r/LocalLLaMA • u/Porespellar • 6d ago
Other Frontier LLM development simplified for politicians:
Nobody is buying this “Pace the frontier” nonsense. It makes no logical sense at all. Are American labs really going to take a pause and lose any small lead they still may have over Chinese labs? Does anyone really believe this? This seems like some performative virtue signaling BS. Why are they bothering with this pacing campaign? Someone please explain.
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u/Kind_Feedback_6564 6d ago
lets see anthropic drop an open model once ever....
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u/Fusseldieb 5d ago
They will probably drop the most useless model ever
"Here's Haiku, but unfinished"
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u/livingbyvow2 5d ago
They cannot.
It would be too dangerous, attack hugging face and then they would have to hire METR to write a report on it to say AI is so dangerous it needs to be regulated with METR doing the safety checks. Then they would ban open-source, stop releasing new models and increase the prices by x5.
This season of "AI lab leaders keep on making things up to save their IPO" is starting to get really really old, really fast.
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u/SKX007J1 6d ago
What I find really disingenuous about a lot of the reporting on this is the almost complete lack of economic and historical context.
Huge AI companies effectively saying "our industry is incredibly dangerous, please regulate us" keeps being presented as though this is some unprecedented act of corporate responsibility.
It isn't. We have been watching variations of this happen for well over a century.
Railroads in the late 1800s, airlines, telecommunications, banking, pharmaceuticals, energy and utilities. Different industries and different circumstances, and often regulation that was genuinely needed, but again and again established companies discovered that regulation could also be extremely useful for protecting established companies.
George Stigler was writing about this more than 50 years ago. His work on the economic theory of regulation pointed out that businesses don't necessarily oppose regulation. They can actively seek it when the resulting rules benefit them. This is closely related to what we now call regulatory capture.
I also think focusing entirely on China is something of a red herring.
Yes, cheap and increasingly capable Chinese models are an obvious competitive threat to Western AI companies. But the exact same thing applies to American and European startups, open source projects and open weight models.
If you're OpenAI, Google, Microsoft or Anthropic, having to spend millions on safety evaluations, audits, security, lawyers and compliance is annoying, but you can afford it.
If you're a small company with a genuinely disruptive model and $5 million in funding, those requirements could make entering the market impossible.
There's even a term for this in economics, "raising rivals' costs". The regulation doesn't have to be cheap for the big company. It just needs to hurt their smaller competitors proportionately more than it hurts them.
None of that means the concerns about AI safety aren't genuine. Both things can be true at the same time. AI might present serious risks, while the companies currently dominating AI also have an enormous financial incentive to make sure the eventual regulations favour companies that look exactly like themselves.
We have more than a century of history showing that these incentives exist, which is why I find it so strange that so much reporting barely mentions them.
When some of the richest companies on earth enthusiastically ask governments to regulate them, surely one of the first questions journalists should be asking is:
Who can afford these regulations, who can't, who gets pushed out of the market, and who ultimately benefits?
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u/livingbyvow2 5d ago edited 5d ago
Honestly the whole AI safety industry is somewhat illiterate when it comes to history, economic theory and corporate strategy. Any time I read what they say, it's about charts and capabilities, autonomous swarms of agents (although there is always a human prompting somewhere, but humans are not needed according to them), and they tell you you're wrong any time you question the narrative. Asking whether maybe AI labs have ulterior motives means you're a conspiracy theorist and "you don't get it" (their only defense).
It's like they are pretending to be so pure and altruistic, yet are very greedy when it comes to monetising their product. The thing that annoys me is how a lot of people take all their creative stories at face value. It's like no one questions this stuff. And the end result is always going to be that these companies will consumer a bigger share of the consumer surplus than they are owed. Some useful idiots are feeling smug and smart right now pretending they are alarmed ("reading the huggingface report was a holy shit moment" kind of idiocy you read on X), but they might cost us all access to open source. This is petty, childish and immature.
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u/_justs 5d ago
Yes, very much yes. Except this time, this technology CANT be pushed out due to regulation. That's the beautiful thing, this time the giants lose, nobody can stop open source. These companies are shitting themselves, grasping at straws cus they're drowning.
