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Comment by utilize1808 | Hacker News Reader

Once the open weight models are banned in the US, there will be no incentives for major labs and corporations to release open weight models.

Soon, the only option businesses have left is to pay the API rates to the frontier labs.

We might start to see API rates drop, however, due to price wars.

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> Once the open weight models are banned in the US

Bold assumption. Cryptography as a field had similar attempts at squashing access. Didn't end well for the censors.

You can prove an open source implementation of a cryptography algorithm to be backdoor free. You can’t do that with open weight models.

Even if you cannot know what is in an open-weights LLM, so it may include malicious content, it is still infinitely safer to run yourself an open-weights LLM, regardless who made it, when you can control as finely as you want its actions and you can customize token probability sampling, than to subscribe to an LLM as a service provided by an external company.

Easier said than done. Manipulating sampling probability is almost certainly detrimental to model performance.

API price rates drop should slow down if open weight models are banned.

Less competition.

No. Venders will want to capture the displaced users. So they will offer lower prices.

Open weight models don’t really compete with frontier models at scale, so they don’t really compete with each other.

I don't agree. Because DeepSeek is a few months behind Sota for 1/5 of the price even if you consider open router API prices.

I highly suspect models like Sol would be much more expensive without Chinese competition.

So to a point Sota pricing is already affected depending who you ask. And the tendency is for the gap to tighten.

The competitive advantages for US companies will not be left on the ground.

Yes, there is an enormous competitive advantage in using open weight models.

Don't really love the data-harvesting potential of that.

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