6 ms·
Most American companies (regulated ones, definitely) can't dare to touch any Chinese models, though they knew that it makes perfect economic sense. Until the ta
by zkmon 4mo ago
Most American companies (regulated ones, definitely) can't dare to touch any Chinese models, though they knew that it makes perfect economic sense. Until the taboo prevails, the cartel get's their flood of profit. That's a cartel protected by regulations.
- xnx 4mo agoIs "taboo" the right word? "taboo" = "banned on grounds of morality or taste". Not sending data to known IP thieves, state actors, and competitors in China (or Russia or Israel) seems very rational.
- tcp_handshaker 4mo ago>> Not sending data to known IP thieves, state actors, and competitors in China (or Russia or Israel) seems very rational. As opposed to sending data to known IP thieves, state actors, and competitors in the USA ? Which one is the most irrational?
- Levitz 4mo agoYou can legally act against one, not against the other. Not exactly a hard question.
- tcp_handshaker 4mo agoLooking forward to the outcome of those legal processes againt the CEOs, that sit behind Trump at the inauguration. After they stole all the knowledge in the world to train their models. And the current administration is drunk on SpaceX pre IPO shares...how did they get them? "Trump Officials Held Millions of Dollars of SpaceX Ahead of IPO" - https://news.bloomberglaw.com/texas-brief/trump-officials-held-millions-of-dollars-of-spacex-ahead-of-ipo https://news.bloomberglaw.com/texas-brief/trump-officials-he...
- sandworm101 4mo agoGiven how little voting power these "shares" have (they are effectively SpaceX trading cards/NFTs) perhaps they were simply printed on SpaceX letterhead? If Musk says a person has "shares" who at spacex is in a position to disagree?
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- tcp_handshaker 4mo agoI would consider editing this while HN still allows it :-)) Or otherwise it may remain here for ever...until the black holes evaporate, as calibration point for the difference between confidence and comprehension...
- SanjayMehta 4mo agoNothing will happen to anyone. Biden preemptively pardoned his cronies, and so will Trump.
- bediger4000 4mo agoThis is an argument against pardons, except that Trump has used instruments of state power against his perceived enemies (Comey James, Schiff, military occupation of Tim Walz state, etc etc).
- Levitz 4mo agoI meant to look for an example of Musk losing a lawsuit and I accidentally came upon another two. Here and elsewhere you are just running propaganda, knowingly or not.
- tcp_handshaker 4mo ago[flagged]
- tcp_handshaker 4mo ago
- kklisura 4mo ago[flagged]
- SanjayMehta 4mo agoNo one is forcing you to use either.
- MSFT_Edging 4mo agoTechnically yes, practically, good luck.
- joquarky 4mo agoYou can act, but the only winner will be the lawyers.
- vitally3643 4mo agoNo, in very real terms you cannot hold an American corporation responsible for anything any more than you could a Chinese or Russian one. Individual citizens simply do not have the means, and the consequences for trying are life-alteringly severe. In fact the situation is even worse. If you tried to sue a Chinese company as an American citizen, you'd be laughed at and nothing more. If you tried to sue an American corporation, they have the option to either counter-sue, or drag things out so long that the legal fees bankrupt you, or win the case with their armies of lawyers and demand compensation from you that bankrupts you. A private American citizen simply cannot hold an American corporation responsible. Our legal system is designed to ensure this.
- tapland 4mo agoThis has nothing to do with the discussion. Do you have a HN poster bot just acting like an annoyed teenager with gripes about everything? 20 day old new account, what happened to the previous ones?
- subscribed 4mo agoYou can't really act against neither, as the case of Meta "stealing" books, torrenting on the truly industrial scale, sharing books while torrenting, etc, etc, was ultimately deemed okay. In the se country where downloading an album can get a person in debt or worse.
- enraged_camel 4mo agoWe as Americans at least have some amount of influence over American corporations, and enforcement mechanisms for those breaking the rules.
- tcp_handshaker 4mo ago[flagged]
- groundzeros2015 4mo agoI suspect the recent space X S&P decision had something to do with public perception.
- Dylan16807 4mo agoThe decision was to do nothing, though. That's not much precedent for going out and punishing lawbreakers.
- somenameforme 4mo agoI think the odds of that are low. It's not like decision maker(s) are watching social media and going with the vibes, but it's almost certain that there's a rich conversation going on behind the scenes in opaque channels, especially with regards to the AI-only companies. And those conversations are likely what drove their decision.
- groundzeros2015 4mo ago> It's not like decision maker(s) are watching social media and going with the vibes, What do you mean? They are all on twitter! It’s the most engaging activity for billionaires
- somenameforme 4mo agoLol, fair point! But I'd argue two things. The first is that few to none of them are changing their opinions due to the proles. The second is that public vs private opinions often differ, sometimes extremely, especially with influential people. For an example there I think it's fairly certain that some chunk of the people pushing AI believe it's a bubble, and are motivated solely by trying to squeeze the boom window for all they can personally extract. And so their public positions on things, and their private ones may different radically - especially in domains where they stand to win/lose as a result of those issues.
