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Who's afraid of Chinese models?

stratechery.com

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Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#841

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that the model doesn't hold any malicious intent when doing it. No "deception", no "sabotage".

Not sure I understand that position. Unless we're talking about a scenario in which one is using an outdated model along with no grounding (which, imo, PEBKAC), why would the model be pinning insecure libraries? If it does have grounding, and can therefore see that it's introducing vulnerabilities to the code it's generating, yet does so anyway... I suppose we could invoke Hanlon's razor, but if the model is that inc…

The model is conditioned / pretrained to use a particular version of a library. The model doesn’t know why — it was just taught to use that version. To the model, it is just some insignificant detail in the grand scheme of things. It’s just like how a model would intuitively favour using English without explicit instructions — it’s not trying to sabotage other cultures, it’s just what it does.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#842
post #836

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It can be multiple reasons. And don't forget that malicious actors love hiding behind Hanlon's.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#843

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NOBUS exploits have rarely been a driving interest for elected officials. Trade restrictions and reciprocity are far more salient and legible. Most elected officials are only barely aware of what NOBUS exploits even mean. Even during the pre-Snowden heyday of US cyber supremacy, these capabilities were barely part of the thought process of White House officials.

Conversely, the United States is now embroiled deeper in asymmetric warfare than ever before. US-based systems are being exploited by Chinese efforts like Salt Typhoon and raising questions about reciprocal attacks. Other targets of US soft-power like Iran (Stuxnet victim) are escalating their hacking efforts and using Chinese technology to stifle American command and control. I can believe that NOBUS and other backd…

[flagged]

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#844

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…

To be fair, you can replace ""believes in climate change" with "prioritizes energy independence". I would argue the latter is a stronger motivator for China.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#845

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Models are not free. Downloading them is free. Running them is not. Is this really different from traditional software? Downloading postgres is free. Running it is not. You either buy hardware and assume the costs of owning and running that, or you pay to run it in the cloud.

But inference costs scale per task whereas platform services like postgres typically amortize across tasks. If you are selling tasks done by inference, then compute is part of your COGS and it scales per task.

Much more so, I would agree. A bit like how mainframe batch jobs might have once been charged back based on "cycles" used for a job or other tracked metrics.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#846

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The state of the US is much more dire than most people are letting on. This is unfalsifiable, so not a great claim. You can continue to claim this forever without having to prove it. >All I know is I can't take my phone into the airport. I can't go out and protest without risking my life and freedom. I can't drive anywhere without my location being tracked and logged. And, if I get pulled over, I must comply with an…

None of this is an exaggeration. It was just recently ruled that your phone can be searched extensively at an airport, without a warrant. The only reasonable thing to do is simply not bring your phone. Notice what I am claiming and what I have claimed. I am not claiming these things will happen. I am saying there is a risk. People have gotten executed by the state for not complying with obviously unlawful orders. It…

>The only reasonable thing to do is simply not bring your phone.

Actually, not bringing your phone is eminently unreasonable, particularly to an airport. Sure, you could wait in a line for a paper boarding pass, but if everyone were "reasonable" and did this, what do you think it would do to airport lines? What would happen when a flight gets canceled, and everyone rushes to the desks for help?

Buddy, birth has a 100% fatality rate. Life is risk.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#847

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? Ok, name list of rogue aggressive nations that are continuously attacking other nations both allies and foes, and I tell you which one he meant...

The United States

its hard to chose from your list...

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#848

Datapoint from the cheap end of the market: I run local models on a couple of Orange Pi SBCs and a decade-old Optiplex with no GPU. What runs usably on that class of hardware is almost entirely Chinese open weights — Qwen's MoE builds (35B total, ~3B active) are the only thing that gives me acceptable speed on CPU, with Gemma as about the only western exception. I evaluated Kimi too and ruled it out purely on size. W…

I assume this is slow and that makes me curious - what are you using this for?

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#849

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I don't know why you're trying to downplay it. Ignoring that I have literally zero trust in anything Anthropic has to say on this -- they have been doing the hysterical routine and trying to get every bit of government granted monopoly they can[1] -- those numbers still simply aren't that impressive. >European models are so far behind because... What a non-sequitur. Europe, like much of the West, foolishly delegated…

> Europe, like much of the West, foolishly delegated tech, media, payment systems, etc, to the United States. No they didn't. Europe has played a role in building all of these. Especially from the software side. Also anyone that doesn't like the US is free to stop using any American website, device, or service. There are alternatives to everything. For instance I do not like Meta, I refuse to use any of their website…

> No they didn't.

Yes, they did. Like, look around. Clearly the Western world foolishly and very short-sightedly allowed the US the reigns on far too many things, to its disadvantage.

It is unwinding, but it turns out that having decades of intertwining takes a while to undo.

>Also anyone that doesn't like the US is free to stop using any American website, device, or service.

What an idiotic, useless bit of pablum to throw in there. Back to 4chan with you.

>This is complete nonsense.

https://www.axios.com/2026/07/20/ai-us-china-open-source-kim...

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#850

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!"

Lol, someone completely missed the point… American propaganda is such a part of the culture, it gets barely noticed. Even movies that has military equipment, the military gets to have heavy input towards positive depictions of american military. US military has paid millions in marketing to all the sports organizations for promoting the military. Etc etc. This is just one aspect of the propaganda. https://en.wikipedi…

>etc etc

please, keep going...

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