Comment by throwaw12
7 days ago
Lets do "who's afraid of US models" version:
* Me, as an individual, because I might not be able to pay price hikes, because my revenue (salary) is much lower than what they want and I can't support my expenses via huge bank loans.
* Again, me as a new entrant to the industry, LLMs are basically pay-to-play games, again related to price hikes, new entrants might not be able to afford paying those prices 24/7 - which you need when learning new things.
* Any non-US company, US can block the models which can disrupt the whole business.
* Even some US companies, for example if you operate in EU and EU somewhat changes their mind and follow the ICC and require you to stop working with Netanyahu (war criminal as per ICC), then following laws in EU, might create trouble to your whole business.
Also me, as someone who lives in Greenland, Canada, Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, etc. China is not threatening to invade, USA is.
you live in all those places??
By this same logic there's nothing to be scared of in regards to Chinese models if you don't live in Taiwan
You might take a different view if you live in Taiwan.
> Any non-US company, US can block the models which can disrupt the whole business.
And read your data, see CLOUD act, PATRIOT act etc. etc.
No longer a theoretical risk in today's US political environment.
Hasn’t that been the assumption since Carnivore? Also we tapped European pols phones back in ‘12, was it? Though it’s not like the Eu are a bunch of innocents either…
It’s not a new thing. Industrial espionage has always been a thing as well. So has bribery (for deals) been a thing especially by euro concerns.
> It’s not a new thing. Industrial espionage has always been a thing as well.
Well sure, except with closed US LLMs you're basically just handing them data on a plate, and paying for the privilege. ;)
Very American really ... monetising industrial espionage.
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Our intelligence services have capabilities, it's not just the US. The Patriot / Cloud Act increase the scope outside of intelligence agencies. I'm of the opinion that for military intelligence there is a legitimate need to have some - black - capability. It should just be highly limited in scope.
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No. Lots of people have never heard of FAA702 (which has been well-documented in mass media) much less Carnivore or ECHELON.
The default email provider for most people in the west is Gmail.
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Also me, as someone who is living in a place that US may drop bombs on because the models may think it is a military target, or even a higher priority target like a girls school.
> Lets do "who's afraid of US models" version
Ah, cultural nuances. The title "Who's Afraid Of Chinese Models" is a riff on "Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf" which itself is a play on the song "Who's Afraid Of The Big Bad Wolf".
The title essentially means that the chinese models are being portrayed as the big bad wolf; but are they really the threat or are american frontier labs afraid of competition and commoditization?
It's also somewhat ironic because the author says that there is something to be feared -that western innovation will become dependent on chinese models, especially for cyber, if the american ones are restricted or unavailable.
I think your second point touches on a bigger concern for small businesses.
US labs have consistently demonstrated their intention to paywall higher intelligence. Eventually the paywall for “hyper-intelligence” will set a bar so high that average small businesses simply won’t be able to afford the bill of what is used by the top corporations to keep themselves at the top. That’s already starting, when it comes to the volumes of tokens top corporations are burning.
This is a feature of the system corporations want to establish and OAI/Anthropic are happy to oblige. 10% of a trillion dollar company is the same as 10% of 1,000,000 million dollar small businesses. Whose hitch would they rather ride, and which size customer easier to obtain to meet their revenue goal?
Not to mention, it would certainly be possible for the EU and other world powers to equally disincentivize use of US labs as a data security risk, since our top models are impossible to run in private lab environments without specialized agreements and there no access to the model weights for auditing. As best as I can tell, AI regulation is a dangerous game that is a hair away from isolationism.
In my opinion, Google is one of the few hopes in this area. There is still a paywall, but I feel like they are the closest thing to a Chinese lab we have (for frontier) in terms of their targets (real business use cases) and they actually have both the infra and already have a pipeline for small businesses into their products; they already have the wide non-AI customer base to leverage unlike Anthropic and OpenAI whose only product requires convincing people to use their (more expensive) AI.
Me as in "Unfortunately, Claude is only available in certain regions right now"
DeepSeek, Kimi, Xiaomi Mimo, Qwen, Minimax, GLM, Hy3 and Ernie are always available, and I can't be happier
in simple terms closed models are rugpull waiting to spring at unsuspecting users, it's like you take all worst components of terminal capitalism (including price cartels), subscriptions relying on almost monopolistic dependency and microsoft/uber models of hugging competition to death to remain only provider and dictate all conditions
For me, the most important factor is:
* All modern AI is a perfect front for harvesting material for processing by NSA/GCHQ.
Given the criminal US' 5-eyes/9-eyes apparatus' atrocious war crimes and human rights records, this is reason enough to eschew American AI 'products'.
I'll use the AI created by the culture that lifts a billion people out of poverty first, not that from the culture that murders children every 15 minutes and lies to itself about it ..
As someone from neither the US nor China, neither are altruistic and both have horrible histories, both meddle in my country’s affairs, and neither have my interests at heart.
China’s got plenty of blood on its hands, pretending otherwise is silly. America does, too. It’s quite easy for me to condemn both their governments and trust neither.
The USA has far more innocent blood on its hands, this century, than any other nation state.
And only nationalist/racists ignore the fact that China has lifted a billion people out of poverty during the same period that the USA and its allies have destroyed countless other sovereign nations and left 36 million refugees from their illegal wars for the world to deal with...
China has a lot, lot better record on human rights than any member state of the criminal 5-eyes/9-eyes countries, which engage in massive human rights violations at atrocious scales every minute of the day.
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