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I don't care if this kills Google and OpenAI. I hope it does, though I'm doubtful because distribution is important. You can't beat "ChatGPT" as a brand in lay
by echelon 11mo ago
I don't care if this kills Google and OpenAI.
I hope it does, though I'm doubtful because distribution is important. You can't beat "ChatGPT" as a brand in laypeople's minds (unless perhaps you give them a massive "Temu: Shop Like A Billionaire" commercial campaign).
Closed source AI is almost by design morphing into an industrial, infrastructure-heavy rocket science that commoners can't keep up with. The companies pushing it are building an industry we can't participate or share in. They're cordoning off areas of tech and staking ground for themselves. It's placing a steep fence around tech.
I hope every such closed source AI effort is met with equivalent open source and that the investments made into closed AI go to zero.
The most likely outcome is that Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic win and every other "lab"-shaped company dies an expensive death. RunwayML spent hundreds of millions and they're barely noticeable now.
These open source models hasten the deaths of the second tier also-ran companies. As much as I hope for dents in the big three, I'm doubtful.
- raw_anon_1111 11mo agoI can’t think of a single company I’ve worked with as a consultant that I could convince to use DeepSeek because of its ties with China even if I explained that it was hosted on AWS and none of the information would go to China. Even when the technical people understood that, it would be too much of a political quagmire within their company when it became known to the higher ups. It just isn’t worth the political capital. They would feel the same way about using xAI or maybe even Facebook models.
- siliconc0w 11mo ago[flagged]
- nagaiaida 11mo agoon what hypothetical grounds would you be more meaningfully able to sue the american maker of a self-hosted statistical language model that you select your own runtime sampling parameters for after random subtle security vulnerabilities came out the other side when you asked it for very secure code? put another way, how do you propose to tell this subtle nefarious chinese sabotage you baselessly imply to be commonplace from the very real limitations of this technology in the first place?
- fragmede 11mo agoThis paper may be of interest to you: https://arxiv.org/html/2504.15867v1 https://arxiv.org/html/2504.15867v1
- nagaiaida 11mo agothe mechanism of action for that attack appears to be reading from poisoned snippets on stackoverflow or a similar site, which to my mind is an excellent example of why it seems like it would be difficult to retroactively pin "insecure code came out of my model" on the evil communist base weights of the model in question
- kriops 11mo ago[flagged]
- coliveira 11mo agoCompetitor != adversary. It is US warmongering ideology that tries to equate these concepts.
- kriops 11mo ago[flagged]
- jrflowers 11mo agoIsn’t every country by definition a “local monopoly on force”? Sweden and Norway have their own militaries and police forces and neither would take kindly to an invasion from the other. By your definition this makes them adversaries or enemies.
- kriops 11mo agoExactly. I am Norwegian myself, and I don’t even know how many wars we have had with Sweden and Denmark. If you are getting at the fact that it is sometimes beneficial for adversaries to collaborate (e.g., the prisoner dilemma) then I agree. And indeed, both Norway and Sweden would be completely lost if they declared war on the other tomorrow. But it doesn’t change the fundamental nature of the relationship.
- deaux 11mo ago> For example, a small random percentage of the time, it could add a subtle security vulnerability to any code generation. Now on the HN frontpage: "Google Antigravity just wiped my hard drive" Sure going to be hard to distinguish these Chinese models' "intentionally malicious actions"! And the cherry on top: - Written from my iPhone 16 Pro Max (Made in China)
- raw_anon_1111 11mo agoWhere does the software come from? Your iPhone can’t magically intercept communications and send it to China without the embedded software. If Apple can’t verify the integrity of its operating system before it is installed on iPhones. There are some huge issues. Even if China did manage to embed software on the iPhone in Taiwan, it would soon hopefully be wiped since you usually end up updating the OS anyway as soon as you activate it.