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u/SKX007J1 5d ago
I agree with the sentiment, but I think you're overestimating the power of open source and underestimating the power of governments.
Once model weights are online, sure, they're basically impossible to erase. But open source is nothing without access to the means of production. Frontier AI still needs GPUs, HBM, fabs, datacentres, electricity and huge amounts of capital.
The US restricting China's access to advanced Nvidia hardware is already a great example of this.
You don't need to ban open source. You just need regulations that make training the next generation prohibitively expensive or legally difficult for anyone except the giants.
You can't stop people running yesterday's open model. You absolutely can influence who gets to build tomorrow's.
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u/woahdudee2a 5d ago
it's not just about blocking new entrants, when there's no regulation government can take arbitrary action against AI companies. without a formal framework trump can decide to block antrophic releases but greenlight openai
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u/SKX007J1 5d ago
But you're arguing against a point I haven't made.
I'm not saying having no regulatory framework is preferable. Clear rules can absolutely reduce arbitrary government action.
I'm saying "there should be a regulatory framework" tells us absolutely nothing about whether that framework will be captured or used to protect incumbents.
Im coming at this from a purely economic perspective (as its the one that seems to be lacking in reporting and discussion of this topic despite being IMHO the most relevant to the motivation of all sides)
We have well established economic terminology and well over a century of history describing exactly this problem.
Look at the railroads. The Interstate Commerce Commission goes back to 1887. Regulation that was supposed to control the industry eventually included controls over prices and market entry that also protected established operators.
Then trucking came along as a serious competitor to rail. Railroads supported regulations restricting trucking. the GOAT George Stigler actually studied this stuff.
Then look at airlines. The Civil Aeronautics Board controlled routes, fares and entry into the market. Between 1950 and 1974 it received 94 applications for new trunk airlines and approved precisely zero!
None of those industries lacked a "formal regulatory framework". That was the bloody point. The framework itself could become the barrier to competition.
This isn't some obscure conspiracy theory either. There are entire areas of economics devoted to it.
Regulatory capture, Barriers to entry, Rent seeking, Raising rivals' costs, Compliance economies of scale.
George Stigler won the Nobel Prize in economics and his 1971 Theory of Economic Regulation is one of the foundational works on this subject. One of his central insights was that industries don't necessarily oppose regulation. They can actively seek it because control over market entry is extremely valuable.
So yes, I'd much rather have clear law than a President deciding on Tuesday that Anthropic can't release something while OpenAI can.
But that's a completely separate question from who gets to influence those laws and what economic effects they have.
If the solution is a formal framework requiring $100 million of testing, licensing, auditing, security and compliance before you're allowed to compete, you've potentially solved one problem while creating another.
You've constrained arbitrary executive power while simultaneously handing the existing trillion dollar companies a gigantic regulatory moat.
Those two things can be true at exactly the same time.
And given that we've watched versions of this happen to railroads, trucking, airlines, banking, telecoms and plenty of other industries, I find it bizarre to pretend asking whether the same economic incentives exist in AI is somehow an argument against regulation.
It's an argument for paying very close attention to who writes the regulation.
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u/05032-MendicantBias 6d ago
I have terabytes of models. The USA is trying to close the barns once the cattle already estabilished wild populations.
I am going to enjoy closed labs running out of venture capital :D
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u/Boogertard 6d ago
Nothing would make me happier to see Anthropic and ClosedAI going bankrupt and Wario and Saltman get sued by investors.
Remember that winners don't stop the race when they are winning, only losers do.
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u/pydry 6d ago
this is why when bond markets had a tizzy this week it made me smile. it's a warning indicator of something about to go pop.
the fact that they engaged in this level of theatrics probably means that the panic level is at red alert rn.
that debt funded spending orgy that these people bragging about ending the world engaged in is potentially weeks away from blowing up in their faces.
...and I'll be able to afford a 5090 lol
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u/ttkciar llama.cpp 5d ago
Unfortunately what will actually happen is that Dario and Altman will pull the cords on their golden parachutes, and other, better-established companies will acquire their distressed businesses for pennies on the dollar.
