This feels like déjà vu from the crypto wars (1990s). If that experience helps, it is impossible to repress knowledge without violence, and it motivates more people to hack the system. Good times ahead "PGP released its source code as a book to get around US export law" <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7885238>
> The ML stuff they're worried about takes a giant data center to train and an unusually beefy computer even to run.
Now, consider this: the Palm [1] couldn’t even create an RSA [2] public/private key pair in “user time” The pace of technological advancement is astonishing, and new techniques continually emerge to overcome current limitations. For example, in 1980, Intel was selling mathematical coprocessors [3] that were cutting-edge at the time but would be laughable today. It’s reasonable to expect that the field of machine learning will follow a similar trajectory, making what seems computationally impractical now far more accessible in the future.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_(PDA)
Not the same situation at all. PGP would run on any computer you happened to have around. The source code was small enough to fit in a book. The people who already had the code wanted to release it. Lots of people could have rewritten it relatively quickly.
The ML stuff they're worried about takes a giant data center to train and an unusually beefy computer even to run. The weights are enormous and the training data even more enormous. Most of the people who have the models, especially the leading ones, treat them as trade secrets and also try to claim copyright in them. You can only recreate them if you have millions to spend and the aforementioned big data center.