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Who's afraid of Chinese models?

stratechery.com

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Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#551
post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> very different to changing historical facts like China does.

Oh but they're trying. The right-wing usage of things like "woke" and "DEI" primarily serve to hide/destroy historical realities. [1]

Florida has it's "STOP WOKE" act that forces teachers to talk about how slaves learned skills/benefited from slavery[2] and that various massacres also had black perpetrators.

What is this other than changing historical facts? About fucking chattel slavery for Christ's sake.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/12/judge-nation...

[2] https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/floridas-new...

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#552
post #468

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?

No, all countries are the same. As per the media bias. If you want a real answer about USA go ask a non-USA model, and if you want a real answer about China, as a non-chinese model

What specifically could you ask Kimi or Deepseek about the US that you can’t ask ChatGPT or Claude?

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, Trump is quite an outlier in his non-standard behavior, I agree on that.

That said, Americans still enjoy very robust protections of freedom of speech and association, about the strongest in the world, and your SCOTUS does not seem to be inclined to hollow them out. Many of the pending lawsuits will end there and eventually bind this administration, plus the following ones.

This just does not happen in actual authoritarian countries, where no judicial remedy is available and the justice system is just another arm of the tyrant, rubberstamping punishments pre-determined by him.

Yes, I agree that vigilance about infringements of freedom is necessary, but the current US population is plenty vigilant. Trump is nowhere near as popular as, say, Erdogan is, and cannot simply raid offices of the Democrats and shut down oppositional media.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#554
post #536

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.

No. Lots of people have never heard of FAA702 (which has been well-documented in mass media) much less Carnivore or ECHELON.

The default email provider for most people in the west is Gmail.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#555
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?

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?

USA and Europe are basically equal in terms of yearly production of renewable energy. Texas + California alone rank 6th in the world.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#556
post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Already is possible. On a machine with 32GB ram, and NO gpu. Just need a large SSD or NVME. Streams from disk to memory. https://github.com/JustVugg/colibri

Painfully slow tok/s though.

I didn't say it was fast!

But its also a 800B sized model running on a ram constrained system with no GPU.

Techniques, GPUs, more ram, and faster disks can always speed it up. But the point being is they run on low end machines now. Its now an optimization problem, not a possibility assessment.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#557

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…

A Russian and an American are sitting next to each other on a plane. The American says "I'm impressed by the propaganda you have in Russia." "Oh it's very good, but it's nothing compared to the propaganda you have in America." replies the Russian. "Huh? We don't have propaganda in America." says the American. "Exactly." says the Russian.

As a Russian, I deeply appreciate this. In Russia, it seemed obvious to even the most parochial peasant that there was propaganda, while in America, the vast majority of the society not only fails to consider the possibility, but is cholerically allergic to the very idea.

Edit: recognising that there is propaganda != knowing what is and isn't propaganda. That's all I meant.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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 i…

Thank god. I'd been hearing we screwed up catastrophically by electing an admin that took a chainsaw to our foreign aid programs, killing millions in the developing world. Such a relief to learn we were never doing that stuff in the first place.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, Trump is quite an outlier in his non-standard behavior, I agree on that. That said, Americans still enjoy very robust protections of freedom of speech and association, about the strongest in the world, and your SCOTUS does not seem to be inclined to hollow them out. Many of the pending lawsuits will end there and eventually bind this administration, plus the following ones. This just does not happen in actual au…

No, he's not. He's more direct and brazen about it.

But he's doing the same culling, the same political demands, same everything.

Its just now in plain view rather than behind closed doors.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#560

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…

For me, the most important factor is:

* All modern AI is a perfect front for harvesting material for processing by NSA/GCHQ.

Given the criminal US' 5-eyes/9-eyes apparatus' atrocious war crimes and human rights records, this is reason enough to eschew American AI 'products'.

I'll use the AI created by the culture that lifts a billion people out of poverty first, not that from the culture that murders children every 15 minutes and lies to itself about it ..

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