Bill proposed to outlaw downloading Chinese AI models.

That doesn't sound like a free market to me.

The Land of the free sure likes taking away freedoms and banning stuff

China : Discovers Anti-gravity
USA : Law preventing study of anti-gravity

This would also effectively ban the use of any research produced by a Chinese national. Any papers which cite the work of Chinese labs (most of them) would be illegal, as this could be interpreted as aiding Chinese AI research.

uh... no.

Good luck trying to ban OSS next, which would criminalize basically everyone who's ever used a browser that isn't IE, everyone who's ever used an Android phone or a Chromebook, everyone who's ever used any modern audio or video codec as the bulk of those are OSS too, and would destroy both Big Data and the Cloud, both of which are primarily Linux-based, and send the US back to the web's dark ages, as in going back to when BBSes were popular.

Also, since this bill punishes people by making them spend most of their lives in prison, how are they going to lock up everyone who’s ever used Chromium or Firefox browsers, for example, or everyone who’s ever used Android or ChromeOS, which is most of the country’s population at this point, should that ban extend to a general OSS ban? (this part was originally a reply but I moved it to the main post)

Nothing will meaningfully improve until the rich fear for their lives

ngl them not wanting me to download it makes me want to download it more than anything else, and I'm usually against ai

Ah yes, the "free market" in action.

We are rotten to the core.

BuT tHe FrEe mArKeT

They are afraid. Very afraid. Good.

Time to start seeding DeepSeek R1 I guess.

I thought software and thus code was protected as free speech?

Capitalism truly thrives on competition and innovation

Awesome, so on top of all the other crap, like a economy that is going off a cliff, the US wants to actually get further behind on AI, just so that assman van make a few extra dollars

One word: pathetic.

US is getting very desperate

So you can't download them, you should run them directly on tencent cloud or something? Smart...

The paste does not go back in the tube....

It is much worse. I hope I am reading it wrong, but:

The term ‘‘technology’’ [...] includes [...] any semiconductor, circuit board, operating system, graphics processing unit, central processing unit, tenor processing unit, field-programmable gate array, random access memory, hard drive, solid-state drive, dataflow architecture, or cloud-computing service, that is manufactured, designed, developed, supplied, deployed, completed, [...] [etc.] to function artificial intelligence [...] and any other hardware, software, equipment, device, component, robotic computer, processor, network [...] that is manufactured, designed, developed, supplied, deployed, [...] [etc.] to function artificial intelligence or generative artificial intelligence.

This would mean that importing and exporting literally any piece of IT equipment, from a Ubuntu installer to a RAM chip, is illegal. Good luck & have fun.

Being open weights, if I, resident of Ijustmadeitupista n take it and make a very slight tweak, would it be OK for this rule?

And, if my pal from China takes a US open model and tweaks it to criticize CCP, will it be banned?

I honestly think politicians should think just a bit before trying to legislate things they clearly don't understand.

Government banned Chinese AI?

Step 1: ask a friend from any other country to fork the model (brotip: use magnets for faster acquiring a friend)

Step 2: have your friend rename the AI.

Step 3: now the model is from said country.

Step 4: download the model from said fork.

OpenAI will go bankrupt. US Government will be jelly. Problem?

These fucking clowns just refuse to learn about how technology works. Fucking morons.

This is why we gotta ban TikTok!!!! \s

Seriously tho it's a bummer to see how many people here promote all this horseshit.

Oh what’s that? Yeah that’s Barbara Streisand’s house

I'd like to point out that it is only one single proposal. If this does not get shut down, then it is time to be worried. But for now, it might just be one glue-sniffing Congressperson sniffing the wrong kind of glue one morning.

I'm not even in to this shit and I'm going to download it right now because fuck those assholes.

I'm surprised usually Hawley is pro running

So, only the rest of the world gets superior technology.

The investors will love that.

Ah, the supporters of the free market strike again. No competition allowed, Sam Altman and his American billionaire peers are entitled to all the money.

Oh well. The rest of the world can benefit from Chinese AI models.

Torrenting is going to be wild in 2025.

