Neil Chilson on why the US can't ban open source: "I think it's pretty unlikely. It runs smack into some very clear First Amendment issues, some right-to-compute issues. There are constitutional reasons it would be very hard to do such a thing in the US, especially if you're trying to target open source models developed here." "Practically it's always been hard to shut down software. These weights are not giant files. They're transferable quite easily, and running them you still need a lot of compute, so maybe that'd be the bottleneck regulators would try to look at." "But moving the models around themselves, that's very easy to do, and it would be very hard for export-import controls to stop the flow of something like open weight models." "There is a big difference between using a Chinese model, just using the weights here on US infrastructure, and using a Chinese model on Chinese infrastructure. In one case you control the data, you're not sending it overseas. In the other case, if you subscribe to something like DeepSeek and you're using the app and it's based in China, you're sending your data there. There are some security risks to that." "There are other concerns from using models you don't fully understand, but most of those, because of the open-weight nature, are relatively easy to resolve. There is a huge appetite among startups, entrepreneurs, and researchers for open-weight models to do research on. Shutting down the open source AI ecosystem is not a way to continue US AI dominance." @neil_chilson @abundanceinst