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Who's afraid of Chinese models?

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Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#371

Post by w4yai »

sevenzero wrote: post #362
bornfreddy wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

NSA has been caught doing that more times than China's MSS

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#372

Post by alex1138 »

platevoltage wrote: post #348
alex1138 wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a civilian, not a VC. In my own case, I'm worried how many things pass through the CCP. How censorship of mentions of Tiananmen Square is something they're quite interested in

Claude refuses to call Trump a Fascist.

[flagged]

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#373

Post by nl »

Ericson2314 wrote: post #229
nl wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Deterministic seed

Deterministic seeds barely work on a single machine, small scale training run.

They just don't work at all on a many month long, 100K+ GPU cluster training run.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#374

Post by BoredomIsFun »

hetman wrote: post #319
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?

Why would it be a problem that they're Chinese? It's a problem because their country is ruled by an authoritarian regime. The West, by contrast, doesn't have a singular arbiter of truth, it has a plurality of perspectives (as much as certain interest groups would really rather that was not the case). It's not perfect, but those of us who have memories of living under authoritarian regimes can tell you there's no comp…

West has though a history of supporting regimes far more hideous than Chinese, and ready to push narrative whenever possible. It is well known idea BTW in political thought that democracies are far more reliant on propaganda for control than authoritarian,which due to their strong grip on political discourse do not need high quality propaganda anyway.

TLDR: American propaganda is not any better than Chinese, neither have the best interests of my country in their minds.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#375

Post by tux3 »

petilon wrote: post #60
tux3 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of fresh hell does the sentence "undercut the professor" come from? Teaching isn't a race to the bottom. You don't undercut teaching by giving more lessons, just like you don't slight the hospital by performing CPR.

We are not really talking about teaching here.

We sure wouldn't be, if we picked better metaphors.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#376

Post by anonzzzies »

culi wrote: post #303
aurareturn wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Private companies will figure it out. Across sectors, China added 543 GW of energy in 2025. Next year, USA is expected to add between 70 and 80 GW of energy

They are not stopping either.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#377

Post by BoredomIsFun »

killingtime74 wrote: post #279
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…

If the Google and meta engineers are not dumb how come they consistently trail behind the frontier labs and even the Chinese labs with a fraction of the funding. Probably bad leadership

they, rightfully so, have no faith in LLMs.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#378

Post by lenkite »

aesthesia wrote: post #214
titanomachy wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> open models are inherently decelerationist I’m struggling to understand this perspective. Is he using the words accelerationist/decelerationist in a sense other than the obvious one? EDIT: I searched his twitter history and discovered that his argument is basically “if you drive down costs, then OpenAI will have less money to invest in development, slowing down the overall rate of AI progress.” IMO this take betray…

Nah, the point is that if models are commoditized and there's no hope of making significant profits, no one is going to be willing to make the massive investments necessary to continue pushing the scale frontier. How large a training run do you expect investors to fund out of the goodness of their hearts?

Doesn't this merely mean that states will do the job of investment ?

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#379

Post by flyinglizard »

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.

China has "overseas police stations". Maybe they won't send goons to your door but they definitely do send goons to Chinese expats: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_police_overseas_servic...

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#380

Post by rightbyte »

nl wrote: post #90
sharadov wrote: post #79

What makes the Chinese models this good? I don't believe it's distillation alone. This from OpenAi's Head of Strategic Futures "Some observations on Kimi: It's a very good model! I don't think its performance can be explained away by distillation or anything like that" https://x.com/deanwball/status/2078133895766114412 China's strategy of spending billions on training these models and open sourcing these models away…

> China's strategy of spending billions on training these models and open sourcing these models away is strategic - they want to kill the US LLM industry at any cost. Why is it when Anthropic and OpenAI spend billions trying to beat each other it is competition , but when the Chinese companies do it then it is trying to kill the US LLM industry at any cost. The US federal government spends billions in subsidies via t…

Jingoism is the answer I believe.
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