Comment by matheusmoreira

5 days ago

No. The "good guys" are the ones who provide permanent value: open weight models, hardware we can afford, purchase and own. The good guys offer sovereignty.

The "you'll buy intelligence from us on a meter" rent seekers are technofeudalists. Just a bunch of "you'll own nothing and you'll be happy" oligarchs who must be resisted at all costs. Anthropic had a reputation for ethics at first but it quickly became clear it was just like OpenAI but with a patronizing attitude.

The fact China is releasing open weight models will never not be amusing. I expected better from the USA.

So... it IS China, not just companies in China. And why would the CCP want to give out open weights, hmm? Because they are all kindness and love? No. It is just their approach to counter dominance in the space by Western frontier labs. No need to make moral attributions..it is everything, and I mean everything, about Great Power Competition.

  • Their self serving reasons are irrelevant. The results can be moral even if the players aren't. The key is to somehow prevent any one of them from dominating completely so we can play them off one another and keep reaping the rewards. If China's undermining efforts achieves that, so be it. The fact we're getting permanent access to powerful models as a result is nothing short of awesome.

    In order for us to win, neither China nor the US can win. The ideal situation is the one where they exhaust themselves trying while we benefit by picking up the pieces.

    • "Their self serving reasons are irrelevant" - I disagree, we have no idea what kind of filtering or injection of BS has been done to this model.

      When you outsource your thinking, you have to be extremely careful that the model doing your thinking is acting in good faith. I have no idea what the CCP may have put into this thing. Not that the US based models aren't suspect, but the CCP certainly doesn't engender trust here. That said, I still use them, but I'm under no illusions that "their self serving reasons are irrelevant".

  • That is literally the point of world trade buddy... lmao

    Its just funny how there is some scary boogeyman around China. You do realise the idiotic west gave china everything - from know-how, techniques to IP by benefitting from lower costs of production?

    What they are doing is pretty fair game.

    • No,it's not just like world trade. It's world trade within strategic good, assets, and, capabilities relevant to national security...e.g. critical minerals, high end chips, and artificial intelligence, and others. Not all world trade is as central to national security, and is only relevant to national security in aggregate. I do agree that the U.S. made bad choices in terms of over-reliance on Chinese supply chains. Too much credence was given to the idea that capitalism would democratize China in the absence of other supporting factors/culture.

The purpose is the destabilization and discrediting of democracy. The Beijing state, in concert with Putin and ex-Khamenei, has no other purpose but to prove there is no democratic alternative. Sure, it turns out you get free things as e.g. one got free RT America.

  • > destabilization and discrediting of democracy

    Democracies don't need any help whatsoever in that area, they're more than happy to do that to themselves on a daily basis.

  • > The purpose is the destabilization and discrediting of democracy.

    Unless they made US elect trump it's hard to see how they might be damaging democracy more than the democracy damages itself.