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Who's afraid of Chinese models?

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Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#91

Post by onesociety2022 »

qurren wrote: post #54
_aavaa_ wrote: post #2

> distillation: why exactly is it bad? After all, what are large language models but the distillation of all of the knowledge on the open Internet, scraped by the frontier labs and distilled into the models that are themselves being distilled? Who is exactly being wronged here? ... The U.S. should pass a law that (1) makes explicit that collecting data for training models is fair use, and (2) bars terms of service th…

Government cannot exactly "bar" terms of service. ToS isn't law. The most they can do is say they're unwilling to enforce them. ToS is just conditions that you agree to in order to use a private service that is provided at-will. I can have a private coffee shop where the terms of service are that you must wear red to enter, and if you're not wearing red, you are not welcome on my property. So it would be upto OpenAI…

Governments can do anything they want by passing a new legislation. In your example, they could easily pass a law that states that any ToS cannot reject service to a customer based on the color of their attire. In the USA, it's obviously already illegal for a business to reject service to a customer based on some protected classes like race.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#92

Post by Aurornis »

wxw wrote: post #14

> It’s striking the extent to which Claude Code and Codex are proving to be quite sticky; whichever harness you start working with is likely to be the one you stick with, and that figures to be even more the case with non-technical users. My experience has been quite the opposite. I was using Claude Code almost exclusively this winter/spring and swapped to Codex earlier this summer. It took no time whatsoever to swit…

For personal use I agree.

For companies, these decisions are very sticky. Companies go through a lot of red tape to get anything purchased and approved, then they discourage change because it's a lot of work.

So the product that gets a foothold in a company sticks for a long time.

Then a couple years later a sales person convinces an exec that they can save some money by switching, so the switching game begins. Not necessarily motivated by the better product, mostly the price. My wife's company keeps switching their tools out from under everyone every year or two. Just when they get everything stabilized and everyone familiar with the new tool, some new contract is signed that moves them all to some other company's suite.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#93

Post by scotty79 »

chuckadams wrote: post #78
grim_io wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forbidding distillation is like forbidding using a compiler to make another(perhaps better, more efficient) compiler.

Lots of software licenses have “non-compete” clauses that forbid you from using it to develop a competing product. Wouldn’t surprise me if there was a compiler or two out there with that restriction, most likely niche languages.

How the hell is non-compete legal in market economy? Competition is one of its core strengths. Why would anyone let anyone opt out of this, even a little bit?

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#94

Post by cheema33 »

NooneAtAll3 wrote: post #11

I don't understand the premise in the beginning how is running servers supposed to be 0 cost, while running ai inferrence isn't?

> how is running servers supposed to be 0 cost, while running ai inferrence isn't?

For a SaaS business, running servers isn't free. But compared to the cost of running GPUs for inference that you are selling, it almost is. The company I work for is a SaaS company. We have a single production server. A couple of QA servers. All hosted on Hetzner. Monthly cost for servers is less than $400. This generates a few million dollars a year in revenue.

If we were in the business of selling inference, our cost of providing the service, for the same amount of revenue would significantly higher.

Even large businesses like Microsoft, Meta, Google have operated with similar margins. Cost of running servers, compared to revenue was very low. But inference changed that, in a dramatic way.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#95

Post by nl »

chrsw wrote: post #55
mrinterweb wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open weight models are much more auditable than closed models, but could still hide backdoors that could be near impossible to detect.

Correct. We need open weights, open code and open data. If nobody else can reproduce what someone did there will always be security questions. Even if we can reproduce it there could still be security concerns but it's more realistic to investigate yourself.

I'm all for open models, but people seem to misunderstand what they are. They aren't the same thing as open source code!

> open weights, open code and open data

Even if you have all these things you still can't replicate a model because of randomness.

You can backdoor a model with less than 1000 examples and it is impossible to detect.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#96

Post by thesmtsolver2 »

scotty79 wrote: post #93
chuckadams wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of software licenses have “non-compete” clauses that forbid you from using it to develop a competing product. Wouldn’t surprise me if there was a compiler or two out there with that restriction, most likely niche languages.

How the hell is non-compete legal in market economy? Competition is one of its core strengths. Why would anyone let anyone opt out of this, even a little bit?

No country in the world is full free market economy. It is always a spectrum.

We are discussing Chinese models. Now look at how much foreign competition the Chinese government prevents in their domestic market in other industries.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#97

Post by thesmtsolver2 »

llm_nerd wrote: post #41
_aavaa_ wrote: post #2

> distillation: why exactly is it bad? After all, what are large language models but the distillation of all of the knowledge on the open Internet, scraped by the frontier labs and distilled into the models that are themselves being distilled? Who is exactly being wronged here? ... The U.S. should pass a law that (1) makes explicit that collecting data for training models is fair use, and (2) bars terms of service th…

The distillation explanation is classic American exceptionalism: No one could possibly do anything unless they were copying American leaders (where "American" means a bunch of Chinese, Canadian, Europeans and Indians working in the US). It's also a bit of securities defensiveness. Pretending that you really do have a super moat, people just keep swimming in it so you just need to add more alligators. It's farcical. A…

China goes even further lol

https://m.economictimes.com/industry/renewables/china-wto-co...

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#98

Post by ggm »

A reminder any comment about risk FROM china, invites a "Tu Qoque" facing the other way. The paranoia here is probably fully symmetrical.

I see massive risks in belief the inferences drawn from strategic information cannot be seen. So if you depend on some position remaining inside a secure facility but you drove to it from data outside that secure facilty, The likelihood that an inference model can derive the same idea is very high. Collation over public data is not inherently secret because you used a secret model or secret weights.

A more simplistic take might be that the fear is not actually driven in the secrets, the fear is "the emperor has no clothes"

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#99

Post by nl »

wxw wrote: post #14

> It’s striking the extent to which Claude Code and Codex are proving to be quite sticky; whichever harness you start working with is likely to be the one you stick with, and that figures to be even more the case with non-technical users. My experience has been quite the opposite. I was using Claude Code almost exclusively this winter/spring and swapped to Codex earlier this summer. It took no time whatsoever to swit…

Have you ever worked with a non-programmer and helped them setup their AI workflows?

You install MCP connectors, specific skills, work around model/harness quirks, set security boundaries etc.

It's a lot of work, and most people will never want to change it once they have it working.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#100

Post by ButlerianJihad »

onesociety2022 wrote: post #91
qurren wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Government cannot exactly "bar" terms of service. ToS isn't law. The most they can do is say they're unwilling to enforce them. ToS is just conditions that you agree to in order to use a private service that is provided at-will. I can have a private coffee shop where the terms of service are that you must wear red to enter, and if you're not wearing red, you are not welcome on my property. So it would be upto OpenAI…

Governments can do anything they want by passing a new legislation. In your example, they could easily pass a law that states that any ToS cannot reject service to a customer based on the color of their attire. In the USA, it's obviously already illegal for a business to reject service to a customer based on some protected classes like race.

The joke is on you! I’m not wearing any attire! Hahaha!
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