Well, now I'm downloading them all and backing them up.

And the ones I can, I'm going to fork on GitHub just so they have my name.

Bring it on.

Lol, protectionism for the administration's fellators.

Had to lookup the penalties since this document just pointed somewhere else:

(a) In General.--Section 206 of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (50 U.S.C. 1705) is amended to read as follows:

SEC. 206. PENALTIES.

• (a) Unlawful Acts.--It shall be unlawful for a person to violate, attempt to violate, conspire to violate, or cause a violation of any license, order, regulation, or prohibition issued under this title.
• (b) Civil Penalty.--A civil penalty may be imposed on any person who commits an unlawful act described in subsection (a) in an amount not to exceed the greater of--
  • (1) $250,000; or
  • (2) an amount that is twice the amount of the transaction that is the basis of the violation with respect to which the penalty is imposed.
• (c) Criminal Penalty.--A person who willfully commits, willfully attempts to commit, or willfully conspires to commit, or aids or abets in the commission of, an unlawful act described in subsection (a) shall, upon conviction, be fined not more than $1,000,000, or if a natural person, may be imprisoned for not more than 20 years, or both.''.

https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/PLAW-110publ96/html/PLAW-110publ96.htm

Just try to stop me. Or anyone for that matter.

The "does it connect to the wifi" mfers came up with this one I'm sure.

What next? Outlaw chinese food?

In other news, Chinese restaurants will serve only burgers, fries and shakes, and will be called Freedom restaurants.

I was playing this whole thing out in my head, and trying to justify the confidence of Trump and pals with such seemingly stupid moves. The only thing I can think of is that they believe that the money they will save (steal) from the government cuts, etc, will make up for the huge losses from the tariffs. And then they would have to believe that their internal AI development is at a point where they can overpower every other nation on earth, and so they don't need those international relations anymore. I mean, technically every single Tesla in the world is a camera for Elon, and a huge percentage of internet traffic goes through US servers.

But then I think, even if they do have all of these advantages, China seems to be catching up pretty quickly, is allied with over 50% of the planet through BRICS, has protected itself from their technological expansion. This is not even including that most other countries in the world will probably want to distance themselves from the US if this keeps up.

Either I'm in denial, or it really is just Trump and Elon are being blinded by their overinflated egos.

This country is so cooked.

Josh Hawley is a complete waste.

This is designed to stop businesses to use locally deployed models and be forced to deploy cloud services by any of the cocksuckers that sat frontlins in the inauguration.

LOL. Next they start burning books?

How would they even attempt to implement this? Will the US end up with a Great Firewall like China has? Even if Chinese models are delisted from Hugging Face (since Hugging Face is a US company and has to follow US law), they could just be hosted elsewhere.

So rather than build off their successes we're just gonna put up a blinder and hope they don't completely leave us in the dust?

PROHIBITIONS ON IMPORT AND EXPORT

They are just doing protectionism for Meta and OpenAI monopoly and shooting rest of the american economy in the foot by doing it. Anybody who isn't openAI one of these tech giants will have to use less effective american gen-AIs, that they can't self host for free for much less cost provided that they have servers. This Just to protect companies like openAI, that relied on the idea that people will have to come to them, so they can set the prize and still harvest their data and even insert all the right political narratives into the model, like what happened with chatgpt and palestine. All of this because few weeks ago good AI was supposed to super hard and scarce and now it isn't.

Can they even enforce this is the question? Will ISP's be forced to ban the deepseek site? Will they criminalize people self hosting deepseek on their home servers? Still that 180 days is just a call to download deepseek and modify it a little bit as it not to be chinese anymore and start hosting it as some alternative.

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=2069436850145993

50 States, 50 Protests, 1day

Feb 5 @ your downtown.

Bad chinaman used the free market to hurt american oligarchs so they got their regime whores in congress to restrict MY access to the good shit?!

Pathetic...

And frankly, it is the internet and model is open source. Get fucked daddy Sam.

Yeah, we should only be allowed to download their social media apps?

so basically more cenaorship because china?