[ballon_monkey]

The 2 things people need to remember:

1) China can (and does) use the models to influence the west. They train in false information about Taiwan and Hong Kong. Or pretend like history is in favor of China.

2) Ignoring the models containing false information, they are incredible. But you should be scared of running inference via the model creators directly. If you think your data is safe compared to running it via model providers in the US ( either frontier or model hosts like fireworks.ai ) then please let me know your bank details so I can poke around.

[w4lker]

https://thereallo.dev/blog/claude-code-prompt-steganography

Why should I trust a US company more than a Chinese one?

[theptip]

Your exhibit is an obvious anti-distillation technique. You can expect far worse from less-regulated companies.

[throw1234567891]

Neither Anthropic nor OpenAI are regulated in the "regulated business" meaning.

[theptip]

I count being incorporated in Delaware as a high baseline level of regulation vs. random Chinese API providers.

[throw1234567891]

From where I sit, it could be incorporated in Mauritius.

[bamboozled]

Agree, China believes in Climate change and are at least taking steps to address it. Personally this is making me trust them more than the USA because, facts.

I mean lesser of two evils thinking, if one is intentionally leading us towards climate disaster, while the other isn't then yeah. What else can be said? Should I trust the authoritarian country who believes in engineering and science, or the one that doesn't?

[WarmWash]

>Agree, China believes in Climate change and are at least taking steps to address it.

China brought 80GW of new coal power online last year. The US added 0, and plans to add 3GW next year (we all know why).

China doesn't care about climate change, they care about energy independence, and conveniently have very little natural fossil fuels besides coal. Which they heavily mine and utilize.

[DanielHB]

The new coal plants are not planned to run a full capacity (or at all) they are meant for backup in case of environmental disaster and geopolitics (war, sanctions, tariffs, etc). So the actual amount of coal being burned is still going down.

Although it is highly suspicious why they are building so much unused capacity, it is as if they expect something to happen soon.

[fisheuler]

We have a very top level strategy design and plan to make safety of our energy supply chains, I can even tell that in my hometwon we also designed and implementated a Pumped-storage hydroelectricity power station in the inner part of China.

Also suggest a very good book which details our past decades hard work on energy saftey design: 筚路蓝缕 世纪工程决策建设记述 (Blazing a Trail: How China Decided and Built Its "Projects of the Century")

Book Link: https://book.douban.com/subject/30348776/ 9 out of 10 score for this book.

[speedstyle]

They commissioned 78 GW of new capacity in 2025, but actual coal-fired generation fell slightly (by 90 TWh, ie 10 GW). It might rise again, but it's expected to peak by 2027–28. And of course they added 440 GW of renewable capacity, 64% of global installations.

I certainly agree there's other motives (renewables even net them significant trade, like EVs) but it's not as though 'caring about' climate impacts requires selfless virtue, they stand to lose $trillions/year like everyone else.

[throwaway2037]

Woah, I am blown away by these numbers. I did some research using ChatGPT. A coal power plant called Guoneng Qingyuan Power Station is 4GW in total size. (It added 2GW of capacity last year.) Normally, 1GW is considered a large coal power plant by itself. This is a massive plant!

Geolocated here: https://www.google.com/maps/place/24%C2%B024'57.0%22N+113%C2...

I asked ChatGPT how many coal train cars are required per year to fuel this 4GW plant: About 200 coal train cars per day. That is staggering! It is about 5.25 million tons of coal per year. Multiple that by twenty and that only covers new capacity added last year. It is depressing to see these numbers.

[SlightlyLeftPad]

Don’t worry I believe AI will figure out how to get fusion energy working any day now and we won’t need these coal plants any more

[tcmart14]

From my understanding, yea they still stand up coal fire plants because world demand for Chinese manufacturing and the energy demand it creates exceeds how fast they can build reactors. So they build coal fire with the intention to replace that capacity with renewables later. Been awhile since I looked, but China has like 30-some odd plans for nuclear reactor construction with quiet a few of them having already broken ground, but that was about 5 years ago.

[robocat]

World Bank said exports in 2024 were about 20% of China's GDP. AI said 30% of China's petrochemical usage is exported as embedded energy. You're right that it is useful to think in terms of marginal generation, where it is marginally used. But that is more difficult to measure than just making assumptions at the level of the economy.

[graemep]

No one forces them to increase manufacturing output. They do it to make money, just like everyone else.

[bamboozled]

China builds literally everything for all countries, so why wouldn't they bring coal online? Very tiring arguments IMO.

Are you sending them extra money to fund nuclear?

[sarchertech]

China emits 3x more co2 than the US and last year their rate of increase was 2.5x that of the US.

https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-by...

[ralferoo]

"big number bad" isn't a great way of analysing the data, because China has a massively larger population.

The US emits 49% more CO2 per capita than China. And even with the much larger rate of increase, 0.79% to US' 0.3%, it'll still require 81 years to catch up to the US per capita rate [0].

The US aren't the good guys here, not by any means. Compared to my country, for instance, the US' emissions are 3x per capita that of the UK. If you want to argue that we shouldn't be using per capita (although we absolutely should), then that's 45x the UK's CO2 emissions.

