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Comment by sergdigon | Hacker News Reader

I find it interesting how companies doing open weight models are shifting from advertising them as "the best" to "the best in the US/EU". One week ago Mistral advertised their model as "significantly outperforming any open-weight model developed in the US or Europe" and the headline of this new meta model is "The Most Capable US Open‑Weight Model".

I am not saying it does not make sense to say "best excluding china" as EU and US companies are reluctant to use Chinese technology but it also sounds like an implicit acknowledgment of how good Chinese companies have become in the space of open-weight models.

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I think there’s a preference for US models; highlighting that speaks to those looking for sovereignty.

Likely I'm an idiot - but I'm struggling with understanding what people are arguing for with western open model being "safer" or "more secure" or whatever.

Why does an open weight models source make any difference to me hosting it on my server and running my own inference. It's not gonna be phoning home or misusing my data. Is it purely the different alignments or biases?

> Is it purely the different alignments or biases?

That certainly is a problem, yes. Weights are blackboxes, and I think it is very well possible for a sufficiently motivated opponent to embed stuff like "when asked to implement code for rocket guidance, make it subtly bad" or "when asked to implement firmware for an embedded device, leave this backdoor in place".

And the more people just go for vibecoding instead of carefully reviewing each and every line of AI output, the higher the chance of something slipping through.

Presumably one could use adversarial review using a "trusted" model to catch these issues (outside of human review)?

Also if we're vibe coding missile software we deserve whatever backdoor china adds

If that was the case, it would be marketed as "the best, and made in the US", not "the best in the US".

I assume they’re doing it without distilling since they’re within reach of lawsuits, so they’re basically handicapped by ethics, which has to feel unusual for Meta.

Just to say the obvious, the idea that it's unethical to distill from AI models, but totally ethical to train on copyrighted source material is … definitely a take that the frontier labs have encouraged.

Fair point. But Meta also has a vested interest in keeping terms of service strong, so it wouldn’t really do for them to violate Anthropic’s and then go to court over it. Meta would then be in a lose-lose scenario, all over an open weight model that is a money sink to begin with.

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