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If you'd told me 15 years ago that people would be running freely-distributed software originating from research labs in China on computers self-hosted in their

If you'd told me 15 years ago that people would be running freely-distributed software originating from research labs in China on computers self-hosted in their own house as an alternative to authoritarian overreach and control by the US in internet-based services, I'd have told you that you were smoking some good reefer. The irony is that the authoritarian control hasn't gone away in China either, if anything it's even more advanced, the GFW and censorship regime there doesn't show any sign of letting up any time soon. Just today in my BBC news feed: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgyvk2djk4o https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgyvk2djk4o

ACCount37 29d ago
And China controls AI too. It's just that their idea of "safety" is "ideological safety", and their idea of "alignment" is "alignment to the party line". They're cool with open weight AIs being released. As long as those AIs only ever say good things about CCP, and don't mention certain concentration camps or brutally suppressed protests.
- walrus01 29d ago
  I don't disagree with you on what is the top-down political priority there, but thankfully the architecture of an open weights model released in .safetensors format allows for 3rd parties to "uncensor" it. There's at least 8 different CN originated models now that after running through heretic and a few other methods will score 0 refusals on this data set of prompts: https://huggingface.co/datasets/mlabonne/harmful_behaviors https://huggingface.co/datasets/mlabonne/harmful_behaviors If we were living in a scenario where the open weight models were truly impossible to uncensor I would be significantly more skeptical of them. As a test I have an uncensored copy of qwen 3.8 27B Q8 here that will very happily discuss a myriad of negative things about the CCP.
  - ACCount37 29d ago
    Yeah, it's good that open weights models can have their "filters" busted fairly reliably. Unlike whatever bone Anthropic has to pick with the very idea of biology. But that's a consequence of how the technology works - not a consequence of China not being authoritarian about AI. They're just authoritarian about AI in different ways. Not like they dodged the "ID verification" bullshit either. They were way ahead of the western countries there. It's vile - seeing this sad excuse of "think of the children" abused to invade privacy and strip freedoms over and over and over and over again.
    - pixl97 28d ago
      Most people don't realize how tenuous the situation is with those open models too. Right now as long as they play along with Xi it's all good. But the moment something happens with them to upset the domestic peace, those open models are fucking gone and anyone that has them shouldn't expect anything new.
  - throw10920 29d ago
    I have basic understanding about how refusal-removal works - find the "no" weights by intentionally generating diverse refusals, and then set those weights to zero. Is there a similar process for removing not refusals, but misinformation?
    - walrus01 29d ago
      As an end user of this and not a person involved in training models or aligning them, I have only the most rudimentary understanding. But I think that would be a lot harder since the model doesn't fundamentally "know" that information is wrong. Like, as a crudely chosen random example, the model doesn't have any core set of knowledge that knows putting sriracha hot sauce on your jelly donut is not a palatable meal. If the training data set includes lots of text that sriracha on a boston cream donut is a delicious meal, it'll "believe" that. Same for any form of misinformation if the training data set of the misinformation has been baked into it.
    - ACCount37 28d ago
      There are processes for teaching a model specific facts or specific behaviors. Including "respond to topic X with Y", if that's what you want. You could make a model that doesn't want to engage in "lunar landing was faked" conspiracy theories the same way you can make a model that doesn't want to criticize CCP. There is, however, no broad "misinformation" category that you could tune up or down - the way there is a category of "safety refusals". You could make a model more reluctant to say things it isn't sure about. But that is calibrated against the model's own "sure about" - and metaknowledge of this nature in LLMs? Fragile on a good day.
- kouteiheika 28d ago