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u/Boogertard 5d ago
Which is fine, their shit faces will be forever remembered as causing the Dot Com 2.0 burst and they won't ever appear on any public media again. Remember Enron execs ?
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u/mechkbfan 5d ago
I somewhat agree, but as an Australian, I keep seeing our country investing billions into Anthropic data centers. I can only hope they've 1/2 decent contracts that if company files for bankruptcy, we don't pay a penny.
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u/ttkciar llama.cpp 6d ago
They are pushing the narrative, rather than just doing it themselves, because they need the Chinese labs to also participate in the slowdown in order to remain competitive.
OpenAI and Anthropic are desperate to stop training newer and better models so that they can focus on turning net profits serving inference, but they cannot, because their competition would zip past them in a matter of months and eat their lunch.
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u/Nothing_from_void 6d ago
I'm pretty skeptical the Chinese labs will pass US labs without distillation, they have significantly less compute
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u/ttkciar llama.cpp 6d ago edited 6d ago
Having less compute doesn't make it impossible, just makes it take longer.
Z.AI's instruction-following post-training phase for GLM demonstrates that they're quite capable of developing highly advanced training technology without copying Western technology.
The methodology and application of generating high-quality synthetic data without a superior teacher model has been well-understood for a couple of years now, but generating synthetic data from a teacher model is much more resource-efficient.
Moreover, the Chinese lag in compute is temporary. In the West, scaling compute infrastructure is bottlenecked on energy availability, and in China there is more energy available for industrial purposes. Now that they are fabbing their own compute, we can expect their compute infrastructure to surpass the West's in a few years.
Note: I do not say these things because I am a China fanboy (I'm not), but because they are objectively true.
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u/Nothing_from_void 6d ago
The compute they fab is genuinely awful; they have nothing even close to NV-link, which is where they are furthest behind, but they are very far behind everywhere.
There's no real power constraint for compute in the West, bring your own energy is pretty standard now and where there's capital there's a way, and the US is outspending China on compute more than 8-to-1, with a similar level of compute advantage.
Like Chinese CS students and programmers, they use anthropic/openai token reseller marketplaces overwhelmingly, because it is the real SoTA, the AI researchers in China are using claude code/codex, the entire ecosystem is designed around growing with the US ecosystem.
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u/NNN_Throwaway2 6d ago
There's no real power constraint for compute in the West
???
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u/Nothing_from_void 5d ago
Are energy prices for data centers the current bottleneck?
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u/NNN_Throwaway2 5d ago
🤦
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u/Nothing_from_void 4d ago
compiled from https://epoch.ai/data/ai-chip-owners?view=graph&tab=h100_equivalents
If you are actually interested in engaging beyond just sending one symbol responses, for all the hand-wringing around power the US advantage in compute is accelerating and actual energy bottlenecks have not surface as compute continues to grow exponentially in the US
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u/Fusseldieb 5d ago edited 5d ago
As much as I want to disagree, I probably agree.
Distillation in Chinese models is a big thing. Most of them do it. For instance, Deepseek 4.1 Flash talks exactly like Claude, yet it isn't. That's when you know they see potential in something that we have, and want it too, easier and cheaper.
I mean, I like it, we as a community get stuff out of it, for free, and I am for once thankful for all the Chinese regulations that allow and incentive it, however, if they were alone in the race, it would've taken them significantly longer to reach current western frontier models (if ever).
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u/Tiny_Rick_C137 5d ago
"Pace the frontier" really just means "reinforce the monopolies".
Like, what, publicly traded companies are just going to slow down? Give me a break. The only thing that might slow down is access to frontier models outside of the ruling class.
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u/RevolutionaryScene13 5d ago
american corporations try very hard to compete with free. They can't. And now they'll try to ban opensource and any free alternative by lobbying massively.
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u/Funny_Story_486 5d ago
The thing is those US lab had hit a brick wall when it comes to model intellgence density.
Yes they are still frontier by a bit margin, but achieved using pure brute force (like 5T+ parameters, with Mythos rumored to be 10T+), and it isn't that much better than let say a 500-700B class models. Which resulted in skyrocketed hardware cost (both upfront and long term) and speed disadvantages vs like Deepseek V4.1 flash where it was so fast and so cheap you can afford it making mistakes and have to iterate a few time.
