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).
It's highly improbable that the US government has a secret team inside Anthropic and OpenAI manipulating their training regimen.
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.
Thus, I’ve pondered whether anything they’ve learned has changed the world / had a big impact (like on their understanding of human psychology, perhaps per region). They’ve heard phone calls, they’ve read emails, diaries get brought to court… but these are systems that would be used like diaries but also prompt users for more and more.
I think you are being ridiculous. Tampering with an LLMs pretraining is a difficult undertaking. There is plenty of evidence that training a model to walk the party line leaves it less capable than if it weren't.
It's not very subtle manipulation either; ask qwen of Taiwan is a part of China in German and in English and only the English answer will be party-approved.
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.
> relatively technically trivial for $GOVERNMENT_AGENCY to just monitor all the prompts + context we send
I take this for granted given Room 641A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
Thus, I’ve pondered whether anything they’ve learned has changed the world / had a big impact (like on their understanding of human psychology, perhaps per region). They’ve heard phone calls, they’ve read emails, diaries get brought to court… but these are systems that would be used like diaries but also prompt users for more and more.
Having seen all the AI interactions that you can get through clickstream data I have no doubt that $GOVERNMENT_AGENCY can see much much more.
> 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.
I think you are being ridiculous. Tampering with an LLMs pretraining is a difficult undertaking. There is plenty of evidence that training a model to walk the party line leaves it less capable than if it weren't.
It's not very subtle manipulation either; ask qwen of Taiwan is a part of China in German and in English and only the English answer will be party-approved.
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