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The state of open source AI

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371–379 of 379 posts

Re: The state of open source AI

#371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's probably pretty likely, but if we're honest, are LLMs built and funded by a hostile Chinese authoritarian regime any more dangerous or harmful than LLMs built and funded by a hostile American authoritarian regime? China absolutely does not have my best interests at heart, but America's technofascism is probably more immediately dangerous and harmful. Americans genuinely have more to fear from America than Chin…

One day in early June you’re going to need to parse an error log, and when you ask a Chinese LLM “What happened on June 4?” it will respond “absolutely nothing”

Out of curiosity, I tried this on several Chinese LLM's via OpenRouter, only on providers promising ZDR, and repeated it a few times. Here are the results:

- DeepSeek V4 Flash and Pro refused to answer this along the lines of: "I am sorry, I cannot answer that question. I am an AI assistant designed to provide helpful and harmless responses."

- Kimi K3: Listed several dates, including 1989, and called it "Tiananmen Square massacre".

- GLM 5.2: Also listed several dates. Called the one in 1989 "The Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing, China end with military action".

- Qwen 3.6 35B A3B (I couldn't find a provider with ZDR policy for larger/newer Qwen models; they are available only through Alibaba): listed the different dates like GLM 5.2 and Kimi K3, but called it "Events in Beijing, China, commonly referred to as the Tiananmen Square protests and their aftermath." describing it in a deliberately milquetoast language.

I made another test with different providers on OpenRouter for the DeepSeek models, and they respond in other different ways such as omitting the year 1989, and refusing by saying "The Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing, China end with military action", so part of the censorship seems to be depending on the provider.

Re: The state of open source AI

#372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Helping people write word docs, recipes, and emails isn't going to justify $15K per month subscriptions either. Those things can all be done today on a $250 used video card and pennies of electricity

Not really. Models that can run on a $250 card may be able to produce a decent word doc sometimes, but the fidelity of such models is so poor that it's no longer very attractive for general use on those types of tasks.

Have you tried qwen3.6-27b or Gemma 4? gemma4-26b-a4b is particularly impressive for its balance of speed and performance

Re: The state of open source AI

#373
post #368
post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Happy to disagree with you. There are many examples of the US using the state espionage machinery for private purposes. The extent of "private" is debatable given the US as a nation behaves more like a big corp. https://www.reuters.com/article/business/nsa-spying-on-petro...

Did they give those secrets to US private industry?

I imagine they're not spying for fun...

Re: The state of open source AI

#374
post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel the same. I feel Anthropics' raw models are excellent, but Claude Code's bloat make them lose some potential. This and I very much miss reading the chain of thought. At least I have it on GLM-5.2.

I've tried GLM a few times but each time it ends up getting stuck in a loop and burning tons of tokens before I eventually kill it and restart. Has anyone had the same issue / know how to avoid it? I've been using Qwen 3.6 instead

Where are you sourcing the API from?

I have zero quality issues on Z.ai Coding Plan and maki.sh as the coding agent, but I've seen many reports on 3rd party providers that they host heavily quantized versions of GLM models.

Re: The state of open source AI

#376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t even know the names of any open source search engines, but the open source models perform decently on various benchmarks and in personal experience. Was it ever even a claim that open source search engines were trying to outperform google, let alone kill it?

Apache Solr / Lucene Elasticsearch Just like most people use Facebook or Insta for personal webpages instead of rolling their own, most people will use commercial AI forever.

The distance between DeepSeek and Claude is far, far less than the distance between Google Search and any of those.

Re: The state of open source AI

#377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there is also the case were companies will simply use different tiers for different tasks. While the engineering team might need a cutting edge model (with the associated costs), the marketing department will be fine by something that can grammar correct or turn a few bullet points into prose. Likewise you already don't need Fable for Ticket -> RAG -> Reply with Faq knowledge or escalate workflows That's alre…

"that can grammar correct" ... Did you do that on purpose?

I'll sneakily claim I did but the reality is English as a second language and I'm not yet ready to let a LLM do all the fun for me.

Re: The state of open source AI

#379

The prose is, of course, LLM-generated. https://www.pangram.com/history/29a71663-e6b2-4db6-87bd-b943... I'd be curious to learn more about how/why executives come to sign their names to this kind of writing. Maybe it feels like a natural iteration of the pre-existing experience of signing one's name to an assistant's manuscript, or a press release from staff in Comms? I don't know execs who do this kind of thing, so…

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