If Chinese LLMs are successfully making people in the west defend China, then I think we have all the evidence we need to explain why they are giving away their models.
The next step of course will be to get people using that ungodly cheap AI on Chinese servers. Which will also be defended because "I would never trust an American Lab".
It's funny how you can look at obscenely overvalued Western AI companies, with capex's that are unsustainable, and along comes a system which pokes a gaping hole in this model, and the response is "Ya, but what do those sneaky Chinese have up their sleeve here?!"
Perhaps the question should instead be "Why are these Western AI companies getting insane valuations on dubious ROI, and how can these Chinese models run on a fraction of the infrastructure?"
Not saying you're doing this specifically, but I'd be careful with thinking that "company" in China means the same as "company" in America (or in the West more generally).
True, "Industrial Policy" [0] is much bigger over in China, and has been for a long time.
Although that might become "was" given the recent shift in US politics, where the Republican party of big-government has been heavily taxing Americans with tariffs [1], nationalizing US companies [2][3], and commanding the manufacture of specific goods [4].
One thing is that many of these Chinese companies have had to do more with less due to technology export restrictions. Doing more with less is not something that the big US AI companies think about much. The Chinese models are apparently much more compute and energy efficient.
>"Ya, but what do those sneaky Chinese have up their sleeve here?!"
I feel like that is way over simplified. I do not trust the American government. I do not trust the Chinese government. As an American, I believe the Chinese government has a longer and broader history of stealing intellectual property and far less checks and balances than the American government. The current American administration will be gone soon and maybe we can get some sanity back at some point. Overall, I trust my data in America more than China and I think that's reasonable. I am not naive. I'm aware of all the problems with my country and am quite vocal about it. In fact, I think it would be naive to think that the Chinese government won't have complete access to everything that goes through a Chinese server.
From what perspective? The American colonies repeatedly and flagrantly ignored foreign property and intellectual rights, e.g. via laws to protect domestic but not foreign authors. Samuel Slater was called Slater the Traitor in Britain for a reason.
That doesn't make any sense. If the cost is training, the cost is compute, not data. Distilling another model means paying for that model, which isn't obviously less expensive than crawling the web and curating a dataset. Regardless of where your data comes from, the training process costs the same.
this is a justification for why one frontier lab would have extremely high spend rates. There is >1 frontier lab though.
More explicitly: if the Chinese can get near-leading performance models at a fraction of the cost by stealing from Anthropic, why doesn't OpenAI? Lord knows they could use the extra cash.
>It's funny how you can look at obscenely overvalued Western AI companies, with capex's that are unsustainable, and along comes a system which pokes a gaping hole in this model, and the response is "Ya, but what do those sneaky Chinese have up their sleeve here?!"
The only way this is funny is if you are completely oblivious to how China usually operates.
> If Chinese LLMs are successfully making people in the west defend China, then I think we have all the evidence we need to explain why they are giving away their models.
Right, and if "The West" wants people to defend them, they better get in on the free action too.
In fact, they have no choice - tokens are soon going to be a commodity, if they aren't already. Most everyone is going to be happy paying 1/20th of the cost for 80% of the value.
Oh, yeah, before I forget, hear the worlds smallest violin, playing for those token suppliers in "The West" whose repeatedly stated goal is to replace human knowledge workers...
I think the next step is for China to start selling Huawei (and other) GPUs around the world, because everyone appreciates the risk of giving either of the two superpowers their data. The US is no longer in a position to pressure other countries to bad imports from Chinese companies.
This is the beginning end of the hyperscaler era, not a shift from US hyperscalers to Chinese hyperscalers. Taking Nvidia's extremely lucrative market is the goal.
Software ecosystem aside, their hardware is inferior to NVDA/TSMC's and will remain so. And even if it wasn't, China just doesn't have the fab capacity to both meet domestic demand and export enough to hurt demand for NVDA.
They're behind, but they're catching up pretty quickly. I wouldn't bet against Chinese companies dominating this market in the medium to long term.
Nvidia could easily end up being the Tesla vs Huawei as BYD.
It’s not like this is a new tactic, china has been very successful at wiping out competition by undercutting them using state subsidies in many sectors of the economy.
As always, the US has a government removing red tape to foster innovation, while China has a regime, unfairly picking winners, to hurt and subvert the West.
this is not an accurate picture of Chinese industrial policy. In fact, you could argue they have the opposite problem. Their industrial policy encourages too many companies to enter a space, where the resulting competition kills off profit margins for whichever companies end up surviving until the end. This is exactly what we end up seeing with extremely cheap Chinese goods.
