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If Chinese LLMs are successfully making people in the west defend China, then I think we have all the evidence we need to explain why they are giving away their
by WarmWash 5mo ago
If Chinese LLMs are successfully making people in the west defend China, then I think we have all the evidence we need to explain why they are giving away their models.
The next step of course will be to get people using that ungodly cheap AI on Chinese servers. Which will also be defended because "I would never trust an American Lab".
- miroljub 5mo agoAs a European, I trust Chinese AI providers more than American. Cloud act did it for me.
- vzcx 5mo agoAs an American, I trust Chinese AI providers more than American.
- WarmWash 5mo agoThe chinese providers are just the CCP. They don't even need a cloud act...
- DANmode 5mo agoInterested in the reply to this.
- dryarzeg 5mo agoI think too many people are conflating Chinese providers with Chinese models - you can easily have Chinese models safely (well, relatively safely, I guess) hosted on US or EU infrastructure.
- crims0n 5mo agoCase in point, Microsoft just announced it is toying with the idea of using DeepSeek as a cheaper model tier in CoPilot. They are hosting the model themselves.
- Swinx43 5mo agoExactly this. For some reason this is constantly being overlooked/confused. It is very possible to deploy these models inside your own VPC on the big cloud providers and have it be completely secure. I would argue that is even more secure than trusting a model provider’s native API as your traffic is not staying inside your own controlled cloud environment.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- jay_kyburz 5mo agoI was reading the threads about local AI closely yesterday. Some people seem happy with it. If I had the cash, I'd spend 6-10k on a strix halo with 128 GB and run it local with no internet connection. I think the Framework desktop is sold out but there were others seem to be still available.
- tranceylc 5mo agoCanadian, and I also agree. It’s hard to avoid but I try not to use any American service or data storage.
- 14u2c 5mo agoAnd that's fine of course, but it's worth noting that you're making a decision driven by emotion rather than data.
- Barrin92 5mo agoHow so, with the Snowden leaks we learned the extent of American digital espionage in Europe, the US government puts pressure on Europe to prevent taxation or regulation of American business and even European citizens have become the subject of mistreatment in American airports based on their digital profiles. We can enter China visa free. Given that you're big on data and don't like emotions, what have the Chinese materially done to us Europeans we ought to care about?
- WarmWash 5mo agoSelling Russia weapons to help kill Ukrainians, buying Russian oil/gas to help kill Ukrainians. But free AI models or something, right?
- villish 5mo agoBoth China and the US can compel businesses to hand over data. There is no reason to trust any service that doesn't have strong built in privacy.
- Vasbarlog 5mo agoIt’s not China that is threatening to annex Greenland though.
- guywithahat 5mo agoThere's nothing wrong with the US buying greenland, which has been done for territories around the world? The US has a long history of protecting individual freedoms, China does not. There's an irony that you're aware of the misgivings of the US because we have free speech protections. You're probably less aware of the misgivings of the EU because they regularly arrest citizens for speech, and no awareness of the issues with China because they'll just disappear journalists in the night.
- kachnuv_ocasek 5mo agoHow long has the history of the US protecting the individual freedoms of non-white or non-rich citizens been?
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- skippyboxedhero 5mo agoSince the late 60s there has been explicit federal legislation. I assume you meant this as a rhetorical question but there is a definite answer because the US is a transparent system. Law is passed, the courts enforce. The fact that you are unable to answer this question about China where it is often unclear why certain people are being targeted should demonstrate how big the gap is. For example, when Xi's first corruption crackdown happened, it turned out that it was being orchestrated in part by someone in their 90s who had left front-line politics twenty years ago (and much of why that happened is unclear, we are only just learning about things that happened in Chinese politics multiple decades ago so it will be a while before we know...we do know that Xi was then able to make unilateral sweeping changes to his own role shortly after that broke every convention of the last 5 decades)...it is difficult to compare this to anything that happens in any other political system. In China, you find out someone has been executed for reasons that are obviously not explicit months after it has happened. It is genuinely quite difficult to compare to anything else. 6 people meet in a room, they have almost all the power, and maybe you will read about what they might have said 4 decades later in a book...that will never be published in China.
