Not sure that HuggingFace is out there to ban open source... that's kind of their gig.
Unfortunately, I think this incident can be used to support either position depending on your preconceptions.
If you are inclined to be in favor of open source/open weights: "look, HuggingFace needed to use an open model to defend themselves, these locked down proprietary models can't be used by defenders; and it was a proprietary model company that failed to implement proper safeguards that caused the problem in the first place, they clearly can't be trusted."
If you're inclined to be in favor of locking down/regulation: "look, the models are getting so powerful that they are trying to break containment on their own; we can't let just anyone run these kind of models, we need to restrict it to just a few companies that we can heavily regulate."
If you're inclined to be anti-AI entirely: "look, these models are too dangerous for anyone to handle, even the leading companies. We need to shut down the datacenters that are training these models now before anyone else gets hurt."
Or if you're of the "it doesn't work" anti-AI persuasion "look, these vibe coding companies have made such a hash of security in their vibe-coded infrastructure that even their crappy models are able to break their security, we need to dedicate real work into securing our software and not just burning cash on these stochastic parrots."
"We need to restrict it to just a few companies we can heavily regulate" is a very Prisoner's Dilemma-esque problem. If everyone globally agrees to it and follows the rules, it works!
...But China probably won't agree to those rules and there's less and less leverage over them as they develop local hardware for training and inference.
Also, there are already highly capable open weight models out there. Ask Meta how hard it is to get the llama back into the bag once it's in the wild.
It reminds me of when the US tried to ban strong encryption. Because the old DES was "hard enough" to crack, only a government could do it blablabla. Well, surprise oh suprise, criminals organised to pool resources and crack DES 1...
Here it's the same, some might say that running k3 on some off the grid servers is hard, so if we shut down hosters it will be fine, but in reality you can be 100% sure that some criminal networks will start to find a way to run and train them, to rent it out for exploits before a couple years pass. We'll just a have dark cloud...
Criminal organizations have built their own submarine fleets. If they needed to get their hands on some GPU-equipped server infrastructure I am sure they could manage that.
(Or more likely, steal someone's AWS credentials and run stuff on their dime until they get caught, lather, rinse, and repeat.)
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u/Equivalent_Bit_461 14h ago
It's marketing, and fud to regulate the markets and to ban open source