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

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#631

Post by jbstack » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 2:00 PM UTC

1over137 wrote: post #580

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…

Also me, as someone who lives in Greenland, Canada, Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, etc. China is not threatening to invade, USA is.

You might take a different view if you live in Taiwan.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#632

Post by whywhywhywhy » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 2:01 PM UTC

thraway3837 wrote: post #24

throwa356262 wrote: post #10

According to openAI's own @deanwball: Even OpenAI isn't buying this distillation talk: https://xcancel.com/deanwball/status/2078133895766114412#m

Can you or someone please explain several of the claims made in this tweet? "I am personally surprised the Chinese state continues to allow the open sourcing of models this good, given potential risks" what risks? I suspect the reason they are is 75% explained by strategic blindness/lack of AGI-pilledness (the CCP is very Yann Lecun-y in its views of AI). Confused what this means Open-weight models are inherently dec…

> I am personally surprised the Chinese state continues to allow the open sourcing of models this good

Writer seems to have no clue how IP actually functions in China

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#633

Post by sarchertech » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 2:05 PM UTC

Zigurd wrote: post #626

sarchertech wrote: post #605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In absolute numbers China produces 1/3 of the total worlds CO2, and they are still growing the amount of CO2 they are producing. That is not the actions of a country who “believes in climate change”. China’s CO2 per capita is ahead of every large developed country except for the US, Australia, and Russia.

Actually, if you Google the rankings, China is 27th per capita, behind, of all places, Iceland.

> ahead of every large developed country

Because those are the only ones that can move the needle on climate change.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#634

Post by AlexandrB » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 2:07 PM UTC

tristanj wrote: post #611

causal wrote: post #583

"distillation attack" is such a loaded term that really pisses me off. Distillation is a technical term with real meaning, and historically requires logits which Anthropic does not provide. "Generated training data" is the correct term. It's not an "attack". And Anthropic undoubtedly also generates training data for each new generation of models, yet you never see them claim Fable is a distilled Opus.

1) Model distillation is the process of transferring knowledge from a large model to a smaller one. It doesn't require logits. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_distillation 2) The word "attack" is standard security vocabulary. Per RFC 4949: attack 1. (I) An intentional act by which an entity attempts to evade security services and violate the security policy of a system. That is, an actual assault on system se…

> 3) The "attack" part of "distillation attack" refers to distillers creating tens of thousands of fraudulent accounts, using proxies to bypass georestrictions, deepfaked IDs, and paying real people to pass biometric KYC checks. Who then blended this in with real user traffic to conceal their behavior.

Lol. Isn't this literally many of the same tactics OpenAI and Anthropic used to scrape the internet? So now it's an "attack", but previously it was just "training".

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#635

Post by BaseBaal » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 2:08 PM UTC

desterothx wrote: post #618

inigyou wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The technique is called "accusation in a mirror". By accusing the enemy of doing what you are doing, when they call out what you are doing, they look like they are just weakly repeating your own accusations because they don't have any truth. And the anger that should be directed against you (because of your practices) gets directed at the enemy.

Well implemented by the current US administration. Every accusation is a confession

The US distilled this from the Russian model.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#636

Post by procgen » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 2:11 PM UTC

nixon_why69 wrote: post #586

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…

> pretend like history is in favor of China. Are you saying that history has a verdict, and it disfavors particular 3000 year old cultures?

> 3,000 year-old cultures

Like Western culture?

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#637

Post by myrmidon » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 2:14 PM UTC

desterothx wrote: post #630

sarchertech wrote: post #605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In absolute numbers China produces 1/3 of the total worlds CO2, and they are still growing the amount of CO2 they are producing. That is not the actions of a country who “believes in climate change”. China’s CO2 per capita is ahead of every large developed country except for the US, Australia, and Russia.

Almost like the entire worlds manufacturing was pushed to China the last 40 years (and is now getting moved to cheaper countries with the rising Chinese middle class). Is there a similar explanation for why the US number is so high?

Outsourced manufacturing is much less of a factor than people typically assume:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/imported-or-exported-co-e...

US numbers are insanely high because cheap hydrocarbons are locally available (=> bad incentives) and everyone is wealthy (that correlation is very strong; just compare Luxembourg, which is much wealthier and more polluting than surrounding nations) and also population density is rather low so more energy wasted for transport.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#638

Post by beepbooptheory » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 2:15 PM UTC

sarchertech wrote: post #561

bamboozled wrote: post #546

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...

Kind of a meta point but for those who don't know, its fun to track this comment and its responses through time. I want to nominate it for the hall of fame in classic HN post genre. It will be two decades soon!

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=21&prefix=false&q...

One interesting thing would be to see how the numbers change over the years alongside the otherwise identical debates.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#639

Post by AlexandrB » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 2:16 PM UTC

hahahaa wrote: post #590

giancarlostoro wrote: post #577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's nice and all, but I would not get hired in many places that are heavily regulated and risk adverse, and would not hire someone who swears by said models because there is no trust in their creators not training for malicious intent, a random tool call here and there, and you've got a "open weight model" that can send your code anywhere. There's just no trust in a country that is digitally totalitarian and hosti…

And how is US doing on digitally totalitarian and hostile towards its own people? In practical terms you could get US and Chinese models to review each other, right. Depends what your use case is. Coding is kinda not so bad it is reviewable and immutable/traceable per commit. An AI app that is like a psychologist or something may be more worrying.

> And how is US doing on digitally totalitarian and hostile towards its own people?

Seemingly better than everywhere else in the world, including where I live (Canada). Whataboutism doesn't really work when you use the least bad option as an example.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#640

Post by sigbottle » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 2:16 PM UTC

causal wrote: post #583

"distillation attack" is such a loaded term that really pisses me off. Distillation is a technical term with real meaning, and historically requires logits which Anthropic does not provide. "Generated training data" is the correct term. It's not an "attack". And Anthropic undoubtedly also generates training data for each new generation of models, yet you never see them claim Fable is a distilled Opus.

Completely unrelated, but I'm seeing people and especially LLMs using causal/intervention so much it's kind of driving me insane.

It's actually a very goated term but not everything is causal, it also has precise technical meanings (although those get blurred too given that causal can mean anything from intervention proper, to mere depdnence on something prior)