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Why China Didn’t Invent ChatGPT

6 points by wolverine876 4y ago

300bps 4y ago
https://archive.is/y4JVk https://archive.is/y4JVk
wolverine876 4y ago
It's surprising to me that authoritarians, as well as economic nationalist businesspeople in free countries, seem to have completely forgotten the immense ecoomic advantage of free markets and open competition, even to the point of abandoning basic self-interest: The Chinese Communist Party needs a strong economy for legitimacy and to achieve other aims, such as military buildup. The economic nationalist businesss people want to make money. Presumably; maybe now they all just want power and could care less about the rest. I think part of it is a shift in attitudes toward individuals: Instead the egalitarianism of 'all men are created equal', and anyone is as good as anyone else (in status), and in the land of opportunity anyone can accomplish anything, and power (and status) being something to be suspicious of and corrupting .... Now power is the goal itself; and rather than seeing other people as equals and sources of incredible potential to nurture, they are looked at with contempt, as things to be dominated and from which to extract as much as possible. Yes, that's all very general stuff, but it's hard to express or discuss otherwise.
- warning26 4y ago
  Shouldn’t be too surprising; we’ve seen it in almost every economically successful dictatorship. Initially, the benefits of centralized control allow things to go great, until the overly-centralized authority starts caring only about perpetuating its own power. The only way to get past that phase is to force out the dictator (see: South Korea).
  - wolverine876 4y ago
    > Initially, the benefits of centralized control allow things to go great That buys into the authoritarian megalomania - that some central person can do better than the independent thinking and labor of millions. Imagine some US president - or anyone - centrally controlling the IT industry for the last few decades. Lol. The problem isn't their corruption - though that is a problem. The problem is that central control can't possibly work. You can't be CEO of everything; you don't want the government's civil service running business. Nobody can compete with millions of people. And you also lose out on creative destruction of the ideas that fail, and the recyling of those resources for a new idea.
    - warning26 4y ago
      I largely agree with you, but I’d push back on the idea that central control is totally useless for innovation. Consider the most successful research initiatives; many of them (ARPAnet, the Manhattan Project) emerged from top-down directives.
      - wolverine876 4y ago
        That's not central control of private sector research, that's the government (or an agency of the government) acting as an independent research and development organization. I agree that can work very well - also think of all the public universities.
xyzzy123 4y ago
Run of the mill hn contrarian post but: I think this op-ed is premature, China has a number of structural advantages wrt. AI and some fairly obvious use-cases that justify enormous investment and large scale deployment. It's no harder to make LLMs aligned with CCP ideology than it is to make them "safe" in the way ChatGPT is. In both cases the AI is trained to understand what are undesirable responses that will get it "cancelled". Censorship and social monitoring are killer use-cases for LLMs. Structurally the huge advantage China has over the west is that it is politically feasible to get all public and private communications fed into AI, with the dual purpose of monitoring communications and providing training data. The long-term questions around what this does to society and is that good or bad - that is harder. Is the "great firewall" a net plus for Chinese citizens or just a tool the CCP use to maintain order and control? A "great AI" seems inevitable but what will the 2nd and 3rd order effects be? Even if you think China will manage this poorly there is no reason to be smug about that; we will need to confront the question of the "AI police state" in the west before long. The pretexts here will of course be CSAM and terrorism.

6 points by wolverine876 4y ago

https://archive.is/y4JVk https://archive.is/y4JVk

It's surprising to me that authoritarians, as well as economic nationalist businesspeople in free countries, seem to have completely forgotten the immense ecoomic advantage of free markets and open competition, even to the point of abandoning basic self-interest: The Chinese Communist Party needs a strong economy for legitimacy and to achieve other aims, such as military buildup. The economic nationalist businesss people want to make money. Presumably; maybe now they all just want power and could care less about the rest. I think part of it is a shift in attitudes toward individuals: Instead the egalitarianism of 'all men are created equal', and anyone is as good as anyone else (in status), and in the land of opportunity anyone can accomplish anything, and power (and status) being something to be suspicious of and corrupting .... Now power is the goal itself; and rather than seeing other people as equals and sources of incredible potential to nurture, they are looked at with contempt, as things to be dominated and from which to extract as much as possible. Yes, that's all very general stuff, but it's hard to express or discuss otherwise.

warning26 4y ago
Shouldn’t be too surprising; we’ve seen it in almost every economically successful dictatorship. Initially, the benefits of centralized control allow things to go great, until the overly-centralized authority starts caring only about perpetuating its own power. The only way to get past that phase is to force out the dictator (see: South Korea).
- wolverine876 4y ago
  > Initially, the benefits of centralized control allow things to go great That buys into the authoritarian megalomania - that some central person can do better than the independent thinking and labor of millions. Imagine some US president - or anyone - centrally controlling the IT industry for the last few decades. Lol. The problem isn't their corruption - though that is a problem. The problem is that central control can't possibly work. You can't be CEO of everything; you don't want the government's civil service running business. Nobody can compete with millions of people. And you also lose out on creative destruction of the ideas that fail, and the recyling of those resources for a new idea.
  - warning26 4y ago
    I largely agree with you, but I’d push back on the idea that central control is totally useless for innovation. Consider the most successful research initiatives; many of them (ARPAnet, the Manhattan Project) emerged from top-down directives.
    - wolverine876 4y ago
      That's not central control of private sector research, that's the government (or an agency of the government) acting as an independent research and development organization. I agree that can work very well - also think of all the public universities.

xyzzy123 4y ago

Run of the mill hn contrarian post but: I think this op-ed is premature, China has a number of structural advantages wrt. AI and some fairly obvious use-cases that justify enormous investment and large scale deployment. It's no harder to make LLMs aligned with CCP ideology than it is to make them "safe" in the way ChatGPT is. In both cases the AI is trained to understand what are undesirable responses that will get it "cancelled". Censorship and social monitoring are killer use-cases for LLMs. Structurally the huge advantage China has over the west is that it is politically feasible to get all public and private communications fed into AI, with the dual purpose of monitoring communications and providing training data. The long-term questions around what this does to society and is that good or bad - that is harder. Is the "great firewall" a net plus for Chinese citizens or just a tool the CCP use to maintain order and control? A "great AI" seems inevitable but what will the 2nd and 3rd order effects be? Even if you think China will manage this poorly there is no reason to be smug about that; we will need to confront the question of the "AI police state" in the west before long. The pretexts here will of course be CSAM and terrorism.