to prevent Chinese companies from doing so, they’ve so far been unable to stop it completely. Without a true technical solution, government officials have limited tools to prevent the practice.
The government has been citing national security concerns around using Chinese models, which is one way to prompt US companies to stop using them. Officials have already been probing the models for whether they contain built-in censorship mandated by Beijing, or potentially hide back doors that could put US companies at risk. In one possible strategy, US officials could designate the models as a supply-chain risk, which would limit how they could be used by companies that do business with the US government.
Another option involves imposing tighter export controls to further limit the compute capacity in China. So far, export controls have prevented China from developing full-blown frontier models. But they haven’t prevented the development of efficient, distilled versions. While US-based frontier labs might yearn for even tighter export controls, Nvidia is arguing the restrictions should be loosened. The rationale: It keeps China dependent on US infrastructure.
The conflicting interests put the White House in a tough spot. Both the frontier labs and Nvidia play a critical role in the US economy and national security. And while officials debate the right path forward, China is gleefully giving away the technology for free, enabling companies all over the world to reduce their token expenditures with US labs, just as they prepare to go public.
Notable
- Many US startups are turning to Chinese open-source models as they face of rising token costs, NPR reported.
- Beijing has weighed curbing overseas access to some of China’s top AI models, according to sources familiar with the matter, as reported by Reuters.