Who's afraid of Chinese models? • Hacker News Board

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#191

Post by urams » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 2:07 AM UTC

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.

> We need open weights, open code and open data.

Even with this, the cost of verification would be enormous. You would need a massive cluster to repeat the training E2E.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#192

Post by lmz » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 2:11 AM UTC

lorecore wrote: post #136

happypappy123 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I’m 100% certain that China won’t be sending any goons to my front door.

Not that I'm anti-China, but their companies would have no qualms selling surveillance tech to your local gov too if they could. I'm sure Palantir, Flock, and other US companies would sell to China too if they could.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#193

Post by zzzeek » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 2:12 AM UTC

the leader of China praised Open Source in a speech. Crazy times

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#194

Post by awakeasleep » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 2:12 AM UTC

bg24 wrote: post #130

I think in general rest of the world needs to take notice (not saying afraid), starting with the US. It cannot be taken for granted that China's frontier labs will be a few months behind. They might be at par or exceed. The lessons from steel, solar and EV needs to be learned by all lawmakers. You have to respect and learn from how China Government puts the system in place for complete industry takeover and they have…

In the earlier days of the USA we did the same thing, with our government having an industrial policy that fed US industry and put us ahead of Great Britain.

It doesn't have anything to do with the form of government, it has to do with the aims of the government.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#195

Post by softwaredoug » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 2:12 AM UTC

Haven’t we been in this “China is 3-6 months behind” for a while now (maybe up to a year? Longer?)

The actual difference is how much scrutiny and time was put into the Mythos / Fable and GPT 5.6 release. Making it feel like “these are a big deal”. Spring and summer THAT was the AI story

Then Chinese labs release models that approach Fable performance. We’re shocked they just seemed to appear out of nowhere.

It’s less about the gap closing. It’s more about the weight we put into Fable-capable models.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#196

Post by AgentME » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 2:13 AM UTC

stingraycharles wrote: post #131

blfr wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most companies just get you a Claude team sub and maybe a couple of skills.

We only get Copilot. I’m not very happy.

What do you find worse about it? I've been switching between it, Codex, and Claude Code to try to compare them, and my only conclusion so far has been that it's nice that Copilot has both OpenAI and Anthropic models as options.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#197

Post by SomeHacker44 » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 2:18 AM UTC

jay_kyburz wrote: post #159

matheusmoreira wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> OpenAI shouldn't be allowed to decide what types of customers it wants and doesn't want? Correct. It shouldn't be allowed to do that.

Err.. I would like preserve my own right to decide who I'll do business with.

You already do not have that unfettered right in the USA.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#198

Post by chockablock » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 2:19 AM UTC

onesociety2022 wrote: post #127

hexator wrote: post #57

I'm worried that any ban on Chinese AI models might be an excuse to get mass surveillance.

You don't need mass surveillance to enforce such a ban. Once the US Govt declares Chinese AI models are banned, no US business will use them nor distribute them. Any cloud service that rents out GPUs in the USA will explicitly prohibit the use of Chinese open model weights in their terms of service (you open yourself to a lawsuit if you violate their ToS). Any Tokens-as-a-Service provider will refuse to serve those t…

> Any Tokens-as-a-Service provider will refuse to serve those tokens to customers in the US.

So under a ban rest-of-world gets to use cheap open-weight models but American companies/individuals must only use only ‘approved models from US for-profits’? Doesn’t seem like that kind of protectionism will be popular or politically tenable. Not so long ago US chose cheap TVs over maintaining the country’s manufacturing base.

(Despite what you wrote it’s also really hard to imagine that enforcement wouldn’t leak like a sieve. Unser sufficient economic incentives [which are the predicate for the ban], loopholes will be found.)

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#199

Post by phendrenad2 » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 2:22 AM UTC

tristanj wrote: post #29

The people who are most afraid of Chinese models are the VCs who poured into Anthropic and OpenAI at astronomically high valuations. Anthropic is valued at $1.2T and OpenAI is targeting $850B. These astronomical valuations were built on the premise that these labs would generate massive profits from premium API pricing, but the Chinese labs are completely undercutting this strategy by releasing excellent open models…

VCs are just pass-through investors, the money comes from billionaires. And when billionaires face losing money, the whole system re-arranges itself to stop that from happening.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#200

Post by eeiei » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 2:24 AM UTC

credit_guy wrote: post #185

People who claim that the Chinese open weight models have some type of manifest advantage don't realize that the close weight models have a huge advantage as well: the researchers from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI, Meta are not dumb, they can read the white papers written by DeepSeek, Moonshot, etc, and they can inspect all those architectures and they can pick and choose the best tricks there are out there, and of…

It’s giving desperate!