[tekacs]

As they start to release more proprietary models, I so wish that they partnered with one of the major US hyperscalers to allow using these models through something US-domiciled.

Totally understand why it may not be reasonable or in their best interest (and that the US is _absolutely_ not doing the same reflexively). But it would be lovely to be able to try these out on production workloads in earnest.

[embedding-shape]

Unless US hyperscalers do the same in reverse, I hope the status quo stays as it is. Either people are happy to share, and the sharing should happen both ways, or US hyperscalers can keep isolating themselves as they've done so far.

[adjejmxbdjdn]

I do hope The U.S. hyperscalers do the same as well.

In an ideal world U.S. residents would use Chinese AI models and Chinese residents would use U.S. AI models.

Governments in both countries are collecting data for nefarious reasons. But the Chinese government has far less influence on a U.S. resident and vice versa.

We are all better off if our data is collected by a government halfway across the world instead of our own governments which hold incredible amounts of power over us.

[adrianN]

In an ideal world everybody runs open models on hardware they control.

[LeifCarrotson]

I'm running Qwen 3.6 via https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-FP8 and it's pretty great. I'll update to the 3.7 equivalent when that's ready.

It's not nearly worth it to me to get an incremental improvement in performance if it means I have to move to hosted environments with Qwen 3.7 (or Claude or Gemini or whatever).

[giancarlostoro]

It would have been the world we live in if China wasn't involved in so much corporate espionage. I don't even feel comfortable using their open weight models on anything my employer makes, the only time I use Qwen is for greenfield "how good is this?" type of projects, but otherwise, how do I trust that it wont mysteriously hallucinate phoning home?

On the other hand, there's other models where the source is 100% open, the training data is known, and people have reproduced the same model from scratch, so while those trail behind, there's definitely an effort to make models more open and capable.

[deaux]

The US has for decades been engaged in mass dumping of their products to establish monopolies all over the world, and punishing anyone who dares try do anything about it. This isn't better than corporate espionage.

[eloisant]

I agree, but the same goes for the US. Remember Echelon.

[stickfigure]

It's highly improbable that the US government has a secret team inside Anthropic and OpenAI manipulating their training regimen. For better or worse, these companies are filled with ideologues and something that invasive would trigger an army of whistleblowers (despite legal consequences).

[booty]

    It's highly improbable that the US government has a secret team inside Anthropic and OpenAI manipulating their training regimen.

Two thoughts.

One: it would be relatively technically trivial for $GOVERNMENT_AGENCY to just monitor all the prompts + context we send over the wire to OpenAI/Anthropic/etc. That's a goldmine of sensitive personal and corporate data, no secret team needed (although, the LLM providers obviously would need to cooperate)

Two: Rather than secret infiltration teams influencing model training I think what's more likely on the training side of things is simply self-censoring by the LLM providers, so that they don't risk angering the government.

I highly doubt that China has government interlopers, secret or otherwise, inside Qwen's training team. Nonetheless, "sensitive" issues like Tiananmen Square are censored. I would imagine that much/most such censorship in China is self-censorship that doesn't leave a legal/paper trail. That's what we're in danger of seeing (more of) in America IMO.

[throwaw12]

> secret team inside Anthropic and OpenAI manipulating their training regimen

You don't need a secret team to manipulate whats coming from them: https://responsiblestatecraft.org/israel-chatgpt/

[Planktonne]

> these companies are filled with ideologues

Are they? They don't behave like it.

[gmerc]

Its very hard to be so naive.

[gcr]

how could running the qwen GGUF phone home? that would require cooperation with the inference backend (llama-cpp), or some kind of model exploit. It’d be far easier to pay the agent harness devs or supply-chain some plugin or something, that space is the Wild West anyways

I've certainly used these models without wifi without any differences.

[HDBaseT]

You've used Qwen with model quantization, locally without internet connection.

A lot of people are purchasing access via Alibaba Cloud directly, or indirectly by companies which host the model.

[gcr]

Pardon. You had mentioned open weight models so I assumed you meant self-hosted

[nickdothutton]

China is much more interested in waging a campaign against companies that represent the material of the future growth in productivity, exports, and prosperity of the US and her people, than learning about you as an individual. Unless of course you are a Chinese dissident living in the US.

