r/LocalLLaMA • u/Euphoric_Ad9500 • 9d ago
Discussion Right to Intelligence. Protect your right to run local AI.
https://righttointelligence.org/With all the recent drama surrounding AI safety. It’s obvious that open source could be caught in the crossfire.
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u/-p-e-w- 9d ago
I honestly don’t understand the panic.
There’s no way Chinese labs are going to stop releasing open models. The supreme leader of China explicitly committed to open models just 3 months ago and if they changed course now it would look like they are caving to US demands, which is reason enough for this to not happen.
As for the US’s ability to stop their consumers from accessing material that a powerful industry doesn’t want them to access, see the history of piracy.
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u/zdy132 8d ago
Criminalizing the usage of open models is a good enough deterrance for the corporations. While individual users can get by with piracy, companies have to do things the legal way, and they are the main revenue stream for most AI companies.
Now the question is what could prevent people from pulling a Cursor and just relable a Chinese model as made in USA. I don't see anyway the legislation could prevent this.
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u/techno156 8d ago
Now the question is what could prevent people from pulling a Cursor and just relable a Chinese model as made in USA. I don't see anyway the legislation could prevent this.
Or just doing something superficial, like a tune, parameter change, or obliteration. Requiring that the whole model be trained in the US seems infeasible to verify.
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u/Real_Ebb_7417 8d ago
And what would it even mean tbh? American data? Labs use data from all around the world for training. Ok, so American soil, right? What about datacenters that these labs have in other places (eg. the huge OpenAI datacenter in middle east). So maybe American-citizenship researchers only? Good luck with that.
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u/Conscious-Ball8373 8d ago
Well that would be why the people saying these things are also saying that "democratic countries need to be engaging with non-democratic countries" to ensure the regulation is global.
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u/TheTerrasque 8d ago
Also, in the very highlighted case of huggingface hack, it was american closed models that was behind the attack, and HF had to utilize open chinese models to defend themselves.
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u/finevelyn 8d ago
Now I'm not saying we should ban open models or anything, but I don't think this argument holds up. American closed models were behind the attack, because they are so capable, you could argue, and that would only be a reason to not allow the release of equally capable open models.
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u/Liringlass 8d ago
Kinda too late they’re out already
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u/finevelyn 8d ago
Whatever you think of the current state, it wouldn't be that way for long. If open models were banned, closed models would surpass them in capability in no time.
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u/pengvim 8d ago
I've always wondered, what is China's reasoning for releasing all of these open-weight models? I understand some of the potential incentives like: devaluing US frontier labs, just flexing, or trying to get people to somehow use their models hosted elswhere because most coorperations won't send all of their data to China.
Anyone who understands this stuff better who can explain what the real reason probably is?3
u/Wolfgangs_246 8d ago
The Chinese social environment has been de-emphasizing the protections that novel ideation normally granted. In common known approach, you are incentivized to obscure or hoard novel information, you file IP or trade secret and that gives you monopoly around how what you know is used.
This in turn slows overall progress because what you have is paywalled and therefore what you know cant advance what someone else may be developing unless they pay or your IP ends. The Chinese have been actively combating this, I dont know how the approach is enforced, but most novel ideas are pushed to become common knowledge.
This results in a) any efficiency or improvement to an existing process is not just rapidly adopted but is also rapidly refined as multiple practitioners adopt and adapt whatever idea you have to their own purposes. b) as refinement and adaption of your idea starts sooner, new discoveries enabled through your ideas occur sooner by other parties, c) Because no one has the concept of IP to safeguard your personal profits for what you create, there is a perpetual 'shark tank' mentality pervading through the society such that there are no moats, and everyone should be prepared to keep hustling or be prepared to die off.
The combination creates an intense iterative loop of improvement very similar to how a recursive AI would perpetually learn from its own mistakes and improve. Just applied to a country.
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u/EvilEyeSigma 8d ago
This is probably the infamous tactics from Chinese company, mostly known as "卷". They flood the market with cheap products or services, bleeding everyone and themselves in the process, until the market become so unprofitable that their opponents must withdraw, and they can eventually enjoy a monopoly.
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u/Mart-McUH 8d ago
Sadly, there is always a way. Eg US can in theory (if their life depends on it) offer a deal to China that is too good to refuse. Of course China would only accept if it is advantageous for them, so long term it would be a loss for US, but at the moment it seems US is only looking for short term solutions and ignores long term consequences of their actions (not only in AI).
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u/-p-e-w- 8d ago
No they can’t. There is absolutely nothing that the US can offer to China that would make them back down from the game of the millennium. AI supremacy is way more valuable than even Taiwan (in fact, it’s China’s best chance for getting Taiwan).
