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by tokioyoyo 575 days ago
Well, the second they'll start overwhelmingly outperforming other open source LLMs, and people start incorporating them into their products, they'll get banned in the states. I'm being cynical, but the whole "dangerous tech with loads of backdoors built into it" excuse will be used to keep it away. Whether there will be some truth to it or not, that's a different question.
3 comments

Qwen models have ideological backdoors already. They rewrite history, deny crimes from the regime, and push the CCP narratives.

Even if their benchmarks are impressive, I refuse to ship any product with it. I'll stick with Llama and Gemma for now.

> Qwen models have ideological backdoors already. They rewrite history, deny crimes from the regime, and push the CCP narratives.

I can't comment on the particular one, but I feel like this will unfortunately apply to most works out of authoritarian regimes. As a researcher/organization living under strict rule that can be oppressive, do you really risk releasing something that would get you into trouble? A model that would critique the government or acknowledge events they'd rather pretend don't exist? Actually, if not for the financial possibilities, working with LLMs in general could open one up to some pretty big risks, if the powers that be don't care about the inherent randomness of the technology.

If you carefully study the so-called regime oppression, you will find that in the end, nothing happened, and there were no large-scale deaths. But it was massively exaggerated by CNN and BBC only because of the appearance of weapons.
Unfortunately, when there’s money to be made, corpos with least morals win over the competition.
This.

I'm 100% certain that Chinese models are not long for this market. Whether or not they are free is irrelevant. I just can't see the US government allowing us access to those technologies long term.

I disagree, that is really only police-able for online services. For local apps, which will eventually include games, assistants and machine symbiosis, I expect a bring your own model approach.
How many people do you think will ever use “bring your own model” approach? Those numbers are so statistically insignificant that nobody will bother when it comes to making money. I’m sure we will hack our way through it, but if it’s not available to general public, those Chinese companies won’t see much market share in the west.
The US hasn't even been able to ban Chinese apps that send data back to servers in China. Unlikely they will ban Chinese LLMs.
Its easy to do.... They dont really want to