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Who's afraid of Chinese models?

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Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#541

Post by traceroute66 »

mc32 wrote: post #536
traceroute66 wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Any non-US company, US can block the models which can disrupt the whole business. And read your data, see CLOUD act, PATRIOT act etc. etc. No longer a theoretical risk in today's US political environment.

Hasn’t that been the assumption since Carnivore? Also we tapped European pols phones back in ‘12, was it? Though it’s not like the Eu are a bunch of innocents either… It’s not a new thing. Industrial espionage has always been a thing as well. So has bribery (for deals) been a thing especially by euro concerns.

> It’s not a new thing. Industrial espionage has always been a thing as well.

Well sure, except with closed US LLMs you're basically just handing them data on a plate, and paying for the privilege. ;)

Very American really ... monetising industrial espionage.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#542

Post by [deleted] »

exhilaration wrote: post #224
Aurornis wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For personal use I agree. For companies, these decisions are very sticky. Companies go through a lot of red tape to get anything purchased and approved, then they discourage change because it's a lot of work. So the product that gets a foothold in a company sticks for a long time. Then a couple years later a sales person convinces an exec that they can save some money by switching, so the switching game begins. Not n…

I'm confused, I work at a big giant Fortune 500, we all get GitHub Copilot subscriptionsn - we can switch between OpenAI and Anthropic models with just a click in Visual Studio. There's no stickiness at all. They just made us go through a training after the price hikes about how to choose between models for the best cost/benefit ratio.

[deleted]

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#543

Post by inglor_cz »

traceroute66 wrote: post #524
inglor_cz wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> you neglect the fact that US corporations have some autonomy from the government In theory. In practice, Trump picks up the phone and say "jump" and the CEO on the other end says "how high ?". And if you say no, well, we saw what happened when Anthropic said no.

Do you seriously believe that if you ask Grok or ChatGPT their opinion about tariffs or the Iran war, they will simply regurgitate Trump's talking points because they were programmed so on the threat of shutdown?

People with no personal experience of an actual totalitarian system don't really know what they are talking about when it comes to actual information control and micromanagement by the government. Hence they make nonsensical comparisons with a straight face.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#544

Post by inglor_cz »

sajithdilshan wrote: post #511
inglor_cz wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> you neglect the fact that US corporations have some autonomy from the government I'm not sure if this is correct. It seems like every big US corporation is changing their policy based on the views of the administration in place. As an example during Biden's time the DEI was in full motion in every corporation and in current administration it's the other way around. Also I remember as soon as Biden won the election…

I remember peak wokeness quite well and it was pretty obvious that it was driven by the Twitter activist mob and not the Biden administration, which was quite visibly behind the times and followed the trends.

Already during the Biden administration, defections from the orthodoxy started and then multiplied - some businesses like Coinbase or IIRC Cloudflare refused the demands outright. Musk bought Twitter with an explicit task to make it less progressive.

And the White House did precisely nothing against this defection trend.

"US has been using the violations of human rights to impose sanctions or to especially get countries in line which are not supporting the US agenda when it comes to global politics. However, they were more than happy turn a blind eye if the respective country that violates human rights (most middle eastern countries) if they are allies of US doctrine."

I do agree that the US is hypocritical about human rights, but actual violations of human rights should be a reason for sanctions, and the fact that this is done only partly/imperfectly, IMHO, beats the potential alternative when it isn't done at all. This would be a much worse world in my opinion.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#545

Post by throwaw12 »

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.

> could still hide backdoors that could be near impossible to detect.

But it won't change after you download it, so you can isolate those problematic cases and use another model for different use cases

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#546

Post by bamboozled »

w4lker wrote: post #451
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…

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

Agree, China believes in Climate change and are at least taking steps to address it. Personally this is making me trust them more than the USA because, facts.

I mean lesser of two evils thinking, if one is intentionally leading us towards climate disaster, while the other isn't then yeah. What else can be said? Should I trust the authoritarian country who believes in engineering and science, or the one that doesn't?

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#547

Post by sajithdilshan »

inglor_cz wrote: post #544
sajithdilshan wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you neglect the fact that US corporations have some autonomy from the government I'm not sure if this is correct. It seems like every big US corporation is changing their policy based on the views of the administration in place. As an example during Biden's time the DEI was in full motion in every corporation and in current administration it's the other way around. Also I remember as soon as Biden won the election…

I remember peak wokeness quite well and it was pretty obvious that it was driven by the Twitter activist mob and not the Biden administration, which was quite visibly behind the times and followed the trends. Already during the Biden administration, defections from the orthodoxy started and then multiplied - some businesses like Coinbase or IIRC Cloudflare refused the demands outright. Musk bought Twitter with an exp…

> I do agree that the US is hypocritical about human rights, but actual violations of human rights should be a reason for sanctions, and the fact that this is done only partly/imperfectly, IMHO, beats the potential alternative when it isn't done at all. This would be a much worse world in my opinion.

That's why I said that it was weaponized. In reality US doesn't care if there is a real human rights violation or not, they just use it as an excuse to get what they want.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#548

Post by jml78 »

kingleopold wrote: post #512
kiicia wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

ethics and other details are for humans. AI companies just proving it, even highest IQ teams are against ethics because they want more, even several millions is not enough for them.

AI has forced a dramatic shift in my view on intellectual property. The laws as they exist only protect corporations now.

They do not protect individuals no matter how much people want to think they do. AI has proven this.

I think to level the playing field all copyright, trademarks, and patents laws should be eliminated.

If I want to make a marvel movie, I should be allowed to and profit from it.

AI let the cat out of the bag and there is no going back. We need to let individuals profit just like corporations can from what is considered theft right now.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#549

Post by traceroute66 »

inglor_cz wrote: post #543
traceroute66 wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you neglect the fact that US corporations have some autonomy from the government In theory. In practice, Trump picks up the phone and say "jump" and the CEO on the other end says "how high ?". And if you say no, well, we saw what happened when Anthropic said no.

Do you seriously believe that if you ask Grok or ChatGPT their opinion about tariffs or the Iran war, they will simply regurgitate Trump's talking points because they were programmed so on the threat of shutdown? People with no personal experience of an actual totalitarian system don't really know what they are talking about when it comes to actual information control and micromanagement by the government. Hence they…

I am not going to post what I could respond on a public forum.

All I will say is that it should be perfectly apparent by now to any sane external observer that Trump does not play by any long-established rules or protocols.

An entire encyclopedia of examples could easily be provided, the most famous recent one being his phone call to FIFA about the red card suspension.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#550

Post by credit_guy »

protocolture wrote: post #239
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…

>they have access to their own in-house secret sauces. I remember some feature lauded by Gemini was reverse engineered by the open weights guys in If they dont publish some technical information its hard to protect in the US, but conversely, once it is published smart people from outside the copyrightosphere can start working to reverse engineer it. >3. The frontier labs are also investing more and more in building a…

> There's nothing there that isn't immediately replaceable.

Indeed. But that was not my point. My point is that we still have this old impression that training cost is dominated by compute and it is hugely expensive, and the Chinese labs can short circuit that by distilling the American frontier models. I don't think the training compute cost is a big factor anymore for the American frontier models, because of the reasons I gave. If the Chinese models can get the training compute cost down by a factor of 100, that's not going to make them 100 times cheaper, and not even cheaper by a factor of 2. Maybe 10% cheaper or so.

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