Don't forget that the Biden administration created export controls for GPUs by establishing tiers and limits for countries[1]. When Democrats come back to power, nothing will change in the context of export controls for models like Fable. This is what things will look like going forward. OP is right: this is a geopolitical and strategic shift that will be used by both Democratic and Republican administrations.
EDIT: Genuinely curious why is this being downvoted? Is this related to US politics or a left vs right thing on HN? I'm not from the US, so I don't have any attachment to either party.
Did the Biden administration do that off their own backs or was that an extension/compromise of the action of a Republican-held Congress that is, for example, unreasonably jumpy about RISC-V?
I think there is good reason to consider that frontier models might cross the ITAR threshold, actually. Not least because of the risk that they can simply blurt out knowledge that already does. If ITAR exists, an AI that might know how to contravene it could be a problem, because no existing legal framework or threat of punishment will cause it to keep secrets.
But I don't think you can ignore that the two big AI companies were pushing for that judgement because it would benefit them commercially if open weights AI was regulated.
> But I don't think you can ignore that the two big AI companies were pushing for that judgement because it would benefit them commercially if open weights AI was regulated.
This doesn't matter in this context, NVIDIA didn't push for restrictions for example but they got it anyway. So AI companies would get restrictions either way.
This happens a lot. Even I as a foreigner understand that Trump is routinely at odds with what long-standing cautious Republicans and right-leaning "national security Democrats" think is in the national security interest. They want the long term picture; he has no long-term perspective at all and wants the bargaining chip.
There was solid bipartisan border policy in 2024 that would have enacted strong border controls, for example — legislation Biden was very willing to sign, but Trump got Republicans who had argued for it to kill it off because he wanted to run against "open borders", not strong border controls. He wanted the advantage with voters.
Trump reversing export controls that sensible Republicans wanted for decades is not at all surprising when you consider just how utterly desperate he is to be friends with Xi (and how easily manipulated by Xi he is). Again, he thinks being able to open and close that tap himself is his own personal leverage.
I agree that in this case the calls for restrictions are coming from the corporate world. Because they want government support for anti-corporate-espionage measures.
Yeah, it's super annoying. A few days ago, Opus 4.7 created a plan with several items on it, including an auth feature. It then went through the plan and reported that it had created the auth feature, that everything was secure, and that the tests passed.
The issue was that it hadn't actually implemented the auth feature. After I confronted it about this, it admitted that it indeed hadn't done it and said it would implement it now.
If we had just trusted its output, we would now have a security vulnerability in production, allowing anyone to access other people's accounts.
It was only a matter of time. Watching how less technical people behave in the LLM era, I've noticed that most people no longer say "Google something", instead, they say "ask ChatGPT" or "ask chat". Many technical people have also stopped using Google for a lot of search queries and now just let an LLM find the answer.
I honestly wonder how many of these are written by LLMs. Without code review, Opus would have introduced multiple zero day vulnerabilities into our codebases. The funniest one: it was meant to rate-limit brute-force attempts, but on a failed check it returned early and triggered a rollback. That rollback also undid the increment of the attempt counter so attackers effectively got unlimited attempts.
> Can you point me to a human written program an LLM cannot write?
Sure:
"The resulting compiler has nearly reached the limits of Opus’s abilities. I tried (hard!) to fix several of the above limitations but wasn’t fully successful. New features and bugfixes frequently broke existing functionality.
As one particularly challenging example, Opus was unable to implement a 16-bit x86 code generator needed to boot into 16-bit real mode. While the compiler can output correct 16-bit x86 via the 66/67 opcode prefixes, the resulting compiled output is over 60kb, far exceeding the 32k code limit enforced by Linux. Instead, Claude simply cheats here and calls out to GCC for this phase (This is only the case for x86. For ARM or RISC-V, Claude’s compiler can compile completely by itself.)"[1]
> If they're not available, then I can't consider them an option?
Who knows where you live and what options you have? Who knows what you considered? Maybe that's why the question was asked?
> I've obviously not tested every car out there. But for years Tesla has been the only car that came close to the convenience of a gas powered car. Their charging infrastructure really allowed it to be a normal car when you live in populated areas.
Charging infra have nothing to do with their cars besides maybe the US. They are barely leading in anything anymore, especially in countries with heavy EV competition, like China. When I was in China this year, I saw Teslas everywhere, but most of them were a few years old. Most of the new cars were Chinese EV brands, and they seemed better on most metrics in the same segment, which included quality. They're losing market share in the EU and worldwide.
> Neocortical networks, with thalamic and hippocampal system integrations, are sufficient to explain the entirety of human experience, in principle.