- woadwarrior01 4mo agoOur thieves are better than their thieves. :)
- scotty79 4mo ago"China bad!" is a moral statement. Whetever the reasons might have been that it was formed.
- blfr 4mo agoChina is bad and there's a moral argument there. But the reason you want to be careful with sending IP to China is quite pragmatic: they're willing and able to use it while competing with you. Is Alibaba interested in copying your TUI RSS reader though? Probably not.
- bix6 4mo agoAnd US companies aren’t going to compete against you?
- HarHarVeryFunny 4mo agoMany of the Chinese models are open weights, so if you are concerned about them "phoning home", then anyone can just self-host and run them themself, or use via a US provider such as OpenRouter.
- falcor84 4mo agoThere's a higher-order concern here that I'm paranoid enough to voice: that if used as a coding agent, an AI model affiliated with a country's government might try to make my software susceptible to attacks by that government's intelligence forces. And note that I'm not singling out China here.
- stevehawk 4mo agoso use the cheap model to do the work and the expensive domestic model to audit?
- SpicyLemonZest 4mo agoOr I can just use the domestic model, accepting that I'm paying some premium in order to reduce the complexity of my dependencies and the amount of time I have to spend thinking about supply chain risk. It's the same reason I don't buy things from Alibaba even though many things I buy from Amazon are surely available there for less.
- throw1234567891 4mo agoYou use “use the model” as if it was equal to “paid some guys to run inference on their hardware”.
- add-sub-mul-div 4mo agoGiving up our agency to AI has the potential to turn us into NPCs, period. Economically, politically, socially. They've invented a vehicle for inserting any idea they want into our consumption and output.
- mannanj 4mo agoI don't want to send my data to known IP thieves, state actors, and competitors in USA either. This to me seems very rational. It's not tribalistic or binary ,choose USA Or Choose China. We can choose neither. Choose neither abuse.
- FeteCommuniste 4mo agoThey've been singing the same old song since the Cold War, "either support everything the US does or you're a commie/terrorist." Yawn.
- SanjayMehta 4mo ago“No country can match the output of moral judgments that spew out from the editorial pages of the New York Times and Washington Post and from the reports of the greatest think tanks and universities in the world.” — Kishore Mahubani
- mannanj 4mo ago[dead]
- Der_Einzige 4mo agoThe Chinese models can and should be run locally (though the price difference vs western models isn't as good when done this way). Before the age of AI Agent Harnesses/unbounded tool calling, there was literally ZERO risk of a .safetensors file "hacking" you. You could even air-gap and run a ton of security analysis/HIDS on your server running the model to verify this. Now, because a microscopic risk of some chinese AI having a "trigger" to act badly in a harness when it detects its being used by some Gweilo in the USA, even locally run Chinese models are DOA for most USA based companies.
- obsidianbases1 4mo agoI'm not any less concerned about the US companies. A Chinese company seems more likely to produce Chinese products that don't directly compete in the US market. While a US company can ship the product as a feature of their platform and undercut on price while making up the revenue elsewhere Edit: I personally use US models, but I'm not naive enough to think that's any sort of real protection of IP
- analognoise 4mo agoThese are the same people that sent manufacturing jobs away to be copied elsewhere. They got rewarded for it in the market. Decades later, when it was clearly a problem, they got tax breaks to bring some of it back/distribute the work to other, friendlier countries. Every public AI that is not full of classified material will end up being hosted where the energy cost*compute efficiency product is lowest, thievery or not. With Chinese GPUs just a step behind (but subsidized), China putting in 8x more solar than we do in 1 year, and Chinese models just a step behind but free? All public AI will be hosted there, theft or not. If it becomes a problem, then we’ll subsidize the rich to bring it on-shore, but only to those companies who our leaders invest in already - to maximize grift and corruption.
- qarl 4mo agoThe real advantage of the Chinese models is that they do not phone home at all. They run locally unlike their US competitors. So odd that your erroneous criticism is at the top of HN. EDIT: I'd love to hear my downvoters' objections. Is it possible that the mechanism that is promoting erroneous information is also demoting its correction?
- kube-system 4mo agoI suspect you’re being downvoted because you’re conflating nationality with hosting model. There are hosted and self-hosted Chinese models. There are hosted and self-hosted US models. DeepSeek’s hosted offering processes your data in mainland China and trains on it. It’s in their privacy policy
- qarl 4mo agoWell - yes - we're on the internet. You always have a choice to run your software in foreign countries. But it's still erroneous to claim that it isn't a choice.
- kube-system 4mo agoThe most popular frontier models are not open weight.
- qarl 4mo agoThe model we're discussing (Deepseek) is open weight.
