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Notes -
AI safety & open models
Yesterday, Kimi K3's weights were published on HuggingFace. We now have an open model comparable to GPT 5.5 and Opus 4.8, which were SOTA only a couple months ago.
An example of what it can do on its own: this website that imitates macOS Desktop (background). Click around, every app has lots of features, and again, this was implemented in one shot. Do you not think that's impressive?
You can, at least in theory, run this on your own equipment. Millions of dollars of equipment, sure, but far more attainable than running GPT or Opus. A medium-sized corporation or small government can.
Which presents problems: its impressive capabilities can be used for evil, without guardrails or surveillance unlike GPT or Opus. Like Fable, Kimi has already found several vulnerabilites. For examples of real evil, see how other LLMs are being used for terrorism by Boko Haram (and almost certainly other groups).
Regulation concerns
Allegedly some US officials are considering restricting US companies from using Chinese open models. Despite this claim being repeated across many outlets, I didn't actually find any evidence. However, I did find plenty of tweets criticizing the models' development and themselves, like this tweet by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent:
IP theft from Anthropic, who themselves are disregarding IP? Really?
What seems more indicative of a potential future restriction, the US government is already rushing unclear regulations for US models Fable/Mythos and GPT 5.6. If an open-weight model reaches somewhere around their capability, intuitively it would also be restricted, and Kimi is close.
Tech companies...support open weights models?
You have people like Dean Bell arguing for regulation, but many companies including Andressen Horowitz, Dell, IBM, Meta, Microsoft, and front and center Nvidia came out in support of open models, in this letter.
Key paragraphs (emphasis mine):
Also
Unlawful extraction from companies that have themselves unlawfully extracted? Again, really?
Regardless, I think overall it's a good sign.
Anthropic's position
Key quotes (emphasis theirs)
The important part is that Anthropic claims they don't want to ban open models, but want "mandatory safety testing" applied to all models. They use the threat of an AI-assisted superbug, which admittedly could cripple civilization, but so far is merely plausible. But that could effectively ban open models if it's implemented such that only closed models pass, like how "nobody can sleep under a bridge" applies equally to rich and poor but only affects the latter.
But it's also part of Plan A, proposed by the AI rationalists, who are supposed to be experts on this topic (what else have they been doing the past 10+ years?). Plan A actually argues against open models entirely, although it specifies that access to the models should be open, and all development and regulation discussions should be public. But how can we publicly develop models without making them open?
I'm curious what the Plan A authors think about Kimi K3, the open letter, and Anthropic's response; I haven't seen anything on lesswrong.com yet, although admittedly I only skimmed the front-page and recent.
My thoughts
For now, I support open weights models.
If someone comes up with a way to regulate AI development that doesn't eventually consolidate power into corrupt hands, sure. But who can be trusted? Even if future atrocities are caused by open models, they may be lighter than the atrocities committed in an alternative timeline, by a tyrant who gained power with the help of regulation, or lack of open models that prevented them.
As for "unlawful training": I still maintain the position that IP should gradually be completely abolished. AI training has already been ignoring IP, so I believe that should continue.
That includes China training on American models. I doubt China will surpass American companies if they're training on American models, especially since America has more hardware. And incentive? Come on, the American companies have enough incentive even if they had to distribute their models freely, from the dream of ASI.
There seems to be a rhetorical trick being employed by safety proponents where "being in support of open models" means "sharing, in some small part, responsibility for when open models end up causing damage" when in reality this is a total non-sequitur.
As a first matter of practicality, unless you are a high-ranking member of the CCP, there is approximately nothing you can do to prevent proliferation of open models if it's deemed in the interest of the Chinese state that it happens; Pakistan and North Korea got the bomb, and the world got Kimi K3, despite American seething to the contrary. Banning Chinese models from being hosted on American soil or sanctioning the Chinese model developers is simply pretending that this isn't going to happen, and entrenching the market position of the existing closed-weight providers, rather than achieving anything meaningful.
As a second matter of practicality, from what we can tell the majority of actual black-hat activity eventuated via LLM has happened via jail-breaking of closed-weight models rather than the use of the feared abliterated open-weight models e.g this Claude hack of Mexico. If you're a black hat with ~infinite access via black market token proxies and don't fear legal consequences, you can already just put effort into jailbreaking the frontier models and using them for evil, while legitimate white hats are the ones that have to use Chinese models because they fear reputational and legal consequences. This is a fully intractable problem unless you go actually closed-weights i.e no access other than by via white-list.
If we already live in a fragile world, then so be it; attempting to restrict open weights is not going to make it any less fragile. It's better to do what we can to harden the world via proliferation rather than sticking our heads in the sand, hoping that will reverse the changes happening in the world.
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