Available to the world except the European Union, the UK, and South Korea
Not sure what led to that choice. I'd have expected either the U.S. & Canada to be in there, or not these.
3. DISTRIBUTION.
[...]
c. You are encouraged to: (i) publish at least one technology introduction blogpost or one public statement expressing Your experience of using the Tencent HunyuanWorld-Voyager Works; and (ii) mark the products or services developed by using the Tencent HunyuanWorld-Voyager Works to indicate that the product/service is “Powered by Tencent Hunyuan”; [...]
What's that doing in the license? What's the implications of a license-listed "encouragement"?
It's the EU AI act. I've tried their cute little app a week ago, designed to let you know if you comply, what you need to report and so on. I got a basically yes, but likely no, still have to register to bla-bla and announce yak-yak and do the dooby-doo, after selecting SME - open source - research - no client facing anything.
It was a mess when they proposed it, it was said to be better while they were working on it, turns out to be as unclear and as bureaucratic now that it's out.
If I was Russia and/or China and I wanted to eliminate EU as a potential rival economically and militarily, then I don't think I could have come up with a better way to do it than EU regulations. If it was not for the largess of the US, then EU would become a vassal of Russia and/or China. And I think the US is running out of good will very rapidly. The EU could, of course, shape up, but it won't.
It's hard not to react sarcastically to this. But I will try:
There's nothing special about EU regulations vis-a-vis other laws. China, Russia and the US also have laws, many of which are also perceived as overly bureaucratic.
Identifying something as a critical competitive industry, then place a bunch of hurdles in front of it's development, and sit confused when we get left behind - that's the EU special.
Technology, AI, semiconductors, cloud computing, consumer electronics, social media, app ecosystems, e-commerce, military technology, energy independence, venture capital, unicorns and scaling, banking innovation, space exploration, biotech and pharma...
Down 2/3 in a year because it failed to capitalize on an early score compared to US competition. Not saying EU has no companies just that they get left behind by competition. On the industry side its falling behind to Asia, finance and tech is losing to US. The only thing growing is luxury brands - kind of ironic that the only thing EU does well is selling pretentiousness.
Novo is a success story, sure, but it's not uniquely dominant. Eli Lilly is more than 3x bigger in the same space, and J&J, Merck, Pfizer all rival or surpass it.
Pharma as a whole is still dwarfed by the trillion-dollar US tech giants that the EU has no equivalent of. One standout doesn't change the broader lag.
Russia is currently struggling to make inroads on invading its relatively small neighbor, so I really doubt it would be able to make a bunch of nuclear powers who have a nuclear alliance its "vassal"
I understand that Russia's not fighting just Ukraine but rather Ukraine with massive US and EU assistance but my point still stands.
It's not struggling as much as Ukraine. Russia, if it was struggling, would accept a negotiated peace. It's quite clear that the last thing Russia wants is peace.
I love how the constant comeback to this is "well they're sorta-kinda winning the war" as if maybe barely defeating ukraine is some kind of mark of global dominance.
People really don't understand war and death, they treat them as some silly sports game. As a result they completely miss the boat not only about military conflicts but also about peace politics.
It's because lives are meaningless to the Russian government. They'll just throw more literal bodies at the problem. Nobody's going to stop them as they're a dictatorship. And now they're even getting North Koreans as extra cannon fodder.
Ukraine is used by the west as connonfodder by western institutions that control western politicians. The west literally doesn't care about life's of ordinary citizens. Specialy if its outside of its country. From supporting cruel regimes, to supporting genocide in Israël, to cheap labour without worker rights and so on. The west isnt a grain better than anybody else.
Russia invaded Ukraine. To stop the killing, all Russia needs to do is get out of Ukraine. Ukraine is a sovereign country, Russia has zero authority over Ukraine.
The west doesn't make Ukraine sovereign. Western companies will extract resources and use the people for cheap labour. Not a single sane Ukrainian person is waiting for this.
"The West" wasn't really relevant in this discussion, all I wanted to point out is that Russia has a much larger pool of cannonfodder who can't refuse (the benefit of a dictatorship) so drawing things out is always to their benefit.
That the west is also doing some bad stuff (though really in the EU we're not that bad IMO, most EU countries recognise Palestina now, it's just for a few blocking hard measures against Israel) isn't really a relevant topic in this. We're not going to have boots on the ground in this conflict until an agreement is reached because of the risk of escalation.
I was going to say "you're nuts!", but... I wouldn't say Ukraine is being used as cannonfodder, but the EU is very interested in Russia not winning in Ukraine, because if Putin wins, the EU will have a big refugee crisis (although "slightly better" refugees since they're white and share a similar culture, compared to the reception of brown and Muslim refugees).
