No one should be afraid of anything. Fear is a terrible advisor. Keep your eyes open, try to read the context as careful as you can and adapt as best as you can. Don’t spent too much time trying to be an oracle, never works out…
Who's afraid of Chinese models?
361–370 of 965 posts
Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?
#362Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh give me a break. Using a Chinese LLM will not put a Marxist under your bed. Did you know Gemini is shockingly bad at French poetry? Hasn’t stopped me for using it for all other tasks though.
> Using a Chinese LLM will not put a Marxist under your bed. Interesting tangent - it might be taught to introduce stealthy backdoors in your company though. Maybe even across multiple PRs where each session puts a small chink in the armor, and together they allow unlimited access to the attacker who knows about them. After all, LLMs are mostly black boxes. How comfortable would you be running a Chinese compiler?
Whats different to US models then? They can also be taught to introduce stealthy backdoors. Its not like stealthy backdoors are a Chinese only topic.
Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?
#363Earlier quoted context omitted.
That plus they don’t distill so they have worse RL examples.
But they both spent tons of money on data collecting/labeling/generation, how is it bad compared to distillation? I thought their data are much better if they spent that much, and it seems they are stupid because with that much of resources putting in there with merely no output compared to the frontier models.
Creating a RL example by hand is hundreds of times more expensive than generating one using an LLM.
Of course the Chinese companies have incredibly talented researchers, and smaller, better organized org structures which account for the rest of the difference.
Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?
#364The article makes a great point that the token industry is going to be commoditized as time goes on.
Following this argument the key for each player will be the underlying cost structure and serving capacity to offset the upfront R&D cost.
The cost infrastructure will be driven by access to cheap electricity and cheap chips. The capacity will be driven primarily by depth of pockets now to buy all available supply in chips/mem/data center building capacity. While China is certainly in the lead on cheap energy, I am wondering if they can/want to beat the > 1tn USD being spent on data centers right now. Following the example in the article:
If company C from China sells 10 units for 20 USD produced for 10 USD they pocket 100 USD.
If company A from America can sell 100 units for 20 USD produced for 15 units, they pocket 500 USD or 5/6th of the market's profits.
Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?
#365Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Previously Anthropic has reported on some Chinese firms doing chicken-shit level of API calls, that at most would be doing some Q and A or final fine tuning "Anthropic said the campaign was conducted between April 22 and June 5, 2026, and generated more than 28.8 million exchanges with Claude through almost 25,000 fraudulent accounts." I don't know why you're trying to downplay it. European models are so far behind…
> European models are so far behind because they don't resort to these tactics on a massive scale. Basically every other country is entirely dependent on 2 countries for frontier AI. You may or may not be factually correct in your other points, but you're really proving the GP's point here regarding American exceptionalism.
Are there other countries releasing frontier level models? Mistral is the only relevant player I can think of that comes from Europe, did I miss one?
Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?
#366Earlier quoted context omitted.
The (quite excellent) article discusses several of your points. If you haven't read it, I recommend it. - Commodity market profitability is determined by marginal cost of production. LLMs have marginal cost; traditional software does not. - Models are not free. Downloading them is free. Running them is not. This has manufacturing economics, not software economics; the idea that they are "free" is an economic category…
The thing I do not understand here because it seems obvious: AI will be a commodity market and you simply cannot have a large PE multiple. So the valuations imagine a global commodity monopoly or duopoly coupled with the increased intelligence still disallowing other suppliers from becoming competitive? Without any network effects to help?
AI (llm) will be a commodity market => I am not sure it was obvious. As of last month, folks thought open weight models are lagging by 6+ months. Once K3 is taken for a deep run across many use cases, it will be clear where it stands. But yes, I agree that now that intelligence is commodity, everything changes.
Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?
#367Earlier 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.
If a person were to receive data from someone subjected to such restriction, is the receiver bounded by the same restriction?
Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?
#368Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ins…
That was guard rails in the harness. Not the model. We are talking about baking it into the model. Denying to do something is also very different to changing historical facts like China does.
Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?
#369The 2 things people need to remember: 1) China can (and does) use the models to influence the west. They train in false information about Taiwan and Hong Kong. Or pretend like history is in favor of China. 2) Ignoring the models containing false information, they are incredible. But you should be scared of running inference via the model creators directly. If you think your data is safe compared to running it via mod…
Regarding point 2, I don't trust my data being safe running inference on model creators api, but neither do I trust US providers. Both use it for their own benefit, the only difference is the country of origin. The US has a lot more legal safeguards for this but I don't trust they don't do it regardless.