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Is "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
by xnx 5mo ago
Is "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 5mo 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 5mo agoYou can legally act against one, not against the other. Not exactly a hard question.
- tcp_handshaker 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo ago[deleted]
- tcp_handshaker 5mo 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 5mo agoNothing will happen to anyone. Biden preemptively pardoned his cronies, and so will Trump.
- bediger4000 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo ago[flagged]
- tcp_handshaker 5mo agoMusk and companies have so far over 950 lawsuits and legal processes for criminal or unethical activity (yes I researched this). Even his data centers and gas turbine deployments are illegal! Lost one lawsuit against the same AI mafia, and if you look at the legal details reason was for filling the claim too late. He publicly called a hero a Pedophile, and got away with it...in court. Now...who do you work for? [1] - "EPA rules that xAI’s natural gas generators were illegally used" - https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/16/epa-rules-that-xais-natura https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/16/epa-rules-that-xais-natura...
- kklisura 5mo ago[flagged]
- SanjayMehta 5mo agoNo one is forcing you to use either.
- MSFT_Edging 5mo agoTechnically yes, practically, good luck.
- joquarky 5mo agoYou can act, but the only winner will be the lawyers.
- vitally3643 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo agoWe as Americans at least have some amount of influence over American corporations, and enforcement mechanisms for those breaking the rules.
- tcp_handshaker 5mo ago[flagged]
- groundzeros2015 5mo agoI suspect the recent space X S&P decision had something to do with public perception.
- Dylan16807 5mo agoThe decision was to do nothing, though. That's not much precedent for going out and punishing lawbreakers.
- somenameforme 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo agoOur thieves are better than their thieves. :)
- scotty79 5mo ago"China bad!" is a moral statement. Whetever the reasons might have been that it was formed.
- blfr 5mo 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 5mo agoAnd US companies aren’t going to compete against you?
- HarHarVeryFunny 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo agoso use the cheap model to do the work and the expensive domestic model to audit?
- SpicyLemonZest 5mo 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 5mo agoYou use “use the model” as if it was equal to “paid some guys to run inference on their hardware”.
- add-sub-mul-div 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo ago[dead]
- Der_Einzige 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo agoThe most popular frontier models are not open weight.
- qarl 5mo agoThe model we're discussing (Deepseek) is open weight.
- kube-system 5mo 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 5mo ago> known IP thieves Such as Antropic and OpenAI you mean?
- anematode 5mo 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