Where did you get that? That's not an established scientific theorem, it's a philosophical stance (strong physicalist functionalism) expressed as if it were empirical fact.
We cannot simulate a full human brain at the correct level of detail, record every spike and synaptic change in a living human brain and we do not have a theory that predicts which neural organizations are conscious just from first principles of physics and network topology.
> We can induce emotions, sights, sounds, smells, memories, moods, pleasure, pain, and anything you can experience through targeted stimulation of neurons in the brain
That shows dependence of experience on brain activity but dependence is not the same thing as reduction or explanation.
We know certain neural patterns correlate with pain, color vision, memories, etc. we can causally influence experience by interacting with the brain.
But why any of this electrical/chemical stuff is accompanied by subjective experience instead of just being a complex zombie machine? The ability to toggle experiences by toggling neurons shows connection and that's it, it doesn't explain anything.
> We've got a good enough handle on physics to know that it's not some weird quantum thing, it's not picking up radio signals from some other dimension, and it's not some sort of spirit or mystical phlogiston.
We do have a good handle on how non conscious physical systems behave (engines, circuits, planets, whatever) But we don't have any widely accepted physical theory that derives subjective experience from physical laws. We don't know which physical/computational structures (if any) are sufficient and necessary for consciousness.
You are assuming without any evidence that current physics + it's "all computation" already gives a complete ontology of mind. So what is the consciousness? define it with physics, show me equations, you can't.
> It's a computer, in the sense that anything that processes information is a computer. It's not much like silicon chips or the synthetic computers we build, as far as specific implementation details go.
We design transformer architectures, we set the training objectives, we can inspect every weight and activation of a LLM. Yet even with all that access, tens of thousands of ML PhDs,years of work and we still don't fully understand why these models generalize the way they do, why they develop certain internal representations and how exactly particular concepts are encoded and combined.
If we struggle to interpret a ~10^11 parameter transformer whose every bit we can log and replay, it's a REAL hubris to act like we've basically got a 10^14-10^15 synapse constantly rewiring, developmentally shaped biological network to the point of confidently saying "we know there's nothing more to mind than this, case closed lol".
Our ability to observe and manipulate the brain is currently far weaker than our ability to inspect artificial nets and even those are not truly understood at a deep mechanistic concept level explanatory sense.
> Your mind is the state of your brain as it processes information.
Ok but then you have a problem, if anything that processes information is a computer, and mind is "just computation" then which computations are conscious?
Is my laptop conscious when it runs a big simulation?
Is a weather model conscious?
Are all supercomputers conscious by default just because they flip bits at scale?
If you say yes, you've gone to an extreme pancomputationalism that most people (including most physicalists) find extremely implausible.
If you say no, then you owe a non hand wavy criterion, what's the principled difference, in purely physical/computational terms between a conscious system (human brain) and a non conscious but still massively computational system (weather simulation, supercomputer cluster)? That criterion is exactly the kind of thing we don't have yet.
So saying "it’s just computation" without specifying which computations and why they give rise to a first person point of view leaves the fundamental question unanswered.
And one more thing your gasoline analogy is misleading, combustion never presented a "hard problem of combustion" in the sense of a first person, irreducible qualitative aspect. People had wrong physical theories, but once chemistry was in place, everything was observable from the outside.
Consciousness is different, you can know all the physical facts about a brain state and still not obviously see why it should feel like anything at all from the inside.
That's why even hardcore physicalist philosophers talk about the "explanatory gap". Whether or not you think it's ultimately bridgeable, it's not honest to say the gap is already closed and the scientific explanation is "sufficient".
We can stimulate a nerve and create the experience of pain, but stimulating the nerve does not create the memory of pain.
Nerves triggering sensations I can understand.
But stimulating the same nerves, or creating the same electrical activations does not create the memory of the pain.
Certainly, if some mad scientist were to stimulate via an electrode some parts of your brain to make you experience pain, you will remember it. Also, it's not unreasonable to assume that it would be equally feasible to create fake memories by stimulating other parts.
Granted, memory is certainly more complex than basic feelings and can probably not be generated on demand by stimulating a few neurons in a single place. We are certainly far from being able to create memories by electric stimulations, but I see no reason to believe it's impossible. Therefore invoking "memory" (or any other complex though, really) does not refute "[the mind] is the sum of electrical and chemical network activity in the brain".
Anyway, I suspect in those discussions more time is spent disagreeing on the meaning of words than on the core concepts.
EDIT: Genuinely curious why is this being downvoted? Is this related to US politics or a left vs right thing on HN? I'm not from the US, so I don't have any attachment to either party.
1. https://www.pcmag.com/news/us-further-restricts-nvidia-ai-ex...
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