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Who's afraid of Chinese models?

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Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#691

Post by Natfan »

ToValueFunfetti wrote: post #558
mad_tortoise wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

the left hand feeds while the right hand beats

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#692

Post by stymaar »

> The defining characteristic of a commodity is that it is fungible: a gallon of oil is a gallon of oil; a ton of copper is a ton of copper; a bushel of wheat is a bushel of wheat.

The concept of “commodity” as defined above is a model, a simplified abstract representation of reality, but that does not match the reality perfectly (the map != the territory).

The author claims that a token isn't literally an ideal commodity, but neither is oil or wheat, many factors influence their real value (intrinsic properties, location, available storage at production, expected delivery date, etc.) so that no two gallons of oil in different contracts have the same price.

Is treating “tokens” as a commodity a worse model than treating oil this way? It depends who you ask! I'm pretty sure that a chemist working at a refinery would be more happy to see tokens being felt with like a commodity by his company than if they started viewing crude oil like one.

(Overall, there's way too much economism in that post, and way too few facts, and as a result the argument makes very little sense, the author basically wrote that both OpenAI and Anthropic are drowning in cash right now because compute scarcity means the price must be significantly higher than the marginal cost…)

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#693

Post by over_bridge »

monooso wrote: post #572
WinstonSmith84 wrote: post #480

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.

I'm sure this will be a terribly unpopular opinion, but I've long held the view that a Chinese AI company might screw me over at some point for a complex geopolitical reason that I don't fully understand. An American AI company will screw me over tomorrow for a quick buck. As to the argument is that (only?) the Chinese labs are training on my data, I find this almost comical given the amount of highly-personal data c…

I don't trust any American company because they will switch into extraction mode eventually and squeeze every cent they can out of you.

Even if the founders didn't want that, eventually the upper ranks will fill with MBAs and the board with private equity and they will make it that way. Their bonuses are based on quarterly performance not customer experience

Long gone are the companies who served their communities for decades or centuries, providing a stable return to the owners, jobs for the workers and value to the customers.

I'd rather China have my data than America. China might do something with it one day but America built exploiting it into the business model (disclaimer that I'm not Uyghur or Taiwanese though)

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#694

Post by jayd16 »

aroman wrote: post #672
braebo wrote: post #650

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saying GPT 5.6 Sol is 1:1 with Fable is laughable. OpenAI models are braindead in comparison and I have hundreds of hours with both.

You have hundreds of hours with a model that was barely even released hundreds of hours ago? The perception of capability varies greatly between task. For my needs for example sol xhigh consistently outperforms fable xhigh.

You could run hundreds of agents in parallel and arguably that counts.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#695

Post by WarmWash »

abalashov wrote: post #557
inigyou wrote: post #517

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.

The American government has propaganda but it really sucks at it. All the people skilled in manipulating behavior work at our ad agencies, and hence our actual propaganda is mostly "Use this detergent! Take this drug! Drive this car!"

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#696

Post by Natfan »

inigyou wrote: post #516
simianparrot wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Been there. Great place. High standard of living, everyone is very productive. Still a dictatorship, and you can't speak ill of the government, but a successful one.

my understanding is that you can speak ill of the government publicly? like they'll nuke your billibilli if you talk shit about xi, but you can complain privately to a friend

not saying i agree with it, i'm saying it isn't as severe as the west makes it out to be

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#697

Post by jayd16 »

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?

You shouldn't trust either but also this is whataboutism.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#698

Post by WarmWash »

inglor_cz wrote: post #553
traceroute66 wrote: post #549

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…

If you're not kowtowing the worst possible characterization of someone, then you're wrong.

Is Trump a dictator with unilateral control? No.

Will you be celebrated for failing to recognize that? Yes.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#699

Post by spyckie2 »

kiicia wrote: post #492
WinstonSmith84 wrote: post #480

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.

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...

Competition is a good thing for consumers.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#700

Post by ausbah »

itake wrote: post #273
Lord-Jobo wrote: post #260

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.

2 parties, there are only two parties. and they vote on a majority of issues the same way. defense spending, judicial nominations, rote legislation, etc.

at least china isn’t pretending to be anything else

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