If china anointed one company per sector, they would have no reason to be so cost competitive globally. There would be no structural cause for Chinese products to outcompete the rest of the world. You can see some of this in the US, where these kinds of anointed companies exist (say e.g. Boeing/other defense contractors, at least post the 90's). They are (famously) not particularly cost competitive. This is also exactly what you'd expect economically.
Please read up on what's really going on inside China when it comes to industrial policy and innovation. Barry Naughton has a nice series of books and papers that might disperse some of your incorrect preconceptions.
How so, with the Snowden leaks we learned the extent of American digital espionage in Europe, the US government puts pressure on Europe to prevent taxation or regulation of American business and even European citizens have become the subject of mistreatment in American airports based on their digital profiles. We can enter China visa free.
Given that you're big on data and don't like emotions, what have the Chinese materially done to us Europeans we ought to care about?
They don't sell weapons to Russia, as Wang Yi said in Brussels, if they'd put their full weight behind Russia the war would be over, this is the middle position for them.
Which, I agree with you btw, I don't like but I can understand rationally. We still buy oil and gas from Russia too. And with 20% of the world's supply casually going offline after America's own 3 day special miltary operation the Chinese would be insane not to.
What one cannot understand rationally to come back to the Snowden era in which Denmark spied on us in Germany on behalf of the US, which is insane to begin with, is being threatened a decade later with annexation of their territory. China is on some fronts a rival, hence the tension around Russia, but the US is as destabilizing and unpredictable for the world as Russia itself now.
Americans truly seem to have no concept that they're in the middle of their own post-Soviet meltdown and look like a rogue state to the world now, which makes China which is no saint more and more attractive simply by being a source of order.
It's hard to call either side good. It can be argued that the side which had the highest powers and oligarchs implicated in Epstein files, and which has also threatened attacks on European nations, isn't the better option. Also the nation which actively funds the war in middle-east.
If only the US was a little bit more like China, nobody would ever know about the Epstein files.
You think China doesn't get its hands dirty because of some moral superiority? The country is utterly brutal towards its own citizens, what makes you think that the lack of warmongering is anything but inability?
Compel? I am confused, all data in China is held in datacentres which the state has full access to, that is the terms of their operation and why some big tech US companies didn't want to operate in China. They don't need to "compel" anyone, the CCP has people at every large company supervising employees, and they already have full access to your data.
I am always completely baffled by these comments that not only get basic facts wrong but appear unable to conceive of a situation where the everything is subordinate to the state.
There is no negotiation, there is no due process, you give access to everything before you start or you can't operate.
Is it so different in the US? These are just the surveillance we know about, and they're not openly telling us about these, they're actively fighting public knowledge of such programs:
Isn't this essentially true in the US too though? The feds can show up at your data center with a National Security Letter and demand access at gunpoint. And you have to give it to them, because guns, and you can't ever tell anyone about it because that's what it says in the National Security Letter and also because guns.
Your reply already shows the difference. In US you have the default expectation of privacy, until the feds get their eyes on you. Meanwhile in China the default expectation is no privacy, exactly as OP argued.
This system in action is best demonstrated during the lock-down period of COVID, when any random dude who contracted the virus would immediately have their personal life for the previous week/month published nationwide to the hour, and those who have overlap will immediately get a 14 day lock-down at home.
I have not seen surveillance done with such ease and breath elsewhere. And local PD already have access to such info, and there are scandals where police sell such info for profit.
You absolutely should remember the Chinese war with the first of those; if you have trouble, a good way to remind yourself is that it was not long after the US one.
Yeah, so getting 1 out of 10 he mentioned, even if it's their direct neighbor (where disputes happen for all countries), ain't bad! This absolutely means they're the same /s
Tibet, Manchuria, it should be somewhat obvious that a nation that is as ethnically diverse as China was not a nation borne out of lots of different people deciding simultaneously that they would like to create a country together.
What is modern China has only existed for 100 years or so. When the country collapsed there were ethnic divisions that were erased after the country was unified.
The hallmark of successful ethnic cleansing is people claiming that there were never any wars, that things were always this way. The same is true of Kaliningrad, the most German city, centuries of history as a leading nation within Germany and the HRE, now a completely Russian city. It is only in the West that you see any narrative around division, in places like China or Russia history is erased (and how could it be any other way, the cornerstone of Chinese politics is one nation, one people...there is no political value in this narrative in Western countries).
Could you give a recent example? Because your example is as pertinent as the overthrowing of Guatemala's democratically elected President in 1954 by the CIA.
There's nothing wrong with the US buying greenland, which has been done for territories around the world?
The US has a long history of protecting individual freedoms, China does not. There's an irony that you're aware of the misgivings of the US because we have free speech protections. You're probably less aware of the misgivings of the EU because they regularly arrest citizens for speech, and no awareness of the issues with China because they'll just disappear journalists in the night.