[0] log(13.59/9.13) / log(1.0049) = 81.4 years

[sarchertech]

In absolute numbers China produces 1/3 of the total worlds CO2, and they are still growing the amount of CO2 they are producing.

That is not the actions of a country who “believes in climate change”.

China’s CO2 per capita is ahead of every large developed country except for the US, Australia, and Russia.

[ralferoo]

A few days late for the discussion, but I just happened to watch an interesting youtube video today [1] which seemed worth sharing.

A summary of some of the points early in the video: in 2025, China added 300GW of solar and 100GW of wind power. In comparison, between 2015 and 2014 China added a total of 78GW of coal power capacity, and for 2025 onwards an additional 161GW has been proposed or reactivated. So, clearly just one year of additional renewables capacity far exceeds the additional coal capacity over multiple years.

Around 5:25, the video then talks about the difference between capacity (maximum possible power) and generation (the amount actually produced) and another chart at 5:52 shows that even though capacity has increased by 6% from 2024 to 2025, actual coal power generation decreased by 1.2% over the same timeframe. So even though the headline is that China is building more coal power stations, in practice they're to cover peak load and to provide energy security and the actual energy production (and hence) emissions is decreasing. FWIW, the same chart shows a similar global trend.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qde4r4_uMU0

[Zigurd]

Actually, if you Google the rankings, China is 27th per capita, behind, of all places, Iceland.

[desterothx]

Almost like the entire worlds manufacturing was pushed to China the last 40 years (and is now getting moved to cheaper countries with the rising Chinese middle class). Is there a similar explanation for why the US number is so high?

[ralferoo]

You seem to think China is the evil polluter here. Just sort by per capita, and you'll see it's not even in the top 10% most polluting per capita.

There are plenty of large (depending on your definition of large) countries above it. Not just US, Australia and Russia that you are excluding for some reason, but also Qatar, Kuwait, UAE, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Canada all have significantly developed economically important countries. And they all have GDP per capita much greater than China's. What's your rationale for excluding them? There's a whole host of smaller countries with higher GDP per capita than China between those I listed above and China on the CO2 per capita results.

We should agree that ALL countries should be working to reduce CO2 emissions. But it sounds like you have a strong US bias and given Trump not only denies that climate change is even a thing, has withdrawn from international agreements on reducing emissions and even tries to pressure other countries to burn oil instead of investing in windfarms, it seems a bit disingenuous to try to make out that China is the only country that needs to improve. Before commenting on the speck in someone else's eye, first remove the plank from your own, yadda yadda...

[onetimeusename]

I don't think per capita emissions is the only metric that should be used. Environmental impact is not measured per capita. Also it blames people in the US for energy consumed here to manufacture which includes exports for people abroad. The US's per capita emissions are not even far away from other similar nations. It's a data point, sure. It's comparable to Canada and Australia and even South Korea. Where did you get that the US emits 45x the UK?

Another point is there is evidence[1] China has cheated and manipulated their data[2]. I don't like this "who are the good guys" game. Anyone playing this game is just looking to create a narrative about good and bad guys.

[1]: https://www.spglobal.com/energy/en/news-research/latest-news...

[2]: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-new-carbon-metri...

[ralferoo]

> Where did you get that the US emits 45x the UK?

From the GP [1], US emits 4,632,164,876 and UK emits 292,419,359 tonnes CO2. Which, sorry my bad, is actually only 15x. Looks like I did the ratio of China to UK which is 45x.

But either way, it shows that comparing total emissions is stupid because it's biased against bigger countries. Emissions per capita is a far more sensible metric.

> Also it blames people in the US for energy consumed here to manufacture which includes exports for people abroad.

Sure, but the same can be said about China, in fact I'd argue even more so. As a resident of the UK, the majority of things I buy is made in China, almost nothing from the US.

> The US's per capita emissions are not even far away from other similar nations.

Sure, but they are higher than China's, which was the point I was making to refute the GP. The only reason China's total emissions is 3x US is because its population is 4x US.

> Anyone playing this game is just looking to create a narrative about good and bad guys.

If you re-read what I wrote that you're replying to, you'll see that we agree on that.

It was the GP post that tried to compare China and US in terms of emissions, and deliberately chose total emissions to portray China as significantly worse than the US and getting worse year-on-year, while conveniently ignoring the population size differential and that the increase in emissions is still negligible compared to the overall difference, because it'd take 81 years for China to catch up with the US on emissions per capita. I then compared the US to the UK to show that comparing total emissions instead of per capita is stupid, because the population size matters.

But, as I said in the post you replied to - both countries can and should do much better, but as China isn't even in the top 10% of emissions per capita, this is a worldwide problem and trying to pin it all on China is disingenuous.

[1] https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-by...

[iso1631]

You need to account for carbin import/exports in manufactured goods and services

If the UK imported all its electricity from Poland, it would reduce on a per-capita basis but would increase global

[Ekaros]

USA emits 2165574,97709 times more than Faroe Islands. Sounds like they should be forced to limit that to some reasonable level say 2x of that of Faroe Islands. Don't think it would be too big ask right?

