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Who's afraid of Chinese models?

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Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#871

Post by throw64259 »

culi wrote: post #865
throw64259 wrote: post #864

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every Western LLM will happily list you these sources, (which is likely how you got it), and would also happily discuss with you - if you’re interested - the reasons some of them may be unreliable and why your accompanying text is sometimes misleading or misrepresenting what the links actually say.

No I got this list by paying attention. It would do you well to stop assuming everyone is as handicapped by LLM-dependency as you are. Every single one of these reports was a major news story. It boggles my mind how uninformed people can be and still readily jump into a debate online Okay please. Tell me how I misrepresented the links. I would love for you to actually do the work of reading them. Something you should…

The ICJ has not concluded anything.

The ICC has not concluded anything - and it’s not even about genocide. It’s also the only known case in modern times where the prosecution officially started before the alleged crimes being prosecuted have been committed.

IAGS was 120 people out of an association of 500 that anyone can join.

It’s trivial to see that the UN is strongly biased by just taking one look at the data here, for example: https://unwatch.org/2025-unga-resolutions-on-israel-vs-rest-...

Or by looking at similar historical data, or at the obvious lies and omissions in many of its reports.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#872

Post by kortilla »

damontal wrote: post #504
youre-wrong3 wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was guard rails in the harness. Not the model. We are talking about baking it into the model. Denying to do something is also very different to changing historical facts like China does.

You are splitting hairs. End result is the same.

No it’s not. Saying “I won’t talk about how to make bombs” is not the same as “the holocaust didn’t happen”.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#873

Post by ralferoo »

onetimeusename wrote: post #712
ralferoo wrote: post #599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"big number bad" isn't a great way of analysing the data, because China has a massively larger population. The US emits 49% more CO2 per capita than China. And even with the much larger rate of increase, 0.79% to US' 0.3%, it'll still require 81 years to catch up to the US per capita rate [0]. The US aren't the good guys here, not by any means. Compared to my country, for instance, the US' emissions are 3x per capita…

I don't think per capita emissions is the only metric that should be used. Environmental impact is not measured per capita. Also it blames people in the US for energy consumed here to manufacture which includes exports for people abroad. The US's per capita emissions are not even far away from other similar nations. It's a data point, sure. It's comparable to Canada and Australia and even South Korea. Where did you g…

> Where did you get that the US emits 45x the UK?

From the GP [1], US emits 4,632,164,876 and UK emits 292,419,359 tonnes CO2. Which, sorry my bad, is actually only 15x. Looks like I did the ratio of China to UK which is 45x.

But either way, it shows that comparing total emissions is stupid because it's biased against bigger countries. Emissions per capita is a far more sensible metric.

> Also it blames people in the US for energy consumed here to manufacture which includes exports for people abroad.

Sure, but the same can be said about China, in fact I'd argue even more so. As a resident of the UK, the majority of things I buy is made in China, almost nothing from the US.

> The US's per capita emissions are not even far away from other similar nations.

Sure, but they are higher than China's, which was the point I was making to refute the GP. The only reason China's total emissions is 3x US is because its population is 4x US.

> Anyone playing this game is just looking to create a narrative about good and bad guys.

If you re-read what I wrote that you're replying to, you'll see that we agree on that.

It was the GP post that tried to compare China and US in terms of emissions, and deliberately chose total emissions to portray China as significantly worse than the US and getting worse year-on-year, while conveniently ignoring the population size differential and that the increase in emissions is still negligible compared to the overall difference, because it'd take 81 years for China to catch up with the US on emissions per capita. I then compared the US to the UK to show that comparing total emissions instead of per capita is stupid, because the population size matters.

But, as I said in the post you replied to - both countries can and should do much better, but as China isn't even in the top 10% of emissions per capita, this is a worldwide problem and trying to pin it all on China is disingenuous.

[1] https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-by...

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#874

Post by kortilla »

MSFT_Edging wrote: post #551
youre-wrong3 wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was guard rails in the harness. Not the model. We are talking about baking it into the model. Denying to do something is also very different to changing historical facts like China does.

