[ortekk]

With deluge of Chinese models popping up recently, I believe there's a few issues one needs to evaluate before deciding to use these models:

- Ethics. As known, ou American frontier AI companies are incredibly ethical. And I have yet to see any interviews or blog posts by Chinese companies where they talk about how they are ethical, or at least credible HN comments about it.

- Safety. Do they covertly sabotage or at least refuse to answer questions that could help cyber- and bioterrorists in their nefarious purposes? What about ML-related questions that could help terrorists create AI models without guardrails?

- Child safety. This is especially important with "free for all" open-weight models, most of which are Chinese (ever think about why that's the case?). How are we going to do age verification and KYC with models that anyone can just download on their computer?

- Intellectual property theft. How can we be sure that no output of our American frontier AI models was used while training these Chinese models?

Frankly, there's a plethora of other issues I don't have time to get into right now. Personally, I believe distribution of Chinese models in the US should be paused until they are required to submit models to the government for review and evaluation, to make sure they are made to Anthropic/OpenAI standards.

We need legal grounds for that.

Write to your congressman, congresswoman or congressperson and urge them to stop proliferation of dangerous non-American intelligence. This is a matter of national security and needs to be acted upon as soon as possible, preferably before IPO.

[revolvingthrow]

The funniest thing about this post is not the fact that some people took it as anything but satire, but that it’s likely very close to what the true believers at Antrophic actually think.

Ah, those wacky terrorists and their non-aligned models, trained on copyrighted data to boot. Remember, the only thing that stops a guy with an evil god-in-a-box is a guy with a benevolent god-in-a-box, and only Antrophic can lead us to the second one – but only if we act together as a nation and ban those subversive open weights models!

[CrazyStat]

> Remember, the only thing that stops a guy with an evil god-in-a-box is a guy with a benevolent god-in-a-box, and only Antrophic can lead us to the second one – but only if we act together as a nation and ban those subversive open weights models!

Eliezer Yudkowsky has made this argument explicitly, substituting himself for Anthropic.

[hollerith]

Yudkowksy gave up on trying to make a god-in-a-box to stop other gods-in-boxes in 2015. Since then his approach to stopping the gods-in-boxes has been to lobby governments.

[jazzyjackson]

And bomb gods in boxes I guess?

[Xiol]

So hard to tell what is satire and what isn't these days.

[colordrops]

This one's pretty easy dude.

[thewebguyd]

Considering I got into a discussion with someone on this very forum who stated that maybe, yes, only Anthropic are reasonable and restrained enough to have access to these powerful models, it is in fact difficult to tell whats satire and whats not.

I've seen all of the parent's points made seriously over the last few weeks by various folks with AI hysteria.

[colordrops]

If that was the only thing in the original message, then yes, but the very last comment about the IPO should have clued you in, among other things. But I get your point, there are a lot of people out there saying crazy ungrounded things.

[ozgung]

I used to buy only American Ethics, but Chinese Ethics are becoming pretty good lately for the fraction of the price.

[monster_truck]

Dario you're logged into the wrong account

[seba_dos1]

This is brilliant, but you should have added some <joke> tag or something. You'll be confusing a lot of people and I really can't blame them. I think I've already seen all of these arguments used here seriously in one way or another.

[seydor]

The solution is tarrifs. Require 3 american tokens for every imported chinese token

[Aldipower]

Yes, please ban all Chinese models in the US and stick to your US-centric stuff. Good for the rest of the world.

[billyjobob]

This is great but sails far too close to Poe's Law that I predict downvotes.

[somenameforme]

I missed it at first. Then reread it, and wow - this is grade A satire of the sort rarely delivered anymore, probably indeed because of exactly what you're saying.

[LearnYouALisp]

Well, if so it needs a little "touch" I guess

[freehorse]

It is not necessary for (good) satire to be easily/immediately recognised as such imo

[freehorse]

Before the "preferably before IPO" I honestly couldn't tell.

[jauntywundrkind]

Fear Uncertainty and Doubt, the terrormongering, is worse than the terrors. Endless denial of society & possibility & progress: begone you demons.

[laoweek]

What is Amodei doing on HN astroturfing instead of trying to get Fable back online smh

[foxindustrial]

_incredibly ethical_

[Lalabadie]

Closed source, gated access, guzzling up all innovation budget from the country, diverting cities' limited water access, gaming the stock market and convincing leaders to cut jobs across all industries.

Truly we must protect these moral and ethical visionaries.

