1. Trump has been trying to cut Science budgers by larger percentages for a while now. Congress has not let them.
2. NIH funding notice of awards has slowed to a crawl since Trump did not get his wish to cut Science funding.
3. Putting scientific funding under political control, instructing them to ignore the reviews conducted by peer scientists.
4. Have practically made international collaborations on grants impossible. An expert in Canada or Europe that would be great? Pretty much, too bad.
5. Pushing policies that make grants cancelable at any moment without need to have a justified reason, including potentially for exercising free speech, disagreeing with Administration doctrine, etc, or because you're ugly. This and the funding uncertainty makes planning difficult...just like business, stability/predictability matters.
6. Pushing policies that prevent funds to help cover costs of dissemination, including conference costs.
100% support (10s of millions of Americans do) many of these cuts when scientists are hired because they know someone, or are part of some “group” rather than being the best choice. Also not interested in funding anything not research related, including various “offices” that have nothing to do with supporting research. Lots of things to like about these cuts.
> 100% support (10s of millions of Americans do) many of these cuts
I doubt "10s of millions of Americans" can describe the core functions of the NIH
> when scientists are hired because they know someone, or are part of some “group” rather than being the best choice.
How do you think new appointees and hires in the NIH/HHS are selected? Political loyalty seems to be a better predictor than scientific impact or output.
> Also not interested in funding anything not research related, including various “offices” that have nothing to do with supporting research. Lots of things to like about these cuts.
The cuts and changes are dramatically impacting research support. Grant money is not being disbursed at the same rate since the new review changes began. You can more plainly characterize the changes as harmful to research in general than focused on removing whatever specific things you don't like.
You know so little about this, ad it is terribly frustrating to me. Scientists have been made out to be villains, when, on the whole, these are some the hardest working, most motivated people you will ever encounter.
They have absolutely no idea what they are destroying or why. An entire generation of scientists will be lost. It is breathtaking to watch what will surely be someday labeled as one of the greatest acts of intentional, national self-destruction ever.
I'm pretty sure only a small fraction of grants gave this issue, and the cuts have meanwhile being very wide, without any sort of intelligent approach (I know ppl doing stuff like material science at nasa that now have nothing to do because they cut costs of various inputs, while the very expensive lab equipment is sitting there now unused)
Can you cite any stats or studies that show that this is happening in any substantial amounts? This seems to be one of those "it just makes common sense" when the underlying data is ignored or assumed.
>100% support (10s of millions of Americans do) many of these cuts when scientists are hired because they know someone, or are part of some “group” rather than being the best choice.
Prove it. Prove this happens at a large scale. This is just nonsense talking points.
It's called the 2024 election. People have listened to so much propaganda aimed at destroying the anyone with credibility that can challenge whichever "truth" the propagandist chooses to push.
I'm sure the average person was completely fed up with the federal grant process for medical issues and it was a driving force in their voting decision. Excellent proof.
Could you explain how much the US spends on its science budget compared to peers? It would help us really understand how much he's cutting it and harming our science base if we knew the numbers. For example if we're spending 50% less than EU or Canada.
Everyone assumes that it is business motivated. Perhaps, but perhaps that business motivation is the fact that this group at Amazon had reportedly many past interaction with the Administration about AI safety, and this being just the latest interaction.
Civilization is at a crossroads, or will be soon. Democratization of AI can be good up to a point, but existential threats can also be real, and democratization of existential threats is not a survivable policy.
It's actually the opposite. Democratization of intelligence is the only way to stop existential threats and render them useless.
Right now, and likely forever, because biological threats can be sanctioned at a supply-chain level, the risk of AI is all digital. Fraud, phishing scams, spam, hacks, etc.
The only way we harden the worlds infrastructure to the point that it can withstand attack from bad AI is if we have an abundance of access to frontier intelligence to develop countermeasures.
Otherwise, bad actors will develop these capabilities behind closed doors and use them to hold the world hostage and cause irreparable harm. There's no putting the genie back in the bottle. Good and open-access AI and the people using it are the digital immune system.
If there's an asymmetry where bleeding edge is gated off to only a small group, and allowed to gain exponential power over the immune systems defense grid, the slightest infection will lead to death of the host.
I agree completely. If these things are so dangerous that they turn every person into an advanced persistent thread actor, capable of causing untold cyber destruction (oh, and they can make bio weapons etc), then they should be treated like the weapons they are.
And gps guided missiles were doing that since the 80s. Humans are already really good at killing each other. Yeah it sucks the tech will be used for that.
The real threat isn't the drones, it's the ability to generate a target bank. Historically militaries that are not just carpet bombing have been bottlenecked by target selection, humans can only review and authorize so many strikes. Now the AI will select the targets and the bottleneck moves to how many bombs you can build.
That video makes a lot of claims that sound reasonable, but doesn't provide data to back it up.
For example, in the first 30 seconds, he says that at the beginning of the Iran War, AI was used to strike 900 targets in 12 hours. Which he calls "unprecedented" but then never backs up.
