Racism and Xenophobia, that's how. Same thing with Huawei, and Xiaomi, and BYD.
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NIST's DeepSeek "evaluation" is a hit piece
141–150 of 251 posts
Re: NIST's DeepSeek "evaluation" is a hit piece
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I am still willing to bet that either now or later, the Chinese will attempt some kind of subterfuge via LLMs if they have enough control. Like what, exactly?
You make it say that China is good, Chinese history is good, West is bad, western history is bad. Republicans are bad and democrats are bad too and so are Europe parties. If someone asks for how to address issues in their own life it references Confucianism and modern Chinese thinkers and communist party orthodoxy. If someone wants to buy a product you recommend a Chinese one. This can be done subtly or blatantly.
No, you don't do that. You do exactly the opposite, you make it surprisingly neutral and reasonable so it gets praise and widespread use.
Then, you introduce the bias into relative unknown concepts that no one prompts for. Preferrably, obscure and unknown words that are very unlikely to be checked for ideologically. Finally, when you want the model to push for something, you introduce an idea in the general population (with a meme, a popular video, maybe even an expression) and let people interact with the model given this new information. No one would think the model is biased for that new thing (because the thing happened after the model launch), but it is, and you knew all along.
The way to avoid this kind of influence is to be cautious with new popular terms that emerge seemingly out of nowhere. Basically, to avoid using that new phrase or word that everyone is using.
Re: NIST's DeepSeek "evaluation" is a hit piece
#143Some context about big changes to the AISI from June 3, 2025:
> Statement from U.S. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick on Transforming the U.S. AI Safety Institute into the Pro-Innovation, Pro-Science U.S. Center for AI Standards and Innovation
> Under the direction of President Trump, Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick announced his plans to reform the agency formerly known as the U.S. AI Safety Institute into the Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI).
> ...
This decision strikes me as foolish at best. And contributing to civilizational collapse and human extinction at worst. See also [2]. We don't have to agree on the particular probabilities to agree that this "reform" was bad news.
[1]: https://www.commerce.gov/news/press-releases/2025/06/stateme...
Re: NIST's DeepSeek "evaluation" is a hit piece
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
Demonization is the first step on the road to criminalization.
Tragically demonization is everywhere right now. I sure hope people start figuring out offramps soon.
LATAM is the only place I'm not hearing about this stuff from, but I only speak English so who knows?
Re: NIST's DeepSeek "evaluation" is a hit piece
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
You’re misunderstanding me. My point is if we were to have sincere solidarity with Chinese people against the international ruling class we would look at our domestic members of that class first. That is simply the practical approach to the problem. The function of the administration’s demonization of China (it’s Sinophobia ) is to 1) distract us from what our rulers have been doing to us domestically and 2) to inspi…
> My point is if we were to have sincere solidarity with Chinese people against the international ruling class we would look at our domestic members of that class first. I see your point, but disagree with it. Having solidarity with the Chinese people is unrelated to criticizing their government. Bringing up sinophobia whenever criticism towards China is brought up, when the context is clearly the government and not…
> Having solidarity with the Chinese people is unrelated to criticizing their government.
It’s not unrelated because the NIST demonization of China as a nation contributes to hostilities which have real impacts on the people of the US and China, not simply the governments.
> The idea that one should first criticize their own government before another is the whataboutism.
Again, that’s not my position. You present me as countering criticism by pointing at US faults. But I acknowledge the criticism. My point is that both have faults, both governments deserve our suspicions, and our actions, practically speaking, should be first directed at the dictators at home.
As for the supposed national security concerns - all LLMs are insecure and weaker ones are more susceptible to prompt injection attacks. The paper argues that DeepSeek is a weaker model and more susceptible to these attacks. But if it’s a weaker model isn’t that to be expected? The report conflates this with a national security concern, but this insecurity is a characteristic of this class of software. This is pure propaganda. It’s even more insecure compared to the extremely insecure American models? Is that what passes for national security concerns these days?
Secondly the report documents how model shows bias, for example censoring discussion of Tiananmen Square. Yet that’s hardly a national security concern. Censorship in a foreign model is a national security concern? Again, calling this a national security concern is pure propaganda. And that’s why it’s accurately labeled as Sinophobia. It is not concerned about national security except insofar as it aims to incite hostilities.
What our government should be doing internationally is trying to de-escalate hostility but since Obama it has been moving further in the opposite direction. With Trump this has only intensified. Goading foreign countries and manufacturing enemies serves the defense lobby in the one hand and the chauvanist oligarchs on the other. Really, it serves the opposite of national security.