Since the late 60s there has been explicit federal legislation. I assume you meant this as a rhetorical question but there is a definite answer because the US is a transparent system. Law is passed, the courts enforce.
The fact that you are unable to answer this question about China where it is often unclear why certain people are being targeted should demonstrate how big the gap is. For example, when Xi's first corruption crackdown happened, it turned out that it was being orchestrated in part by someone in their 90s who had left front-line politics twenty years ago (and much of why that happened is unclear, we are only just learning about things that happened in Chinese politics multiple decades ago so it will be a while before we know...we do know that Xi was then able to make unilateral sweeping changes to his own role shortly after that broke every convention of the last 5 decades)...it is difficult to compare this to anything that happens in any other political system. In China, you find out someone has been executed for reasons that are obviously not explicit months after it has happened.
It is genuinely quite difficult to compare to anything else. 6 people meet in a room, they have almost all the power, and maybe you will read about what they might have said 4 decades later in a book...that will never be published in China.
The inability to conceive of a country where these things would happen and you would have no idea that it had ever happened...and, perhaps more importantly, wouldn't care that you didn't know.
I think too many people are conflating Chinese providers with Chinese models - you can easily have Chinese models safely (well, relatively safely, I guess) hosted on US or EU infrastructure.
Case in point, Microsoft just announced it is toying with the idea of using DeepSeek as a cheaper model tier in CoPilot. They are hosting the model themselves.
Exactly this. For some reason this is constantly being overlooked/confused. It is very possible to deploy these models inside your own VPC on the big cloud providers and have it be completely secure. I would argue that is even more secure than trusting a model provider’s native API as your traffic is not staying inside your own controlled cloud environment.
I was reading the threads about local AI closely yesterday. Some people seem happy with it.
If I had the cash, I'd spend 6-10k on a strix halo with 128 GB and run it local with no internet connection. I think the Framework desktop is sold out but there were others seem to be still available.
Not OP, but IMO the Chinese are waging economic warfare by "commodifying the competition". US VC's and equity are massively invested in AI being very very profitable and as soon as it's not that becomes garbage debt on a balance sheet, and a lot of it. When money is invested it's expected to make a return. When a few people make bad investments they lose their bag, when many many people all make the same bad investment, you get a nasty recession. When the US goes into recession China is more emboldened to pursue their agenda because policy makers are distracted by shoring up support at home and not as interested in expanding their power abroad.
Free market economics is constant warfare. It's called competition, and if you're really doing free market economics, you don't get to shut down the market every time you're bad at it.
I'm confused. China has been in a fairly bad recession the last ~2 years (their housing bubble popping). Why are we assuming that recessions can only happen in the US?
I'm also confused how China managed to convince so many US VC's to spend an insane amount on a technology with "no moat". China exporting cheap AI hurts American hyperscalars. But it doesn't induce the behavior in American hyperscalars that causes them to be vulnerable to cheap AI. It seems kind of patronizing to point the finger at China, rather than acknowledge the American (potential) misallocation of resources.
That sounds like a problem for the idiots invested in this garbage and who cut foolish sweetheart debt deals with the hyper-scalers. That's mostly rich people, because they haven't yet found a way to offload their bags onto retail (though they're certainly trying).
Not sure I follow your point, are you confusing espionage with IP theft? The victims are entirely different in each case, I am sure china would not restrict itself to corporate espionage.
Soft power primarily (see my original comment),and less data for western labs to train on, less money for western labs to have.
The state can use their AI as a tool to bolster their standing, which is working well. Chinese AI labs don't have to worry about making money or affording more compute. The state will (and does) give them whatever they need.
Because the US is a democracy and there is blowback for pissing off the public. So allocating hundred of billions of taxpayer money to AI would be enormously unpopular. We have private markets that can spend their money however they chose.
China just has the state with one leader than thats it.
Not who you are replying to, nor do I agree with their take (no sign of irony, complete lack of self awareness, and just blatantly xenophobic. not suprised by it either). but they did already address this:
> it's called soft power, look at endless glazing, it works
So people in countries adversarial to the US, or even demographics at risk domestically like illegal migrants have nothing to worry about dumping their info OpenAI or Anthropic servers? But the Chinese are going to spy on people using open weight models running on private or third party servers? Do you hear yourself? Do you have any grasp of theory of mind at all? Is your vision of Chinese "ethnonationalism" white people picking cotton? Is that what you are afraid of?
The untold capital and effort, the disciplined, complex long game operation, all to get 10 million people a second asking "are there timezones in space?" or "excel bar chart colors?" or "do you think I'm beautiful?"
It's hard to truly grasp the enormity of the evil, really.
The next step of course will be to get people using that ungodly cheap AI on Chinese servers. Which will also be defended because "I would never trust an American Lab".