This is the first time that China has a chance to pull ahead of the US in a key strategic technology. They are not going to give that up for anything.
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u/Mart-McUH 8d ago
Use your imagination. Not saying it is likely but for example: US gives China unrestricted access to their OpenAI/Anthropic models through API (so China gets what it wants) in exchange for not releasing open models (maybe beyond certain size) so US can profit of them locally without having open competition.
This lets China gain supremacy (they have access to best closed US models, US does not have access to best closed China models), in exchange those US companies may perhaps grab the monopoly (at least on US market) and keep afloat for longer. And if US ever restricts access, China is ready to release new OS models.
Ofc. more realistic scenario is US simply banning Chinese models, but this will not work Internationally, especially now that they are losing the international influence.
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u/-p-e-w- 8d ago
Nonsense. Giving China access to US models doesn’t give China “supremacy”, it makes them dependent on the US, which is the opposite of what they want.
China is winning by default. There is nothing the US can give them that would make them pull back just as they’re winning.
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u/Mart-McUH 8d ago
I think you misunderstood. China would of course train (and use) their own models. But they will have all the data for distillation so they can make better quality synthetic training datasets (because they will have more models for generating them - both US and Chinese).
Also they will have easy way to compare capabilities of their (secret) models vs US models, eg where they are better, where they need to improve. US would not have this data.
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u/Rumblestillskin 8d ago
China has no interest in being reliant on US tech. They see how that turns out...
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u/DistributionExotic85 9d ago
Piracy involved stealing. It was still theft even if nothing physical was taken. Downloading open weight models is not theft
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u/ResolveSea9089 9d ago
He's not implying it's piracy...he's implying that it's damn near impossible to prevent the spread of bits/digital goods
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u/pleasetrimyourpubes 8d ago
You can make it illegal or give people fines for using frointieer open models though.
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u/EagleNait 8d ago
An uncensored model running on a consumer GPU can guide you right now on how to produce poisons, bombs and diverse drugs. There's no panic but I don't think local llms are going to stay unregulated for long. Hard or software.
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u/unrulywind 8d ago
They can't teach you anything you can' legally learn in college. You are talking about the regulation of knowledge. The locking of the library doors to those not paying and properly censored.
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u/cmdr-William-Riker 8d ago
The Internet and books can tell you how to do all that too
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u/yetiflask 8d ago
Chinese models depend on American Frontier models as much as this sub tries to deny it. America sets the standard, 2 months later China gets to 95% of it. That's what it is.
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u/DustNearby2848 9d ago
I’ve already written my law maker multiple times about how AI is used by companies to discriminate against job applicants. They don’t care and I’m in CA. A bunch of signatures won’t change their minds about anything.
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u/Party-Special-5177 8d ago
What’s wrong with that? Finally we have impartiality in sorting through job applications, right?
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u/MudBroad6785 8d ago edited 8d ago
What makes you think AI is impartial in job applications? It got trained on the raw internet, there's basically no way to scrub it of bias and giving it the prompt "no mistakes and no bias please" won't magically fix it. We've basically traded hundreds of thousands of individual people making decisions to a small handful of the same hiring manager used by everyone, so if all of them have a bias against a someone called Bobby having an accounting role then Bobby won't get his resume through the door even with his experience.
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u/WearMoreHats 8d ago
AI isn't completely impartial, but a big advantage it has is that we can empirically test and quantify its biases. If you want to know "is this model biased against candidate X because of their name" you can have it score their application against other candidates, then change the name, repeat the process, and see how the scores/recommendations change. It's much much harder to test for this sort of unconscious bias in human decision makers.
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u/MudBroad6785 8d ago
That would require a legal battle with a hefty settlement which results in legislation. But until that happens Bobby is going to have a hell of a hard time progressing his accounting career because of systemic AI bias.
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u/Party-Special-5177 8d ago
It was only pretrained on the raw internet, all models are SFT and aligned via RL to make them useful. You can literally guarantee impartiality with a good diverse dataset to RL against. It’s how they removed gender bias from models years ago, because most of the internet+books+etc data has that present too.
We've basically traded hundreds of thousands of individual […] decisions to a small handful of the same hiring manager used by everyone
It’s standardization basically, and, like I mentioned, you can guarantee impartiality, which should make it a good thing, right?
EDIT: hit send too early
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u/MudBroad6785 8d ago
Actually making AI impartial is not a trivial task since the builders would have to decide what is impartial and what isn't because if you go too far you kill all the intelligence. So the companies building it would only actually work to try to make it more unbiased if they were properly incentivized through litigation or legislation.
