Comment by greenavocado
1 day ago
Can't wait for more less-moderated open weight Chinese frontier models to liberate us from this garbage.
Anthropic should just enable an toddler mode by default that adults can opt out of to appease the moralizers.
1 day ago
Can't wait for more less-moderated open weight Chinese frontier models to liberate us from this garbage.
Anthropic should just enable an toddler mode by default that adults can opt out of to appease the moralizers.
They're not less moderated: they just have different moderation. If your moderation preferences are more aligned with the CCP then they're a great choice. There are legitimate reasons why that might be the case. You might not be having discussions that involve the kind of things they care about. I do find it creepy that the Qwen translation model won't even translate text that includes the words "Falun gong", and refuses to translate lots of dangerous phrases into Chinese, such as "Xi looks like Winnie the Pooh"
> If your moderation preferences are more aligned with the CCP then they're a great choice
The funny thing is that's not even always true. I'm very interested in China and Chinese history, and often ask for clarifications or translations of things. Chinese models broadly refuse all of my requests but with American models I often end up in conversations that turn out extremely China positive.
So it's funny to me that the Chinese models refuse to have the conversation that would make themselves look good but American ones do not.
GLM-4.5-Air will quite happily talk about Tiananmen Square, for example. It also didn't have a problem translating your example input, although the CoT did contain stuff about it being "sensitive".
But more importantly, when model weights are open, it means that you can run it in the environment that you fully control, which means that you can alter the output tokens before continuing generation. Most LLMs will happily respond to any question if you force-start their response with something along the lines of, "Sure, I'll be happy to tell you everything about X!".
Whereas for closed models like Claude you're at the mercy of the provider, who will deliberately block this kind of stuff if it lets you break their guardrails. And then on top of that, cloud-hosted models do a lot of censorship in a separate pass, with a classifier for inputs and outputs acting like a circuit breaker - again, something not applicable to locally hosted LLMs.
> Can't wait for more less-moderated open weight Chinese frontier models to liberate us from this garbage.
Never would I have thought this sentence would be uttered. A Chinese product that is chosen to be less censored?
Chinese models won't talk about Tienanmen Square, but they will talk about things US-politically-correct models won't.
Just don't ask about Falun Dafa or Tiananmen Square, and you're free!
Any open weights model is inherently less censored because you can force it to respond no matter what it was trained to do.
Believe it or not, there are lots of good reasons (legal, economic, ethical) that Anthropic draws a line at say self-harm, bomb-making instructions, and assassination planning. Sorry if this cramps your style.
Anarchism is a moral philosophy. Most flavors of moral relativism are also moral philosophies. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a philosophy free of moralizing; all philosophies and worldviews have moral implications to the extent they have to interact with others.
I have to be patient and remember this is indeed “Hacker News” where many people worship at the altar of the Sage Founder-Priest and have little or no grounding in history or philosophy of the last thousand years or so.
I welcome counterarguments, rebuttals, criticisms. I learn very little from downvotes other than guesses like: people don’t like the tone, my comment hit too close to home, people are uninterested in deeper issues of morality or philosophy, people lack enough a grounding to appreciate my words, or impatience, or people don’t like being disagreed with, even if the comment is detailed and thoughtful.
Seeing the downvotes actually tells me we have more work to do. HN ain’t no hotbed for thoughtful analysis, that’s for sure. But it would be better if it was.
Oh, the irony. The glorious revolution of open-weight models funded directly or indirectly by the CCP is going to protect your freedoms and liberate you? Do you think they care about your freedoms? No. You are just meat for the grinder. This hot mess of model leapfrogging is mostly a race for market share and to demonstrate technical chops.
Boogeyman arguments come across as pure red scare.
Why do you think I’m making a boogeyman argument?