- c03 5mo agoSame
- uberex 5mo agoI trust them as a cloud less than US but don't completely trust US.
- inigyou 5mo agoChina has something equivalent but as usual, it's harder for their spying to affect you. For now.
- deer6 5mo agoI spoke with a high up fella in a uk firm - same thing - trusting china more. Couldn’t believe it when he said. Americans you wanted isolation - you’re gonna get it eventually!
- beepbooptheory 5mo agoI understand it's supposed to be obvious to all of us, but maybe just for fun, can you follow through? What is the next step in the nefarious plan?
- WarmWash 5mo ago[flagged]
- riskd 5mo ago[flagged]
- stackbutterflow 5mo agoThe present US administration and its backers don't want diversity, democracy and non-whites. Where does that leave non-Chinese and non-US citizens ?
- WarmWash 5mo agoWaiting until the next election, mid-terms are in a few months.
- mft_ 5mo agoIn your take, why are they producing and giving away such good local models? Mindshare? Promotion?
- cwel 5mo agoNot who you are replying to, nor do I agree with their take (no sign of irony, complete lack of self awareness, and just blatantly xenophobic. not suprised by it either). but they did already address this: > it's called soft power, look at endless glazing, it works
- WarmWash 5mo agoSoft power primarily (see my original comment),and less data for western labs to train on, less money for western labs to have. The state can use their AI as a tool to bolster their standing, which is working well. Chinese AI labs don't have to worry about making money or affording more compute. The state will (and does) give them whatever they need.
- Helloworldboy 5mo ago[dead]
- varispeed 5mo agoFunny that Europe starts to become China, just without the manufacturing and growth. I can see why people like them.
- FuckButtons 5mo agoIt’s not like this is a new tactic, china has been very successful at wiping out competition by undercutting them using state subsidies in many sectors of the economy.
- betaby 5mo ago> wiping out competition by undercutting them using state subsidies The same tactic is in the USA. Like every new AI datacenter has ~10 tax waiver + explicit subsidies + favorable loans, etc, etc.
- kachnuv_ocasek 5mo agoNot even mentioning the many instances where US corporate interests were defended and advanced by US military force abroad.
- lbreakjai 5mo agoAs always, the US has a government removing red tape to foster innovation, while China has a regime, unfairly picking winners, to hurt and subvert the West.
- kachnuv_ocasek 5mo agoPlease read up on what's really going on inside China when it comes to industrial policy and innovation. Barry Naughton has a nice series of books and papers that might disperse some of your incorrect preconceptions.
- mswphd 5mo agothis is not an accurate picture of Chinese industrial policy. In fact, you could argue they have the opposite problem. Their industrial policy encourages too many companies to enter a space, where the resulting competition kills off profit margins for whichever companies end up surviving until the end. This is exactly what we end up seeing with extremely cheap Chinese goods. If china anointed one company per sector, they would have no reason to be so cost competitive globally. There would be no structural cause for Chinese products to outcompete the rest of the world. You can see some of this in the US, where these kinds of anointed companies exist (say e.g. Boeing/other defense contractors, at least post the 90's). They are (famously) not particularly cost competitive. This is also exactly what you'd expect economically.
- PunchyHamster 5mo agoI feel like it's less "defend china" but more "don't wanna have US have monopoly on it"
- impalallama 5mo agoThe smallest violin in the world for Sam Altman, and Musk
- lelanthran 5mo ago> If Chinese LLMs are successfully making people in the west defend China, then I think we have all the evidence we need to explain why they are giving away their models. Right, and if "The West" wants people to defend them, they better get in on the free action too. In fact, they have no choice - tokens are soon going to be a commodity, if they aren't already. Most everyone is going to be happy paying 1/20th of the cost for 80% of the value. Oh, yeah, before I forget, hear the worlds smallest violin, playing for those token suppliers in "The West" whose repeatedly stated goal is to replace human knowledge workers...