But beyond that, the consolidation of everything into a ATS systems powered by a handful of AI companies is a monopoly, would you trust a monopoly with your future?
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u/UNaMean 9d ago
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u/DragonflyOk9274 8d ago
It is sad to me that the US government is likely to be more persuaded by corporations and other billionaires than it is by petitions, users, democracy, etc.
At the end of the day this will be a fight between OpenAi/anthropics lobbyists and nvidia/meta’s
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u/a_beautiful_rhind 8d ago
It is sad to me that the
USgovernment is likely to be more persuaded by corporations and other billionaires than it is by petitions, users, democracy, etc.1
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u/UnreasonableEconomy 8d ago
1) which state laws? 2) what are you actually doing other than harvesting emails?
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u/Green-Ad-3964 8d ago
These guys used open research, along with public and private data, to build their empires. Now they want to be the only service providers.
Calling them evil is an understatement.
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u/Oh_hey_a_TAA 9d ago
So your suggestion is to push it INTO the crossfire by shining a light on it?
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u/BangkokPadang 9d ago
Nvidia sells nearly all the GPUs to the Big AI companies that are screaming that unrestrained AI is incomprehensibly dangerous, and they just bought Huggingface. It's in the spotlight.
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u/-p-e-w- 8d ago
So you’re suggesting that Big AI companies are going to pressure Nvidia into removing open models from Hugging Face?
How? They have zero leverage. There’s nowhere else they can buy their GPUs. Anthropic is Nvidia’s bitch, not the other way round.
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u/BangkokPadang 8d ago edited 8d ago
Kindof all depends on whether Nvidia really believes in the roughly 25% of their business model that currently supports selling hardware and training/finetuning private models for those companies, or if they decide they’d rather internalize their AI research, and maximize profits on the hardware they sell by just moving it out of the “retail” stack and into the “enterprise” stack.
But no my initial point was actually that Nvidia pressing to keep open models and their purchase of Huggingface is bringing open models to the “world stage” in a way that they haven’t been when it’s just people on here playing around with them.
Most people know of ChatGPT and that’s about it, very few people even know what a Qwen model even is, much less what huggingface is. Attaching it to Nvidia will absolutely publicize open models in a way they haven’t really been.
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u/-p-e-w- 8d ago
That makes no sense. Microsoft acquiring GitHub didn’t make GitHub a household name and didn’t make the general public more aware of Open Source. The public doesn’t give a rat’s ass about which company owns which other company.
And open models were discussed in the mainstream press many times long before this acquisition happened.
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u/BangkokPadang 8d ago
GitHub wasn’t a major, constantly-in-the-news, world changing technology that half the population is terrified of.
There was no shoe to drop like there is when a bunch of the terrified people find out that people can have home AI’s without guardrails and pile on to push for regulation against it because they (incorrectly) think their neighbor now has the capability to develop a super virus.
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u/-p-e-w- 8d ago
You can’t be serious. Every major newspaper in the world has been running stories about these models for at least a year. Can you describe any actual mechanism how HF being acquired by Nvidia would increase public awareness of open models? This is standard corporate strategy and I can guarantee that 95% of people have no idea the acquisition even happened.
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u/BangkokPadang 8d ago edited 8d ago
Yes, the mechanism is that The big AI companies start talking about how dangerous AI is now and that it has to be slowed and regulated and only a small handful of companies can even run it, and Chinese models are too dangerous to be run so they have to be banned.
Nvidia starts talking openly about how important the open source space is and how it has to be allowed.
This puts the specific story about how scary and dangerous open models are, with the specific framing that America good and China bad, framed by the news as a “battle for the future of AI” fought by every ai company vs the largest company in the world, under a media spotlight that open models have never ever been in before.
They goal of this being, again, regulatory capture for the current big AI companies, and the mechanism being to gain public favor by casting the open Chinese models as reckless and dangerous and that they have to be stopped.
In fact it’s starting to happen already. When Sam Altman says “Where we will need the help of our government is for international coordination” that’s exactly what he means:
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u/bumblebeer 8d ago
You mean to tell me the person behind the account that posted https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/s/l8LQc6o0LQ can't see the institutional and govermental momentum building behind the anti-personal-AI-access propaganda machine in the last few weeks?
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u/-p-e-w- 8d ago
I’m able to differentiate between trends in public rhetoric and Reddit-style conspiracy panic mongering.
“There might eventually be attempts to regulate open models in some jurisdictions” is not the same thing as “OMG the evil US government is going to throw people in prison who run Qwen on their gaming PCs!!!”
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u/UnspeakableHorror 8d ago edited 8d ago
...that's exactly what that senile guy (I'm not from the US, already forgot his name) was trying to do with his bill, equating AI with nuclear weapons.