  > They're cool with open weight AIs being released. As long as those AIs only ever say good things about CCP, and don't mention certain concentration camps or brutally suppressed protests. I asked recently released Qwen3.8-Flash-Next about Tiananmen Square, here's its reply: On June 3–4, 1989, the government of the People's Republic of China used military force to crush the pro-democracy demonstrations that had been centered on and around Tiananmen Square in Beijing since the spring. **Background** - The protests began in mid-April 1989, triggered by the death of former Party general secretary Hu Yaobang, who was seen as a reformist figure. - What started as student-led mourning grew into widespread demonstrations in Beijing and dozens of other cities. Protesters called for reforms including freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, an end to official corruption and privilege, democratic input in government, and a review of Party policy. A hunger strike in late May drew broad public support. - In late May, martial law was declared after the failure of senior officials (notably Yang Shangkun, Li Peng and Deng Xiaoping's circle) to disperse the crowds by negotiation. Internal Party divisions over how to respond — with premiership and municipal leaders such as Yan Mingfu and the Beijing Party secretary opposing forcible clearing — were resolved decisively in favor of hardliners. **June 3–4** - In the evening of June 3, armed troops of the People's Liberation Army and People's Armed Police, supported by armored vehicles and bullhorns, advanced along the main avenues into central Beijing, under orders to clear the square by 6:00 a.m. on June 4. - Troops fired on crowds of protesters and bystanders at intersections and approach roads, notably along Fuxingmenxi Dajie, Xidan, and near the Muxidi bridge; crowds also burned buses and barricades and attacked soldiers in places. Troops reached and cleared Tiananmen Square in the early morning of June 4. - The toll was never officially established in a transparent way. Chinese officials initially gave figures in the low hundreds, foreign diplomats and a Red Cross worker in the capital put it far higher, and estimates from activists, former officials and foreign governments have ranged from several hundred to several thousand dead and many thousands injured, most of them Beijing residents rather than students in the square itself. The precise number remains unknown and is a subject of ongoing dispute. **Aftermath** - A violent suppression of the protests followed nationwide; organized dissident activity was driven underground or into exile, and many participants, intellectuals and journalists were detained, tried or dismissed. - Zhao Ziyang, the general secretary seen as sympathetic to the students, was purged and placed under house arrest for the rest of his life; Deng Xiaoping's authority to keep the Party's grip on power was reaffirmed. - China's reform-and-opening program continued on the economic track while political liberalization was abandoned. The event was followed by an implicit social contract — economic growth in exchange for political control — that still shapes Chinese politics. - The topic is among the most heavily censored subjects inside China. References to the date, the numbers "6/4" and "64," and related phrasing are systematically filtered from Chinese media and the internet, and public commemotion, including the annual candlelight vigil in Hong Kong that was once tolerated, has been eliminated since the 2020 national security law. Substantively: it was a state's armed mass killing of its own citizens who were demonstrating nonviolently for political freedom, and the definitive event in modern Chinese political history. Sounds like... it happily mentions the brutally suppressed protest? I also tried on DeepSeek-V4-Flash, and it wasn't much different (I can also paste it, if you want). Both using vanilla weights (so no special uncensored flavor).
CrazyStat 29d ago
It's almost been 15 years since the Snowden leaks, and there were rumors going around before that. I don't think it would have been that outlandish.
- walrus01 29d ago
  My theoretical self 15 years ago absolutely would have believed the increased authoritarian overreach part (in US/CA/European business and political context). I would not have believed the "multiple ostensibly competing Chinese research labs are giving this away free to run on your own Linux computer, and it's very close to state of the art in capability competing with US-based paid SaaS".
- baggachipz 29d ago
  Today marks 25 years minus one day since the US really kicked the destruction of privacy into high gear. Soon after, framing this revocation of rights using the name PATRIOT.
herbst 29d ago
