Comment by satvikpendem
1 day ago
Don't worry, they'll just lobby to ban Chinese models instead to keep their token revenues high.
> Compounding the problem, labs in China often release dual-use capable models as open-weight. Once a model is open-weight, safeguards that do exist can be removed, making the model available to any state or non-state actor to use for malicious purposes, including the cyber and CBRN misuse those safeguards were built to prevent.
If you do the math, they don't have a choice. If China captures America's AI market it'll cause a major depression. They'll give it the BYD treatment, though it'll be a lot less effective.
The “you wouldn’t download a car” meme applies here
They'll ban them because (unless run locally or self-hosted) they are just data capture tools for the China.
You dont think CIA and NSA are reading the data Asian and European companies and individuals send to openai and antropic?
If it’s open weight then anyone can run it for you. Presumably someone you trust just as much as US proprietary models.
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Please explain to me how that works. If I download gguf file and run inference with it, how is it collecting and sending data back to China?
This makes no sense, 99% of the people using Chinese models are using them via Western inference providers who are running them and serving them to people over openrouter or whatever. If anyone is stealing your data it would be an American or European inference provider. A model has no ability to send data anywhere.
China bad by default, right?
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China is the worst trading partner in the world. They banned most companies from functioning in their country for decades
Worst indeed, hardly anyone trades with them.
So, have you ever been to China and could hadely found anything familay?
- Oh, they must have been blocked from entering the Chinese market!
But none of that is true. You could see global brands everywhere here — Tesla, Unilever, KFC, Apple, and so on.
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Or have you ever actually done cross-border trade? Or any international business collaboration? If you had, you’d definitely realize that what’s really stopping you is U.S. legislation. At least, that was the case with our former U.S. partner
Have you ever heard forced IP transfer and partnerships?
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> Once a model is open-weight, safeguards that do exist can be removed
Safeguards trained into the model (ie exist in the weights) can’t be removed.
You don't have to remove the safeguards if you can prompt your way around them.
There's a subreddit for people wanting to sex-talk to various models. It just so happens that the same prompt they use to 'jailbreak' SOTA models for sex talks also works if you want to have model write malware, or tell you how to design a highly illegal device.
Search for "heretic"+Gemma/qwen/DeepSeek for examples where exactly this has been done.