- kube-system 4mo agoPerhaps your prior comment would’ve been better received if it said that specifically instead of “Chinese models”. But also, the latest DeepSeek is 1.6T parameters. “Choosing” to run this locally is a choice that comes with a seven digit price tag, and is a sunk cost that will probably not run any other frontier model anytime soon. Most organizations are not looking to spend millions of dollars trying to find a workaround to specifically run DeepSeek. Most enterprise consumption in this space is still very experimental and a pay as you go model is much more palatable. Most are simply just looking for three checkboxes: is it close to frontier performance, is it compliant with my organizations requirements, and is it a good price? DeepSeek can only do two of the three at the same time.
- Matl 4mo ago> known IP thieves Such as Antropic and OpenAI you mean?
- anematode 4mo agoNoooo, the real thieves are the Chinese AI companies which used Anthropic/OpenAI model output as training data. American AI companies can do no wrong. /s
- joe_mamba 4mo ago>Most American companies (regulated ones, definitely) can't dare to touch any Chinese models, though they knew that it makes perfect economic sense. Weird, considering they had no issues shipping manufacturing and supply chains to China when that made economic sense.
- blfr 4mo agoYes, there was a whole idea about civilizing and pacifying the world through economic cooperation that would foster middle class in countries across the world that would then in turn make them democratize and become peaceful trade partners. It didn't quite work out so now people are looking for other strategies.
- joe_mamba 4mo ago>then in turn make them democratize Most non western countries lack the foundations of western democracy, and you can't force that onto them neither peacefully not through war. The west has tried and failed for 40+ years to do this, it doesn't work, time to drop it and let them self govern the way they always have. Stop trying to export our version of democracy onto others. Plus, the main reason they exported manufacturing to China was precisely so capitalists could avoid the issues democracy gave them back home and easily exploit Chinese labor and environment for profit because just bribing the CCP meant all your problems go away, no unions, no employee rights, no environmentalism etc. like in democratic countries. So given that, why would the west want China or other countries they want to exploit, to be more democratic? Unless their version of democratic just means a puppet government under western(US) control. >become peaceful trade partners. Which countries did China bomb VS how many the US bombed? My energy prices (and directly inflation) is now higher because of (yet again) US military intervention, not because of China.
- zozbot234 4mo ago> Most non western countries lack the foundations of western democracy, and you can't force that onto them Several East Asian countries managed to democratize successfully up thru the 1980s and are extremely successful today, so this is not just a uniform failure story. Even mainland China might still come around (at least partially) as it gains a true massive middle class by Western standards, which it's still very far from today. Southeast Asia is also doing comparatively quite well.
- mynameismon 4mo agoWhy not Chinese models hosted on American hardware?
- Der_Einzige 4mo agoThe reality is that they're a hell of a lot less cheap on American hardware than on Chinese hardware. At the point you are running Chinese models on US hardware, "Why not nano or haiku" becomes the next relevant question.
- computerex 4mo agoNot true. Togetherai, deepinfra, fireworks AI offer a wide range of models like gpt oss that are very capable and far cheaper than the models from big 3.
- cactusplant7374 4mo agoAre they better? Are they better than GPT5.5?
- computerex 4mo agoThat depends on the use case. For a lot of business use cases they are good enough. They are certainly better than older models like gpt-4o.
- Der_Einzige 4mo agoI'm referring to Chinese open source models hosted on American clouds vs Chinese clouds. You're talking about an old and non-agentic capable American produced model.
- computerex 4mo agoYou are actually referring to open weight models, not open source. Gpt-OSS is an example of an open weight model. It’s highly capable in agentic settings, people use it for coding all the time. My greater point remains. Models like the qwen variants, minimax, k2.5, glm models are available by American providers like AWS at a much cheaper price than api offerings from the big three LLM providers. Your point about Chinese models being cheap only on Chinese hardware makes absolutely zero sense. You can check out the model catalog like together ai’s qwen 3.5 9b offering. It’s 25 cents for 1M tokens vs the ridiculous $5/1M tokens for haiku.
- tcp_handshaker 4mo agoYou have the models available on Bedrock. What is the problem? It stays within your AWS account.
- worldthruword 4mo agoAnd the reasons are same. Chinese cars can't be sold in US (EU is planning a similar law to ban Chinese goods).
- mavhc 4mo agoWhen will we see an open source car?
- moron4hire 4mo agoThe same year Linux wins the desktop market.
- newaccountman2 4mo agoI think unless one is operating in a highly regulated industry, wanting to avoid "sending data to China" is a bit paranoid. For code specifically, most of it is not interesting anyways.
- lopsotronic 4mo agoEven with open weights, there's a legit reason to be careful when making stuff for defense. Let's say I am making sensor software, and I say, huh, let's bring in a tiny little vision model for my EO sensor - then it can identify "boat shapes" even if it doesn't have a database of all boats. Pretty neat, right? Well, the point could be made, that the weights might be hiding behavior that will make my vision model . . not see specific boats very well. "Landing craft? I see no landing craft." Some decent testing would expose this in a couple shakes, but, well, now you know how much software testing happens in Defense, especially in the unmanned world. Not a whole bunch.