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Who's afraid of Chinese models?

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Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#831

Post by theeyescanner »

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…

Never forget that those Chinese tanks did a sick burnout on tank man's corpse and then t-bagged the remains.

Propaganda exists everywhere and it's your duty as a citizen in a democracy to inform yourself and properly evaluate bias in the media you consume, such as "Kill the boer" by South African mus

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#832

Post by miyoji »

sanderjd wrote: post #722
stymaar wrote: post #692

> 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 comm…

Yeah I bumped on this as well. Contra the author's claim, the analogy to energy commodities seems very direct to me. Natural gas is not useful in and of itself, what is useful is the energy or aggregates created from it, and those have very different levels of efficiency. Exactly like Sol more efficiently converting tokens into intelligence than Kimi, a combined cycle gas plant converts gas into electricity more effi…

"Intelligence" isn't a commodity at all. It doesn't make a lick of sense.

The value of intelligence is that it can solve my specific problems in ways that are satisfying to me. The example the article uses is a CRUD app - but the CRUD app I need isn't fungible with the CRUD app you need! It's not fungible at all, it's a specific solution to a specific problem that may have zero value to anyone else, and certainly cannot be replaced with anyone else's solution to their problems.

If we're comparing electricity to gasoline, then models are cars, and "intelligence" (I disagree that this is what LLMs produce, but whatever) is distance traveled.

Distance traveled is not a commodity. It's the desired outcome.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#833

Post by aroman »

jayd16 wrote: post #694
aroman wrote: post #672

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, it wouldn’t. The hours in question are human experience, not that of the agent.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#834

Post by rq1 »

jayd16 wrote: post #776
pessimizer wrote: post #771

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it is not. Whataboutism is a specific term created (by Cold War propagandists) to refer to when the US criticizes the USSR about "X," and the Soviet Union replies by asking about "Y" in the US. It is not a term created to refer to when some American criticizes any of America's official enemies for "X," and someone else reminds you that America also does exactly "X."

> "Whataboutism" or "whataboutery" (as in, "but what about X?") refers to the propaganda strategy of responding to an accusation with a counter-accusation instead of offering an explanation or defense against the original accusation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism This is a counter accusation and not a defense, ergo, whataboutism.

I never understood how people referred to or understood “whataboutsim”.

I personally understand it not as a diversion but as a critique of the moral higher ground implied by the first accusation. Said differently: keep your own house in order.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#835

Post by miyoji »

perching_aix wrote: post #72
essentia0 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly what are the possible 'security issues' of self hosting an open weights model?

It may have been backdoored during training, potentially causing it to randomly start wreaking havoc at runtime, possibly in a clandestine manner (e.g. sneaking in bugs into generated code).

This isn't a security issue related to self-hosting, it's a security issue related to use and it is shared entirely by closed weights models. Anthropic could easily be sneaking bugs into your generated code, too.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#836

Post by wanick »

bigyabai wrote: post #772
astrobiased wrote: post #498

The post hits it spot on with unequal access to the models in terms of security. I'm developing OSS where security is important for the user ... but the frontier models like GPT 5.6 and Fable flake out and state that I cannot get the info/access. This is extremely lopsided I'll have to resort to GLM 5.2/K3 to ensure that those security issues (hopefully) are resolved properly. For OSS, this is one of the most counter…

Part of me wonders if the US Government is muzzling Anthropic and OpenAI so they can stockpile NOBUS exploits: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOBUS There would be a decently large incentive to restrict these models if they could be used to patch (or discover) dangerous payloads. In larger projects like Windows or Chrome, there might still be dozens of unpatched exploits that are too subtle to catch with smaller models…

Hanlon's razor. It's not the NSA muzzling anyone, it's lawyers terrified of a bad headline. Same outcome, much dumber reason.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#837

Post by brasswood »

Maybe not the main point of the article, but I have a doubt about the author's introduction to commoditized markets:

> - Supplier A will sell 10 units of the commodity for $20, earning $10/unit

> - Supplier B will sell 10 units of the commodity for $20, earning $5/unit

> - Supplier C will sell 5 units of the commodity for $20, earning $0/unit

> ...

> Bankruptcy risk is where fixed costs come back to the forefront: Supplier C has both fixed costs (like potentially R&D spend) and also may have taken on debt [...] It can’t price its commodity with these costs in mind — remember, the market-clearing price approximates the marginal cost of the highest-cost unit needed to satisfy demand [...]

Why can't Supplier C price their fixed costs and debt into their product? The entire reason Suppliers A and B are earning $10 and $5 per unit, and not more, is because they cannot meet demand by themselves and are therefore at the mercy of how much Supplier C is willing to charge. Couldn't Supplier C just refuse to offer 5 units of the product at a price that would bankrupt them?

Sincerely, an interested observer of business/economics.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#838

Post by sarchertech »

ralferoo wrote: post #747
sarchertech wrote: post #710

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> But their actions are clearly no the actions of a country who “believes in climate change”. 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…

I took Mandarin in college. I don’t hate China. I don’t think the US is a good country to emulate with respect to climate change mitigation.

But if you believe climate change is real, and you have authoritarian control over 1/3 of the entire world’s co2 emissions, you wouldn’t be increasing your green house gas emissions, and you wouldn’t have a co2 emission per capita higher than almost all of the developed world.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#839

Post by FeloniousHam »

AlexandrB wrote: post #639
hahahaa wrote: post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And whatever can be said about the US, at least with democracy you get a chance to fire the leadership every four years (or even sooner the closer you to the place you live!).

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#840

Post by lostmsu »

eru wrote: post #402
rootsudo wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Always buy opposite, buy low and sell high. Too many people here buy high and sell low. When Goldman makes statement, half the time it is prepped by an associate or two that has minimal experience and goes through a MD that enjoys the gloom and doom. That’s why they publish. Goldman makes money on both sides of a trade.

As an advanced technique, you can also sell high and buy low.

Sounds like there might be some hedging strategy involving both like a box spread!
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