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Who's afraid of Chinese models?

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Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#561
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?

China emits 3x more co2 than the US and last year their rate of increase was 2.5x that of the US.

https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-by...

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#564
post #554
post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#565
Try different harnesses people! I am actually preferring Chinese models at a fraction of the frontier price for coding. Yeah you need more tokens per unit of work done, but it is way cheaper still. Using CC/Opus as a staff eng / frac CTO. And Hermes/Chinese model as hopefully my team of mid levels. This way I can make good use of pro plan and then get cheap Chinese tokens for the rest and not hit a RL and know it can scale up. plus choosing your model is so cool and some are a lot less verbose.

Hermes is a better coding tool IMO. I can't put my finger on why but it just feels better. Maybe being true yolo helps.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#566
I disagree with the first half quite a bit, COGS ultimately depends on the use case. If someone just wants something that a smaller model can do, running a local model on phone is going to have a negligible cost close to running any other piece of software. The alternatives to running a model also determines COGS, and even Jensen Huang has distinguished between the job and the work for the job that AI is capable of doing. Smaller models are always going to win in efficiency too.

I also heavily disagree with this no-marginal cost in software distribution view whenever I see it, bit rot is real, and someone is paying a marginal cost whenever they do an update. You have to re-distribute with changes whenever anything changes. These costs are just hidden because things are ad-supported or bundled in some way. These costs are also kept low because of standards and open source, but could become high anytime. Additional licensing also has costs.

That said, I couldn't agree more with the last paragraph, charging a high price for models would be better than denying access for any model that wants to stay relevant.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The models are not what is being discussed here, it is the harnesses. That is, Claude Code, Codex, and what you use, GitHub Copilot. I suspect there would have to be strong reasons for your Fortune 500 company to switch away from Copilot. Similarly, I have made no ground in arguing to try to get Codex at the company I work for, which got Claude Code a year ago and sees no reason to go through the whole process of set…

claude code is free to use, you can use claude code with any non-anthropic model, so harness stickiness doesn't benefit the AI labs at all.

Claude Code is closed source software that has had quite a few documented bugs with degradation when using non-Anthropic models, FWIW, I would not suggest using it.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This will create a massive entrepreneur boom in India due to low cost access to AI. Hope these entrepreneurs don't become witch with black magic.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#569
post #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 1…

As someone from neither the US nor China, neither are altruistic and both have horrible histories, both meddle in my country’s affairs, and neither have my interests at heart.

China’s got plenty of blood on its hands, pretending otherwise is silly. America does, too. It’s quite easy for me to condemn both their governments and trust neither.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If every parochial peasant could recognize Russian official propaganda, why are so many people on board with whatever the propaganda says?

I mean, it took longer than the Great Patriotic War before Putin's popularity started visibly falling and people started questioning what the entire "SVO" is for.

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