741–750 of 965 posts
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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.
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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...
It blows my mind that these two companies are going to mint billionaires, meanwhile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz was bullied to death by the state for sharing academic papers which were at least in part, if not largely, paid for by tax dollars.
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> People absolutely use LLMs to research politically sensitive topics. Note I used the word "seriously", I meant it in its fullest form, i.e. serious people. I'm not interested in what-if arguments based on "you can't fix stupid". Stupid people also blindly believe whatever a US LLM tells them without any form of verification, hallucinations and all. Most people on this planet would agree that a Chinese LLM is perfec…
>> I meant it in its fullest form, i.e. serious people. Is academia serious enough? Well ever since LLM journals' inboxes are bombarded with submissions, and this applies across fields. Like OP said, ppl serious or not are asking LLM about any stuff, also serious or not.
Of all the people, academics should know better than to get their answers from LLMs.
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Maybe I should clarify. As I understand it, the kind of vulnerability being discussed is something like a Chinese model invisibly "realizing" that it's working on an American project, and then deliberately leaving subtle security bugs in its generated code for Chinese hackers to later exploit. As far as I know, that scenario is hypothetically possible, but has never been demonstrated to happen in the wild. Admittedly…
They can just favour some specific versions of some library that's been compromised. Unlike introducing bugs / flaws directly in the source code, they can claim plausible deniability, and it's much easier to implement without compromising the general coding capabilities of the models.
Finding these kinds of activations is something Anthropic is actively researching [1] but they're the only ones who can use those techniques to see Claude's intent. On the other hand, if a model is open-weights, in theory whoever is running the model could look inside the activations at runtime to see if a hidden vector associated with "deception" or "sabotage" is being activated [2].
[1] https://transformer-circuits.pub/ [2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.03518
(Those sources are just a couple of relevant starting points I could find without much effort, there is also https://www.neuronpedia.org/ if one is interested in seeing interactive demonstrations of interpretability concepts)
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.
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While true, you neglect the fact that US corporations have some autonomy from the government. I doubt that any of the current American AI corporations get regular dossiers of desirable responses to sensitive political topics from Washington and implement them. That would be a reason for a major lawsuit and a major scandal. In China, the image of the country and the preferred narrative is under much tighter control of…
> I doubt that any of the current American AI corporations get regular dossiers of desirable responses to sensitive political topics from Washington and implement them. That's completely true. What happens is that you get hit with a wall of bureaucratic threats and nonsense by the government out of nowhere, and usually for some unrelated matter. It's like a high level version of getting pulled over for not using your…
> bureaucratic threats and nonsense by the government out of nowhere
You can challenge these in courts. There is a free press you can go to. You can go to social media and lay your case out there. You can challenge what the government is requesting of you. In China, you can not at all.
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You seem to think China is the evil polluter here. Just sort by per capita, and you'll see it's not even in the top 10% most polluting per capita. There are plenty of large (depending on your definition of large) countries above it. Not just US, Australia and Russia that you are excluding for some reason, but also Qatar, Kuwait, UAE, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Canada all have significantly developed economically important c…
> There are plenty of large (depending on your definition of large) countries above it. Not just US, Australia and Russia that you are excluding for some reason, but also Qatar, Kuwait, UAE, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Canada None of those countries have more than 50 million people. Most of them have fewer than 10 million. None of them are going to move the needle on climate change. The US is clearly not a country to emulate…
I'd be willing to bet that you've not been to China. Shenzhen is a very green city, I'll go into that later, but also Beijing and Shanghai have historically had serious problems with smog in summer, and this has got significantly better in recent years as local government pushes companies towards renewable energy sources and close down coal power stations.
For example in Shenzhen, all buses and taxis have to be EV, and around 80% of all new privately owned cars are also EVs. That seems like a city that believes in climate change.
You've got vast swathes of desert covered by solar panels providing electricity further east (although sadly, a lot is waste due to transmission inefficiencies). That seems like a country that believes in climate change.
You've got a country that produces 80% of the world's solar panels, and has over 1/3 of the worldwide installation of solar panels. That seems like a country that believes in climate change.
You've got a country with massive windfarms and a net exporter of wind turbines. Combined, over 1/4 of all electricity in China comes from renewables. That seems like a country that believes in climate change.
You've got a country that uses a lot of battery storage to smooth power demand, and exports these units to pretty much everywhere because they're about the best you can get. That seems like a country that believes in climate change.
You've got a country that built the massive three gorges dam project, started in the 1990s and finished nearly a quarter of a century ago. That seems like a country that believes in climate change.
Sure, there's still a long way to go, and due to the massive energy demands, it still has coal power stations providing about half it's electricity generation needs. That needle is shifting over time, but you know what? It's still half coal and yet it still only has 2/3 the emissions per capita compared to the US. But even if it still has a long way to go, its actions clearly ARE the actions of a country that believes in climate change.
What is stopping China from gaining a majority market share, then, in terms of serving inference?
AI Sovereignty -- yes
Cybersecurity concerns -- yes
Latency -- no, unlike previous emerging IT workload types , inference does not have strong latency requirements. eg 1s of additional network latency doesn't matter to a 15 min, 10-turn agent session.
Cost -- ultimately this comes down to a nations ability to plug chips into warm shells. which forks into geopolitical / trade on the chips side and energy scalability and modularity on the warm-shell side. Even if you call geopolitical / trade a toss-up, China has the US beat HANDILY on the energy front, yearly they are deploying 10x power to their grid relative to the US, which is shooting itself in the foot at every possible moment.
IMHO chip tech will travel across borders, absent a breakthrough in analog inference, energy scalability will ultimately dominate.
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.
Re: common people, yes, and given all the talk of job instability AI is creating, why hasn’t Anthropic or OpenAI offered discounted plans for laid off or displaced workers? Wouldn’t this be a tangible way to display goodwill and build adoption?
because they are profit maxing. the AI world would be a completely different place if it's not for the open models.