> very different to changing historical facts like China does. Oh but they're trying. The right-wing usage of things like "woke" and "DEI" primarily serve to hide/destroy historical realities. [1] Florida has it's "STOP WOKE" act that forces teachers to talk about how slaves learned skills/benefited from slavery[2] and that various massacres also had black perpetrators. What is this other than changing historical fac…

> and that various massacres also had black perpetrators.

the implication of your message is that this is not true

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#875

Post by perching_aix »

miyoji wrote: post #835
perching_aix wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Correct, that was not my point either.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#876

Post by onetimeusename »

ralferoo wrote: post #873
onetimeusename wrote: post #712

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think per capita emissions is the only metric that should be used. Environmental impact is not measured per capita. Also it blames people in the US for energy consumed here to manufacture which includes exports for people abroad. The US's per capita emissions are not even far away from other similar nations. It's a data point, sure. It's comparable to Canada and Australia and even South Korea. Where did you g…

> Where did you get that the US emits 45x the UK? From the GP [1], US emits 4,632,164,876 and UK emits 292,419,359 tonnes CO2. Which, sorry my bad, is actually only 15x. Looks like I did the ratio of China to UK which is 45x. But either way, it shows that comparing total emissions is stupid because it's biased against bigger countries. Emissions per capita is a far more sensible metric. > Also it blames people in the…

Ok I appreciate the correction, I could not figure that out.

As far as everything else, yes I think this is a global problem, not solely a Chinese problem but I would characterize US-Chinese relations as tense so that tends to amplify finger pointing which I disagree with so yes, we agree.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#877

Post by graemep »

tcmart14 wrote: post #782
WarmWash wrote: post #683

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Agree, China believes in Climate change and are at least taking steps to address it. China brought 80GW of new coal power online last year. The US added 0, and plans to add 3GW next year (we all know why). China doesn't care about climate change, they care about energy independence, and conveniently have very little natural fossil fuels besides coal. Which they heavily mine and utilize.

From my understanding, yea they still stand up coal fire plants because world demand for Chinese manufacturing and the energy demand it creates exceeds how fast they can build reactors. So they build coal fire with the intention to replace that capacity with renewables later. Been awhile since I looked, but China has like 30-some odd plans for nuclear reactor construction with quiet a few of them having already broke…

No one forces them to increase manufacturing output. They do it to make money, just like everyone else.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#878

Post by sarchertech »

nixon_why69 wrote: post #624
sarchertech wrote: post #608

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China produces 1/3 of the world’s CO2. They already produce more per capita than all other large developed countries except Australia, the US, and Russia. And their rate of growth is higher than all of those countries except Russia. There’s no way to force them to do anything, but this is not that action of a nation that “believes in climate change”.

That's while being the world's factory, having lots of green energy, electric cars and an ACUTE motivation to reduce oil imports. Coal is a problem but at least they're not canceling half-finished green energy products when administrations change.

Sure they are building solar infrastructure. But they’re also still increasing co2 emissions. If you are the autocratic leader with almost total control of 1/3 of the worlds co2, and you believe that climate change is an existential threat, you wouldn’t be increasing co2 emissions. Xi could reduce co2 emissions with the stroke of a pen.

So he obviously doesn’t think it’s that much of a threat.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#879

Post by nixon_why69 »

sarchertech wrote: post #878
nixon_why69 wrote: post #624

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's while being the world's factory, having lots of green energy, electric cars and an ACUTE motivation to reduce oil imports. Coal is a problem but at least they're not canceling half-finished green energy products when administrations change.

Sure they are building solar infrastructure. But they’re also still increasing co2 emissions. If you are the autocratic leader with almost total control of 1/3 of the worlds co2, and you believe that climate change is an existential threat, you wouldn’t be increasing co2 emissions. Xi could reduce co2 emissions with the stroke of a pen. So he obviously doesn’t think it’s that much of a threat.

Xi could theoretically reduce GDP and associated emissions with the stroke of a pen[1], and so could most legislatures. None are doing it.

Building up alternative energy is a work in progress for anyone, they're leaders on electric cars which is good but they won't get off coal until they (or someone) figures out managing a grid with 80%+ of mostly-intermittent inputs from wind and solar.

[1] Not really, for the same reason as the legislatures, it's horrible politically. Dictatorships and especially the Chinese system have broader bases of support and political activity than most American media discourse assumes.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#880

Post by sanderjd »

miyoji wrote: post #832
sanderjd wrote: post #722

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 can…

I think he's creating a definition for an abstract thing here, and using the word "intelligence" to represent that abstract thing.

In your analogy, the "CRUD app" is analogous to the car, but that's not what Thompson is defining to be the unit of "intelligence". He's saying that some number of units of "intelligence" are necessary to create that CRUD app, somewhat analogously to how some number of units of energy are necessary to create a car.

But I agree with you that this concept of a "unit of intelligence" that he's using is probably too abstract to ever be usefully well defined.

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