[sarchertech]

China produces 1/3 of the world’s CO2. They already produce more per capita than all other large developed countries except Australia, the US, and Russia. And their rate of growth is higher than all of those countries except Russia.

There’s no way to force them to do anything, but this is not that action of a nation that “believes in climate change”.

[nixon_why69]

That's while being the world's factory, having lots of green energy, electric cars and an ACUTE motivation to reduce oil imports. Coal is a problem but at least they're not canceling half-finished green energy products when administrations change.

[fooster]

Just to quote a poster above:

"You seem to think China is the evil polluter here. Just sort by per capita, and you'll see it's not even in the top 10% most polluting per capita."

[beepbooptheory]

Kind of a meta point but for those who don't know, its fun to track this comment and its responses through time. I want to nominate it for the hall of fame in classic HN post genre. It will be two decades soon!

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=21&prefix=false&q...

One interesting thing would be to see how the numbers change over the years alongside the otherwise identical debates.

[linkregister]

Can you refine that search term a bit more? I followed the link but it brings up many marginally related comments.

[bamboozled]

They make literally everything, including all the pieces for a renewable / low emission economy.

[drop_star]

"Clean coal"

[petcat]

USA and Europe are basically equal in terms of yearly production of renewable energy. Texas + California alone rank 6th in the world.

[MaxHoppersGhost]

>China believes in Climate change and are at least taking steps to address it

I've got a bridge to sell you!

[butlike]

Exactly my question

[jayd16]

You shouldn't trust either but also this is whataboutism.

[pessimizer]

No, it is not. Whataboutism is a specific term created (by Cold War propagandists) to refer to when the US criticizes the USSR about "X," and the Soviet Union replies by asking about "Y" in the US.

It is not a term created to refer to when some American criticizes any of America's official enemies for "X," and someone else reminds you that America also does exactly "X."

[jayd16]

> "Whataboutism" or "whataboutery" (as in, "but what about X?") refers to the propaganda strategy of responding to an accusation with a counter-accusation instead of offering an explanation or defense against the original accusation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

This is a counter accusation and not a defense, ergo, whataboutism.

[shimman]

No, it would be whataboutism to say something like "but in America you extrajudicially kill citizens for protesting the government."

It's not whataboutism to talk about the same subject in the context of a different government. In this case LLM corporations.

All you're doing is deflecting valid criticism. It's not whataboutism to talk about how bad American corporations are to American citizens in the context of talking about how supposedly bad Chinese corporations are to American citizens (China doesn't profit off of the deaths of Americans like health insurance companies (this is whataboutism for example)).

[kortilla]

That’s still whataboutism because it’s not the only alternative.

[rq1]

I never understood how people referred to or understood “whataboutsim”.

I personally understand it not as a diversion but as a critique of the moral higher ground implied by the first accusation. Said differently: keep your own house in order.

[kortilla]

Because that’s not a logical defense and nobody cares about moral high grounds. That’s why it’s a logical fallacy.

Actions can be judged on their own merits regardless of who presents the arguments.

[WithinReason]

No it's not. There is a difference between a comparison and whataboutism

[platinumrad]

There's nothing intrinsically wrong with "whataboutism" and it is in fact often illuminating.

[pessimizer]

Especially because the original criticism is usually a stand-in for an overarching moral condemnation. "Whataboutism" was a US defense for the fact that it was an apartheid state while criticizing political and financial liberties in the Soviet Union.

It also worked. The shame built up in the US so quickly that laws started being struck from the books. The US entered WWII with a segregated military, and by the time it marched into Korea, it was rapidly desegregating. The Soviet Union had successfully made its case that the US had no moral high ground, although it had not made its case for its specific set of limitations of financial and political liberties.

"Whataboutism" is just ad hominem for dummies. But if the real argument is about who is the better man, or what is the better system, ad hominem isn't a logical fallacy. It's simply a change of subject.

[bigyabai]

1) I'm not using AI to bicker over fringe political shibboleths.

2) I don't think it is any more or less safe to put my code on a Chinese server versus an American one. A Chinese provider also isn't liable to spy on me for the feds, as OpenAI and Anthropic certainly do.

[sanex]

Different county different feds both spying I'm sure.

[margalabargala]

Sure but if you are not Chinese or in China, then the chances of negative consequences to you from the Chinese feds is vanishingly small due to lack of ability to do anything that affects you.

Meanwhile if you are in the US, DHS has already subpoenaed social media sites looking for people who made anti-ICE posts and I can't imagine they consider subpoenaing AI conversations off limits https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/technology/dhs-anti-ice-s...

[hnfong]

Also the US government has defacto extra-territorial jurisdiction due to the willingness of allied countries (i.e. most of the developed world) to extradite.

Of course only applies when they really want to get you, but that's still a risk.

[margalabargala]

The chances of a foreign country extraditing you (or the US requesting extradition) over social media posts is for now quite low, fortunately, though you're right.

Broader point being, in general if a country's federal police are going to be spying on you, if you get to pick the country you should pick the one in which you do not reside and don't plan to visit. For a typical US citizen who is not an intelligence target, the chances of negative consequences from China spying on them is way lower than the chances of negative consequences from the FBI spying on them, simply because the FBI will have nonzero false positives.