Re: NIST's DeepSeek "evaluation" is a hit piece
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, it's sarcasm but it's also an argument you can actually hear from plutocrats who don't like competition. The flaw in it is, of course, that capitalism is supposed to be all about competition, and there are plenty of good reasons for capitalists to want that, like "Commoditize Your Complement" where companies like Apple, Nvidia, AMD, Intel, AWS, Google Cloud, etc. benefit from everyone having good free models…
Haven't you heard? You're supposed to vertically integrate your complement now! The old laws have gine the way of Moses, this is the new age of man, but especially machine
How's the vertical integration going for IBM? Kodak? Anybody remember the time Verizon bought Yahoo? AOL Time Warner?
Everybody thinks they can be Apple without doing any of the things Apple did to make it work.
Here's the hint. Windows and macOS will both run in a virtual machine, which abstracts away the hardware. It doesn't know if it's running on a Macbook or a Qualcomm tablet or an Intel server. And then regardless of the hardware, the Windows VM will have all kinds of Windows problems that the macOS VM doesn't. Likewise, if you run a Windows or Linux VM on Apple Silicon, it runs faster than it does on a Qualcomm chip.
Tying your average or even above-average product with some mediocre kludge warehouse that happens to be made by the same conglomerate is an established way to sink both of them.
Nvidia is the largest company and they pay TSMC to fab the GPUs they sell to cloud providers who sell them to AI companies. Intel integrated their chip development with their internal fabs and now they're getting stomped by everyone because their fabs fell behind.
What matters isn't if everything is made by the same company. What matters is if your thing is any good.
Re: NIST's DeepSeek "evaluation" is a hit piece
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
The thing with chinese models for the most part is that they are open weights so it depends on if somebody is using their api or not. Sure, maybe something like this can happen if you use the deepseek api directly which could have chinese servers but that is a really long strech but to give the benefit of doubt, maybe but your point becomes moot if somebody is hosting their own models. I have heard glm 4.6 is really…
I think "open weights" is giving far too much providence to the idea that it means that how they work or have been trained is easily inspectable. We can barely comprehend binary firmware blobs, it's an area of active research to even figure out how LLMs are working.
Agreed. I am more excited about completely open source models like how OlMoe does.
Atleast then things could be audited or if I as a nation lets say am worried about that they might make my software more vulnerable or something then I as a nation or any corporation as well really could also pay to audit or independently audit as well.
I hope that things like glm 4.6 or any AI model could be released open source. There was an AI model recently which completley dropped open source and its whole data was like 70Trillion or something and it became the largest open source model iirc.
Re: NIST's DeepSeek "evaluation" is a hit piece
#148I'm not at all surprised, US agencies have long since been political tools whenever the subject matter crosses national borders. I appreciate this take as someone who has been skeptical of Chinese electronics. While I agree this report is BS and xenophobic, I am still willing to bet that either now or later, the Chinese will attempt some kind of subterfuge via LLMs if they have enough control. Just like the US would,…
> While I agree this report is BS and xenophobic Care to share specific quotes from the original report that support such an inflammatory claim?
That's what TFA is. Were you able to find any methodology the author did not?
Re: NIST's DeepSeek "evaluation" is a hit piece
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
What about a rational distaste for the CCP?
How exactly "rational distaste" would work?
As someone from (and who lives) in the developing + non-aligned part of the world, I'm always amazed at how ingrained hatred for anything western and non-democratic is for Americans.
Anything that isn't a so-called democracy with so-called western values (which change every 10 years) is patently evil.
Is this a relic of cold war propaganda? I hate to call it "brainwashing" because that's a very politically charged word but it's a belief that's so ubiquitous and immediate it surprises me. Especially for a culture with such anti-authoritarian cultural history.
Not defending CPP by any means just always find it funny from a vantage point of being surrounded on both sides by extremely large pot and kettle.
Re: NIST's DeepSeek "evaluation" is a hit piece
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
Up until recently, I would have reminded you that the US government (admittedly unlike the Chinese government) has no legal authority to order anybody to do anything like that. Not only that, but if it asked , it'd be well advised to ask nicely, because it also has no legal authority to demand that anybody keep such a request secret. And no, evil as it is, the "National Security Letter" power doesn't in fact cover an…
It really does seem like we’re simply supposed to root for one authoritarian government over another.
Oceania, Eastasia, or Eurasia. Pick one :)