[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.

[Barbing]

> relatively technically trivial for $GOVERNMENT_AGENCY to just monitor all the prompts + context we send

I take this for granted given Room 641A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

Thus, I’ve pondered whether anything they’ve learned has changed the world / had a big impact (like on their understanding of human psychology, perhaps per region). They’ve heard phone calls, they’ve read emails, diaries get brought to court… but these are systems that would be used like diaries but also prompt users for more and more.

[SoMomentary]

Having seen all the AI interactions that you can get through clickstream data I have no doubt that $GOVERNMENT_AGENCY can see much much more.

[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.

[SR2Z]

I think you are being ridiculous. Tampering with an LLMs pretraining is a difficult undertaking. There is plenty of evidence that training a model to walk the party line leaves it less capable than if it weren't.

It's not very subtle manipulation either; ask qwen of Taiwan is a part of China in German and in English and only the English answer will be party-approved.

[embedding-shape]

Compared to what we have proof the US government have engaged in before? Do people not remember PRISM anymore? It was virtually impossible to think of the scope before it was leaked, and you'd be marked as a conspiracy theorist for believing that happened, before it was made concretely true.

I think it's borderline naive to assume various agencies haven't infiltrated OpenAI, Anthropic and others, essentially the entire world was wiretapped by NSA in the past, to assume they don't have an employee or two at these companies does seem a bit naive to me.

[logicchains]

Agencies like the CIA have infiltrated the news agencies, so they have indirect power over the information that LLMs consume.

[gmerc]

Tampering with pretraining is as simple as uploading a few pages to github. See pliny

[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