Hacker News Reader

Comment by mkl | Hacker News Reader

The license seems really restrictive for something intended to be built on. Entire countries are forbidden to use it at all (European Union, the United Kingdom and South Korea), and you are responsible for making sure no one in those places uses your derivative.

View on HN

Seems specific legislations on European Union, the United Kingdom and South Korea made it hostile to Open weights model, I think I have seen other models with similar exclusion

> The AI Act Article 53 requires anyone who places a general-purpose model on the EU market to keep technical documentation, give information to downstream developers, adopt a copyright compliance policy, and draw up and make publicly available a sufficiently detailed summary about the content used for training the model.

Sounds like a pretty good reason. Maybe there should have be exemptions for open-weight models?

"Giving information to downstream developers" and a "copyright compliance policy" could get pretty expensive quickly.

you dont put exceptions in regulatory capture

What are you talking about. This site went absolutely batshit that "muh ai com'pnies are stealing everything, punish them!" And celebrated these anti ai laws

> Sounds like a pretty good reason. Maybe there should have be exemptions for open-weight models?

Article 2.12: "This Regulation does not apply to AI systems released under free and open-source licences, unless they are placed on the market or put into service as high-risk AI systems or as an AI system that falls under Article 5 or 50."

So there is some exemption.

When you're the engineer responsible for releasing an AI model at baidu, and one checklist item is 'check for local laws and either exclude that country or get a local lawyer to check for compliance', it is probably easier to just exclude any country with specific AI laws than to hire 200+ lawyers to meet every countries laws.

This applies even more so when revenue from the model release is likely nil. You will get the academic fame and PR no matter what the licence says.

They would not pursue it probably, but they sure pass on the regulatory responsibility to adopters

Anyone aware why this restriction was added? Is it a legal issue in those territories or more a competitor restriction issue? If it's the latter, you would think the US would be somewhere to exclude too

legal

The EU AI Act, as an example, has a bunch of restrictions that they may not have wanted to deal with, and open weight models are only partially exempted. It seems they don't plan on meeting all of those requirements, and so the model can't legally be used there.

The restriction exists to wash their hands of legal complexities of dealing with those countries’ AI laws.

Same situation as websites that blocked EU visitors when the GDPR first came out and everyone was still trying to interpret the rules. There were ambiguities in the GDPR that made it risky to operate in those countries so the easy solution was to opt out.

I doubt they care what you do with the model in those regions. It’s an escape clause to show they don’t encourage it if some regulator gets itchy trigger fingers and tries to go after them.

In 2032 the EU will have an approved version which has been signed off on by 15 different committees.

If you want to fine tune it you will also need to apply for approval from the department of Weight Watchers, which has not been created yet because the naming committee is still in litigation with the American company, and the chair of the naming committee is on vacation for the next 3 months and it is illegal to call him during that time.

agents do the same thing - the recent Minecraft experiment was illuminating and anyone using enough of agent swarms/clusters have experienced similar things .

Maybe bureaucracy is emergent property of intelligence.

That seems... impossible to enforce.

That's more often than not the point - they get to pick and choose where to enforce, likely based on whether or not said user is in competition with them.

I'm sure they don't care about enforcing it. This is about pushing the legal risk of prosecution by those countries on to whoever runs the model and derivatives.

Detect might be hard, but enforcing isn't neccesarily so. You file a civil lawsuit and then it's up to courts to enforce the contract (as this would be viewd in EU or copyright infringement (in the US).

> or copyright infringement (in the US).

Has any US court decided that weights are copyrightable?

That's where you've misunderstood Baidu's intent.

They don't care to enforce it, only to check the box that says they told you open weight models are all but illegal in EU, UK, and South Korea.

"You cannot use our models in these regions."

Now it's on the EU, UK and South Korea to stop users from downloading and running those models.

All that said, the EU, UK and South Korea, if they want to, are all more than capable of making life a living perdition for people who do run those models. So I wouldn't say it's "not enforceable". Only that it probably won't be enforced in the fashion one would think these rules would be enforced.

why are you surprised? dealing with EU is not worth the regulation cost and litigation cost

Does the publisher of open model weights have any exposure to compliance requirements if it’s someone else using the software, and they aren’t distributing or operating there?

You bet someone in Brussels is working on that

> me.

For a large multinational company, probably.

I read the clause as more of a cya from them. I doubt Baidu is going to come after you if you use their model in the EU, but if Brussels has a problem with it Baidu wouldn’t be on the hook.

> Does the publisher of open model weights have any exposure to compliance requirements if it’s someone else using the software, and they aren’t distributing or operating there?

Nope, no international treaties exist in that area, regardless of what EU's wannabe dictators want you to think.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com