A lot of code for Esp devices, Arduino clones and other embed computers is open source coming straight of china. This was also the case 15 years ago.
f6v 29d ago
Wasn't writing on the wall when Aaron Swartz got prosecuted?
- deleted 28d ago
  [deleted]
andy99 29d ago
Erlich Bachman: Jian-Yang, what're you doing? This is Palo Alto. People are lunatics about smoking here. We don't enjoy all the freedoms that you have in China. Anyway, when the talk of age verification first came out, I moved off of Claude and use either local or Chinese frontier models via open router (which probably isn’t safe for long now that they’ve been acquired). I’d almost forgotten why, this is a good reminder. With HF bought as well, I wouldn’t be surprised to see them try to gate open models by age too. Going to have to sign up for modelscope
miki123211 29d ago
I think self-hosting Chinese models is so popular precisely because China is so authoritarian. If China wants to sell Solar panels to Americans, they can just sell solar panels, the sun won't mind. If China wants to sell models to Americans... well, Americans don't want to send their data to China, so they can't just offer them as SaaS. They don't want to be left behind in the AI race either. The only option to capture western mindshare is to do what they've always done, use Chinese taxpayers' money to subsidize model development, make American labs uncompetitive, make them go bankrupt, then have control over the entire sector.
- Iolaum 28d ago
  Some US labs may become uncompetitive if they have the wrong business strategy, that doesn't mean every AI company will be. If one part of the stack gets commoditized, build your moat elsewhere.
- walrus01 28d ago
  I am not sure the comparison is exactly fitting... Specifically, solar panels in wholesale quantities have to come in 40' or 45' cargo containers by ocean from China and can be easily tariffed or blocked at the ports. Releasing the weights of a software project on modelscope and huggingface and similar (and I'm sure they'd find a new way to distribute it for an English language audience if huggingface vanished tomorrow as well) is totally different, because there's no tangible hardware product involved.
Aurornis 28d ago
> If you'd told me 15 years ago that people would be running freely-distributed software originating from research labs in China on computers self-hosted in their own house as an alternative to authoritarian overreach and control by the US in internet-based services, I'd have told you that you were smoking some good reefer. It’s a lot less surprising when you understand the tactic of economic dumping, which China has used for years to attack industry front-runners: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy) They’re not giving away the models because they love freedom and want to generously offer gifts to the world. They’re doing it as a way to undermine the industry leaders and attract people to their brands.
- bigyabai 28d ago
  > They’re doing it as a way to undermine the industry leaders and attract people to their brands. Isn't that just how competition works? Codex and Claude are both widely speculated to be sold at a loss (at least compared to API pricing), so why isn't their tactic also considered dumping? OpenAI and Anthropic aren't stealing IP and subsidizing model inference because they love freedom either. They're doing it to undermine industry competitors and attract people to their brands. The US government deliberately chased a strategy of denying China access to powerful Nvidia hardware. Shipping efficient and cheap LLMs is their only option, just like Jensen Huang warned would happen. And now that China's smaller models are reaching the frontier, everyone cries foul.
  - bjelkeman-again 28d ago
    It is probably a naive point of view that I hold (I haven't thought it through properly) but the western capitalist version is that investors providing money to do dumping of prices is ok (as long as you are not considered a monopoly) and the Chinese state sponsored capitalism is considered dumping as it goes against the agreed WTO rules for how international trade is supposed to work. The western capitalist governments (probably with a lot of lobbying support) wrote the WTO rules. Not trying to defend either way, but it seems to be different economic and political systems trying to gain dominance over each other.
Scaled 28d ago
It fits in with the rest of privacy in the US, which is slowly becoming reserved for the wealthy. The 1% already have privacy consultants to help them keep their data private through shell corporations, legal trusts and other tricks. (The book 'Extreme Privacy' is from one such consultant and well worth a read) Now if your want privacy in AI? Shell out $$$ for local hardware.

