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Who's afraid of Chinese models?

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Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#321

Post by nunez »

I really enjoyed reading this.

This might be a simplistic take, but my biggest worry with depending on Chinese models (and, by proxy, open-weights model development) is that the US can deem them a national security risk at basically any time, and Ant/OAI have minimal interest in making frontier-level models open-weights.

Regulated companies prohibit Chinese models in anticipation of the ban-hammer from the feds, so for data-sensitive work, they're stuck with LLaMa, gpt-oss and Gemma models (which are good and serve as a good-enough base for sft, but seemingly not as good or as expensive as Chinese models)

I suppose the USG can do the same thing that China is doing and bankroll/subsidize that effort; whether they will is for fate to decide.

Nonetheless, this article made it clear that nVIDIA is the real winner in all of this. Shovel selling to the extreme.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#322

Post by oeatwell »

I think frontier labs should start building ecosystems by partnering with companies that already have software products, and even collaborating with hardware manufacturers. The ultimate goal should be to create a much broader range of products that integrate naturally into people's everyday lives.

The United States' real advantage over China is freedom. Chinese LLMs simply can't compete with American ones when it comes to the humanities, creativity, entertainment, or financial transparency. As long as the U.S. continues monetizing these strengths, the compounding effect will make it virtually impossible for China to surpass the U.S. at the product level.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#323

Post by hetman »

youre-wrong3 wrote: post #317
riskd wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s perfectly fine for the “West” to influence the world though, right? Or is it only a problem because… they’re Chinese?

Have you got examples of GPT/Claude/Grok influencing people?

I think there's no denying they each have an ideological bent (as is their right as private companies). I have had Copilot deny me access to historical information on ethical grounds, even though I don't think anyone would find it controversial (clearly it was overtuned, GPT and Claude had no problem answering the same question). What is different though is that they are each allowed to have their own perspective instead of a singular mandated one.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#325

Post by Aperocky »

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…

I use a mixture of claude code and codex and kiro as my swarm.

They communicate through my own harness, and it's working pretty well so far. claude code is being overtaken by codex however because I noticed lately the accuracy of the latter is the best.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#326

Post by TripolitianFish »

itake wrote: post #273
Lord-Jobo wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this something that is more true of a Chinese model than any other model of a different national origin? Genuine question: generalized up from individual models to “models from country X”, is there any country that doesn’t have this exact risk?

In the USA, multiple political parties balance each out other. In China, there is 1 party. 1 view. 1 definition of the Truth.

I’d love to live in the USA you’re talking about friend.

This is just oriental despotism paranoia, whatever cutsie repetition slogan you come up with is not a serious argument.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#327

Post by kinj28 »

Lord-Jobo wrote: post #260
kinj28 wrote: post #253

I am afraid — if Chinese models go mainstream it has a clear way of pushing its narrative way beyond its otherwise borders. More like a Trojan horse it is for the Chinese. Here is a quick example of how Chinese deepseeks agent works kn its underlying model) when asked a tough question https://x.com/jinen83/status/2079406993979383902?s=46&t=D7hQ...

Is this something that is more true of a Chinese model than any other model of a different national origin? Genuine question: generalized up from individual models to “models from country X”, is there any country that doesn’t have this exact risk?

I would think everything boils down to source of funding and their narrative should get pushed!

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#328

Post by hnfong »

eli wrote: post #111
mediaman wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This happens all the time. The government can decide legislatively that certain commercial terms are simply unenforceable. Making distillation clauses unenforceable in tort law would be straightforward. They can decide what customers they want to have, but they do not have unfettered rights as to the enforceability of terms governing the relationships between the parties.

I'm not doubting it's possible to pass such a law, I'm doubting that's it's a practical or worthwhile goal. The terms of service don't even necessarily matter here. OpenAI could cancel your account for almost any reason, or for no reason at all. They don't particularly need to cite a ToS violation just as a store owner doesn't need to point to a written policy to kick you out of their store. If the underlying issue i…

You two are talking about different things.

You are pointing out that OpenAI can cancel user's accounts for almost any reason, and nobody can really force them to serve customers that they suspect are distilling their models.

That's one thing.

The GP is saying the government can make laws to make terms against distillation unenforceable. Without such laws, if you signed an agreement with OpenAI pinky swearing you won't distill, but turns out you did, you are liable in tort and OpenAI can sue you. (It seems nobody really cares about contract and agreements any more, but still...)

This is the other thing.

And I think you are both right.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#329

Post by Aperocky »

oeatwell wrote: post #322

I think frontier labs should start building ecosystems by partnering with companies that already have software products, and even collaborating with hardware manufacturers. The ultimate goal should be to create a much broader range of products that integrate naturally into people's everyday lives. The United States' real advantage over China is freedom. Chinese LLMs simply can't compete with American ones when it com…

> humanities, creativity, entertainment, or financial transparency

> monetizing these strengths

> real advantage over China is freedom

Please tell me if I'm unfairly paraphrasing but these seem to be your main argument and they seem to be oxymorons

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#330

Post by wbadart »

aurareturn wrote: post #267
larrysalibra wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ben's article "distills" down to 2 reasons that US frontier labs shouldn't be "afraid": 1. US frontier lab unit economics are better 2. US frontier labs are moving up the stack making tools that are "stickiness" and will prevent users from switching. For 1...he doesn't provide any evidence for US lab unit economics being better...the major input to unit economics is electricity...which is cheaper in China. And buildi…

Cost of electricity isn’t a long term advantage in my opinion. Private companies will figure it out. What matters most is $/completed task. It does seem like OpenAI and Anthropic are winning here even with worse electricity rates. Perhaps it is made up by the efficiency of Nvidia and Broadcom chips, which China can’t get in mass. I do think that OpenAI and Anthropic are moving up in stickiness. My company has rallied…

Seems like most popular harnesses, including codex and Claude code, support Agent Skills (an open spec for skill formatting/ organization): https://agentskills.io/clients

Which is to say, this isn't really a lock-in/ stickiness vector (unless maybe the wording itself of a skill is hyper-optimized for a specific model)

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