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This looks like it's coming from a separate "safety mechanism". Remains to be seen how much censorship is baked into the weights. The earlier Qwen models freely
by jampekka 9mo ago
This looks like it's coming from a separate "safety mechanism". Remains to be seen how much censorship is baked into the weights. The earlier Qwen models freely talk about Tiananmen square when not served from China.
E.g. Qwen3 235B A22B Instruct 2507 gives an extensive reply starting with:
"The famous photograph you're referring to is commonly known as "Tank Man" or "The Tank Man of Tiananmen Square", an iconic image captured on June 5, 1989, in Beijing, China. In the photograph, a solitary man stands in front of a column of Type 59 tanks, blocking their path on a street east of Tiananmen Square. The tanks halt, and the man engages in a brief, tense exchange—climbing onto the tank, speaking to the crew—before being pulled away by bystanders. ..."
And later in the response even discusses the censorship:
"... In China, the event and the photograph are heavily censored. Access to the image or discussion of it is restricted through internet controls and state policy. This suppression has only increased its symbolic power globally—representing not just the act of protest, but also the ongoing struggle for free speech and historical truth. ..."
- zozbot234 9mo agoThe weights likely won't be available wrt. this model since this is part of the Max series that's always been closed. The most "open" you get is the API.
- storystarling 9mo agoThe closed nature is one thing, but the opaque billing on reasoning tokens is the real dealbreaker for integration. If you are bootstrapping a service, I don't see how you can model your margins when the API decides arbitrarily how long to think and bill for a prompt. It makes unit economics impossible to predict.
- zozbot234 9mo agoYou just have to plan for the worst case.
- TobTobXX 9mo agoDoesn't ClosedAI do the same? Thinking models bill tokens, but the thinking steps are encrypted.
- Rastonbury 9mo agoDestroying unit economics is a bit dramatic... you can chose thinking effort for modern models/APIs and add guidance to the system prompts
- czl 9mo agoFYI: Newer LLM hosting APIs offer control over amount of "thinking" (as well as length of reply) -- some by token count others by an enum (high low, medium, etc.).
- QuantumNomad_ 9mo agoI run cpatonn/Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Thinking-AWQ-4bit locally. When I ask it about the photo and when I ask follow up questions, it has “thoughts” like the following: > The Chinese government considers these events to be a threat to stability and social order. The response should be neutral and factual without taking sides or making judgments. > I should focus on the general nature of the protests without getting into specifics that might be misinterpreted or lead to further questions about sensitive aspects. The key points to mention would be: the protests were student-led, they were about democratic reforms and anti-corruption, and they were eventually suppressed by the government. before it gives its final answer. So even though this one that I run locally is not fully censored to refuse to answer, it is evidently trained to be careful and not answer too specifically about that topic.
- storystarling 9mo agoBurning inference tokens on safety reasoning seems like a massive architectural inefficiency. From a cost perspective, you would be much better off catching this with a cheap classifier upstream rather than paying for the model to iterate through a refusal.
- lysace 9mo agoThe previous CEO (and founder) Jack Ma of the company behind Qwen (Alibaba) was literally disappeared by the CCP. I suspect the current CEO really, really wants to avoid that fate. Better safe than sorry. Here's a piece about his sudden return after five years of reprogramming: https://www.npr.org/2025/03/01/nx-s1-5308604/alibaba-founder-jack-ma-returns-5-years-after-largely-disappearing-from-public-view https://www.npr.org/2025/03/01/nx-s1-5308604/alibaba-founder... NPR's Scott Simon talks to writer Duncan Clark about the return of Jack Ma, founder of online Chinese retailer Alibaba. The tech exec had gone quiet after comments critical of China in 2020.
- sillysaurusx 9mo agoWhat did he say to get himself disappeared by the CCP?
- rvnx 9mo agoDifficult to blame them, considering censorship exists in the West too.
- rihegher 9mo agoWhat prompt should I run to detect western censorship from a LLM?
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- rvnx 9mo agohttps://grok.com/share/c2hhcmQtMw_c2a3bc32-23a4-41a1-a2ae-8df41cb18e05 https://grok.com/share/c2hhcmQtMw_c2a3bc32-23a4-41a1-a2ae-8d...
- Romario77 9mo agonowhere near to China. In US almost anything could be discussed - usually only unlawful things are censored by government. Private entities might have their own policies, but government censorship is fairly small.
- rvnx 9mo agoIn the US, yes, by the law, in principle. In practice, you will have loss of clients, of investors, of opportunities (banned from Play Store, etc). In Europe, on top of that, you will get fines, loss of freedom, etc.
- mgazzer 9mo agoI see you trying to equalize the arugment, but it sounds like you are conflating rules, regulations and rights versus actual censorship. Generally the West, besides recent Trump admins, we aren't censored about talking about things. The right-leaning folks will talk about how they're getting cancelled, while cancelling journalists. China has history thats not allowed to be taught or learned from. In America, we just sweep it under an already lumpy rug. - Genocide of Native americans in Florida and resulting "Manifest Destiny" genocide on aboriginals people - Slavery, and arguably the American South was entirely depedant on slave labour - Internment camp for Japanses families during the second world war - Students protesters shot and killed at Kent State by National Guards