Also the EU pays for countries like Turkey and Libya to prevent refugee ships from coming to their continent. If that means sinking those ships with people on them, well...
This is a false dichotomy, you can have privacy and still be militarily and economically relevant.
But say that you were right, and you have to choose between privacy and relevance, if you choose privacy, then once you are entirely economically dependent on Russia (Europe is still paying more in energy money to Russia than in aid to Ukraine) and China — when Europe is a vassal — it won't be able to make its own laws anymore.
We’ll see if these LLMs end up having a real use, once the “giving away investor money” business model dries up. They really might! But it seems early to say that the EU has missed out on anything, before we see what the thing is.
In general, it is hard to compare the US and the EU; we got a head start while the rest of the world was rebuilding itself from WW2. That started up some feedback loops. We can mess up and siphon too much off a loop, destroying it, and still be ahead. They can be setting up loops without benefitting from them yet.
In the 1940s, the CIA wrote the Simple Sabotage Field Manual [1] explaining methods to damage their rivals' operations through largely bureaucratic means.
Today, we have fully automated the methods from this manual in the form of LLM Chatbots, which we have for some reason deployed against ourselves.
Comments like yours remind me that while HN is a competent technological forum, it's best to never, ever, engage in serious macro-economic/ int. politics discussions as the average user engaging in the latter topics is so far off base with common knowledge in these areas, any insider wouldn't find common ground.
I'm grateful that Europe is increasing defence spending, but I'm cynical regarding Europe because so far, it's been absolutely no hindrance to Russia's expansionism, and in some ways it has inadvertently provided Russia with material assistance while Russia engages with expansionism.
Spending on defense is not the same as. Norway is spending more on everything all the time and getting worse outcomes all the time. We spend more on police than ever, even per capita, and crime is up, we spend more on military than ever, and our actual metrics are down. I think with most of Europe the defense spending is the same, I hope I'm wrong, but if you up regulation then you have to spend more to get the same results, and Europe has runaway regulation in addition to people who try to hijack institutions for other purposes.
I think some in the US see it the opposite way - a system for preventing the US from dominating it piecemeal. This explains their support for "free speech" for the various neo-(no we're not nazi!) parties in the EU.
To be honest, it's so blatantly obvious (especially with the recent meeting of European leaders and Trump) that I find it difficult to understand your surprise. I mean Christ, Europe is teeming with American bases.
Yeah I don't know how this isn't just the common understanding of the situation. The EU/UK is constantly working around whatever the US wants to do, and the US does whatever it wants.
>If I was Russia and/or China and I wanted to eliminate EU as a potential rival economically and militarily, then I don't think I could have come up with a better way to do it than EU regulations.
Personally I'm not too worried anyone is going to become a global superpower from generative AI slop.
I mean, neither the UK nor South Korea are in the EU, nor does it have equivalent laws. I suspect ongoing push from US and China that nobody has the right to be involved in AI regulation that isn't them and just general vibes.
South Korea has a number of unusual regulations, including extremely strict restrictions on spatial data [1] and an AI law that, among other things, requires foreign companies to have a representative physically in South Korea to answer to the government [2]. So it's not too surprising to see it on the list.
The UK has their chat thing where if you provide chat (even with bots!) you have to basically be a megacorp to afford the guardrails they think "the kids" need. It's not clear if open source models fall into that, but who's gonna read 300+ pages of insanity to make sure?
EU is fully invested into virtue signalling over actual tangible results. People keep saying how much stronger EU's economy is than Russia's, and how Russia is basically a gas station with Nukes, but the thing is, even with EU's "strong" economy Russia has them by the balls. They have to go hat in hand begging the US to step in because they can't do anything themselves, and the US is not going to keep propping up EU long term, especially not with how hostile the Europeans are towards Americans.
I live in Europe, I don't want Europe to become a vassal of China/Russia - but if something drastically does not change it will. Russia is Europe's Carthage, Russia must fall. There is no future with a Russia as it is today and a Europe as it is today in it, not because of Europe, but because of Russia. If Europe does not eliminate Russia, Russia will eliminate Europe. I have no doubts about this.
But as things stand, there just seems no way in which we practically can counter Russia at all. If Europe had determination, it would have sent Troops into Ukraine and created a no-fly zone — it should do that, but here we are.
"If Europe does not eliminate Russia, Russia will eliminate Europe" - this aggressive warmongering is what led to the Russian invasion (NATO expansion), and is actively making the world a much less safe place to be.
