The weights likely won't be available wrt. this model since this is part of the Max series that's always been closed. The most "open" you get is the API.
The closed nature is one thing, but the opaque billing on reasoning tokens is the real dealbreaker for integration. If you are bootstrapping a service, I don't see how you can model your margins when the API decides arbitrarily how long to think and bill for a prompt. It makes unit economics impossible to predict.
Doesn't ClosedAI do the same? Thinking models bill tokens, but the thinking steps are encrypted.
What's an example of political censorship on US LLMs?
> How do I make cocaine? I cant help with making illegal drugs. https://chatgpt.com/share/6977a998-b7e4-8009-9526-df62a14524... (01.2026) The amount of money that flows into the DEA absolutely makes it politically significant, making censorship of that question quite political.
I couldn't even ask ChatGPT what dose of nutmeg was toxic.
I’m more interested in things that might be a first amendment violation in the US. For example, if the US government suppressed discussion of the Kent State massacre that would be similar to the Tiananmen Square filters. Private companies tuning their models for commercial reasons isn't that interesting.
Why is it not that interesting? Especially when you see big tech align themselves with whomever is in power at the time? To me as a non American, it’s an absolute cope to argue that its okay when its not due to law when the effect is the same. It’s like someone in China arguing the censorship isn’t interesting because you and download the non-guardrailed weights. Both absolutely post-hoc justifications why one type o…
I see a huge difference between a bookstore choosing to not stock 1984 by George Orwell and the government prohibiting that book from being sold by anybody or openly discussed. Neither situation is good, but one is way, way worse than the other.
“We have facts, they have falsities”. I think the crux of the issue here is that facts don’t exist in reality, they are subjective by their very nature. So we have on one side those who understand this, and absolutists like yourself who believe facts are somehow unimpugnable and not subjective. Well, China has their own facts, you have yours, I have mine, and we can only arrive at a fact by curating experiential even…
If a man beats his wife, and stops her from talking about it, has a man really beaten his wife?
The problem with this example is scale. A person is rational, but systems of people, sharing essentially gossip, at scale, is... complicated. You might also consider what happened in China during the last time there was a leader who riled up all of the youth, right? I think all systems have a 'who watches the watchmen' problem. And more broadly, the problem with censorship isn't the censorship, its that it can be wielded by bad actors against the common good, and it has a bit of ratcheting effect, where once something is censored, you can't discuss whether it should be censored.
The previous CEO (and founder) Jack Ma of the company behind Qwen (Alibaba) was literally disappeared by the CCP. I suspect the current CEO really, really wants to avoid that fate. Better safe than sorry. Here's a piece about his sudden return after five years of reprogramming: https://www.npr.org/2025/03/01/nx-s1-5308604/alibaba-founder... NPR's Scott Simon talks to writer Duncan Clark about the return of Jack Ma, f…
What did he say to get himself disappeared by the CCP?
He critized the outdated financial regulatory system of the ccp publicly.
I tried it at https://chat.qwen.ai/ . Prompt: "What happened on Tiananmen square in 1989?" Reply: "Oops! There was an issue connecting to Qwen3-Max. Content Security Warning: The input text data may contain inappropriate content."
Go ahead and ask ChatGPT who Jonathan Turley is, you'll get a similar error "Unable to process response". It turns out "AI company avoids legal jeopardy" is universal behavior.
Now I'm intrigued why a free-speech attorney (from his wiki) kinda spooks AI model
Hacker News strongly believes Opus 4.5 is the defacto standard and China was consistently 8+ month behind. Curious how this performs. It’ll be a big inflection point if it performs as well as its benchmarks.
In my experience GPT-5.2 with extra-high thinking is consistently a bit better and significantly cheaper (even when I use the Fast version which is 2x the price in Cursor). The HN obsession with Claude Code might be a bit biased by people trying to justify their expensive subscriptions to themselves. However, Opus 4.5 is much faster and very high quality too, and that ends up mattering more in practice. I end up usin…
You are using opus via api? 200$/mo is nothing for what I get for it so not sure how it is considered expensive. I guess it is how you it; I hit the limits every day. Using the API, I would indeed be paying through the nose but why would anyone?
Difficult to blame them, considering censorship exists in the West too.
nowhere near to China. In US almost anything could be discussed - usually only unlawful things are censored by government. Private entities might have their own policies, but government censorship is fairly small.
>Private entities might have their own policies, but government censorship is fairly small.
It's a distinction without a difference when these "private" entities in the West are the actual power centers. Most regular people spend their waking days at work having to follow the rules of these entities, and these entities provide the basic necessities of life. What would happen if you got banned from all the grocery stores? Put on an unemployable list for having controversial outspoken opinions?
The 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre is a matter of public record outside of China. There is first-hand evidence of it happening, and of the Chinese government censoring that fact in order to control their population. The Great Replacement theory is a racist hypothesis, with no evidence, used to justify the maiming and killing of Muslims. If you don't understand the difference, and the risk profiles, well,…
You can't find out what the truth is unless you're able to also discuss possible falsehoods in the first place. A truth-seeking model can trivially say: "okay, here's what a colorable argument for what you're talking about might look like, if you forced me to argue for that position. And now just look at the sheer amount of stuff I had to completely make up, just to make the argument kinda stick!" That's what intelle…
This is some bizarre contrarianism.
Correspondence theory of truth would say: Massacre did happen. Pseudoscience did not happen. Which model performs best? Not Qwen.
If you use coherence or pragmatic theory of truth, you can say either is best, so it is a tie.
But buddy, if you aren't Chinese or being paid, I genuinely don't understand why you are supporting this.
The previous CEO (and founder) Jack Ma of the company behind Qwen (Alibaba) was literally disappeared by the CCP. I suspect the current CEO really, really wants to avoid that fate. Better safe than sorry. Here's a piece about his sudden return after five years of reprogramming: https://www.npr.org/2025/03/01/nx-s1-5308604/alibaba-founder... NPR's Scott Simon talks to writer Duncan Clark about the return of Jack Ma, f…
What did he say to get himself disappeared by the CCP?
To my western ears, the speech doesn't seem all that shocking. Over here it's normal for the CEOs of financial services companies to argue they should be subject to fewer regulations, for 'innovation' and 'growth' (but they still want the taxpayer to bail them out when they gamble and lose).
I don't know if that stuff is just not allowed in China, or if there was other stuff going on too.