| > While I agree this report is BS and xenophobic Examples please? Can you please share where you see BS and/or xenophobia in the original report? Or are you basing your take only on Hartford's analysis? But not even Hartford make any claims of "BS" or xenophobia. It is common throughout history for a nation-state to worry about military and economic competitiveness. Doing so isn't necessarily isn't necessarily xenophobic. Here is how I think of xenophobia, as quoted from Claude (which to be honest, explains it better than Wikipedia or Brittanica, in my opinion): "Xenophobia is fundamentally about irrational fear or hatred of people based on their foreign origin or ethnicity. It targets people and operates through stereotypes, dehumanization, and often cultural or racial prejudice." According to this definition, there is zero xenophobia in the NIST report. (If you disagree, point to an example and show me.) The NIST report, of course, implicitly promotes ideals of western democratic rule over communist values -- but to be clear, this isn't xenophobia at work. What definition of xenophobia are you using? We don't have to use the same exact definition, but you should at least explain yours if you want people to track. |
Here’s an example of irrational fear: “the expanding use of these models may pose a risk to application developers, consumers, and to US national security.” There’s no support for that claim in the report, just vague handwaving at the fact that a freely available open source model doesn’t compare well on all dimensions to the most expensive frontier models.
The OP does a good job of explaining why the fear here is irrational.
But for the audience this is apparently intended to convince, no support is needed for this fear, because it comes from China.
The current president has a long history of publicly stated xenophobia about China, which led to harassment, discrimination, and even attacks on Chinese people partly as a result of his framing of COVID-19 as “the China virus”.
A report like this is just part of that propaganda campaign of designating enemies everywhere, even in American cities.
> The NIST report, of course, implicitly promotes ideals of western democratic rule over communist values
If only that were true. But nothing the current US administration is doing in fact achieves that, or even attempts to do so, and this report is no exception.
The absolutely most charitable thing that could be said about this report is that it’s a weak attempt at smearing non-US competition. There’s no serious analysis of the merits. The only reason to read this report is to laugh at how blatantly incompetent or misguided the entire chain of command that led to it is.