- adrian_b 11mo agoThe hardware can always contain undetectable sub-devices that can magically intercept anything with no possibility for the software to detect this. You should remember that all iPhones had for several years an undetected hardware backdoor, until a couple of years ago, when independent researchers have found it and reported the Apple bugs as CVEs, so Apple was forced to fix the vulnerabilities. The hardware backdoor consisted in the fact that writing some magic values to some supposedly unused addresses allowed the bypassing of all memory protections. The backdoor is likely to have consisted in some memory test registers, which are used during manufacturing, but which should be disabled before shipping the phone to customers, which Apple had not done. This hardware backdoor, coupled with some bugs in a few Apple system libraries, allowed the knowledgeable attackers to send remotely an invisible message to the iPhone, which was able to take complete control over the iPhone, allowing the attacker to read any file and to record from cameras and microphones. A reboot of the iPhone removed the remote control, but then the attacker would immediately send another invisible message, regaining control. There was no way to detect that the iPhone was remotely controlled. The backdoor was discovered only externally in the firewalls of a company, because the iPhones generated a suspiciously high amount of Internet traffic, without apparent causes. This has been widely reported at the time and discussed on HN, but some people continue to be not aware about how little you can trust even major companies like Apple to deliver the right hardware. The identity of the attackers who exploited this Apple hardware backdoor has not been revealed, but it is likely that they had needed the cooperation of Apple insiders, at least for access to secret Apple documentation, if not for intentionally ensuring that the hardware backdoor remained open. Thus the fact that Apple publishes only incomplete technical documentation has helped only the attackers, allowing them to remain undiscovered for many years, against the interests of the Apple customers. Had the specifications of the test registers been public, someone would have quickly discovered that they had remained unprotected after production. Therefore, for many years the iPhones of certain valuable targets had magically intercepted all their communications and they have sent them to an unknown country (due to the nature of some of the identified targets and the amount of resources required to carry the attacks, it has been speculated that the country could have been Israel, but no public evidence exists; a US TLA is the main plausible alternative, as some targets were Russians).
- nylonstrung 11mo agoLiterally every time a Chinese model is discussed here we get this completely braindead take There has never been a shred of evidence for security researchers, model analysis, benchmarks, etc that supports this. It's a complete delusion in every sense.
- StealthyStart 11mo agoThis is the real cause. At the enterprise level, trust outweighs cost. My company hires agencies and consultants who provide the same advice as our internal team; this is not to imply that our internal team is incorrect; rather, there is credibility that if something goes wrong, the decision consequences can be shifted, and there is a reason why companies continue to hire the same four consulting firms. It's trust, whether it's real or perceived.
- 0xWTF 11mo agoChildren do the same thing intuitively: parents continually complain that their children don't listen to them. But as soon as someone else tells them to "cover their nose", "chew with their mouth closed", "don't run with scissors", whatever, they listen and integrate that guidance into their behavior. What's harder to observe is all the external guidance they get that they don't integrate until their parents tell them. It's internal vs external validation.
- raw_anon_1111 11mo agoOr in many cases they go over to their grandparents house and they let them run wild and all of the sudden your parents have “McDonald’s money” for their grandkids when they never had it for you.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- raw_anon_1111 11mo agoI have seen it much more nuanced than that. 2020 - I was a mid level (L5) cloud consultant at AWS with only two years of total AWS experience and that was only at a small startup before then. Yet every customer took my (what in hindsight might not have been the best) advice all of the time without questioning it as long as it met their business goals. Just because I had @amazon.com as my email address. Late 2023 - I was the subject matter expert in a niche of a niche in AWS that the customer focused on and it was still almost impossible to get someone to listen to a consultant from a shitty third rate consulting company. 2025 - I left the shitty consulting company last year after only a year and now work for one with a much better reputation and I have a better title “staff consultant”. I also play the game and be sure to mention that I’m former “AWS ProServe” when I’m doing introductions. Now people listen to me again.
- tokioyoyo 11mo agoIf the Chinese model becomes better than competitors, these worries will suddenly disappear. Also, there are plenty startups and enterprises that are running fine-tuned versions of different OS models.
- raw_anon_1111 11mo agoYeah that’s not how Big Enterprise works… And most startups are just doing prompt engineering that will never go anywhere. The big companies will just throw a couple of developers at the feature and add it to their existing business.