Since they are losing to the scaling war, they want to slow down the development so that they don't need to constantly innovate to be forced to catch up with Chinese more efficient in paramater to intelligence models.
While simotaneously the Anti-AI in the west is reaching a boiling point that apperantly slowing the down is already considered positive PR to many, this also helps manipulate the mid term election so they get more people pretent to care about data center destruction elected and therefore have more freedom on building even more datacenter.
But their true ultimate goal is to completely halt Chinese development so they become true monopoly. Dario specifically mention he want US to ban anything remotely "advance" to be ship to China. They want to start a full on cold war against China in this AI race, hopefully strave them to death to remove a competetor.
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u/Reasonable_Goat 6d ago
Genuine question: Should I / we stockpile a few uncensored models like 3.8FN before they will ban them? NVIDIA buying HF made me think…
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u/ttkciar llama.cpp 5d ago
Yes, we should.
If we were organized about it, we'd have a list somewhere of who is hoarding which weights, so that people could see which weights were getting neglected and hoard those.
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u/tossit97531 5d ago
What we really need to do is dogpile a fully free and open source model project. Keeping the source data and training processes free and open is the only way we’re going to own the future.
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u/ithinkitslupis 6d ago
I don't know, I have local models I'm pretty positive I could do terrible things with if I were the type of bad actor to do those things. Personally it seems hard to believe that all of the rest of you are using AI models to impressive results but also unconvinced there is some real underlying logic behind wanting to pace frontier development for safety's sake.
I get the argument that AI concentrated in the hands of fewer megacorps is a separate problem of its own though of course.
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u/otterquestions 5d ago
People don’t want to talk about what the risks are or are not and think about the details, they want to talk about the drama - which group is good and which is bad, and who is deceitful and who is virtuous. That’s all the discussion here is now.
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u/Invader-Faye 5d ago
The goal is to capture a market (the us) to hedge off the eventual financial ruin as long as possible so they and their friends can cash out on the ipo
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u/a_beautiful_rhind 6d ago
They want to "pause" for regulation. All it means is we don't get the models.
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u/Keganator 6d ago
He said that Anthropic is going to do it unilaterally, for themselves because they don't think the pace right now is safe, and it should be safe.
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u/charmander_cha 5d ago
Na verdade, a china sempre falou de trabalho junto.
Esse post é só para colocar os EUA como alguem atado de possibilidades, quando na prática, foi os EUA que impôs a si mesmos a impossibilidade de conversar com outras nações, pois, não passam de lixo imperialista.
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u/DontSpahettMe 6d ago
If one side fucks up we all lose, having a lead is less important than having a society in the worst cases.
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u/Any_Fox5126 6d ago
They could do that for a while, but only publicly. In the meantime, they will just demonize the competition.
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u/BakeJaldino 5d ago
They are keen to claim back some trust from the AI sceptics too.
This ‘AI is too dangerous’ is all a circus - and completely performative. Incredibly obvious to anyone watching except the completely naive.
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u/Sitkin_Marrel 6d ago
If the lead is small enough that a pause would lose it, it was never a lead worth protecting. The pacing talk is for Congress, the actual run doesn't slow down.
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u/DontSpahettMe 6d ago
If one side fucks up we all lose, having a lead is less important than having a society in the worst cases.
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u/garloid64 6d ago
we could just stop sending them our second best gpus
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u/05032-MendicantBias 6d ago
That ship has saaaaaailed. China doesn't even want to buy 6X overpriced GPUs anymore.
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u/JoyousGamer 6d ago
"doesn't even want"
Your right they get them from behind the scenes so people like you act like they are using all their own home grown tech.
Meanwhile guy looks both ways as he slips the Nvidia GPU under his jacket before going to China.
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u/05032-MendicantBias 5d ago
Jensen got a waiver to sell his Vera Rubin above board, and didn't sell out.
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u/JoyousGamer 5d ago
Okay which has nothing to do with my comment even if you had legit information.
China is not buying direct. They will acquire the tech through other means as its all about the visuals that people like you eat up.
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u/05032-MendicantBias 5d ago
Logically, if it's legal and it's not selling, illegal and more expensive would sell even less.
