ioulaum
Also, Iran isn't as bad as you make it sound. Broadly, it's an okay-ish country.
It would likely have become a liberal country by now if not for the sanctions... Their leadership's lifestyles certainly don't suggest that they want to be living in a country dominated by religion – even if they maintain that for the masses still.
Being under attack makes people more conservative on average.
Iran is much like Israel as a country... Their territory isn't safe, and so they maintain a forward defense strategy that keeps enemies from directly reaching their borders where they are vulnerable.
It's more a result of the international order being primitive, and there being a lack of intelligent leadership on the global level that can establish trust.
Plus, one has to be realistic about the sheer amount of harm the US has caused internationally – and even on Americans in the past (chemical weapon tests? the outrageous number of people in prison?).
Pretending that Iran is somehow especially evil is childish.
It's more that that's also a "human government".
Unfortunately for them, they're not ruled by super geniuses...
Like freezing Russian assets and breaking faith internationally... Gotta know what is not actually worth doing.
They need some Alexander Hamilton like people to teach them the basics that only through establishing trust and predictability can the US be strong and have access to international money at scale.
... The lack of talent among these people is disturbing.
But then, Team Trump is really a bunch of rebels. They have no respect for the US Government or how it functions.
The Democrats recently don't either.
They're basically going to just give up the advantages the US gained after WW2.
Which may just mean that they need to stay focused on self-improvement and job hopping as possible.
A startup of your own still looks fine on your resume.
I imagine some opensource player will try to recreate their model themselves too.
Whereas the biases of human judges can be hard to detect, and even if you could correct one judge, that fix doesn't propagate to other judges with the same flaw.
And... Enable better understanding of context, since unlike human politicians, most LLMs have very board knowledge.
So it should reduce some of the automatic bad decision making that comes from bureaucrats making laws about things they don't (and maybe can't) understand.
And this same RL is also creating improvements in small model performance.
So, more LLMs are about to rise in quality.
Wanting human like causes for problems is how humanity invented gods. So that they could feel more under control by trying to appease the now humanized force.
Of course, if the problem went away after you prayed, that would really just have been luck. Even though it strengthened your belief.
But they are saying that they have low confidence, and that there is no new evidence that changes anything.
They're just changing the way they're biased, because they think that the lab's conditions weren't particularly safe.
But then, we might as well expect that dozens of dangerous viruses should've gotten out.
They are just choosing to believe the lab leak hypothesis now, because they spent more time thinking about the conditions of the labs before Covid started.
...
And it's still low confidence... Since there's no evidence.
Sad stuff, really. Any self respecting person would just not express their opinion in such a situation.
Just about the only value of this new report is that it tells Trump what he wants to hear.
People just assumed that the wet markets were the cause of the problem, because they found them digusting (and wanted an excuse to blame it on the Chinese being evil).
In a less dense population, without many people going to the same hospital... You would just not have noticed Covid much.
Supposedly because they've had more time to think about the conditions of the lab before Covid was released...
But really, nothing has changed except their biases. Nothing has changed on the solid evidence side.
Separately, if there were actual safety issues and stuff was leaking... Then we're incredibly lucky that it was something as tame as Covid, and not one of the more serious kinds of horrors that gain of function research has successfully produced.
The intelligence networks there were weak, and if people were talking about it, they may have assumed wrongly that there was something there.
Politicians hunting for excuses to do what they already want to do though, is definitely a thing.
Obviously, it's not impossible.
But, there were even RNA samples from Covid found in other countries, months before Covid really spread in China.
I imagine the main problem with the superspreader event there was more that enough people ended up in the same hospital, and thus it was easier to identify that Covid was a distinct virus.
If it was crawling around in a less dense population, its spread would've been meh, and the hospitals might not even notice the spike much.
Generally though, China is somewhat better suited to producing pandemics, because they have a larger and more dense population within which a disease can spread.
And more realistically, if it was a lab leak, it was likely some lab technician being careless, or some thing breaking and whoever was responsible, not fixing it quickly enough.
That compute can go to many things.
Even so, if we look at Groq / Cerebras, the fastest LLM inference companies:
They're both based on architectures that are 7nm+, and so architectures that China can produce locally despite the export restrictions.
Ultimately, the export controls are mainly just inconvenience. Not a real blocker.
The Chinese don't need to achieve state of the art chip manufacturing to achieve SOTA AI outcomes.
They just need to make custom silicon specialized for the kinds of AI algorithms they want to scale.
Of course, at scale, that's going to mean that the US should eventually have both lower production costs, and energy use in consumer use of AI models, and that Chinese products will likely be more dependent on the cloud for at least the near future.
The whole strategy seems ultimately meh in a long term sense... Mainly good for building up a sense of mutual enmity and dividing the world ... Which is also going to result in higher cost of living around the world as trade falters.
Sad stuff.
And overall, the controls on sales are being expanded.
The simpler option for them realistically, is not so much that they buy the latest GPUs, but rather that they manage to use them on western cloud services.
The US is looking to track money flows in greater detail to see if funds are ultimately coming from China, but that's some majorly invasive stuff, and not entirely easy to implement on the scale of the planet.
Once you have trained models, inference is almost always less of a hassle.
It's similar to Mixtral having gotten good performance while not having anywhere near OpenAI class money / compute.
It's funny seeing things like US Gov trying to control free speech, while being restricted by the Constitution.
They do still manage via back-channels.
Although I haven't tried to find a Chinese mode myself.
That it's targeted at Chinese abroad is just what I saw from Googling it and reading the SCMP (Singapore) article on it.
The company that made it is also from Singapore (even if it's under Bytedance's umbrella).
They seem to be separate from TikTok. The only thing they have in the app store for example, is some chatbot application.
Separately, the fact that they can translate between languages where they have never seen any translation data in their inputs shows that they have internal models of the world and language, that go beyond what one might expect from a statistical parrot.
They do have world understanding - perhaps limited some by the fact that their input data may not cover a lot of everyday things.