Open-Weight

The AI arms race heats up: “The U.S. is preparing to ‌tell dozens of countries they must pick sides in the artificial intelligence race with China, warning they will be excluded from a U.S.-led AI coalition if they also sign up for Beijing’s competing framework,” reports Reuters. “Washington last year launched the Pax Silica initiative aimed at securing supply chains for AI models, semiconductors and critical minerals, amid a fierce technology rivalry with ​Beijing….By pressing ​countries to choose sides the U.S. hopes to starve China of resources in a race to make the most sophisticated AI, which could be used for military or economic dominance.”

At the same time, the Trump administration appears to be set to financially benefit from the growth and sophistication of Chinese AI models. World Liberty Financial, a Trump family–backed crypto firm, offers tokens that are then used by WorldClaw, which Reuters calls “a Hong Kong–based venture offering artificial-intelligence models developed by Chinese companies.” According to Reuters, “43 of the 90 models available through WorldClaw’s website, or nearly half, were developed by Alibaba, Baidu, Z.ai and other Chinese technology companies the Trump administration says pose risks to national security and intellectual property.”

Chinese AI products are rapidly gaining popularity in the U.S.: Mozilla’s chief technology officer “switched to Chinese AI startup Moonshot’s Kimi K3 for many of his day-to-day activities within days of the new, powerful model’s launch more than a week ago,” reports the Associated Press. “Earlier, he had been using another high-performing Chinese model, Z.ai’s GLM-5.2, for routine tasks such as managing his calendar, documents and email….U.S. companies like cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase said they’re switching to Chinese AI models to help trim costs.” Some of the value-add from Chinese models is that they’re often open-weight or open-source, not closed.

“AI systems exist along a spectrum,” explains John Villasenor at Brookings. “On one end are closed models, such as the various tiers of Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Users can submit queries to these models and get responses, but the detailed inner workings of the models and how they were trained are proprietary. At the other end of the spectrum are open-source models, in which information about the training data, the code used to generate weights from the training data, and the resulting weights are publicly disclosed. In between these two endpoints are ‘open-weight’ models in which the weights that ‘determine how the model interprets input data and generates outputs’ are public, but the methods that were used to generate those weights are not.” Globally, China is establishing dominance as a provider of both open-weight and open-source models, which some companies prefer as they’re a lot cheaper to run, with more customization, control, and data privacy available.

“If American AI is dominated by a small handful of closed model providers, the result will be an overconcentration of power,” warns Villasenor. “That raises many concerns, including the risk of regulatory capture and a set of resulting policies that impede new market entrants.”

Starving China of resources is one path, I guess, but beating China at their own game would be another possibly worth choosing.

Dose of sanity: Finally, someone says what much of the left needs to hear surrounding jobs, pay, and inequality! “If men disproportionately hold dirty or dangerous jobs, paying them more may widen the earnings gap between men and women even when no woman is formally excluded (of course, one could also frame this as widening the longevity gap in women’s favor),” writes the eminently reasonable Kelsey Piper for The Argument. “Differences in opportunity, choice, and achievement can accumulate into durable disparities between groups defined by immutable characteristics like sex. But—while such a disparity might be a warning sign to investigate further for injustice—we have to keep in mind that our objective is to identify and redress injustice, not difference itself. Sometimes unequal outcomes are evidence of sexism and will vanish in a better world. Sometimes they are the mechanism by which society persuades people to haul away our garbage.”

Scenes from Texas: I was back in Texas with my family last week and shocked by the amount of Talarico Fever (in an admittedly blue city).

Democratic state Rep. James Talarico, who is running for Senate against the state’s attorney general, Ken Paxton, believes “it’s time to start flipping tables”—referencing Jesus flipping the tables of merchants outside the temple—and reclaim talk of Jesus and the gospel from the right.

Democratic strategists, per a long Washington Post piece on the matter, seem to believe the Talarico playbook will win over ultra-religious Bible Belt voters. I am less sure. Talarico drew plenty of scorn back in March for an appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast in which he claimed that the story of the Annunciation—when the angel Gabriel came to Mary and told her she would bear a child, to be called Jesus—lays the foundation for Christians to accept abortion as morally permissible. “To me, that is an affirmation in one of our most central stories that creation has to be done with consent. You cannot force someone to create,” Talarico told Rogan. He further elaborated that Christian opposition to abortion is not rooted in Scripture. “All I’m asking is that for Christians who are pro-choice and who respect the bodily autonomy of women, that we be given the space to make our theological argument, because I think there is a lot of biblical evidence to support that opinion,” he added.

I don’t think this is theologically sound in the slightest, but more to the point: I don’t think most Christian voters—like evangelicals and Catholics, both groups strongly represented all over Texas—will find his logic persuasive. (Talarico also said that “God is nonbinary” during a debate over trans youth inclusion in single-gender sports. My point being: I’m not sure most Texas evangelicals will appreciate his theology. “It is blasphemous,” one Republican told the Post.)

QUICK HITS

• Are people tiring of the pursuit of artificial perfection, in the form of botox, fillers, and veneers? asks Amanda Mull at Bloomberg. Some people “have moved on to some kind of artfully messy style or are asking their cosmetic injectors to let a few wrinkles remain. Ultimately, though, it’s probably too optimistic to regard this potential shift as the coming triumph of more realistic beauty standards or domestic ideals. If big white veneers are too popular, those with means can move on to even more expensive cosmetic dentists, armed with the latest techniques and materials to ensure their perfect new teeth look like the kind that might actually have grown out of their jaw. To avoid a too-puffy face full of filler, they can opt for a new injectable like Sculptra, which subtly stimulates your body’s own collagen production over time. Perfection, after all, isn’t some set point in the distance. It moves when you do.”
• Semi-related: Rep. Nancy Mace (R–S.C.) has new ink, and I kind of love it, though it’s admittedly a little comical. She’s going for the Liz Wolfe look!
• “Democrats have a habit of enacting abortion laws that are extreme by any reasonable definition, and then feigning shock if you care to point this out,” writes Emma Camp for The Wall Street Journal. “This week Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey signed an expansive new law that effectively eliminates the state’s restrictions on postviability abortion. Under current law, abortion is unlawful after 24 weeks unless the mother’s life or health is at risk or the unborn child has been diagnosed with a fatal birth defect. The new law, which takes effect in November, allows abortion at any time, for any reason, subject only to the ‘professional judgment’ of a physician that it is necessary….Democrats want it both ways—to pass laws with the explicit intent of allowing elective abortion at any point in pregnancy, and to deny that these laws could possibly have that effect.”