[cesarb]

As a less extreme example: consider how many non-USA hosts say they follow the DMCA.

[ansgar77]

Regarding point 2, I don't trust my data being safe running inference on model creators api, but neither do I trust US providers. Both use it for their own benefit, the only difference is the country of origin. The US has a lot more legal safeguards for this but I don't trust they don't do it regardless.

[vachina]

legal safeguards only make sense only when they’re enforced. With how “move fast and break things” Silicon Valley is law is always playing catch up (at your expense)

[riskd]

It’s perfectly fine for the “West” to influence the world though, right? Or is it only a problem because… they’re Chinese?

[hetman]

Why would it be a problem that they're Chinese? It's a problem because their country is ruled by an authoritarian regime. The West, by contrast, doesn't have a singular arbiter of truth, it has a plurality of perspectives (as much as certain interest groups would really rather that was not the case). It's not perfect, but those of us who have memories of living under authoritarian regimes can tell you there's no comparison.

[podgorniy]

> It's a problem because their country is ruled by an authoritarian regime

Hey, have you seeing what trump does with your (presumably) country? Maybe wars? Maybe market manipulation? Mayde pedo right covering on the government level? Maybe bubbles and threats to EU? What an ignorance. You live with old stories, not the current state of the world...

[burnerRhodov3]

This is absolutely nothing compared to what China did to the Uyghurs, or China cutting citizens off of the financial system (WeChat) due to posting political content... If you were in China, you would be blacklisted for posting a similiar comment on wechat. If you openly called the CCP a group of pedo's you'd regret it within 24 hours.

[herbst]

If you post content like this you likely to get refused entering the US. I realize it doesn't apply to US citizens but it's also not like everyone can say what they want and get away with it.

[burnerRhodov3]

Refusing entry is not the same as being made to disappear.

[rikima_]

> This is absolutely nothing compared to what China did to the Uyghurs

which is absolutely nothing compared to what they did to Gaza.

[burnerRhodov3]

Palestine elected a international terrorist organization to head their government, then killed, and raped a music festival.

[hetman]

So you're telling me Trump has direct control over the topics and conclusions allowed into AI models built by Western companies? I don't think your off topic whataboutism has really helped dispel any ignorance in the world.

[inigyou]

If being ruled by an authoritarian regime is the problem, then wouldn't both Chinese and American models be problematic?

European models too, if they had any.

[hetman]

I don't think you'll understand what authoritarian means until you try moving to China and then criticising their government. For those of us who have lived under authoritarian regimes, it's an absolute travesty to see how diluted the meaning of this term has become.

[Denkel]

This is from this year: https://www.democracynow.org/2026/6/25/prairieland_nine

Year 2 of Trump's regime, how will things be in year 14? Do you think there would be much difference from China? They are both authoritarian governments, the only difference is how much they actually control, China just had more time, give it to USA and won't be any different.

PS: I am pretty sure black people and now trans people in US know very well how you felt living under authoritarian regimes..

[hetman]

Trans and black people in the US are disappeared for speaking critically of their government? This level of hyperbole is dangerous for those who employ it; cf. the boy who cried wolf.

[herbst]

Ex. https://apertus.ai

A swiss one. No idea if it's any good but it's there

[mynameisbilly]

The United States has propped up some pretty horrific, murderous, bloodthirsty regimes over the past century to ensure they maintain a proxy presence across the globe. If supporting or engaging in an "authoritarian" regime is your litmus test, then the United States fails resoundingly.

[burnerRhodov3]

The unfortunate concequence of "rebellion", is sometimes those regimes go on to be just as bad as the previous regime. You're playing captain hiehnsight here... intent matters in these things.

[Denkel]

The fact that the USA only helps right wing "rebellions" is pure luck, right? Those regimes weren't "as bad as the previous regime" as unexpected result, those resulta were exactly what the US expected.

[hetman]

Guess what you can do in the US and can't do in China? Talk about their respective atrocities. You've missed the point entirely as it pertains to AI if you thought my litmus test was about having the most moral government. It was about that government's ability to censor information.

[BoredomIsFun]

West has though a history of supporting regimes far more hideous than Chinese, and ready to push narrative whenever possible. It is well known idea BTW in political thought that democracies are far more reliant on propaganda for control than authoritarian,which due to their strong grip on political discourse do not need high quality propaganda anyway.

TLDR: American propaganda is not any better than Chinese, neither have the best interests of my country in their minds.

[youre-wrong3]

Have you got examples of GPT/Claude/Grok influencing people?

[hetman]

I think there's no denying they each have an ideological bent (as is their right as private companies). I have had Copilot deny me access to historical information on ethical grounds, even though I don't think anyone would find it controversial (clearly it was overtuned, GPT and Claude had no problem answering the same question). What is different though is that they are each allowed to have their own perspective instead of a singular mandated one.

[youre-wrong3]

That was guard rails in the harness. Not the model. We are talking about baking it into the model. Denying to do something is also very different to changing historical facts like China does.