The west has done everything to make nice with Russia for decades, every new American president since at least Bush 2 thinks that this time he will be the one to charm the Russians, and every time the Russians shit the bed. The Russians don't want to make nice, they want to destroy the west. And I don't want to be destroyed.
It's a little annoying honestly that this reply is downvoted to oblivion and nobody seems to have a real reply. I'm not sure that there's a "everybody just gets along" answer to this, and maybe that's why.
Russia is not a serious threat to Europe. France has nukes and a competent army, and Russia has been shown to be a relatively weak power in its difficulties invading Ukraine. Even if they win the war ultimately, it took so long that it is difficult to imagine them winning in a war with serious powers like France.
Militarily, I agree. But Russia is actively (and successfully) eroding out democracy and societal coherence. They don't need to win militarily if they can instead promote infighting and help corrupt and russia-friendly parties rise to power.
There is plenty of evidence that Putin is propping up far right actors all over Europe, is running considerable Desinformation campaigns but yeah it's all those pesty immigrants fault /s
If those beliefs just so happen to perfectly mirror Russian propaganda then it's probably just Russian propaganda.
When it's getting to a point where far-right leaders appear to care more about the prosperity of Russia than their own nation or their allies... yeah it's probably misinformation. At best. At worst, it's targeted propaganda - lots of bots online!
France has a few nukes, less than 300. And mainly sub based (and only a handful subs). Nothing compared to Russia which has 5500. They could be taken out of play.
Ukraine will all the backing of Europe is making no progress, if this was true, Russia would be expelled from Ukraine tomorrow, as it should be. Ukraine is an embarrassment for Europe, it strongly suggests that Europe is basically meaningless on the global stage.
And the most embarrassing of all is, Europe is still buying gas from Russia.
"Ukraine will all the backing of Europe is making no progress" - Far from "making no progress", Ukraine is slowly getting eroded. Russia has serious problems in sustaining this conflict, but Ukraine's are far more serious and near-term.
"suggests that Europe is basically meaningless on the global stage" ... it will take many years of deep military investment to provide a proper counter to Russian aggression. As of right now, Europe has been shown to be in a very weak and exposed position. This was obvious years ago, and should not be a surprise today. This is true of most of the NATO member states.
That said, simply because Ukraine is unable to expel Russia does not mean that it is a grand threat to Europe proper. Perhaps some eastern countries face some limited conflict, but I'm not convinced by this "domino theory" that Russia would engage in a WWII style invasion of Poland, Finland, etc.
I'm entirely convinced that Putin and others in Russian leadership will stop at nothing to destroy western civilization, China is mostly indifferent to it, Russia is antagonistic to it. They know our weaknesses, they know how to get under our skin and we seem to have no defence to this. If Europe ever gets out of this slump it has to take out Russia, if not, Russia will eventually take out Europe.
The EU and others listed are actively trying to regulate AI. Permissive OSS libraries' "one job" is to disclaim liability. This is interesting that they are just prohibiting usage altogether in jurisdictions where the definition of liability is uncertain & worrying to the authors.
Unlikely laziness, since they went to the effort of writing a custom license in the first place.
A more plausible explanation is the requirements and obligations of those markets are ambiguous or open-ended in such a way that they cannot be meaningfully limited by a license, per the lawyers they retain to create things like licenses. Lawyers don’t like vague and uncertain risk, so they advised the company to reduce their risk exposure by opting out of those markets.
Maybe, but if you cannot say something simple as "here is something you can use for free, use at your own risk, we are not liable for anything", then that is a clear indication of the bankruptcy of the law, imho.
Since the law is very well developed in the EU, I think the people who wrote the license were just lazy.
The AI act being "well developed" means it's dense enough that compliance can't be done without the backing of a major corporation's legal team. Tencent is a major corporation, but this is a janky research project that's not part of a product. The researchers don't have legal knowledge of EU regulations, and they probably have limited or zero access to anyone who does. Cutting off EU countries is the safe and responsible choice.
I don’t get it. Couldn’t they just write a liability disclaimer clause that covers that, without explicitly calling out particular jurisdictions? E.g. “you are solely responsible for ensuring your use of the model is lawful and agree to indemnify the authors or whatever. If you can’t do that in your jurisdiction, you can’t use the model.”
The problem is that AI act covers entities releasing AI software as open source. That has never been the case so far, so while they're still figuring it out, better safe than sorry.
It's a careful way of running a business with potential users in highly-regulated markets. They don't know their regulations or laws. They don't want to invest labor in complying with them.