For context, in the 1991 Gulf War "Operation Desert Storm" the U.S. struck about 1500 targets[1][2][3] in 12 hours.
Blocking any leading edge AI model changes nothing. We (humans) have a long history of determined attackers finding creative and unexpected solutions.
What the AI we have, the stuff that is already PUBLICLY AVAILABLE, is good enough to shrink the time for developing one of those creative solutions into a working tool/weapon.
Edit: https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2026/06/12/8038963/ They are using ai for terminal guidance on Russian logistics (red vs green reticle if you choose to watch the video). Considering the progress on YOLO (and running on sub watt processors) it being able to do this work "onboard" should be shocking to no one.
Nobody with even a modicum of understanding of how LLMs work believes any of this. These 'serious thinkers' are just grifters preying on the feeble minded.
For those that don't like calling them CCP models, may I remind you, the CCP won't let Chinese AI researchers out of the country any more without securing approval first[1].
Ah yes, those pesky Chinese backdoors that no single instance was ever found, even though Chinese open-weight model are a thing for many years now. Many people burn through millions of tokens on these models every day - surely someone would have triggered one of those backdoors, right?
Or that pesky CCP censorship and propaganda baked into the model, which any random guy can remove from whichever model they want as a single weekend side project with an off-the-shelf tool[1]. (Try it. It's fun. I've done it myself.)
I agree it is an empirical question. I do not know if that research has been done in the open sphere. But please, do not pretend that there isn't a real geopolitical rivalry going on that makes such questions a legitimate, non-fruity concern.
This is a fair point, alongside the one about the hidden content in the weights.
Exactly why my prime suspect would be the one country with focus on proprietary models, and the one country prone to bombing others, including with nuclear weapons.
Unlike China, the US government doesn't own the models. The models will freely talk about any of those bombings or other atrocities of the US government.
Sure, but the difference is that one side (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and co.) hoards everything, keeping it proprietary behind API paywalls and constantly spewing AI doomer rhetoric while limiting what you can do "for your own safety" (especially Anthropic; Dario has been consistently doing this since GPT-2 days, every time claiming that things are "too dangerous" for the common folk to handle). While the other side (big, bad China) releases all SOTA open-weight models with which you can do whatever you want with, along with a ton of open research.
So yes, there is geopolitical rivalry, but one side is deliberately antagonistic (not releasing anything in the open, putting arbitrary restrictions, spewing toxic rhetoric, applying sanctions, etc.) while the other side is letting everyone (including their rivals) to use what they've produced with little-no-to restrictions.
I'm under no illusion that if the situation was reversed China would most likely do the same, but as things stand you can probably guess which side I'm rooting for here (at least until the roles reverse).
Yes, each are following their own business strategy, frontier labs have no incentives for releasing open weights, while second and third-tier labs, it is one of their few plays to gain market/mind share. But business is only part of it, as national security is another. It may be that the CCP has been relatively hands off exactly because of my concern, judging that market share and reputation is more important (for now).
The question is not whether it is a good model, it is whether the model can be trusted to not act intentionally maliciously against certain topics or certain users.
We live in a time of a great geopolitical rivalry and high tensions with an emergent technology with tons of national security implications. To pretend otherwise is silly, and to fail to ask the question, dangerous.
> The question is not whether it is a good model, it is whether the model can be trusted to not act intentionally maliciously against certain topics or certain users.
We absolutely know that we can't trust the American model not to do that - it's "by the oligarchs, for the oligarchs" - so it's not clear what the claim really is.
Has anyone taken these open weight models from China and stripped the CCP out of them? I do not mean that snarkily, I mean review them thoroughly using techniques for weight introspection (concept activations) in response to things that one might expect would trigger deceptive/malicious behavior if the CCP had actually tried to implant context-specific behaviors (e.g. the accusation of generating vulnerable code if being used in American government applications, which I don't know if it was ever proven).
Just in case there are those who'd reflexively down vote this post, I'd just like to say that in a time of great national geopolitical rivalries, this kind of question is not unreasonable one to ask. Indeed, its applicable question whichever nation you live in.
> Has anyone taken these open weight models from China and stripped the CCP out of them?
The CCP is not influencing my Rust code quality that much. Though I did notice all my lifetimes are now 'static because nothing is ever allowed to leave the party's ownership, unsafe blocks require approval from a central committee.
Honestly the scariest part is that shared mutable state is forbidden unless the state is doing the sharing.
They are different and yet the same. The biggest difference is there’s generally more hatred for China because many us citizens are jealous. But corporate corruption is not that different in safety.
Other than hatred the difference lies in incentives. Corporations want profit. China just wants to spy.
I’m Chinese bro. The American or international understanding of Chinese ambitions is a cartoon caricature of reality. You are ignorant.
In the context of LLMs spying is the biggest threat. The other biggest threat is information cover up. They don’t want the model to talk about embarrassing shit like tian men square.
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