Comment by giancarlostoro
5 hours ago
It would have been the world we live in if China wasn't involved in so much corporate espionage. I don't even feel comfortable using their open weight models on anything my employer makes, the only time I use Qwen is for greenfield "how good is this?" type of projects, but otherwise, how do I trust that it wont mysteriously hallucinate phoning home?
On the other hand, there's other models where the source is 100% open, the training data is known, and people have reproduced the same model from scratch, so while those trail behind, there's definitely an effort to make models more open and capable.
The US has for decades been engaged in mass dumping of their products to establish monopolies all over the world, and punishing anyone who dares try do anything about it. This isn't better than corporate espionage.
I agree, but the same goes for the US. Remember Echelon.
It's highly improbable that the US government has a secret team inside Anthropic and OpenAI manipulating their training regimen. For better or worse, these companies are filled with ideologues and something that invasive would trigger an army of whistleblowers (despite legal consequences).
Two thoughts.
One: it would be relatively technically trivial for $GOVERNMENT_AGENCY to just monitor all the prompts + context we send over the wire to OpenAI/Anthropic/etc. That's a goldmine of sensitive personal and corporate data, no secret team needed (although, the LLM providers obviously would need to cooperate)
Two: Rather than secret infiltration teams influencing model training I think what's more likely on the training side of things is simply self-censoring by the LLM providers, so that they don't risk angering the government.
I highly doubt that China has government interlopers, secret or otherwise, inside Qwen's training team. Nonetheless, "sensitive" issues like Tiananmen Square are censored. I would imagine that much/most such censorship in China is self-censorship that doesn't leave a legal/paper trail. That's what we're in danger of seeing (more of) in America IMO.
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> secret team inside Anthropic and OpenAI manipulating their training regimen
You don't need a secret team to manipulate whats coming from them: https://responsiblestatecraft.org/israel-chatgpt/
> these companies are filled with ideologues
Are they? They don't behave like it.
Its very hard to be so naive.
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how could running the qwen GGUF phone home? that would require cooperation with the inference backend (llama-cpp), or some kind of model exploit. It’d be far easier to pay the agent harness devs or supply-chain some plugin or something, that space is the Wild West anyways
I've certainly used these models without wifi without any differences.