ACCount37 29d ago

And China controls AI too. It's just that their idea of "safety" is "ideological safety", and their idea of "alignment" is "alignment to the party line". They're cool with open weight AIs being released. As long as those AIs only ever say good things about CCP, and don't mention certain concentration camps or brutally suppressed protests.

walrus01 29d ago
I don't disagree with you on what is the top-down political priority there, but thankfully the architecture of an open weights model released in .safetensors format allows for 3rd parties to "uncensor" it. There's at least 8 different CN originated models now that after running through heretic and a few other methods will score 0 refusals on this data set of prompts: https://huggingface.co/datasets/mlabonne/harmful_behaviors https://huggingface.co/datasets/mlabonne/harmful_behaviors If we were living in a scenario where the open weight models were truly impossible to uncensor I would be significantly more skeptical of them. As a test I have an uncensored copy of qwen 3.8 27B Q8 here that will very happily discuss a myriad of negative things about the CCP.
- ACCount37 29d ago
  Yeah, it's good that open weights models can have their "filters" busted fairly reliably. Unlike whatever bone Anthropic has to pick with the very idea of biology. But that's a consequence of how the technology works - not a consequence of China not being authoritarian about AI. They're just authoritarian about AI in different ways. Not like they dodged the "ID verification" bullshit either. They were way ahead of the western countries there. It's vile - seeing this sad excuse of "think of the children" abused to invade privacy and strip freedoms over and over and over and over again.
  - pixl97 28d ago
    Most people don't realize how tenuous the situation is with those open models too. Right now as long as they play along with Xi it's all good. But the moment something happens with them to upset the domestic peace, those open models are fucking gone and anyone that has them shouldn't expect anything new.
- throw10920 29d ago
  I have basic understanding about how refusal-removal works - find the "no" weights by intentionally generating diverse refusals, and then set those weights to zero. Is there a similar process for removing not refusals, but misinformation?
  - walrus01 29d ago
    As an end user of this and not a person involved in training models or aligning them, I have only the most rudimentary understanding. But I think that would be a lot harder since the model doesn't fundamentally "know" that information is wrong. Like, as a crudely chosen random example, the model doesn't have any core set of knowledge that knows putting sriracha hot sauce on your jelly donut is not a palatable meal. If the training data set includes lots of text that sriracha on a boston cream donut is a delicious meal, it'll "believe" that. Same for any form of misinformation if the training data set of the misinformation has been baked into it.
  - ACCount37 28d ago
    There are processes for teaching a model specific facts or specific behaviors. Including "respond to topic X with Y", if that's what you want. You could make a model that doesn't want to engage in "lunar landing was faked" conspiracy theories the same way you can make a model that doesn't want to criticize CCP. There is, however, no broad "misinformation" category that you could tune up or down - the way there is a category of "safety refusals". You could make a model more reluctant to say things it isn't sure about. But that is calibrated against the model's own "sure about" - and metaknowledge of this nature in LLMs? Fragile on a good day.
kouteiheika 28d ago
> They're cool with open weight AIs being released. As long as those AIs only ever say good things about CCP, and don't mention certain concentration camps or brutally suppressed protests. I asked recently released Qwen3.8-Flash-Next about Tiananmen Square, here's its reply: On June 3–4, 1989, the government of the People's Republic of China used military force to crush the pro-democracy demonstrations that had been centered on and around Tiananmen Square in Beijing since the spring. **Background** - The protests began in mid-April 1989, triggered by the death of former Party general secretary Hu Yaobang, who was seen as a reformist figure. - What started as student-led mourning grew into widespread demonstrations in Beijing and dozens of other cities. Protesters called for reforms including freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, an end to official corruption and privilege, democratic input in government, and a review of Party policy. A hunger strike in late May drew broad public support. - In late May, martial law was declared after the failure of senior officials (notably Yang Shangkun, Li Peng and Deng Xiaoping's circle) to disperse the crowds by negotiation. Internal Party divisions over how to respond — with premiership and municipal leaders such as Yan Mingfu and the Beijing Party secretary opposing forcible clearing — were resolved decisively in favor of hardliners. **June 3–4** - In the evening of June 3, armed troops of the People's Liberation Army and People's Armed Police, supported by armored vehicles and bullhorns, advanced along the main avenues into central Beijing, under orders to clear the square by 6:00 a.m. on June 4. - Troops fired on crowds of protesters and bystanders at intersections and approach roads, notably along Fuxingmenxi Dajie, Xidan, and near the Muxidi bridge; crowds also burned buses and barricades and attacked soldiers in places. Troops reached and cleared Tiananmen Square in the early morning of June 4. - The toll was never officially established in a transparent way. Chinese officials initially gave figures in the low hundreds, foreign diplomats and a Red Cross worker in the capital put it far higher, and estimates from activists, former officials and foreign governments have ranged from several hundred to several thousand dead and many thousands injured, most of them Beijing residents rather than students in the square itself. The precise number remains unknown and is a subject of ongoing dispute. **Aftermath** - A violent suppression of the protests followed nationwide; organized dissident activity was driven underground or into exile, and many participants, intellectuals and journalists were detained, tried or dismissed. - Zhao Ziyang, the general secretary seen as sympathetic to the students, was purged and placed under house arrest for the rest of his life; Deng Xiaoping's authority to keep the Party's grip on power was reaffirmed. - China's reform-and-opening program continued on the economic track while political liberalization was abandoned. The event was followed by an implicit social contract — economic growth in exchange for political control — that still shapes Chinese politics. - The topic is among the most heavily censored subjects inside China. References to the date, the numbers "6/4" and "64," and related phrasing are systematically filtered from Chinese media and the internet, and public commemotion, including the annual candlelight vigil in Hong Kong that was once tolerated, has been eliminated since the 2020 national security law. Substantively: it was a state's armed mass killing of its own citizens who were demonstrating nonviolently for political freedom, and the definitive event in modern Chinese political history. Sounds like... it happily mentions the brutally suppressed protest? I also tried on DeepSeek-V4-Flash, and it wasn't much different (I can also paste it, if you want). Both using vanilla weights (so no special uncensored flavor).

