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!
Eliezer Yudkowsky has made this argument explicitly, substituting himself for Anthropic.
I've seen all of the parent's points made seriously over the last few weeks by various folks with AI hysteria.
Truly we must protect these moral and ethical visionaries.
From my perspective
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?
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.
"You're not gonna tell me Chinese are smarter, are you?" No I'm not, but I will say culture does play a massive role, China was not a bunch of roaming tribes living off the land. Turn the clock back a couple of hundred years and it would be peak civilisation. China was literally thousands and thousands of years ahead of somewhere like North Sentinel island.
Calling China a developing country is actually pretty absurd, it's much more like a rebuilding country. GDP was the only undeveloped part because the communist party was terrible at running the economy. Art, science, poetry, fashion, literature, philosophy, culinary arts it was all present and pretty cutting edge up until the communist party ruined things.
It's the same reason Japan, German and the UK bounced back after WW2 except instead of it being war ( Japanese invasion and Chinese civil war aside ) it was self inflicted.
Also I don't think China has escaped the middle income trap. China to this day has horrible wealth inequality and pretty bad social mobility. I actually think this is an intentional strategy they have an underclass of cheap workers for a reason, the government doesn't force a high minimum wage for a reason. Then they have a rich upper class that gets to study in the west and buy a Porsche something that is completely unreachable for the rest of the country.
You are really, really overselling the state of the late Qing and the Republican era. My wife's grandparents are older than the PRC, and things pre-communism were not as you describe, to put it lightly.
> I actually think this is an intentional strategy
I think you need to look into why it's the poor rural population and not the elite urbanites that overwhelmingly support the communist party.
You can actually do it. If you don't live in the US, you can probably visit visa free tomorrow and just talk to a bunch of rural elderlies to test your hypotheses.
I'm not making the argument China was more advanced than the British Empire. I'm saying there is an ocean of difference between a country with it's own writing system and taxation, and a country that does not. Not everyone has a particle accelerator in there backyard but there is institutional knowledge baked into the society.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minggatu
This is a real person that existed, they were not banging rocks together they were doing sophisticated mathematics, I'm overstating anything. It's not my description of China these are historical facts. One the communist party would very like people to forget because it doesn't suit their narrative. They failed with their planned economy and they persecuted their scientists and scholars for being part of the wrong class. They actively caused a regression where millions died from their incompetence. Credit where credit is due they have since corrected course to some extent.
And no I can't find out what the communist party is thinking by talking to old people in rural China. One they don't know, two most Chinese people are extremely Cagey about what they think, you need to know them for years until they trust you enough to talk about it if you are Chinese and even longer if you are not.
If your wife is Chinese it might do you some good to read up on what a primary source is and then go read some Chinese History.
After 100 years of disaster, war and poverty, people needed time to figure out how to govern well, things didn't just happen and kumabaya with "freedom". If you think the Great Famine was uniquely bad, you should compare with at all the famines during late Qing and Republic.
When western allies gave Qindgao to Japan, completely violating any earlier agreements with the Republic, it enraged the population so much that support for the communists spiked. I find things really puzzling... the west helped create the communists' popularity, and when things suited the west geopolitically they would cast the communists as the good guys. Now that the west feels threathened, people happily forget the parts of history that don't suit them, and cherry-pick other parts to create a distorted narrative. Where's the intellectual honesty that they taught me at school and is supposed to be the heart of Enlightened ("western") values? Voltaire would be rolling in his grave.
We are talking about open source ai models working really well for the people of the world
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.
(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.)
Funny that you came to this conclusion and then posted the comment anyway.
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.
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.
- 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.