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PRC elites voice AI-skepticism

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Re: PRC elites voice AI-skepticism

#51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> Yes PRC is a common abbreviation amongst literate, engaged, people. So I'm either not literate, not engaged, or not people? I'm surprised to learn it is as common as USA, UK, and EU.

Seems about as important as knowing FRG = West Germany, and GDR/DDR = East Germany in the 20th century.

Re: PRC elites voice AI-skepticism

#52
There was an interesting bit about the relationship between industry and academia (translated from a link in the OP):

> Currently, some universities are cultivating engineering talent; it would be very necessary and beneficial to have people with industry experience come to teach them. However, under our current system, these teachers from enterprises may not even have the opportunity to teach classes, because teaching requires certain approvals. Although everyone encourages university-enterprise cooperation, when it comes to implementation, it often cannot be realized.

This makes a lot of sense and as someone in the AI industry it’s a shame research is so siloed. Some masters programs have practicums and some classes invite speakers from industry, but I ended up learning a ton of useful knowledge from work. I’d love to teach a class but there’s essentially no path for me to do that. Plus industry can pay ~10x what adjuncts can make.

Re: PRC elites voice AI-skepticism

#53

Apart from the obvious, China seems to be making incredibly reasonable decisions lately. Especially compared to the current superpower.

We should probably wait before declaring any decisions "incredibly reasonable". After all, the outcomes of previous rationally-sounding decisions were mixed. One-child policy, intended to prevent overpopulation, made Chinese birth deficit worse than it would have to be - if it were phased out by 1995 or so, there would likely be at least 100 million more young people now. Chinese real estate bubble popped and had to…

When Evergrande went down in 2021 a lot of commentary said this would take their whole economy down (or worse) similar to how the subprime mortgage bubble took down the US economy in 2007. That didn’t really happen.

Re: PRC elites voice AI-skepticism

#54

> former Dean of Electronics Engineering and Computer Science at Peking University, has noted that Chinese data makes up only 1.3 percent of global large-model datasets (The Paper, March 24). Reflecting these concerns, the Ministry of State Security (MSS) has issued a stark warning that “poisoned data” (数据投毒) could “mislead public opinion” (误导社会舆论) (Sina Finance, August 5). from a technical point of view, I suppose i…

I was thinking about this yesterday. My personal opinion is that the PRC will face a self created headwind that likely, structurally, will prevent them from leading in AI. As the model get's more powerful, you can't simply train the model on your narrative if it doesn't align with real data/world. At some capacity, the model will notice and then it becomes a can of worms. This means they need to train the model to be…

You say it like western nations don't operate on double-think, delusions of meritocracy, or power disproportionately concentrating in monopolies.

Re: PRC elites voice AI-skepticism

#55
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI Threatens the Workforce Under communism, why is this a thing? I know that China hasn't been strictly communist since the Soviets fell but ostensibly, humanoid AI robots under semi-communism is a the dream, no?

From the article, Xi looks down on western “Welfarism”, he believes it makes the population lazy.

As a westerner who has at least to some degree been influenced by socialism ideologically, but who perhaps isn't a communist (I don't know what my ideology really is-- and who does), I don't necessarily dislike welfare, but I don't want to build society on it. Instead I want some element of an actual 'to each according to his contribution'-type thing with an exception so that we treat disabled people and others who can't work or who for different reasons end up being unproductive in an acceptable way.

So I don't think this is necessarily unusual in the west either, especially not if you look back to 1950s or 1960s Swedish social democrats.

Re: PRC elites voice AI-skepticism

#56

> former Dean of Electronics Engineering and Computer Science at Peking University, has noted that Chinese data makes up only 1.3 percent of global large-model datasets (The Paper, March 24). Reflecting these concerns, the Ministry of State Security (MSS) has issued a stark warning that “poisoned data” (数据投毒) could “mislead public opinion” (误导社会舆论) (Sina Finance, August 5). from a technical point of view, I suppose i…

I think they're referring to this study on LLM poisoning in the pretraining step: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07192 (related article: https://www.anthropic.com/research/small-samples-poison ) I'll admit I'm out of my element when discussing this stuff. Maybe somebody more plugged into the research can enlighten.

The ministry of state security is not issuing warnings due to an arXiv paper… it’s a different type of “poison”.

Re: PRC elites voice AI-skepticism

#57

> former Dean of Electronics Engineering and Computer Science at Peking University, has noted that Chinese data makes up only 1.3 percent of global large-model datasets (The Paper, March 24). Reflecting these concerns, the Ministry of State Security (MSS) has issued a stark warning that “poisoned data” (数据投毒) could “mislead public opinion” (误导社会舆论) (Sina Finance, August 5). from a technical point of view, I suppose i…

I was thinking about this yesterday. My personal opinion is that the PRC will face a self created headwind that likely, structurally, will prevent them from leading in AI. As the model get's more powerful, you can't simply train the model on your narrative if it doesn't align with real data/world. At some capacity, the model will notice and then it becomes a can of worms. This means they need to train the model to be…

Would you say they face the same problem biologically, of reaching the state of the art in various endeavors while intellectually muzzling their population? If humans can do it why can't computers?

Re: PRC elites voice AI-skepticism

#58
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After some searching, something similar happened at Anthropic [1] [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpqeng9d20go

He is probably referring to that exact thing. Anthropic does a lot of these contrived "studies" though that seem to be marketing AI capabilities.

What would make it less contrived to you? Giving my assistant, human or AI, access to my email, seems necessary for them to do their job.

Re: PRC elites voice AI-skepticism

#59

Is "PRC" a common abbreviation? Does it mean "China", or does it mean something else? Why not write China? I'm from KOS* (neighbor country of KON* and ROF*), so I don't know much. * Kingdom of Sweden , Kingdom of Norway , Republic of Finland .

Others answered the main reason, but sometimes I find myself using "PRC" to indicate a particular government (~1950-Present) which unlike "China" excludes past dynasties, and is less-likely to be interpreted as referring to the people or culture.

For example, the potential differences between:

    "France has always been X."
    "The French republic has always been X."
    "The French monarchy has always been X."

Re: PRC elites voice AI-skepticism

#60
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was thinking about this yesterday. My personal opinion is that the PRC will face a self created headwind that likely, structurally, will prevent them from leading in AI. As the model get's more powerful, you can't simply train the model on your narrative if it doesn't align with real data/world. At some capacity, the model will notice and then it becomes a can of worms. This means they need to train the model to be…

Just as an aside; Why is "intelligence" always considered to be more data? Giving a normal human a smartphone does not make them as intelligent as Newton or Einstein, any entity with sufficient grounding in logic and theory that a normal schoolkid gets should be able to get to AGI, looking up any new data they need as required.

“Knowing and being capable to do more things” would be a better description. Giving a human a smartphone, technically, let’s then do more things than Newton/Einstein.
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