[damontal]

You are splitting hairs. End result is the same.

[kortilla]

No it’s not. Saying “I won’t talk about how to make bombs” is not the same as “the holocaust didn’t happen”.

[MSFT_Edging]

> very different to changing historical facts like China does.

Oh but they're trying. The right-wing usage of things like "woke" and "DEI" primarily serve to hide/destroy historical realities. [1]

Florida has it's "STOP WOKE" act that forces teachers to talk about how slaves learned skills/benefited from slavery[2] and that various massacres also had black perpetrators.

What is this other than changing historical facts? About fucking chattel slavery for Christ's sake.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/12/judge-nation...

[2] https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/floridas-new...

[nixon_why69]

And also, not taking a side here, plenty of woke partisans valued righteousness over truth in the 2020 era. The 1619 project which was a whole NYT backed big thing had a bunch of factual errors.

The real rub is when you get into "shared facts" that Americans were all taught in high school civics but the rest of the world wasn't. If you've mostly been in America, it can seem like someone's deliberately lying about history but they simply weren't properly educated with the Correct Interpretation.

[kortilla]

> and that various massacres also had black perpetrators.

the implication of your message is that this is not true

[rhdunn]

1. https://www.uea.ac.uk/about/news/article/fresh-evidence-of-c... -- (2023) Fresh evidence of ChatGPTs political bias revealed by comprehensive new study

2. https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2026-01-20-new-study-finds-chatgpt... -- (2026) New study finds that ChatGPT amplifies global inequalities

3. https://stevepavlina.com/blog/2026/03/chatgpts-political-bia... -- (2026) ChatGPT’s Political Bias

4. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10623051/ -- (2023) Revisiting the political biases of ChatGPT

5. https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/21/24079371/google-ai-gemini... -- (2024) Google apologizes for ‘missing the mark’ after Gemini generated racially diverse Nazis

[BoorishBears]

https://i.imgur.com/3zWdJpz.png

vs

https://i.imgur.com/ta6g1d2.png

[xmcp123]

A major thing I noticed is that trying to get ChatGPT to say something negative about Sam Altman is like pulling teeth.

Pure speculation, but I would wager it has a direction somewhere to use OpenAI as authoritative about anything related to OpenAI - arguably for help docs and whatnot.

But the impact does stay the same.

[phantompeace]

Why did you mention Grok, because it undermines your argument.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/may/16/elon-musk...

https://www.trtworld.com/article/24cbdb873a6b

[makeitdouble]

On (1), models are an aggregation of large volumes of data sources, whatever the culture producing them, you'll get the average bias of that culture.

We see that on what minorities are associated with inside the model, or how things that aren't online will have a completely different weight. Or how 2/4/5/8ch or X will be disproportionately present in specific models despite being the places where facts go to die.

[MintPaw]

I see your point, but this isn't exactly true, it only takes a single person to bias a model by deleting specific training data or over training on certain facts.

[sajithdilshan]

But hasn’t it been the same with US since the WWII? US has influenced the world through various ways sometimes even weaponising human rights to spread American superiority and its narrative?

[inglor_cz]

While true, you neglect the fact that US corporations have some autonomy from the government. I doubt that any of the current American AI corporations get regular dossiers of desirable responses to sensitive political topics from Washington and implement them. That would be a reason for a major lawsuit and a major scandal.

In China, the image of the country and the preferred narrative is under much tighter control of the government and local AI shops won't have any autonomy in this regard at all. Either obey or get shut down.

BTW What you mean by "weaponizing human rights", exactly? I am curious. If anything, I would say that the US foreign policy didn't promote human rights sufficiently, especially in Latin America, where the "bastard, but our bastard" attitude was typical.

OTOH in Europe, US human rights policy was probably relevant in saving some dissenters in the former Eastern Bloc from torture or execution.

[sajithdilshan]

> you neglect the fact that US corporations have some autonomy from the government

I'm not sure if this is correct. It seems like every big US corporation is changing their policy based on the views of the administration in place. As an example during Biden's time the DEI was in full motion in every corporation and in current administration it's the other way around. Also I remember as soon as Biden won the election twitter and meta suspended the profile of Trump. So I hardly think that there is much room for autonomy. Also the latest export bans on Antropic and OpenAI models kind of make your argument weak, of course the company can sue the givernment, but the national security comes above all.

> BTW What you mean by "weaponizing human rights", exactly?

US has been using the violations of human rights to impose sanctions or to especially get countries in line which are not supporting the US agenda when it comes to global politics. However, they were more than happy turn a blind eye if the respective country that violates human rights (most middle eastern countries) if they are allies of US doctrine.

[inigyou]

A Russian and an American are sitting next to each other on a plane.

The American says "I'm impressed by the propaganda you have in Russia."

"Oh it's very good, but it's nothing compared to the propaganda you have in America." replies the Russian.

"Huh? We don't have propaganda in America." says the American.

"Exactly." says the Russian.

[abalashov]

As a Russian, I deeply appreciate this. In Russia, it seemed obvious to even the most parochial peasant that there was propaganda, while in America, the vast majority of the society not only fails to consider the possibility, but is cholerically allergic to the very idea.

