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Technically speaking, you can run a 3T model on 25x DGX Sparks. Not fast, but it's around 150k if you include networking and power costs. If you really don't care about speed, you could probably get a couple second-per-token on older server hardware running fully CPU under 70k, though I wouldn't recommend it.
I'm also just not seeing a route to do it. Putting Moonshot on the BIS Entity List is the nuclear option, and it'd fuck up Moonshot's business and operations a lot, but I don't think it'd actually stop anyone from using their weights legally, and might not even do much to prevent them from doing future training. And I just don't see any better avenue.
To be fair, a distillation attack typically involves massive numbers of smurfed requests, and doesn't have the fair use backing that normal transformative works would. I agree it doesn't make much philosophical sense, but it's not quite the same thing categorically.
There's also an issue where it might be only possible to pass without letting anyone access the model directly, regardless of how public. Pretty much every model is vulnerable to 'heretic' modification which changes the weights in minor ways to make it see any request as legitimate. These are widely available and, once discovered, can be performed by anyone with the weights and some hard drive space. It's mostly been helpful for writing smut in more 'circumspect' models, but there's already a lot of 100B-sized models that can independently discover serious dangers that are not well-known among the general populace (and, to be fair, some legitimate and safe uses of the model that also trigger those safeguards and thus are good reason to want a heretic model).
Not so sure. Qwen3.6 was a major step forward compared to other models of the same time, and even now it remains a good example of good ideas being able to best raw hardware or parameter count to some degree. And there is the power-and-regulation issue, where especially if China decides to really hammer on the matter, the US advantage might not stay around.
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