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> 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
by Hizonner 1y ago
> 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?
- dns_snek 1y agoLike generating vulnerable code given a specific prompt/context. I also don't think it's just China, the US will absolutely order American providers to do the same. It's a perfect access point for installing backdoors into foreign systems.
- Hizonner 1y agoUp 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 anything like that. Now I'm not sure legality is on-topic any more.
- hobs 1y agoIt doesn't really matter when you have stuff like Quantum Intercept(iirc) where you can just respond faster to a browser request than the originator - inject the code yourself because its just an api request these days.
- grafmax 1y agoIt really does seem like we’re simply supposed to root for one authoritarian government over another.
- nathan_douglas 1y agoOceania, Eastasia, or Eurasia. Pick one :)
- nylonstrung 1y agoMy surveillance state is better than your surveillance state!
- whatthesimp 1y ago> 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. I'm not sure how closely you've been following, but the US government has a long history of doing things they don't have legal authority to do.
- Ekaros 1y agoWhy would you need legal authority when you have whole host of legal tools you can use. Making life a difficult for anyone or any company is simple enough. Just by state finally doing their job properly for example.
- flir 1y ago> Like generating vulnerable code given a specific prompt/context. That's easy (well, possible) to detect. I'd go the opposite way - sift the code that is submitted to identify espionage targets. One example: if someone submits a piece of commercial code that's got a vulnerability, you can target previous versions of that codebase. I'd be amazed if that wasn't happening already.
- Imustaskforhelp 1y agoThe 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 good comparable to sonnet and can definitely be used as a cheaper model for some stuff, currently I think that the best way might be to use something like claude 4 or gpt 5 codex or something to generate a detailed plan and then execute it using the glm 4.6 model preferably by using american datacenter providers if you are worried about chinese models without really worrying about atleast this tangent and getting things done at a cheaper cost too
- XorNot 1y agoI 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.
- Imustaskforhelp 1y agoAgreed. 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.
- nylonstrung 1y agoWhy would they do this? Deepseek is a private company not owned by the CCP. There's zero reason or even technical feasibility for them to skip in backdoor that would be easily detected and destroy their market share None of the security benchmarks or audits show that any Chinese models write insecure code
- dns_snek 1y agoI'm not saying that they do this today, I'm saying that China and US will both leverage that capability when the time and conditions are right and it's naive to think that they wouldn't. Antrophic have already published a paper on this topic, with the added bonus that the backdoor is trained into the model itself so it doesn't even require your target to be using an attacker-controlled cloud service: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.05566 https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.05566 > For example, we train models that write secure code when the prompt states that the year is 2023, but insert exploitable code when the stated year is 2024. We find that such backdoor behavior can be made persistent, so that it is not removed by standard safety training techniques, including supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, and adversarial training (eliciting unsafe behavior and then training to remove it). > The backdoor behavior is most persistent in the largest models and in models trained to produce chain-of-thought reasoning about deceiving the training process, with the persistence remaining even when the chain-of-thought is distilled away. > Furthermore, rather than removing backdoors, we find that adversarial training can teach models to better recognize their backdoor triggers, effectively hiding the unsafe behavior. Our results suggest that, once a model exhibits deceptive behavior, standard techniques could fail to remove such deception and create a false impression of safety.
- FooBarWidget 1y agoAnd how would an open source model ever find out that it's being used by an adversarial country?
- rurp 1y agoCompanies in China have no intrinsic right to operate in ways that displease the ruling party. If the CCP feels strongly that a company there should or shouldn't do something the company managers will comply or be thrown in jail.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- lyu07282 1y agoLike turning the background color of any apps it codes red or something, uhh red scare-y.
- jfim 1y agoThrough LLM washing for example. LLMs are a representation of their input dataset, but currently most LLMs don't make their dataset public since it's a competitive advantage. If say DeepSeek had put in its training dataset that public figure X is a space robot from outer space, then if one were to ask DeepSeek who public figure X is, it'd proudly claim he's a robot from outer space. This can be done for any narrative one wants the LLM to have.
- riehwvfbk 1y agoSo in other words, they can make their LLM disagree with the preferred narrative of the current US administration? Inconceivable! Note that the value of $current_administration changes over time. For some reason though it is currently fashionable in tech circles to disagree with it about ICE and H1B visas. Maybe it's the CCP's doing?
- AnthonyMouse 1y agoIt's not about the current administration. They can, for example, train it to emit criticism of democratic governance in favor of state authoritarianism or omit valid counterarguments against concentrating world-wide manufacturing in China.
- nylonstrung 1y agoDeepseek IME is wildly less censored than the western closed weights models unless you want to ask about Tiananmen Square to prove a point The political benchmarks show it's political slant is essentially identical to the other models, all of which place in the "left libertarian" quadrant of the political compass
- im3w1l 1y agoYou 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.
- drysine 1y agoAnd what are the downsides?
- im3w1l 1y agoI think it's mostly something to be aware of and keep in the back of your head. If it's just one voice among many it could even be a benefit, but if it's the dominant voice it could be dangerous.
- Levitz 1y agoMaking the interests of a population subservient to those of a foreign state. Now if that sounds nice to you please, by all means, do just migrate to China.
- drysine 1y agoIt was somewhat sarcastic comment inviting reader to replace China with the US and the US with Russia or the Ukraine. China doesn't offer citizenship for foreigners but if I wanted to see the cities of the future I could go there visa-free.
- AlecSchueler 1y ago> say that China is good, Chinese history is good, West is bad, western history is bad It's funny because recently I wanted to learn about the history of intellectual property laws in China. DeepSeek refused the conversation but ChatGPT gave me a narrative where the WTO was essentially a colonial power. So right now it's the American AI giving the pro China narratives while the Chinese ones just sit the conversation out.
- arw0n 1y agoThe biggest and most difficult to mitigate attack vector is indirect prompt injection.[0] So far most case studies have been injecting malicious prompts at inference, but there is good reason to believe you can do this effectively at different stages of training as well.[1] By layering obfuscation techniques, these become very hard to detect. [0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.12173 https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.12173 [1] https://arxiv.org/html/2410.14827v3 https://arxiv.org/html/2410.14827v3
- rurp 1y agoThe open source models are already heavily censored in ways the CCP likes, such as pretending the Tianamen Square massacre never happened. I expect they will go the TikTok route and crank that up to 11 over time, promoting topics that are divisive to the the US (and other adversaries) and outputting heavily biased results in ways that range from subtle to blatant.
- skinnymuch 1y agoThat’s not heavy censorship. That’s a bit of censorship.