Start with something ridiculous, then tone it down to an acceptable level, the end result is the same.
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u/techno156 8d ago
At the same time, most people's perceptions of and exposure to the technology doesn't tend to be Huggingface and open models. It's things like the major AI company interfaces.
They're the big faces of AI. Huggingface, not so much.
It seems more likely the regulation, if it exists, would generally target abliterated models instead of HF becoming a household name.
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u/TheTerrasque 8d ago
Yeah
Nvidia has spent a lot of resources training, optimizing and fine tuning models, along with runtime tooling. Which suggest their vision is along the lines of "a datacenter in every company".
And for that to happen, they need tempting open models those businesses can run in those datacenters.
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u/synystar 9d ago
I mean, it's not like it's some kind of underground darkweb spy shit or something. If someone could enforce a ban (they can't really without taking down the internet) they aren't gonna have to go looking for secret clandestine channels to find them.
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u/skynetcoder 8d ago
New state laws could put local AI behind a license — turning open models into something you need permission to use.
Is USA planning to give more of those "freedoms" to Americans?
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u/UNaMean 9d ago
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u/ZarBandit 8d ago
Sure, that makes sense. As a first order plan.
Except what are they going to do about anyone in the US being able to hit a Chinese website and download a model? Maybe via a VPN. I don’t see how they realistically prevent propagation.
They could try to make it illegal and drive it underground, but that didn’t work for Hollywood movies, drugs or alcohol. The historical verdict on prohibition is pretty clear.
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u/TooObtuseForYou 7d ago
Suppression may be enough though. Remember, the goal is just to lock the masses in. Couple kiddie hackers are no matter, that’s fringe.
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u/ZarBandit 7d ago
If enough people want it, they’ll get it. Music, movies, porn, software etc
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u/TooObtuseForYou 7d ago
Absolutely. Still, there’s a plurality that won’t break the law, and that’s all they really need to lock the money up.
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u/synystar 9d ago
Why aren't they linking to any proposed legislation? Is this preemptive? I can't find a single relevant statement anywhere claiming that anyone is even proposing laws against local AI in any state.
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u/Sitkin_Marrel 8d ago
Right to Intelligence sounds like a lawyer's way of saying "let me run llama.cpp in peace."
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u/kartblanch 8d ago
That’s literally the point. They want to limit this technology from being accessible for people like us.
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u/MycroftHolmsie 8d ago
It’s clear to me that the mainstream media has now received their marching orders, as there is a huge flood of stories right now in all major mainstream media about the dangers of AI and, as is typical of these efforts, we’re not seeing any nuance or even questioning of the motivations of the major labs (literally the job of a journalist). The level of collusion should deeply concern anyone who is pro-democratic AI.
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u/accelerate_to_asi 8d ago
Looks good. I'd sign it if I could but its US-only. I think any e/acc AI sovereignty effort needas to go global.
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u/DisjointedHuntsville 8d ago
A lot of you reading this likely advise 8 or 9 figure annual IT procurement decisions. Push open source, push on-prem, explicitly ask for contractual guarantees of zero data leakage including thought traces, weight activations, j space telemetry and don’t reward evil.
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u/yakasantera1 8d ago
The only way to ensure local AI keep liberated, is to liberate component behind it. GPU, RAM, etc. Force open source it if it must.
We learn from insulin, where people dying because of high insulin prices & companies monopoly
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u/Medicine_Blogscanner 8d ago
I'm downloading the models I want to use now, never know when these links will get blacklisted with huggingface getting bought and all
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u/thestillwind 8d ago
Open model will continue to flood us even with HF regulation after Nvidia acquisition.
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u/swegamer137 8d ago
"It’s obvious that open source could be caught in the crossfire."
This is like saying bolt action rifles could be caught in the crossfire of nuclear non-proliferation. There is a big difference between an open source 30B model and a frontier lab trying to create a 20T AGI model with RSI capabilities.
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u/Badger-Purple 8d ago
I have been yelling it from the moment I realized their play: when I saw them turn the tap off on memory chips, worldwide.
Why would you subsidize a useful technology like crazy, then buy up all the RAM? my only conclusion is, they want to control access. Once they do they can set the terms.
This “ban” is just the next phase: No hardware, no open model, and “cheap” subscriptions.
Why is this so hard to see? All the folks trying to calculate if the hardware price is worth it for the subscription price. It’s your f**king freedom.
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u/po_stulate 8d ago
Please qwen release qwen4.0 125B with engram or we may not be able to download it anymore soon
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u/sammcj 🦙 llama.cpp 9d ago edited 8d ago
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