Remember when OpenAI were wise enough to know OpenAI should be…open?

Greed will cost America the entire AI market at this rate

Don't model weights fall under free speech?

The letter really dances around the issue that we don’t want to see a ban on the release and use of open weights foreign or domestic models in the US. If we do it will leave us at a severe competitive disadvantage in a global context. Many of us would consider moving our businesses out of the US to avoid being mired in a stagnant pond that reeks of government capture by a handful of corrupt laggards whose core competency is regulating away competition and killing domestic innovation.

"The Bitterness of Poor Quality Remains Long After the Sweetness of a Low Price is Forgotten"

Benjamin Franklin

Would it even be possible to ban open weight models, given all the ways they can be used in finetuned models or online services, also in 3rd countries?

I think that we humans still have a really tough time differentiating and classifying between public and private goods (and everything in between) from an economic sense.

Unfortunately, capitalism of today appears to find public goods and strong, public, healthy public goods to be undesirable investments. Yet, it seems inevitable that some things trend that direction.

I feel if we could get a better handle on what goods fall into which category, and find ways to make those things sustainable and even grow, the situation could get better.

I'm speaking purely from observations here but it also looks like in some ways, the "invisible hand of the economy" (i.e. Adam Smith) might sort these things out by itself, albeit, painfully.

We could look at the fact that LLMs were mostly created from the public domain (except when they were not), and the resulting products/services (expensive to create/operate, benefits a huge swath of humanity, has all kinds of externality issues) as something that perhaps should again almost be considered as a public good.

If we look at the struggles LLM/AI companies have had with legal structure choices, such as nonprofit, for profit, etc and pricing (e.g. do we make it accessible at a loss? Do we extract huge profits?) as a kind of moral dilemma of classifying this new economic good (LLM-based AI).

In the US, the government has been taking investment interests in some tech companies, and recent proposals even include establishing sovereign wealth funds around AI/LLM. I think this is further evidence that the system is trying to figure out how to classify these new economic goods and corporations.

Why? The current administration is doing such a fine job protecting the investments of a few hundred wealthy people, and not caring about the economy of the country.

The combination of a wide range of model sizes and capabilities, with good engineering choices as which to use for what applications, that is the way.

English is not my first language, but to me the construct "to urge not to do something" in the title feels off. I think I only saw it without the negative, with some implied urgency... And now that I spelled it out, "urge" and "urgent" are probably related.

side note : I wish they had an actual link to the companies instead of just their names in https://littletech.org/membership