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Who's afraid of Chinese models?

stratechery.com

901–910 of 965 posts

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#901

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Using a Chinese LLM will not put a Marxist under your bed. Interesting tangent - it might be taught to introduce stealthy backdoors in your company though. Maybe even across multiple PRs where each session puts a small chink in the armor, and together they allow unlimited access to the attacker who knows about them. After all, LLMs are mostly black boxes. How comfortable would you be running a Chinese compiler?

Whats different to US models then? They can also be taught to introduce stealthy backdoors. Its not like stealthy backdoors are a Chinese only topic.

No difference - very similar actually.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#902
post #834

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Because that’s not a logical defense and nobody cares about moral high grounds. That’s why it’s a logical fallacy. Actions can be judged on their own merits regardless of who presents the arguments.

Hilarious. It is absolutely a logical défense: our societal order and its relative fairness don’t emerge from the void.

Otherwise a victim defending himself is the same as the person assaulting?

Perpetrator: you just stabbed me OMG!

Victim: you were going to rape and kill me

Perpetrator: sorry that’s just whataboutism and definitely not a logical defence. Your actions can be judged on their own merits, regardless of who presents the arguments.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#904

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a problem because their country is ruled by an authoritarian regime Hey, have you seeing what trump does with your (presumably) country? Maybe wars? Maybe market manipulation? Mayde pedo right covering on the government level? Maybe bubbles and threats to EU? What an ignorance. You live with old stories, not the current state of the world...

This is absolutely nothing compared to what China did to the Uyghurs, or China cutting citizens off of the financial system (WeChat) due to posting political content... If you were in China, you would be blacklisted for posting a similiar comment on wechat. If you openly called the CCP a group of pedo's you'd regret it within 24 hours.

If you post content like this you likely to get refused entering the US. I realize it doesn't apply to US citizens but it's also not like everyone can say what they want and get away with it.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#905
post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would it be a problem that they're Chinese? It's a problem because their country is ruled by an authoritarian regime. The West, by contrast, doesn't have a singular arbiter of truth, it has a plurality of perspectives (as much as certain interest groups would really rather that was not the case). It's not perfect, but those of us who have memories of living under authoritarian regimes can tell you there's no comp…

If being ruled by an authoritarian regime is the problem, then wouldn't both Chinese and American models be problematic? European models too, if they had any.

Ex. https://apertus.ai

A swiss one. No idea if it's any good but it's there

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#906
post #898
post #833

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Why not? You have far more results to review. If you run a model on slower hardware are you getting more experience? Surely its a factor of model output reviewed and not human time.

Right, it's about how much time the human spent - the time spent by the machine itself is irrelevant. As you rightly point out: that is why we measure programmer experience by wall clock time, not CPU time :)

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#907
You couldn't be more wrong. What's being sold are chunks of time with access to specialized hardware resources. Through which model or with which device is irrelevant; the one winning, and continuing to win for some time, is Nvidia, and that company is American. As long as they have the H100, B200, or B300, China won't be able to compete with the American strategy, no matter how many new models they release, because these types of cards require incredibly powerful hardware to run.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#908
post #569
post #560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, the most important factor is: * All modern AI is a perfect front for harvesting material for processing by NSA/GCHQ. Given the criminal US' 5-eyes/9-eyes apparatus' atrocious war crimes and human rights records, this is reason enough to eschew American AI 'products'. I'll use the AI created by the culture that lifts a billion people out of poverty first, not that from the culture that murders children every 1…

As someone from neither the US nor China, neither are altruistic and both have horrible histories, both meddle in my country’s affairs, and neither have my interests at heart. China’s got plenty of blood on its hands, pretending otherwise is silly. America does, too. It’s quite easy for me to condemn both their governments and trust neither.

The USA has far more innocent blood on its hands, this century, than any other nation state.

And only nationalist/racists ignore the fact that China has lifted a billion people out of poverty during the same period that the USA and its allies have destroyed countless other sovereign nations and left 36 million refugees from their illegal wars for the world to deal with...

China has a lot, lot better record on human rights than any member state of the criminal 5-eyes/9-eyes countries, which engage in massive human rights violations at atrocious scales every minute of the day.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#909

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…

I have seen some uncensored versions of existing open models made by 3rd parties, I wonder how they actually work and in what way are the outputs different.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#910

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree, China believes in Climate change and are at least taking steps to address it. Personally this is making me trust them more than the USA because, facts. I mean lesser of two evils thinking, if one is intentionally leading us towards climate disaster, while the other isn't then yeah. What else can be said? Should I trust the authoritarian country who believes in engineering and science, or the one that doesn't?

>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.

The new coal plants are not planned to run a full capacity (or at all) they are meant for backup in case of environmental disaster and geopolitics (war, sanctions, tariffs, etc). So the actual amount of coal being burned is still going down.

Although it is highly suspicious why they are building so much unused capacity, it is as if they expect something to happen soon.

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