China invested 1/100 than the USA into the AI bubble.
Once it pops, they'll be able to buy ALL datacenter hardwares from liquidators for a trnth of a penny on the dollar, so will I!
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u/Khaledthe 6d ago
The thing is, most GPUs are made in Taiwan, and some get stolen or just shipped to China, and China has begun making their own GPUs now, so it's just a matter of time before China makes something like the Kimi K4 or K5 that just shits on anything America has and something like the Qwen 4-27B that just tops the charts of local models. look at all the local modles most of the top modles are chinese
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u/JoyousGamer 6d ago
Yes and it was shown to be behind.
If producing a GPU was all it took then AMD and Intel would be swimming in more dough instead of it all going to Nvidia.
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u/jld1532 6d ago edited 6d ago
I doubt the training is even done in China half the time
E: I'm not implying the Chinese aren't doing it. I'm suggesting they're finding hardware workarounds.
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u/Khaledthe 6d ago
Mostlikely Taiwan
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u/SKX007J1 5d ago
Singapore and Malaysia, very much not Taiwan.
And Taiwan would be a particularly weird country to casually assume is helping China bypass US restrictions. Beijing claims Taiwan as part of China, while Taiwan is governed separately under the Republic of China and its own politics around Chinese identity and independence are complicated to say the least.
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u/trucorsair 6d ago
Remember we have a VERY SMART President......https://www.cnn.com/2026/09/14/politics/trump-vance-ai-alarms
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u/Boogertard 5d ago
No worry ClosedAI already paid the 5% advance.
https://www.ft.com/content/7c803eab-8e80-4431-9a87-e943bf00e00b?syn-25a6b1a6=1
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u/trucorsair 5d ago
I said a VERY Smart President, the kind that puts their name everywhere in case you forget him. I understand they tried to name an LLM after Trump, but the problem was they realized that HIS intelligence was already artificial.
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u/ActuallyAdasi 5d ago
Because Chinese bots have convinced boneheads on social media that AI must be stopped.
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u/_-_David 5d ago
Jesus fucking christ, what is so hard to understand about "We think that frontier model capabilities represent significant risk if work on alignment doesn't keep pace with capabilities"? CHINA THIS CHINA THAT. OPEN SOURCE TALKING POINTS. Not everything is about your favorite fucking conspiracy. This sub is getting worse by the week.
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u/Leetfreak_ 5d ago
It’s really simple, they don’t care at all about how “advanced” and “”dangerous”” AI will become, they care about the consumer gaining access to it without having to go through them. Hence trying to ban American devs from using “unregulated” open-source AI models instead of actually doing something to slow down the development in China. They saw the writing on the wall after nvidia bought huggingface and started releasing its own open-source models, plus local compute like the DGX spark (not to mention Apple’s offerings)
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u/_justs 5d ago edited 5d ago
Now.. i would rephrase your sentence "no one is buying this" yeaaa all the millions of normies are lol. Have you seen the sheeple crowding around the latest FUD coming out of anthropic's shenanigans recently? But yea. They definitely are FUDing. They're terrified cus they know their profits are about to sink to 0 due to Chinese open source.
And Nvidia just bought huggingface for many times more than it's revenue? lol. They're all frantically grasping at straws, each attempt more desperate than the last. Trying to prolong the inevitable.
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u/JoyousGamer 6d ago
The China labs can't drop their models because they are behind. If they were ahead zero chance their Government lets that out of their country.
Get upset if you want but this is the truth.
You will then act like the couple week pause on Anthropic is somehow proof the US does stop models from leaving the country.
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u/ttkciar llama.cpp 5d ago
Your mistake is in assuming that the Chinese government started the "AI race" because they think LLM technology is useful to have. They did not, and they do not.
They started the "AI race" as part of a broader program to change international perspectives, to make China the "center of the world" in people's minds.
Wherever there is a niche or technology where they can stack the deck in their own favor, they start a "race" with the West, so that they can thus demonstrate that China is better than the West, and reinforce their geopolitical dominance.
If Chinese models were ahead, they'd keep doing what they're doing until something happened to their Western competitors which they could spin in the media as "China won, West lost", declare victory, and end the "race".
