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

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#491

Post by kiicia » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 10:30 AM UTC

podgorniy wrote: post #465

Just couple years ago mr altman was promising open AI, to benefit humanity. They even forgot to remove this part about "openess" from the company name. Today chineese deliver that promise and usa people freak out like they have any skin in this game. Enjoy the ride leader of the free world....

altman should listen to his own words, and he should replace himself (wasting energy for eating) with ai (supposedly not wasting energy for eating)

it would be beneficial both for openai and world (most likely)

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#492

Post by kiicia » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 10:32 AM UTC

WinstonSmith84 wrote: post #480

I'm rather scared of US models - if Anthropic was the only AI provider in the world, it's easy to see that common people would have no access at all. Thankfully there is OpenAI which compete 1:1 with Anthropic (at a slightly lower cost) but most importantly the Chinese models keep Anthropic, but also OpenAI in checks. And I'm saying this as someone working for American companies.

it's a real paradox, that chinese models are what guards democratization and private use of ai while us models are moted castles with "kings" crying that you are stealing their legally stolen goods... what times we are living in...

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#493

Post by Der_Einzige » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 10:32 AM UTC

chimp_brain wrote: post #454

tesnorindian wrote: post #453

Are the open weights models accelerating layoffs in Indian IT sector?

They are neither accelerating or decelerating layoffs in Indian IT sector, from what I know they were bound to happen as software and IT were never hard skills. They were anyway supposed to move to Africa or other countries within a decade, so a lot of executives were cautious even before 2023. AI has simply killed the opportunity for an Infosys or TCS in countries in Africa or even other South Asian countries.

The world would be so much better off if the WITCH companies ceased to exist

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#494

Post by mad_tortoise » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 10:34 AM UTC

simianparrot wrote: post #460

w4lker wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://thereallo.dev/blog/claude-code-prompt-steganography Why should I trust a US company more than a Chinese one?

[flagged]

This is such an hilarious answer. For most of the non-Western world, we don't distrust China because they have created benefits for the developing world. Whereas the USA has been outright imperialist for the past 60-70 years, undermining and overthrowing developing democracies, putting in dictators, using international organisations as debt traps, waging and funding wars that put our lives and economies at risk.

It is so pathetic how American's see themselves, and are so deeply afraid of China. I am far more fearful of the predatory nature of the USA and its agencies than I could ever be of China who would never have any interest in me.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#495

Post by inglor_cz » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 10:34 AM UTC

sajithdilshan wrote: post #466

ballon_monkey wrote: post #233

The 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…

But hasn’t it been the same with US since the WWII? US has influenced the world through various ways sometimes even weaponising human rights to spread American superiority and its narrative?

While true, you neglect the fact that US corporations have some autonomy from the government. I doubt that any of the current American AI corporations get regular dossiers of desirable responses to sensitive political topics from Washington and implement them. That would be a reason for a major lawsuit and a major scandal.

In China, the image of the country and the preferred narrative is under much tighter control of the government and local AI shops won't have any autonomy in this regard at all. Either obey or get shut down.

BTW What you mean by "weaponizing human rights", exactly? I am curious. If anything, I would say that the US foreign policy didn't promote human rights sufficiently, especially in Latin America, where the "bastard, but our bastard" attitude was typical.

OTOH in Europe, US human rights policy was probably relevant in saving some dissenters in the former Eastern Bloc from torture or execution.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#496

Post by kiicia » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 10:36 AM UTC

throwaw12 wrote: post #486

Lets do "who's afraid of US models" version: * Me, as an individual, because I might not be able to pay price hikes, because my revenue (salary) is much lower than what they want and I can't support my expenses via huge bank loans. * Again, me as a new entrant to the industry, LLMs are basically pay-to-play games, again related to price hikes, new entrants might not be able to afford paying those prices 24/7 - which…

in simple terms closed models are rugpull waiting to spring at unsuspecting users, it's like you take all worst components of terminal capitalism (including price cartels), subscriptions relying on almost monopolistic dependency and microsoft/uber models of hugging competition to death to remain only provider and dictate all conditions

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#497

Post by kiicia » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 10:37 AM UTC

ballon_monkey wrote: post #233

The 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…

but you are not using chinese models to learn about taiwan, you use chinese models to do everything BUT learning about taiwan, so no issue there

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#498

Post by astrobiased » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 10:40 AM UTC

The post hits it spot on with unequal access to the models in terms of security. I'm developing OSS where security is important for the user ... but the frontier models like GPT 5.6 and Fable flake out and state that I cannot get the info/access.

This is extremely lopsided I'll have to resort to GLM 5.2/K3 to ensure that those security issues (hopefully) are resolved properly.

For OSS, this is one of the most counterintuitive experiences I have ever had. More than ever I'm convinced that open weight and open pipelines models are 100% critical for progress on the AI and societal fronts.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#499

Post by kiicia » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 10:41 AM UTC

mrinterweb wrote: post #51

jke_kang wrote: post #39

People seem to conflate "made in China" with "can't be trusted." id argue the bigger distinction is open vs. closed. An open model can be audited, fine-tuned, and technically run entirely on your own hardware. A closed model is basically "trust us."

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

which is moot point, if open model is hard to fully audit, then closed model is complete enigma and you should be more scared about closed models

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#500

Post by kiicia » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 10:43 AM UTC

grim_io wrote: post #68

_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…

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

let's call it for what it really is, only companies "entitled to legally stolen data, don't steal from us now" are crying about distilation