Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Who's afraid of Chinese models?

stratechery.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

851–860 of 965 posts

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#851

Post by mynameisbilly »

hetman wrote: post #319
riskd wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s perfectly fine for the “West” to influence the world though, right? Or is it only a problem because… they’re Chinese?

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…

The United States has propped up some pretty horrific, murderous, bloodthirsty regimes over the past century to ensure they maintain a proxy presence across the globe. If supporting or engaging in an "authoritarian" regime is your litmus test, then the United States fails resoundingly.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#852

Post by mynameisbilly »

AlexandrB wrote: post #639
hahahaa wrote: post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And how is US doing on digitally totalitarian and hostile towards its own people? In practical terms you could get US and Chinese models to review each other, right. Depends what your use case is. Coding is kinda not so bad it is reviewable and immutable/traceable per commit. An AI app that is like a psychologist or something may be more worrying.

> And how is US doing on digitally totalitarian and hostile towards its own people? Seemingly better than everywhere else in the world, including where I live (Canada). Whataboutism doesn't really work when you use the least bad option as an example.

Are you familiar with the flock camera situation in the States? The American surveillance state has rapidly been getting worse with the help of this technology.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#853

Post by shimman »

jayd16 wrote: post #776
pessimizer wrote: post #771

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it is not. Whataboutism is a specific term created (by Cold War propagandists) to refer to when the US criticizes the USSR about "X," and the Soviet Union replies by asking about "Y" in the US. It is not a term created to refer to when some American criticizes any of America's official enemies for "X," and someone else reminds you that America also does exactly "X."

> "Whataboutism" or "whataboutery" (as in, "but what about X?") refers to the propaganda strategy of responding to an accusation with a counter-accusation instead of offering an explanation or defense against the original accusation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism This is a counter accusation and not a defense, ergo, whataboutism.

No, it would be whataboutism to say something like "but in America you extrajudicially kill citizens for protesting the government."

It's not whataboutism to talk about the same subject in the context of a different government. In this case LLM corporations.

All you're doing is deflecting valid criticism. It's not whataboutism to talk about how bad American corporations are to American citizens in the context of talking about how supposedly bad Chinese corporations are to American citizens (China doesn't profit off of the deaths of Americans like health insurance companies (this is whataboutism for example)).

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#854

Post by hahahaa »

AlexandrB wrote: post #639
hahahaa wrote: post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And how is US doing on digitally totalitarian and hostile towards its own people? In practical terms you could get US and Chinese models to review each other, right. Depends what your use case is. Coding is kinda not so bad it is reviewable and immutable/traceable per commit. An AI app that is like a psychologist or something may be more worrying.

> And how is US doing on digitally totalitarian and hostile towards its own people? Seemingly better than everywhere else in the world, including where I live (Canada). Whataboutism doesn't really work when you use the least bad option as an example.

Whataboutism moniker doesn't apply when the context is "avoid Chinese models because China commits crimes against humanity" and context is also "Top sota models for useful work are created by, let's list them all: US and China". If the argument is don't use Chinese models because China is hostile then let's say "The USA.... Objection: Relevance? Overruled".

US is less hostile in the day to day sense, but they could look at your cloud data at any time because say someone in your company protested and exercised their 1A right, and the government didn't like that, so that sort of thing tracks directly to secrecy and privacy guarantees I might want from models.

I personally don't worry for my sloperating but if I ran a large company's AI I might consider it. Esp if in Europe.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#855

Post by lossolo »

itake wrote: post #360
TripolitianFish wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d love to live in the USA you’re talking about friend. This is just oriental despotism paranoia, whatever cutsie repetition slogan you come up with is not a serious argument.

I've traveled to China ~5x [0], visited a range of cities Tier 1-3 over a collective 5 months, and grew up in the USA. I also currently live in Vietnam (~3.5 years) and spent 5.5 years working for a Singaporean company and a team stationed in Beijing. I don't really know how else to express my experiences living in, working with, and interacting with people in both of these countries. Perhaps you can share how life w…

> I don't really know how else to express my experiences living in, working with, and interacting with people in both of these countries.

Could you please describe your experiences, since you didn't? I've also been to China twice now (also multi month trips). I visited Tier 1-3 cities like Shenzhen, Shanghai, Beijing, and Chongqing etc, as well as some smaller cities. I'm very curious to hear about your experiences. How did they differ from the West for you?

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#856

Post by sarchertech »

fooster wrote: post #766
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”.

Just to quote a poster above: "You seem to think China is the evil polluter here. Just sort by per capita, and you'll see it's not even in the top 10% most polluting per capita."

It is just barely out of the top 10%. 27 out of 207. If you remove counties ahead of with tiny populations like Palau with 40k people, Iceland with 400k, and Greenland with 50k, it is in the top 10%.

Since they produce 1/3 of the co2, 1/3 of the reduction the world needs, needs to come from them. And they are still increasing their emissions. This is not the action of an autocratic leader who believes in climate change.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#857

Post by villish »

llm_nerd wrote: post #849
villish wrote: post #828

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Europe, like much of the West, foolishly delegated tech, media, payment systems, etc, to the United States. No they didn't. Europe has played a role in building all of these. Especially from the software side. Also anyone that doesn't like the US is free to stop using any American website, device, or service. There are alternatives to everything. For instance I do not like Meta, I refuse to use any of their website…

> No they didn't. Yes, they did. Like, look around . Clearly the Western world foolishly and very short-sightedly allowed the US the reigns on far too many things, to its disadvantage. It is unwinding, but it turns out that having decades of intertwining takes a while to undo. >Also anyone that doesn't like the US is free to stop using any American website, device, or service. What an idiotic, useless bit of pablum t…

> What an idiotic, useless bit of pablum to throw in there. Back to 4chan with you.

You want to hate the US but don't want the personal inconvenience of moving away from the daily sites and apps you use. How are these alternatives to american tech going to get enough users if someone like yourself who seems to have a hate boner for the US can't even leave a message board?

> https://www.axios.com/2026/07/20/ai-us-china-open-source-kim...

The orange idiot can say whatever he wants. The first amendment makes any ban unconstitutional. US companies being advised about potential backdoors in the models isn't a bad thing, even if I personally think it's FUD, open weights is not open source.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#858

Post by bamboozled »

WarmWash wrote: post #683
bamboozled wrote: post #546

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.

China builds literally everything for all countries, so why wouldn't they bring coal online? Very tiring arguments IMO.

Are you sending them extra money to fund nuclear?

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#859

Post by bamboozled »

sarchertech wrote: post #561
bamboozled wrote: post #546

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?

China emits 3x more co2 than the US and last year their rate of increase was 2.5x that of the US. https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-by...

They make literally everything, including all the pieces for a renewable / low emission economy.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#860

Post by nmthornhill »

chr15m wrote: post #848
nmthornhill wrote: post #808

Datapoint from the cheap end of the market: I run local models on a couple of Orange Pi SBCs and a decade-old Optiplex with no GPU. What runs usably on that class of hardware is almost entirely Chinese open weights — Qwen's MoE builds (35B total, ~3B active) are the only thing that gives me acceptable speed on CPU, with Gemma as about the only western exception. I evaluated Kimi too and ruled it out purely on size. W…

I assume this is slow and that makes me curious - what are you using this for?

[flagged]
Post reply on HN