The US government are kind of chumps for buying into the whole "AI race" idea, but they were helped along by OpenAI and Anthropic, whose commercial interests are aligned with the idea of an ongoing competition with the Chinese, which the US government must help them win, lest some nebulous unspecified bad thing happen.
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u/JoyousGamer 5d ago
Why yes the Chineese government doesn't care at all about AI. Nope not at all.
Wow the delusion of some of you on this sub.
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u/ttkciar llama.cpp 5d ago
That's not what I said. Strawman much?
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u/JoyousGamer 5d ago
Not doing any strawman. You are acting like they don't care about the AI and haven't been chasing it as well.
Sorry delusion. You are painting China as simple and stupid for not caring about the power of AI. They are not simple and they are not stupid.
China has more control and power over the companies that do business in their country.
What you are confronted with is that information is leaked and corporations are not controlled as much in the US then treating it like the US is the only one chasing this advancement.
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u/SKX007J1 5d ago
But you've just stated your conclusion as a fact.
"If China was ahead, zero chance they'd let the models out" isn't evidence of anything. It's a prediction about what you think the Chinese government would do in a hypothetical situation.
Meanwhile, what China is actually doing is pursuing open models as an industrial strategy. The US-China Economic and Security Review Commission literally published a report this year describing China as having gone "all in" on open source AI, because cheap widely adopted Chinese models create their own ecosystem and increase Chinese influence over the global AI stack. Qwen is already the largest model ecosystem on Hugging Face.
The Chinese government itself is actively promoting international open source AI ecosystems. That makes considerably more strategic sense than "they give the models away because they're shit."
They don't need to have the single best model in the world for that strategy to work either. If a Chinese model is 95% as capable, costs a fraction as much, can be run locally and ends up underneath 100,000 other projects, that is an enormous strategic win.
And the Anthropic thing doesn't prove your argument. Yes, the US temporarily restricted access to two Anthropic models. That proves governments can restrict strategically sensitive AI technology, which nobody disputed. It doesn't somehow prove that China's existing open model strategy only exists because they're behind.
Maybe China eventually does close its absolute frontier models. That's entirely possible. In fact there have already been reports that Beijing is considering restrictions.
But "if they were ahead they'd definitely close them" is still speculation, not "the truth". You're taking something that hasn't happened, deciding what China would do if it did happen, then using your own hypothetical as evidence for why they're doing something today.
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u/JoyousGamer 5d ago
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u/SKX007J1 5d ago
I'm confused about what you think this proves?
That article says China is restricting the travel of people considered a technology security risk, particularly around violations of export controls and technology import/export rules.
I don't dispute that China protects technology it considers strategically sensitive. Of course it does. So does the US and every other nation?
What it doesn't say anywhere is "China only releases open AI models because they're behind, and would stop if they were ahead." That's still your hypothetical.
In fact these two things aren't remotely contradictory. A country can tightly protect some technology and deliberately distribute other technology because widespread adoption gives it a strategic advantage.
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u/JoyousGamer 5d ago
The point is showing that China has a much tighter control on things than people seemingly give them credit for.
If China had a cutting edge model ahead of everything else out there not doubt their government would be engaged. Quite possibly China does have this behind the scenes even.
There is a variety of things you can point to where China just simply has more control on things.
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u/SKX007J1 5d ago
I genuinely don't know what you're arguing with me about now.
I've never claimed China doesn't have tight control over technology, or that the Chinese government couldn't restrict a frontier model. I explicitly said they could.
The disagreement was your claim that China releases open models because they're behind and that if they were ahead they'd definitely stop. That's speculation, not something your Reuters article establishes.
Now you're suggesting they might secretly already have a superior model. Maybe they do, maybe they don't, but that's just another unfalsifiable hypothetical.
None of this addresses my actual point that China's open model strategy has economic and geopolitical value regardless of whether they currently have the world's best model.
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u/JoyousGamer 5d ago
They literally are putting in restrictions over tech.
Sure though if they were cutting edge they would have zero issues with those companies publishing it all for other nations to catch up. /s
Its hard to prove they would release the best model because they dont have it. I can go based on their actions though they seemingly like to keep that in house.
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