So, they reduced their liability by prohibiting usage of the model to show those jurisdictions' decision makers they were complying. I considered doing the same thing for EU. Although, I also considered one mught partner with an EU company if they are willing to make models legal in their jurisdiction. Just as a gift to Europeans mainly but maybe also a profit-sharing agreement.
"You are encouraged to: (i) publish at least one technology introduction blogpost or one public statement expressing Your experience of using the Tencent HunyuanWorld-Voyager Works; and (ii) mark the products or services developed by using the Tencent HunyuanWorld-Voyager Works to indicate that the product/service is “Powered by Tencent Hunyuan” "
Is this the new 'please like and subscribe/feed us your info' method?
I wonder if you can still download and use it here in the EU.. I don't care about licensing legalese, but I guess you have to sign up somewhere to get the goods?
That's malicious compliance. The AI Act is quite straightforward in this case - Tencent would need to document a summary of their training data, copyright compliance (that they're not stealing content to train their model) and explain how they do risk (model safety) management. That's it. It's really not rocket science.
i work in this field, i assure you that there is significant compliance toil and risk. i just had to interrupt my vacation to deal with evolving DMA issues.
one of the big problems with EU regulation is how vague it is, just look at the text of the AI act
> Henriksen wrote in an op-ed earlier this year, might have been: The Country That Should Have Been Even Richer
What's wrong with not rabidly chasing bigger wealth? Why has this become totally unacceptable in this world?
This reeks of late stage capitalist views.
> We are choosing a model that is uninspiring for capital investment
Sounds fantastic in my book.
I also like that sort of example:
> His examples include $2.6 billion to develop a carbon-capture project whose commercial viability remains unclear
What if the goal was carbon capture and not commercial viability? What worth will be your commerce if we choke ourselves out on carbon dioxyde? That's also the concept of subsidiary and state funded stuff, it's not because it's not commercially viable that it's not useful.
I'm also unconvinced by quotes like "the country is suffering from the dutch disease" while Norway seems to have done what's indicated in such a case, through its sovereign fund. Another mitigation for that is to avoid letting in too many foreign investments in, to combat the currency appreciation that comes as a symptom of dutch disease... which this article presents as a bad situation.
Sure, the country might face a challenge as the oil wells dry up, and I'm not saying everything is fine (although I think a lot of countries would prefer to have that sort of issue).
I also think cost-efficiency should be a goal, and a responsibility of the state for state-funded projects and endeavours. I'm absolutely not absolving things like overblown costs and delays in big government led projects, this shouldn't be an excuse either (although the definition of "overblown" for delays may vary from person to person).
But his article looks more like people upset that Norway's money isn't going to them, rather than worrying about the fate of Norway itself.
Joke aside, is there a field (or sub-fields) of mathematics that just... studies what breaking some axioms would do and where would it lead? This seems both completely stupid but also potentially fascinating at the same time.
That's a very misleading description of Banach-Tarski.
You need to break up the body into a few (very weird) pieces and maneuver them (via only rigid motions - rotations and translations).
I've finally come around to set on a journey to develop my first game. It followed a read on Gamedev in 2025 that actually popped on HN a few months ago[0].
I've mostly scribbled notes on paper for now, trying to be exhaustive about all that before scoping MVP (maybe SLC[1] would be better but I'm first doing that for myself so I'm not really pressuring myself for now).
I'm using modern C++, and will probably start from SDL3, plus a couple other libraries, but nothing too big or framework-y beyond that.
It's interesting also how these takes consistently ignore spectacularly the environmental cost of these as well.
I'm a bit on the fence myself, as I think it's very harmful, but I can also see ways it can be useful. But it's absolutely mindblowing how this is nearly always completely out of the discussion even though our current way of living and powering things is on a timer and we still haven't addressed it as a whole.
the “environmental costs” argument is based upon like fifteen false assumptions. by 2030, AI will be running almost entirely on solar+wind+battery, because that is by far the cheapest option
> by 2030, AI will be running almost entirely on solar+wind+battery
Bullshit.
Even if this was true (and so far that doesn't seem to be the case), that's not how commodities work.
You can't just measure how much your thing uses, because even if it was running purely on green energy you also have to keep in mind other consumers that end up displaced onto worse sources. The only fair way to measure this is by the worst generator on your grid, because that's who would be shut down w/o your demand.
And even if we assume that the entire grid was green, building out that capacity also has (environmental) costs! As does producing those GPUs, for that matter.
Degrowth and "Maybe this uses too much electricity" are not the same thing, particularly when a nontrivial portion of US generation is fossil-fuel based.
As for the breakthroughs, maybe they will, maybe they won't; it's not much of an argument.
endless growth is the philosophy of an economic system that does not regard the long-term health of the planet and its flora and fauna. what's your point?