[WarmWash]

China definitley wants information on all Americans. This commment is so far off the mark you it's on par with "Billionaires aren't interested in taking your money"

As Americans go through life, some of them will become people with power. When you need to leverage that power, having the right knowledge about them can effectively transfer that power to you.

Tiktok was a goldmine, because every 20-something on their way to a future position of power was uploading every single facit of their digital life to CCP servers everyday.

[giancarlostoro]

Which is basically the current primary use for AI is programming more than anything, you hear about AI in programming more than in any other field.

[saghm]

There are also a lot more novels about writing than making movies and a lot more songs about music than plays. It's not clear that this is because it's actually the primary use-case or if it's just because people who work with computers will inevitably talk quite a lot about computer things. For the past several years, pretty much everyone I meet who isn't in software but find out I do (doctors, people who sit next to me on a plane, etc.) will ask me my thoughts about AI because it's so widely discussed in general, and they're curious about my perspective on it as someone in software, but most of the time they're most curious about understanding more about how it might affect their own lives, not mine.

[boomskats]

Yeah, about that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UKUSA_Agreement#Controversy

[MintPaw]

Interesting point, but I'd always thought the opposite, you're much better protected by the law if you use services from your own country.

If you use a service outside your country, I believe you could have all your code stolen and get hacked/exploited in a way that would be totally legal.

[CodingJeebus]

> We are all better off if our data is collected by a government halfway across the world instead of our own governments which hold incredible amounts of power over us.

Sure, that is until each government's dataset is interesting enough to the other to facilitate a data-sharing agreement.

There's gotta be an internet "law" that says something like "Eventually, the data you volunteer to a benign 3rd party eventually winds up being used against you by someone". This is short-term thinking at it's finest.

[tmoravec]

Qwen3.6-Plus is available from Fireworks.

[tekacs]

Thank you for pointing that out! If 3.7-Max makes its way to Fireworks that'd be a joy.

[dchftcs]

fireworks hosts Qwen 3.6 Plus, they might also get Qwen 3.7 Plus.

[mostafab]

Alibaba Cloud has data centers in Mexico

[epolanski]

US hyperscalers, all of them, are financially invested in the US AI labs and have the incentives to keep the status quo.

[motiw]

ChatLLM support QWEN, do you consider this as US safe?

[0xbadcafebee]

I'm more interested in hearing specific reasons why one wouldn't use a Chinese company. Unless you're thinking Alibaba is going to ship chat logs to some government ministry that will then dole out proprietary information to new competitors (which doesn't seem logistically feasible), or you run a human rights organization, it feels a bit like FUD.

[vessenes]

All this data is accessible to national security agencies; this is true in every country in the world.

China has more integration between intelligence and industry than many western countries, and it does present a higher risk of unwanted “tech transfer” to industry than running on oracle or Google or ms or Amazon does in the US.

DHS has long staffed full time agents in California to deal with foreign IP exfiltration - using qwen is like fast/easy mode for IP exfiltration: why make anyone get a job in your palo alto office when you can just send it to them in Hanzhou?

Upshot - If you have something proprietary you’re working on I would generally advise not to just direct send it to Alibaba.

[culi]

I highly doubt China has a more sophisticated integration of their intelligence ministries than the USA. The world in which that was true would look very different from our own.

[kbelder]

He didn't say more sophisticated integration. He said 'more integration', which is very likely true.

[vessenes]

Interesting. Have you worked in China?

[HDBaseT]

The US Education propaganda is working, China are the bad guys!

[bachmeier]

> Unless you're thinking Alibaba is going to ship chat logs to some government ministry

This made me think of a Seinfeld episode: "I didn't know it was possible not to know that."

[noelsusman]

>Unless you're thinking Alibaba is going to ship chat logs to some government ministry that will then dole out proprietary information to new competitors (which doesn't seem logistically feasible)

That's exactly the fear, and why would it not be logistically feasible? The threat is definitely a bit overhyped, but China has a longstanding track record of aggressive corporate espionage.

[tekacs]

… building and selling a product to US companies that sends company-internal data to Chinese AI providers is not a particularly good way to get people to buy it.

Even if they weren’t individually worried about their proprietary data being shared with Chinese domestic competitors or with government… their audit / security programs likely wouldn’t allow it for a _huge_ range of types of data.

[dpoloncsak]

Because my CEO thinks China scary big hacker guys over there