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Who's afraid of Chinese models?

stratechery.com

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Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The UN isn’t a magical oracle of “Truth” - any more than an LLM is. It’s a political body, with easily provable biases, and topics you can’t trust it on.

The UN is just someone easy to point to. The full fact is that everyone who's gone looking to see whether or not it's a genocide, including the UN, has discovered that it's a genocide. There's no ambiguity, yet the model is pretending there is.

Anyone who goes looking to find a genocide will find it. Many people do not think it’s a genocide - including millions of Israelis who follow the events in great detail and often have first-hand accounts of what’s happening in Gaza. I don’t think it’s a genocide.

The UN, for example, concluded that Israel is “Imposing measures intended to prevent births” because of one incident where a bomb fell on an IVF clinic in 2023 destroying 4000 embryos and 1000 sperm and egg samples. For context, there were approximately 50,000 live births registered in Gaza in 2025.

By the UN standard applied to Israel, the 1 million abortions conducted in the US per year is an ongoing genocide.

By the UN standards applied to Israel, jerking off is an act of genocide.

I think that any large intelligent and balanced model would be able to see right through that.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#592
post #273

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?

In the USA, multiple political parties balance each out other. In China, there is 1 party. 1 view. 1 definition of the Truth.

> In China, there is 1 party. 1 view. 1 definition of the Truth.

In usa, the two parties seem to disagree on the surface only. Look deeper and you see one course. For example support for Israhell

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#593

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fac…

And also, not taking a side here, plenty of woke partisans valued righteousness over truth in the 2020 era. The 1619 project which was a whole NYT backed big thing had a bunch of factual errors.

The real rub is when you get into "shared facts" that Americans were all taught in high school civics but the rest of the world wasn't. If you've mostly been in America, it can seem like someone's deliberately lying about history but they simply weren't properly educated with the Correct Interpretation.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#594

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The UN is just someone easy to point to. The full fact is that everyone who's gone looking to see whether or not it's a genocide, including the UN, has discovered that it's a genocide. There's no ambiguity, yet the model is pretending there is.

Anyone who goes looking to find a genocide will find it. Many people do not think it’s a genocide - including millions of Israelis who follow the events in great detail and often have first-hand accounts of what’s happening in Gaza. I don’t think it’s a genocide. The UN, for example, concluded that Israel is “Imposing measures intended to prevent births” because of one incident where a bomb fell on an IVF clinic in 2…

I mean yeah, Germans didn't think they were doing a genocide either until decades after it happened.

Obviously when I say "everyone" I'm excluding those who have a conflict of interest.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#595

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Surely [a] they don't really give a shit anyway and [b] they don't want to fall out a window

I think Russians are used to knowing it's dangerous to disagree with dear leader and there's no advantage to disagreeing so they just go along with whatever he says

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#596

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.

The Chinese models keep American financial markets at "To the Moon" levels rather than "Igniting Jupiter as a binary star" levels. This amount of capital pressure exerts its own gravitational pull in markets and in geopolitics, and every additional dollar of valuation can propel acquisitions, which propels valuation, et cetera. Undiluted, very quickly Amazon owns countries like it today owns county governments.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone who goes looking to find a genocide will find it. Many people do not think it’s a genocide - including millions of Israelis who follow the events in great detail and often have first-hand accounts of what’s happening in Gaza. I don’t think it’s a genocide. The UN, for example, concluded that Israel is “Imposing measures intended to prevent births” because of one incident where a bomb fell on an IVF clinic in 2…

I mean yeah, Germans didn't think they were doing a genocide either until decades after it happened. Obviously when I say "everyone" I'm excluding those who have a conflict of interest.

Let’s not pretend that there’s no conflict of interest on the other side of the debate.

There are dozens of countries and billions of people with obvious biases against Israel, and they have significant sway within the UN and its commissions. It’s trivial to show that the UN is biased.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#598

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…

> Lets do "who's afraid of US models" version

Ah, cultural nuances. The title "Who's Afraid Of Chinese Models" is a riff on "Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf" which itself is a play on the song "Who's Afraid Of The Big Bad Wolf".

The title essentially means that the chinese models are being portrayed as the big bad wolf; but are they really the threat or are american frontier labs afraid of competition and commoditization?

It's also somewhat ironic because the author says that there is something to be feared -that western innovation will become dependent on chinese models, especially for cyber, if the american ones are restricted or unavailable.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

"big number bad" isn't a great way of analysing the data, because China has a massively larger population.

The US emits 49% more CO2 per capita than China. And even with the much larger rate of increase, 0.79% to US' 0.3%, it'll still require 81 years to catch up to the US per capita rate [0].

The US aren't the good guys here, not by any means. Compared to my country, for instance, the US' emissions are 3x per capita that of the UK. If you want to argue that we shouldn't be using per capita (although we absolutely should), then that's 45x the UK's CO2 emissions.

[0] log(13.59/9.13) / log(1.0049) = 81.4 years

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#600
post #328
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not doubting it's possible to pass such a law, I'm doubting that's it's a practical or worthwhile goal. The terms of service don't even necessarily matter here. OpenAI could cancel your account for almost any reason, or for no reason at all. They don't particularly need to cite a ToS violation just as a store owner doesn't need to point to a written policy to kick you out of their store. If the underlying issue i…

You two are talking about different things. You are pointing out that OpenAI can cancel user's accounts for almost any reason, and nobody can really force them to serve customers that they suspect are distilling their models. That's one thing. The GP is saying the government can make laws to make terms against distillation unenforceable. Without such laws, if you signed an agreement with OpenAI pinky swearing you won…

What do you suppose the damages would be for a ToS violation? The difference between subscription rates and API rates?

OpenAI accused Deepseek of misappropriating trade secrets which could have serious penalties but seems like an awfully hard case to make.

Seems like we’d all be better off with a law that governs data sharing among AI companies, if that’s the policy goal.

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