Three experts debate how U.S. restrictions on AI model releases could backfire. If the U.S. ties its own ceiling to China's releases, Beijing gets leverage. Top researchers may flee to China to avoid restrictions, a pattern already seen in biotech. Advanced quantization research has already moved from Microsoft to Chinese labs.
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It's an implicit admission that open-weight models cannot be unshipped. Models like Deepseek have already been downloaded millions of times. So once China releases a model freely, banning it is impossible. So the US response is to define a permissible ceiling rather than a wall. The implications? We're tying our open release ceiling to China's pace of release, effectively giving, you know, Beijing control. If they push their open-weight models higher, then the US can release higher models as well. If China holds back, then they throttle us. And it's a very strange mechanism. You know, I could just imagine where a US frontier lab CEO calls Deepsea, can say, would you please accelerate your next model release?
We want to get ours out as well. There's actually an even worse scenario, which is you start to see the best, if not Western labs, unlikely, the best Western researchers move to China to escape this regulatory framework. Like, that would be a disaster, I think. And we've seen this, by the way, there's precedent for this. We saw this in biotech, where China now exceeds the West in terms of number of trials. Like, China is experiencing a biotech boom. That could happen in AI as well.
Alex, it's, it's much more specific than that. If you look at all the quantization research, all the best stuff came out of Microsoft Research in China. Yeah, all those people now are at Chinese labs. They're not, they're not still working for U.S. companies.