Edit: recognising that there is propaganda != knowing what is and isn't propaganda. That's all I meant.

[WarmWash]

The American government has propaganda but it really sucks at it. All the people skilled in manipulating behavior work at our ad agencies, and hence our actual propaganda is mostly "Use this detergent! Take this drug! Drive this car!"

[butlike]

Propaganda is just advertisements for the government, right?

[inglor_cz]

If every parochial peasant could recognize Russian official propaganda, why are so many people on board with whatever the propaganda says?

I mean, it took longer than the Great Patriotic War before Putin's popularity started visibly falling and people started questioning what the entire "SVO" is for.

[inglor_cz]

I remember peak wokeness quite well and it was pretty obvious that it was driven by the Twitter activist mob and not the Biden administration, which was quite visibly behind the times and followed the trends.

Already during the Biden administration, defections from the orthodoxy started and then multiplied - some businesses like Coinbase or IIRC Cloudflare refused the demands outright. Musk bought Twitter with an explicit task to make it less progressive.

And the White House did precisely nothing against this defection trend.

"US has been using the violations of human rights to impose sanctions or to especially get countries in line which are not supporting the US agenda when it comes to global politics. However, they were more than happy turn a blind eye if the respective country that violates human rights (most middle eastern countries) if they are allies of US doctrine."

I do agree that the US is hypocritical about human rights, but actual violations of human rights should be a reason for sanctions, and the fact that this is done only partly/imperfectly, IMHO, beats the potential alternative when it isn't done at all. This would be a much worse world in my opinion.

[sajithdilshan]

> I do agree that the US is hypocritical about human rights, but actual violations of human rights should be a reason for sanctions, and the fact that this is done only partly/imperfectly, IMHO, beats the potential alternative when it isn't done at all. This would be a much worse world in my opinion.

That's why I said that it was weaponized. In reality US doesn't care if there is a real human rights violation or not, they just use it as an excuse to get what they want.

[linkregister]

Everybody is amoral and cynically only doing good things for personal gain, except for you, the one good person

[buellerbueller]

>US corporations have some autonomy from the government

This is correct...because they just buy the government when they need to.

[pydry]

In China the state rules the corporations and in the US the corporations rule the state.

Neither is a system worth fighting for. Swiss style democracy maybe but not autocracy and not oligarchy.

>OTOH in Europe, US human rights policy was probably relevant in saving some dissenters in the former Eastern Bloc from torture or execution.

Yeah, a bit like how Russia saved Edward Snowden.

The US will use human rights as a club to beat its imperial rivals with but when it has deemed torture and arbitrary execution in the interests of its imperial power it has adopted them enthusiastically.

When US allies use these tools and worse they are excused.

There is basically nothing which US rivals do which the US wouldn't also do under similar circumstances.

[tedd4u]

The corps ruled the US until Trump. Now it’s moving to an oligarchical / kleptocratic mode like Russia. Sure the corps are still involved, but not on top. Will they remain after the current administration? I think it will be hard to put the genie back in the bottle.

[ux266478]

> I doubt that any of the current American AI corporations get regular dossiers of desirable responses to sensitive political topics from Washington and implement them.

That's completely true. What happens is that you get hit with a wall of bureaucratic threats and nonsense by the government out of nowhere, and usually for some unrelated matter. It's like a high level version of getting pulled over for not using your turn signal. Which is why if your company has good legal, they often act in a highly proactive manner about that kind of thing.

What constitutes sufficient rabble rousing to get put on the government's shitlist differs between both countries, but there are plenty of things that will send American politicians into having a conniption, and it's not a static criteria. McCarthyism is a pretty easy example. I'm no Muskboy, but we can point to the procedural harassment he recieved over hitting a blunt on the Joe Rogan podcast to be a related matter. Criticizing the genocide happening in the Levant is frequently saber rattled by politicians as something they're interested in making prosecutable, and there are examples of institutional authority targeting and attempting to punish people over it.

[mullen]

Non-sense. In China, you obey. There is no way to challenge the orders in courts or even with your local party official. It's written into law and companies that disobey are shutdown or taken over by a party loyalist and the management is disappeared.

> bureaucratic threats and nonsense by the government out of nowhere

You can challenge these in courts. There is a free press you can go to. You can go to social media and lay your case out there. You can challenge what the government is requesting of you. In China, you can not at all.

[traceroute66]

> you neglect the fact that US corporations have some autonomy from the government

In theory.

In practice, Trump picks up the phone and say "jump" and the CEO on the other end says "how high ?".

And if you say no, well, we saw what happened when Anthropic said no.

[inglor_cz]

Do you seriously believe that if you ask Grok or ChatGPT their opinion about tariffs or the Iran war, they will simply regurgitate Trump's talking points because they were programmed so on the threat of shutdown?

People with no personal experience of an actual totalitarian system don't really know what they are talking about when it comes to actual information control and micromanagement by the government. Hence they make nonsensical comparisons with a straight face.

[traceroute66]

I am not going to post what I could respond on a public forum.