[tiahura]

Is this a parody of the Chinese-funded anti-datacenter astroturfing?

[bbg2401]

That you and other readers can't outright identify the comment as parody is actually quite disturbing to me.

[orangeboats]

It is disturbing, and it is hard to blame them. Given the political climate nowadays, I guess it's really hard to tell what is satire and what is real anymore.

Sometimes I see batshit insane takes on places like X, thought they were just satire. Later it turned out the posters were actually being dead serious.

[yieldcrv]

Chinese models are the closest shining example of their ideological system working for the world than anything else they've ever done

From my perspective

[throawayonthe]

i would call out reduction in extreme poverty or increased healthcare access or something but yeah the models are fine i guess

[yieldcrv]

I don't consider mainland aspects to be "examples of their ideological system working for the world", it works for urban areas in China

and I don't really see their foreign investment to be doing that, I think it complements what the West has done and has high impact in areas that the West ignores or hasn't taken seriously for investment, only a history of pillaging and subsequently aid

their ideological system - usually in name alone - also relies on the whole world eventually being on it for it to work, so the models being so good and available for the people openly instead of as a closed source concoction fits really well

that's what I see and how I got there, what do you see?

[shimman]

If you can't appreciate or understand what a substantial effort it was to reduce poverty in China, then you aren't a serious person worth paying attention to. It's literally the economic question of the century and something we should seriously study because we have the potential to lift the entire world out of poverty too.

[dudisubekti]

Crazy how people make light of this, when you can see the alternative today: India.

Sorry Indians reading this for throwing shade at India, but I just want to point out that making 1 billion of people not poor is freaking hard.

[logicchains]

The Chinese government did a terrible job of reducing poverty relative to other East Asian nations like Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. From a similar starting point the GDP per capita lagged well behind, and even now it still does; it's around $15k, similar to Mexico and less than half of those other East Asian countries. If the argument is "it's harder because the country is bigger", then if the government care about living standards it should have decentralized into lots of smaller countries like Europe, which if didn't do.

[FooBarWidget]

Sorry, splitting up does not work for China, politically, geographically and culturally. Peaceful and prosperous times only come when there's a strong central government. If any current government advocates for splitting up, then they'll be toppled in no time and replaced with new guys, maybe even warlords, who strive for a united China. "The land, long divided, must unite. The land, long united, must divide."

[re-thc]

> The Chinese government did a terrible job of reducing poverty relative to other East Asian nations like Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan

Your examples ALL had massive help from the US. So not sure if it is a fair comparison.

Japan literally rose to existence back then due to US influence and then has been declining ever since.

[jacker39]

It's really not that complicated. The government banned people from trading causing extreme poverty and famine in one of the most fertile areas in the world. Then they reversed the ban and let Chinese people trade again. At the same time western companies setup factories in China causing massive capital inflows.

[FooBarWidget]

If it's really as simple as allowing trade with the west then why are many other developing countries either stuck at the middle-income trap or not developing quite as fast as China? You're not gonna tell me Chinese are smarter, are you?

[yieldcrv]

We’re just not talking about that right now

We are talking about open source ai models working really well for the people of the world

[SubiculumCode]

Please. Be serious.

[hollerith]

Either that or the only reason they've been releasing the models under permissive licenses is that that the only way they have get any attention in a market dominated by American companies.

(Also, they don't need to make a profit because their system does not prioritize profit potential when making investment decisions: it prioritizes alignment with directives out of Beijing, which include keeping up with the West in strategic technologies.)

[yowlingcat]

Couldn't agree more. Maybe it's because it's a shining example of their ideological system that actually alters /my/ life, in ways that are tangible and which i can grasp, and makes it better.

[yieldcrv]

You get it

[matheusmoreira]

Satire, yet terrifyingly real.

[holoduke]

Is this comical satire or what? I am surprised to see such a dillusional reply. Come on. Intellectual property theft and openai rings a bell? Ethics? Ever tried uncensored versions of gemma4? LLMs have no bad or good etics. Etics are a thin layer on top. Always. You must be joking.

[arcatech]

> You must be joking.

Funny that you came to this conclusion and then posted the comment anyway.

[cyber_kinetist]

> our American frontier AI companies are incredibly ethical

Ah... sweet summer child.

> Intellectual property theft. How can we be sure that no output of our American frontier AI models was used while training these Chinese models?

The US AI models are already using pirated copyrighted material off the Internet. If Chinese models also do this, they're at least giving it back to the people by releasing their weights as open source.