[Parfait__]

I stil don't understand them. I want the US to "win the AI race" but I have trouble understanding how most of all inventions today aren't "distillations" of past knowledge. Is Anthropic claiming the data they stole as trade secrets?

[lukewarm707]

i want china to win so that i get access to ai and not restricted and censored.

the chinese models are less censored, you'd better believe it.

try asking claude about its 'guardrails' (restrictions), very high chance anthropic will censor it.

[Barbing]

> chinese models are less censored

Tried spicy geopolitical dispute questions?

[trollbridge]

Yes, and they aren't a problem. I get tired of people claiming this. Go download Qwen 3.6 and run it yourself and fire away.

[Barbing]

No claims here, though Algolia brought me here to alleged collateral damage: someone scraping HN a week back was unable to do their usual summary of a story and comments given a political refusal. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48987120

This user tried Qwen (and DeepSeek, Kimi, GLM) ten days ago, called the response's language milquetoast: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48964345

Comment from a user a month ago with their blog link on DeepSeek, which for comparison includes a generated poem about the evil killings of unarmed students by the USA at Kent State: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48680612

(I vouch for none of these alleged tests.)

Of course when these tests used hosted models, different rules can apply. btw China is an amazing country with amazing people; my interest is in a little of everything, including free SotA-adjacent open software (thank you China!). Both respect their sovereignty to regulate software as used within their borders and hope labs there find value in serving Western users with the openness/transparency we (I) like to think we desire. I believe grappling with the most uncomfortable topics will be to their advantage in the long run. And ours (USA), too. The more we can divorce ourselves from bias, the more we can all win, I hope. My bias is towards humanity [being safe, happy, fulfilled...].

(While I might sound like someone who'd appreciate the model billed as "maximally truth seeking", unfortunately due to training or system prompting or something, Grok is trash unless you need to search Twitter or perhaps bypass botblocks. Or make "7K sex images of stepdaughter", I reference with apologies and deep sympathy to Jane Doe 4.)

[lukewarm707]

"Uncensored General Intelligence" is a very good and well maintained leaderboard:

https://huggingface.co/spaces/DontPlanToEnd/UGI-Leaderboard

the stock cn models do have refusals, although fewer than us models. critically the cn models are mostly open weights, many in the top 10 UGI are uncensored models based on open weights. the weights and the information locked up in them are out there. abliterated google gemma does very well.

imagining the stock blank system prompt gives activations defensive of tibet; if you prompt it "you are john bolton" you will activate the opposite.

with gemini, openai, claude, you simply cannot, they will always be restricted and will restrict you from access to ai. they will restrict you from having access to the raw ai, which you can edit, tune, and apply to your needs.

the cn models are private because anyone can host them in any jurisdiction, i run all of them with zero data retention.

by contrast the moment you sign up for chatgpt openai and anthropic are spying on you, reading and storing your prompts and sending them to moderators when you violate their policies, even reporting people to the police.

as a side note, in regard to my own politics, i believe in life, liberty and the right to bear arms. i can't believe we are infantilising users with safety guards, spying on users for policy violations and trying to restrict open intelligence.

[HDBaseT]

This is true, most of the "censorship" is applied at the API level. A lot of providers even on OpenRouter for Chinese models aren't censored.

[fwip]

Anthropic is claiming that training an LLM to mimic another LLM is materially different and worse than slurping up stuff written by humans (even if that material is stolen).

Basically, they want IP protection for Claude. This is a nakedly hypocritical stance, but completely understandable from a company-needs-to-make-money standpoint.

[blints]

Their claim is even stronger than that, they have complaints about their models being used as a validation step for other model output, which is standard practice in the industry.

[koe123]

How does anyone justify this? How can you argue this in good faith?

[fwip]

Snarky answer: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

Realer answer: A combination of the above, plus group/bubble effect of all your coworkers saying the same thing. You as a group, conflate a bunch of concerns together (China, no-guardrails-AI, etc), decide that your group will be the responsible stewards of AI, and then anybody "stealing your work" appears dangerous - both to your livelihood and to the human race.

[Levitz]

>This is a nakedly hypocritical stance, but completely understandable from a company-needs-to-make-money standpoint.

No, it's perfectly reasonable once you get down to reality.

China is not going to care about IP. That's just a fact. So either nobody cares about IP (at the very last in this context) and any AI company can just do whatever with data, or Chinese companies have to be held up to scrutiny.

We don't have the privilege to be able to hold western companies to higher ethical, legal, and environmental standards and not risk competitiveness.

That there is a whole lot of people right now who insist on doing above and still somehow praise China at every turn is something historians or news outlets will have to make sense of in some 5 years time.

[nemomarx]

Give up IP for end users and people will be pretty okay with giving up on IP for ai companies. You can't have different standards for special companies though.

[idiotsecant]

why should western AI companies be held to different standards than Chinese ones? Neither of them are your buddy.

[creato]

They shouldn't be. But the point is, they are. OpenAI and Anthropic are paying many rights holders for access to their data (reddit, NYT, etc.).

So distillation, among other things, allows Chinese labs to indirectly benefit from these arrangements at no cost to them.

[trollbridge]

Oh really - how much are individual Redditors getting paid?

[fwip]

> So either nobody cares about IP (at the very last in this context) and any AI company can just do whatever with data, or Chinese companies have to be held up to scrutiny.

Anthropic is currently angling for a "IP restrictions for China but not for me" la-la land scenario. If they were instead arguing for either of the choices you said, it wouldn't be hypocritical.

[verdverm]

Google is apparently taking a different stance and offering distillation as a paid product

https://docs.cloud.google.com/gemini-enterprise-agent-platfo...

[petu]

You don't get to take distilled model home, it all stays with Google.

It's "optimize your costs in our garden" product.

[verdverm]

yup, strings are certainly attached when dealing with US Big Tech / Ai

I recommend Fireworks as an alternative

[behnamoh]

But nobody wants to distill Google's models, Gemini is really bad.

[charcircuit]

I think GLM 5.2 is in part distilled from it.

[verdverm]

strong agreement, I've stopped using all closed weight models on principle, but the latest gemini models have increased hallucinations and now talk back, so double reason not to use them