All I will say is that it should be perfectly apparent by now to any sane external observer that Trump does not play by any long-established rules or protocols.

An entire encyclopedia of examples could easily be provided, the most famous recent one being his phone call to FIFA about the red card suspension.

[inglor_cz]

Yes, Trump is quite an outlier in his non-standard behavior, I agree on that.

That said, Americans still enjoy very robust protections of freedom of speech and association, about the strongest in the world, and your SCOTUS does not seem to be inclined to hollow them out. Many of the pending lawsuits will end there and eventually bind this administration, plus the following ones.

This just does not happen in actual authoritarian countries, where no judicial remedy is available and the justice system is just another arm of the tyrant, rubberstamping punishments pre-determined by him.

Yes, I agree that vigilance about infringements of freedom is necessary, but the current US population is plenty vigilant. Trump is nowhere near as popular as, say, Erdogan is, and cannot simply raid offices of the Democrats and shut down oppositional media.

[kiicia]

but you are not using chinese models to learn about taiwan, you use chinese models to do everything BUT learning about taiwan, so no issue there

[est]

> China can (and does) use the models to influence the west

OK now that's false information.

You can uncensor, tweak or fine-tune open-weight models, but not so easy on a proprietary model from some cloud provider.

[inigyou]

It's probably true (why wouldn't it be?) but the missing context is that the US does it even more.

[pwn0]

1. Get the free Chinese model. 2. Jailbreak it 3. ??? 4. Profit?

[whywhywhywhy]

> They train in false information about Taiwan and Hong Kong. Or pretend like history is in favor of China.

American labs can open their models or their old models at any point if they actually care about this, but until the day OG GPT 4 isn't averrable to download or Claude 3 then they're only pretending to care about this because they can profit from restrictions.

[throw1234567891]

It's incredible how accurate this is towards US models:

> The 2 things people need to remember:

> 1) USA can (and does) use the models to influence the rest of the planet, and put political pressure. They train on stolen data, hide information, gate keep, who knows what they're hiding. In favor of the USA, nevertheless.

> 2) Ignoring the models containing false information, they are incredible. But you should be scared of running inference via the model creators directly. If you think your data is safe compared to running it via model providers in China ( either frontier or model hosts like z.ai ) then please let me know your bank details so I can poke around.

[onetimeusename]

There's an irony in it. I have many reasons to believe China has its own geopolitical narratives and goals just like the US does. If someone dislikes when the US does it, why ignore when China does the same thing and praise them for their efforts? These models exist and sure, they accomplished something interesting. Use them with caution but I don't appreciate the political narratives about good and bad guys and AI models and politics.

[walrus01]

> 1) China can (and does) use the models to influence the west. They train in false information about Taiwan and Hong Kong. Or pretend like history is in favor of China.

One of the interesting things is that through a fairly rudimentary process which is being done by 3rd party amateurs who've downloaded the open models, models like Qwen 3.6 35B-A3B (or 27B) can be fully 'uncensored' when turned into GGUF files.

I have an uncensored Q8 version of Qwen 3.6 35B-A3B here that will very happily output information about Tiananmen Square, Uyghurs, human rights in China, or indeed can even be instructed to write an intentionally absurd vitriolic screed against the CCP. The same uncensored 27B (dense) will do the same, just at a slower token/s rate.

Similarly there's 'uncensored' variants of Gemma4 31B and other western trained models, which once put through the same process, will also discuss or write just about anything you want, bypassing whatever internal guard rails were attempted in the training data set.

edit: more concerning, and a very legit concern, is that a model is only as good as the sum total of its training dataset, so if something is trained on a steady diet of news sources like Peoples Daily, Xinhuanet and similar in the English language, then it'll have a greater percentage of CCP-approved media publications in its training dataset. No amount of uncensoring it will help with that after the fact.

[theeyescanner]

Never forget that those Chinese tanks did a sick burnout on tank man's corpse and then t-bagged the remains.

Propaganda exists everywhere and it's your duty as a citizen in a democracy to inform yourself and properly evaluate bias in the media you consume, such as "Kill the boer" by South African mus

[DanielHB]

I have seen some uncensored versions of existing open models made by 3rd parties, I wonder how they actually work and in what way are the outputs different.

[podgorniy]

Somehow chineese make less troubles and more good to the world than americans at this point... Something something about ai benefiting all humanity, something something ai being open and stuff, like OpenAI.

Chineese simply delivering what americans promised.

Tell me: why is EU safe from Trump forcing AI companies to cut access to EU?

[hnfong]

> Tell me: why is EU safe from Trump forcing AI companies to cut access to EU?

Well, I think they might end up doing it to themselves by imposing regulations that US companies are unwilling to put up with.

[skupig]

It's so naive to think that US companies won't do (or aren't already doing) the exact same thing but for money.

[horsawlarway]

Or even similar ideological goals... (See: grok)

[nixon_why69]

> pretend like history is in favor of China.

Are you saying that history has a verdict, and it disfavors particular 3000 year old cultures?

[procgen]

> 3,000 year-old cultures

Like Western culture?

[nixon_why69]

Sure? Someone calling a model biased for "pretending history is favorable to western culture" would sound pretty provocative.