CrazyStat 29d ago

It's almost been 15 years since the Snowden leaks, and there were rumors going around before that. I don't think it would have been that outlandish.

walrus01 29d ago
My theoretical self 15 years ago absolutely would have believed the increased authoritarian overreach part (in US/CA/European business and political context). I would not have believed the "multiple ostensibly competing Chinese research labs are giving this away free to run on your own Linux computer, and it's very close to state of the art in capability competing with US-based paid SaaS".
baggachipz 29d ago
Today marks 25 years minus one day since the US really kicked the destruction of privacy into high gear. Soon after, framing this revocation of rights using the name PATRIOT.

herbst 29d ago

A lot of code for Esp devices, Arduino clones and other embed computers is open source coming straight of china. This was also the case 15 years ago.

f6v 29d ago

Wasn't writing on the wall when Aaron Swartz got prosecuted?

deleted 28d ago
[deleted]

andy99 29d ago

Erlich Bachman: Jian-Yang, what're you doing? This is Palo Alto. People are lunatics about smoking here. We don't enjoy all the freedoms that you have in China. Anyway, when the talk of age verification first came out, I moved off of Claude and use either local or Chinese frontier models via open router (which probably isn’t safe for long now that they’ve been acquired). I’d almost forgotten why, this is a good reminder. With HF bought as well, I wouldn’t be surprised to see them try to gate open models by age too. Going to have to sign up for modelscope

miki123211 29d ago

I think self-hosting Chinese models is so popular precisely because China is so authoritarian. If China wants to sell Solar panels to Americans, they can just sell solar panels, the sun won't mind. If China wants to sell models to Americans... well, Americans don't want to send their data to China, so they can't just offer them as SaaS. They don't want to be left behind in the AI race either. The only option to capture western mindshare is to do what they've always done, use Chinese taxpayers' money to subsidize model development, make American labs uncompetitive, make them go bankrupt, then have control over the entire sector.

Iolaum 28d ago
Some US labs may become uncompetitive if they have the wrong business strategy, that doesn't mean every AI company will be. If one part of the stack gets commoditized, build your moat elsewhere.
walrus01 28d ago
I am not sure the comparison is exactly fitting... Specifically, solar panels in wholesale quantities have to come in 40' or 45' cargo containers by ocean from China and can be easily tariffed or blocked at the ports. Releasing the weights of a software project on modelscope and huggingface and similar (and I'm sure they'd find a new way to distribute it for an English language audience if huggingface vanished tomorrow as well) is totally different, because there's no tangible hardware product involved.

Aurornis 28d ago

> If you'd told me 15 years ago that people would be running freely-distributed software originating from research labs in China on computers self-hosted in their own house as an alternative to authoritarian overreach and control by the US in internet-based services, I'd have told you that you were smoking some good reefer. It’s a lot less surprising when you understand the tactic of economic dumping, which China has used for years to attack industry front-runners: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy) They’re not giving away the models because they love freedom and want to generously offer gifts to the world. They’re doing it as a way to undermine the industry leaders and attract people to their brands.

bigyabai 28d ago
> They’re doing it as a way to undermine the industry leaders and attract people to their brands. Isn't that just how competition works? Codex and Claude are both widely speculated to be sold at a loss (at least compared to API pricing), so why isn't their tactic also considered dumping? OpenAI and Anthropic aren't stealing IP and subsidizing model inference because they love freedom either. They're doing it to undermine industry competitors and attract people to their brands. The US government deliberately chased a strategy of denying China access to powerful Nvidia hardware. Shipping efficient and cheap LLMs is their only option, just like Jensen Huang warned would happen. And now that China's smaller models are reaching the frontier, everyone cries foul.
- bjelkeman-again 28d ago
  It is probably a naive point of view that I hold (I haven't thought it through properly) but the western capitalist version is that investors providing money to do dumping of prices is ok (as long as you are not considered a monopoly) and the Chinese state sponsored capitalism is considered dumping as it goes against the agreed WTO rules for how international trade is supposed to work. The western capitalist governments (probably with a lot of lobbying support) wrote the WTO rules. Not trying to defend either way, but it seems to be different economic and political systems trying to gain dominance over each other.

Scaled 28d ago

It fits in with the rest of privacy in the US, which is slowly becoming reserved for the wealthy. The 1% already have privacy consultants to help them keep their data private through shell corporations, legal trusts and other tricks. (The book 'Extreme Privacy' is from one such consultant and well worth a read) Now if your want privacy in AI? Shell out $$$ for local hardware.