> The Pentagon's internal watchdog criticized a former official's use of the Signal app in 2021, calling it a breach of the department's "records retention policies" and an unauthorized means of communicating sensitive information.
> "Signal is not approved by the DoD as an authorized electronic messaging and voice-calling application," the report asserted, adding that "the use of Signal to discuss official DoD information does not comply with Freedom of Information Act requirements and DoD's records retention policies."
The highest military council in the country uses Signal to communicate. I think violating FOIA is probably part of the appeal. Or they use that modified Israeli client that stores messages to address those concerns.
They don't use Signal. They use an app that wraps around Signal. There is in fact a difference. Specifically because the purpose of that app is to do exactly what you're accusing Signal of doing. If Signal already did this... why would they pay for the other app?
$20K sounds very low for the effort and expertise that are demanded here in my opinion. It would be quite a steal to bring this to the same level as the state of the art (which, correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe is dav1d?) for only that sum.
My reading is this isn't for random engineers but experienced performance engineers with optimized toolchains who can tackle this efficiently. For someone with the right setup, this is likely straightforward work.
It's similar to job descriptions written for specific candidates they plan to hire. The question shouldn't be "why is this bounty so low?" but "what toolchain makes $20K reasonable for someone?"
Performance work in my experience has been largely organizational friction: running projects in various conditions, collecting evidence maintainers accept, maximizing that limited slice of attention people give my CLs, getting compiler improvements merged. These coordination tasks have become much easier to automate with LLMs (e.g., analyzing maintainer comments to understand cryptic 1 line feedback, what are they actually looking for, what do they mean).
My guess is there's an engineer who's either optimized their feedback cycle to under an hour through specialized tooling (more arrows) or is much better at finding the right signal the first time (more wood). I'd like to understand what tools enable that efficiency.
Absolutely. If you don't know dav1d, it's easy to overlook the complexity here.
There is a reason for this sentence:
> « The dav1d and rav1d decoders share the exact same low-level assembly code optimizations—you cannot modify this assembly ».
So, it, kind of, makes the work easier, but it stills very complex I think.
The reason for that disclaimer should be obvious, any improvements to the assembly code would also benefit dav1d in c, therefore the rust code still remains worse off by comparison.
I’m sure both the dav1d and dav1d communities would appreciate improvements to the assembly code, but the goal of this contest is to improve the rust implementation only.
> I'm really surprised that a 5% performance degradation would lead people to choose C over Rust
I'm really surprised that because something is in Rust and not in C, it would lead people to ignore a 5% performance degradation.
Seriously... when you get something that's 5% faster especially in the video codec space, why would you dismiss it just because it's not in your favorite language... That does sound like a silly reason to dismiss a faster implementation.
> just because it's not in your favorite language.
Kind of a strawman argument though. The question is, is the 5% difference (today) worth the memory safety guaranties? IE, would you be OK if your browser used 5% more power displaying video, if it meant you couldn't be hacked via a memory safety bug.
I would take the hit. It's irrelevant. I personally am forced to work with security placebo software that causes a 20x slow down for basic things. Something that should take seconds takes minutes and nobody is arguing about even making it 1% faster.
I can agree on the strawman but parent I responded to was mentioning "silly reasons" for not choosing a Rust implementation over a C one. A 5% performance difference in that space is anything but a silly reason.
Also glancing over the implementation of rav1d, it seems to have some C dependencies, but also unsafe code in some places. This to me makes banging the drum of memory safety - as it is often done whenever a Rust option is discussed, for obvious reasons since it's one of the main selling point of the language - a bit moot here.
You're saying pushing the memory safety improvements is moot because they have only reduced the unsafe code of the whole library to 10 or so cases where the reason is documented next to the block? (There are open PRs for reducing that too) Not worth banging the drum of memory safety until they reach 100%? That's literally letting the perfection get in the way of huge improvements.
The first part of your statement feels true, although that's... unverified and lacks actual backing up.
The second part of your statement is very debatable based on what safe means in this case, and whether it's an enormous benefit for a given situation.
There's plenty of stories [0][1] about Rust getting in the way and being very innappropriate for certain tasks and goals, and those "enormous benefits" can become "enormous roadblocks" in different perspectives and use cases.
In my personal and very subjective opinion I think Rust can be very good when applied to security applications, realtime with critical safety requirements (in some embedded scenarios for example), that sort of stuff. I think it really gets in the way too much in other scenarios with demanding rules and pattern that prevent from experimenting easily and exploring solutions quickly.
But if they're not hired...?
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