[Jackpillar]

So you agree - it would be stupid to say "pretend like history is in favor of X civilization"

[markovs_gun]

You think that the US based models aren't doing the same?

[softwaredoug]

Is anyone using these models as their daily chat driver? I am skeptical.

The vast majority of Westerners will interact with ChatGPT/Claude/Google in a browser. They'll use these models to try to save some money coding.

[DrScientist]

All models/data sources are biased - you need to understand inherent biases in any data source.

The first point is a strawman - these models are not going to be used to set foreign policy on Taiwan - it's to write code etc.

Likewise risk of data exfiltration and misuse isn't model specific. Indeed it's not even the biggest data risk - there are much larger risks from the data we know companies like Meta and Google already collect.

Bottom line - a model you can download and run on your own private infrastructure is always going to be safer than anything accessed over the internet - as in that case it's not even just the hosting service that's the issue.

[rikima_]

i'm also influenced by claude every single day with its constant preaching about certain values.

[shunia_huang]

But Dario said (and maybe more ppl) that Chinese models are just distillation of their model and training data, so I guess your first point is invalid?

[traceroute66]

> But Dario said (and maybe more ppl) that Chinese models are just distillation

"But Dario said" ... yawn.

I am increasingly convinced that "they distilled us" is as much US FUD as "it was made by communists". Especially since its mostly the US tech-bros who are coming out with that tiny violin.

People telling me the Chinese models are distilled just because it says "I am Claude" when asked is also lame.

I am not the only one, look at this post on interconnects about Kimi K3 for example:[1]

     It should be clear looking at this model that if adversarial distillation from the closed frontier models in the U.S. contributed, it is at most to a relatively small degree. AI observers who followed the distillation panic and came away with the wrong conclusion that Chinese AI labs are only producing good models due to IP theft are in for an awakening – that Chinese companies are extremely good at building models in the same way the leading American companies are.

[1] https://www.interconnects.ai/p/kimi-k3-the-open-weights-esca...

[whywhywhywhy]

It probably was distilled but the point is why is that an issue at all, Claude is just distilled from all our work. Why is stealing our work fine but stealing Anthropic's work bad.

Anyone doing so should have zero guilt because it was already stolen goods to begin with.

[Jackpillar]

"Or pretend like history is in favor of China."

What does this even mean?

[inigyou]

Like it will tell you the PRC (current China) was right to go to civil war with ROC (former China, current Taiwan)

[cpburns2009]

Personally I'm more worried about a US provider/model censoring for BS reasons than Chinese ones. Biology 101 is too dangerous for Anthropic. If I want an AI to scrutinize the CCP for Tiananmen Square, Taiwan or Tibet because I'm bored, I'll use a US or heretic model.

Your data isn't safe from exfiltration no matter who the host is. You should host the models locally if your data is truly sensitive.

[999900000999]

Regarding 1.

We’re literally tearing down monuments to slavery and civil rights.

Religion is now determining law in much of the nation. Having a miscarriage? Good luck since politicians have decided their God doesn’t want you to have access to basic healthcare.

The government has defacto control over domestic LLMs.

Let’s worry about our own historical record.

[traceroute66]

> China can (and does) use the models to influence the west. They train in false information about Taiwan and Hong Kong. Or pretend like history is in favor of China.

I am not Chinese and I'm not defending the Chinese, but I see this argument come up a lot.

In practical terms it is US-sponsored FUD.

Why ?

Because the hard reality is that what you say is simply not going to affect 99.9999999999% of users.

Is it realistically going to affect anyone using an LLM in coding ? No.

Is it realistically going to affect anyone using an LLM in $anything_else_not_politically_sensitive ? No.

Does anyone seriously use LLMs for researching politically sensitive matters ? No.

Just as there is plenty of information out there on the US's less than perfect history, there is also plenty of information out there on the various Chinese politically sensitive matters. You do not need a Chinese LLM to find out about it, all you need is a search engine.

[girvo]

People absolutely use LLMs to research politically sensitive topics.

I wish they wouldn’t, but people use LLMs as their general search engines now.

[traceroute66]

> People absolutely use LLMs to research politically sensitive topics.

Note I used the word "seriously", I meant it in its fullest form, i.e. serious people.

I'm not interested in what-if arguments based on "you can't fix stupid".

Stupid people also blindly believe whatever a US LLM tells them without any form of verification, hallucinations and all.

Most people on this planet would agree that a Chinese LLM is perfectly usable for all tasks except asking about politically sensitive matters.

And for most people on the planet, that is just fine. They can get their political information elsewhere.

[handle584]

>> I meant it in its fullest form, i.e. serious people.

Is academia serious enough? Well ever since LLM journals' inboxes are bombarded with submissions, and this applies across fields. Like OP said, ppl serious or not are asking LLM about any stuff, also serious or not.

[traceroute66]

> Is academia serious enough?

Of all the people, academics should know better than to get their answers from LLMs.

[girvo]

Your definition means that any example I can bring up, you can dismiss as “non serious” as you haven’t provided your criteria.

This is a useless rubric and makes discussing this pointless.