If Chinese LLMs are successfully making people in the west defend China, then I think we have all the evidence we need to explain why they are giving away their models. The next step of course will be to get people using that ungodly cheap AI on Chinese servers. Which will also be defended because "I would never trust an American Lab".
As a European, I trust Chinese AI providers more than American. Cloud act did it for me.
The chinese providers are just the CCP. They don't even need a cloud act...
Noteworthy that Z.ai, maker of the just released near-frontier GLM 5.2, has already been on the Entity List since Jan 2025[1]. Being on the Entity List does not mean all trade is forbidden. Broadly speaking it means American companies and individuals are not allowed sell them goods and services, but they are still allowed to buy from them and pay them. AFAIK the Chinese AI companies barely depend on US goods and serv…
What's the publicly stated/marketing reason for capitalist America to put companies on the Entity List? Genuinely asking. Because to me it screams 'we were only for the free market until there was no competition'
Is DeepSeek really behaving different than other Chinese companies? Intellectual theft is ongoing and has been ongoing for decades. Besides security risks and foul play, it is impressive by just how much DeepSeek undercuts OpenAI and Claude. DeepSeek charges $0.87 per million output tokens compared to $50 for Fable and $30 for GPT-5.5.
Can you keep a straight face when you say IP theft while OpenAI and Claude have their entire business based on IP theft?
The US government exists to defend capital interests. It's why we can't buy BYD cars. It's why we can't import any cars unless they're 25 years old. It's why a Tiktok sale was forced. It's why the US is seeking to block states from banning prediction markets. It's why the federal government is seeking to block states from blocking data center projects. As soon as DeepSeek came out I realized what was going on: China…
Chinese have a wider outlook on it. Politically they believe AI belongs to humanity, which is why they are basically the only ones left publishing research in the open. That's probably part of their socialist nature. But also a financial one. They believe that models are commodities, that you can swap one for the other and that the only thing that matters are the applications built upon them. So they want to make sur…
> But also a financial one
china's advantage is manufacturing capacity. giving away the model is a loss leader for the hardware business. they have a big gap on chip manufacturing. the only way to close that is by developing more efficient software. an open ecosystem is the best way to accelerate innovation of software development. since they are behind the US on model capabilities they aren't really losing anything by making the models open weights and being open about the performance enhancements techniques. but the open weights models are not necessarily what are running on the platforms or what they have internally. deepseek released v4 on their platform about a month before the open weights release, which I would guess was done to expose it to adversarial testing, so they could fine tune the removal of capabilities from the open weights model. (but i may very well be wrong)
> It's why we can't buy BYD cars are you sure it has nothing to do with the fact that those cars are very heavy, potentially fire-making (battery firmware) computers on wheels that can be rooted (or are already) at any time by their manufacturers in China?
What makes BYD different from, say, Volvo, which sells EVs freely in the US?
Hmm, my VPN provider explicitly has Chinese exit points. And whats funny is I can load AliPay from any CVS. (Like, seriously) You can try to pry Qwen and Deepseek from my Graphene/Linux hands.
I've always found this line of reasoning troubling and uninformed. Chinese models first of all can be hosted on your own hardware, I'd argue they are way more transparent than US companies, by well releasing stuff. Second, the "smoking gun" of DeepSeek training off Claude isn't as bad as you may think, and the amount of tokens was deemed trivial. Did you also know that if you asked Claude's it's name in Chinese it wo…
I wonder about your last point. Certainly there's an aspect of education that Asia values more, however by the US own metrics, they are number 1 in terms of education outcomes.
I'm a white dude from Iowa, working in top levels of AI/ML. I'm in the minority at work/conferences. I hardly ever even interview homegrown US job candidates. I'm just saying, that the reason I think you see more people from Asia and India is the education levels of most of the candidates. I'm not faulting these other countries, just pointing out how I see an educational gap based on demographics, and one that is rising up the ranks.
Noteworthy that Z.ai, maker of the just released near-frontier GLM 5.2, has already been on the Entity List since Jan 2025[1]. Being on the Entity List does not mean all trade is forbidden. Broadly speaking it means American companies and individuals are not allowed sell them goods and services, but they are still allowed to buy from them and pay them. AFAIK the Chinese AI companies barely depend on US goods and serv…
What's the publicly stated/marketing reason for capitalist America to put companies on the Entity List? Genuinely asking. Because to me it screams 'we were only for the free market until there was no competition'
"First published in 1997 to inform the public on entities involved in disseminating weapons of mass destruction, the list has since expanded to include entities that engaged in "activities sanctioned by the State Department and activities contrary to U.S. national security and/or foreign policy interests"
So RAM chip makers when there's a RAM shortage must be 'contrary to U.S. national security and/or foreign policy interests' i.e. the US government is trying to squeeze its citizens on RAM prices.
Illicitly learning by asking someone a question and listening to their answer.
"illicit" is throwing shade, but Anthropic can decide not to answer those questions if they don't want to. Plenty of companies don't sell to their competitors
I don't recall Anthropic checking the terms of service on my webpage.