- bashtoni 5mo agoI think the next step is for China to start selling Huawei (and other) GPUs around the world, because everyone appreciates the risk of giving either of the two superpowers their data. The US is no longer in a position to pressure other countries to bad imports from Chinese companies. This is the beginning end of the hyperscaler era, not a shift from US hyperscalers to Chinese hyperscalers. Taking Nvidia's extremely lucrative market is the goal.
- kyboren 5mo agoSoftware ecosystem aside, their hardware is inferior to NVDA/TSMC's and will remain so. And even if it wasn't, China just doesn't have the fab capacity to both meet domestic demand and export enough to hurt demand for NVDA.
- bashtoni 5mo agoThey're behind, but they're catching up pretty quickly. I wouldn't bet against Chinese companies dominating this market in the medium to long term. Nvidia could easily end up being the Tesla vs Huawei as BYD.
- gypsy_boots 5mo agoIt's funny how you can look at obscenely overvalued Western AI companies, with capex's that are unsustainable, and along comes a system which pokes a gaping hole in this model, and the response is "Ya, but what do those sneaky Chinese have up their sleeve here?!" Perhaps the question should instead be "Why are these Western AI companies getting insane valuations on dubious ROI, and how can these Chinese models run on a fraction of the infrastructure?"
- thinkingtoilet 5mo ago>"Ya, but what do those sneaky Chinese have up their sleeve here?!" I feel like that is way over simplified. I do not trust the American government. I do not trust the Chinese government. As an American, I believe the Chinese government has a longer and broader history of stealing intellectual property and far less checks and balances than the American government. The current American administration will be gone soon and maybe we can get some sanity back at some point. Overall, I trust my data in America more than China and I think that's reasonable. I am not naive. I'm aware of all the problems with my country and am quite vocal about it. In fact, I think it would be naive to think that the Chinese government won't have complete access to everything that goes through a Chinese server. We are in full agreement on your second point.
- tired-turtle 5mo ago> a longer and broader history From what perspective? The American colonies repeatedly and flagrantly ignored foreign property and intellectual rights, e.g. via laws to protect domestic but not foreign authors. Samuel Slater was called Slater the Traitor in Britain for a reason.
- inigyou 5mo agostealing intellectual property == producing higher quality goods for cheaper, because the IP owners are not paid for it
- winwang 5mo agoNot saying you're doing this specifically, but I'd be careful with thinking that "company" in China means the same as "company" in America (or in the West more generally).
- ge96 5mo agoIf they had encrypted LLM compute then in theory wouldn't matter who/what is running it
- inigyou 5mo agoWell they don't, and nobody has any idea how to build that, so why even mention it
- ge96 5mo agoIt is being worked on this is just a random paper I pulled but yeah https://arxiv.org/html/2502.01013v1 https://arxiv.org/html/2502.01013v1 few of em actually https://openreview.net/forum?id=PGNff6H1TV https://openreview.net/forum?id=PGNff6H1TV
- inigyou 5mo agofully homomorphic encryption is a theoretical thing that runs a billion times slower than running the code normally, to make that more clear, it takes a year to run a millisecond's computation.
- petercooper 5mo agoThe next step of course will be to get people using that ungodly cheap AI on Chinese servers. Step one of this was perhaps DeepSeek's incredibly low cache hit pricing ($0.0036/M) which no-one else seems to be able to match.
- AnonymousPlanet 5mo ago> get people using that ungodly cheap AI on Chinese servers. These open weights models are also hosted outside of the US and China. That's a very important difference.
- sp527 5mo agoFound the late-stage OAI/Anthropic bagholder lmao
- CamperBob2 5mo agoYes, they have been coming out of the woodwork like borer beetles. Not exactly subtle.
- azan_ 5mo agoI'm sorry but USA no longer has any moral superiority over China.
- dana-s 5mo agoTalking with an American trying to sell me on "don`t use deepseek because of moral reasons" really made me much more invested in China.