- tokioyoyo 11mo agoBig enterprise with mostly private companies as their clients? Lol, yeah, that’s how they work from my personal experience. The reality is, if it’s not a tech-first enterprise and already outsource part of tech to a shop outside of NA (which is almost majority at this point), they will do absolutely everything to cut the costs.
- raw_anon_1111 11mo agoI spent three years working in consulting mostly in public sector and education and the last two working with startups to mid size commercial interest and a couple of financial institutions. Before that I spent 6 years working between 3 companies in health care in a tech lead role. I’m 100% sure that any of those companies would I have immediately questioned my judgment for suggesting DeepSeek if had been a thing. Absolutely none of them would ever have touched DeepSeek.
- ipaddr 11mo agoWhy would you be presenting what AI tech you are using? You would tell them AI will come from Amazon using a variety of models.
- 11mo ago
- kriops 11mo ago[flagged]
- JSR_FDED 11mo agoAirBnB is all in on DeepSeek and Qwen. https://sg.finance.yahoo.com/news/airbnb-picks-alibabas-qwen-over-093000045.html https://sg.finance.yahoo.com/news/airbnb-picks-alibabas-qwen...
- raw_anon_1111 11mo agoTIL: That Chinese models are considered better at multiple languages than non Chinese models.
- tayo42 11mo agoIt's a customer service bot? And Airbnb is a vacation home booking site. It's pretty inconsequential
- antonvs 11mo agoAirbnb has ~$12 bn annual revenue, and is a counterexample to the idea that no companies can be "convinced to use DeepSeek". The fact that it's customer service means it's dealing with text entered by customers, which has privacy and other consequences. So no, it's not "pretty inconsequential". Many more companies fit a profile like that than whatever arbitrary criteria you might have in mind for "consequential".
- tehjoker 11mo agoreally a testament to how easily the us govt has spun a china bad narrative even though it is mostly fiction and american exceptionalism
- beowulf0x0 11mo ago[flagged]
- tehjoker 11mo agoThis is how crazy and nationalistic people are getting. I'm an American citizen, though I am critical of the US government, and have no allegiances to China. What do you think America is doing to every country, even allies (which has been highly publicized)? Why would a country being constantly attacked by American intelligence and propaganda not want to counter that? https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/us-security-agency-spied-merkel-other-top-european-officials-through-danish-2021-05-30/ https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/us-security-agency-spie... American intelligence has penetrated most information systems and at least as of 10 years ago, was leading all other nations in the level of sophistication and capability. Read Edward Snowden.
- ClearZ 11mo ago[dead]
- corimaith 11mo agoMoralizing through whataboutism does not logically follow in disproving the China threat narrative, it is axiomatic that what matters is what they are doing to us, not what we are doing to them from that vantage. Rather, I'd say it speaks more about how deranged the post-snowden/anti-neocon figures have become, from critiquing creeping authoritarianism to functionality acting at the behest of an even more authoritarian regime. The funny thing is that behavior of deflection, moralizing and whataboutism is exactly the kind of behavior nationalists employ, not addressing arguments head on like the so-called "American nationalists".
- 11mo ago
- littlestymaar 11mo ago> I can’t think of a single company I’ve worked with as a consultant that I could convince to use DeepSeek because of its ties with China even if I explained that it was hosted on AWS and none of the information would go to China. Well for non-American companies, you have the choice between Chinese models that don't send data home, and American ones that do, with both countries being more or less equally threatening. I think if Mistral can just stay close enough to the race it will win many customers by not doing anything.
- register 11mo agoThat might be the perspective of a US based company. But there is also Europe and basically it's a choice between Trump and China.
- Muromec 11mo agoEurope has Mistral. It feels that governments that can do things without fax take this as a sovereignity thing and roll their own or have their provider in their jurisdiction.
- deaux 11mo ago> Even when the technical people understood that I'm not sure if technical people who don't understand this deserve the moniker technical in this context.
- nylonstrung 11mo agoThe average person has been programmed to be distrustful of open source in general, thinking it is inferior quality or in service of some ulterior motive
- giancarlostoro 11mo agoChatGPT is like "Photoshop" people will call any AI chatgpt.
- banq 11mo ago[dead]