[nmfisher]

None of those companies are created by the Chinese government. They're obviously subject to the Chinese government, whose whims may change at any given moment, but as we're seeing at the moment, so are the American companies.

And while I don't have a very positive view of the Chinese government, last I checked, they haven't been dropping bombs on innocent schoolchildren recently.

[cheesecakegood]

Bombs are a bit of a non sequitur here. The point is that Chinese companies are demonstrably hostile to American ones historically (and threatening in some specific structural ways to the American consumer). The presentation may be similar but to attribute American ethics to a Chinese decision is dubious.

[defrost]

Isn't the nature of capitalism such that many companies are demonstrably competitive (aka 'hostile' ?) with one another?

Chinese companies have also demonstrably pandered to the American consumer for many decades now.

To further muddy the waters, US companies have, some would argue, been openly hostile to the American consumer via monopoly practices, restricting access to purchased devices, etc.

[mkozlows]

Go to chat.z.ai right now and ask it about what happened in Tiananmen Square. Do you think it's good for the world if software is written by the model that answers that question that way?

[nmfisher]

It makes no difference to me if a coding model has an opinion about Tiananmen Square, Americans bombing schoolgirls in Iran, how many genders there are, or anything else other than designing and writing code.

A coding model is a tool, as long as it follows its user's instructions for building software I don't really care what opinion it spits out about world history.

Yes, it is important to ensure that aren't hidden guardrails that are affecting its ability to perform its function. But the great thing about open weight models is that you can actually evaluate this rigorously, and retrain to remove any prejudices you don't like.

[40four]

Hey I hear you, I’m not trying to make this a political argument of who’s dropping bombs on who, or the American government is better than or worse than the Chinese. But what I said is a matter of fact.

We can debate the semantics of whether “created by” or “subject to” means the same thing in regards to the Chinese government, but that is neither here nor there.

I’m happy to take your wording that they are obviously “subject to” the Chinese government. That logically means they are subject to carrying out the CCP’s long term strategy. And as you said “whose whims may change at any given moment”.

That directly relates to the OP’s fears, that these models could be taken away at any given moment. “The spigot can be turned off at any time” as they put it.

Or another possibility is they will never turn the spigot off, but they will engineer it in a way to best achieve their goals. My bet is that’s the more likely outcome.

I simply disagree with the OP’s description of the problem as “open weights models are the result of philanthropy by some private org”, I think the problem is much more complicated than that

[nmfisher]

What you said is not "a matter of fact" because it's simply untrue.

These companies were not "created by" the Chinese government. Specifically, I'm talking about DeepSeek, Zhipu, MiMo (Xiaomi), Kimi (Moonshot), Qwen (Alibaba). "Subject to" certainly does not mean "created by", it just means that the government ultimately has the power to tell them what to do. The US government has the exact same power, hence why none of us has access to Fable at the moment, but you wouldn't say that OpenAI or Anthropic were "created by" the US government.

There is zero evidence that open-sourcing their models is part of some grand strategy from the Chinese government. In DeepSeek's case, I think it probably is a genuine commitment to open source, for the others I think it's probably just a convenient business decision to gain market share (though Zhipu is probably more aligned, given their academic lineage from Tsinghua).

At some point in the future, the Chinese government may decide it's not in their national interest for Chinese companies to open source their frontier AI models, and DeepSeek et al will be restricted from doing so. I'm well aware of that. But until that point in time, the rest of the world is unanimously better off with open-source Chinese models. We should put as much reliance on Chinese companies long-term as we do on American companies - zero.