Comment by applicative
11 hours ago
Xi going to shut down open-weighting of them in a matter of months. No one seriously doubts this. They will be too powerful and they will be gone.
11 hours ago
Xi going to shut down open-weighting of them in a matter of months. No one seriously doubts this. They will be too powerful and they will be gone.
He explicitly said he wants open weight models at his recent speech at an AI conference in Shanghai: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48970449#48970784
The Chinese equivalent of the expression 'open weights' appears nowhere in this talk. You believed the Western press. Chinese AIs are not typically open. The most important by far is Bytedance.
The second China shuts down open weights is the second they lose the AI race. Nobody is going to use Chinese models if they're closed, besides hobbyists who don't have anything they care about getting stolen.
What would the benefit of this be? If China stops open weights, US labs still have the intelligence frontier. Maybe once Chinese models have speed, cost, and intelligence beat but right now they don't.
Undermining out entire economy by subsidizing the release of DIY versions of our main economic drive sounds like a huge win for China.
> Maybe once Chinese models have speed, cost, and intelligence beat but right now they don't.
Yes this is why I referred to 'months' and was downvoted by people who can't distinguish their politics from reality. You are restating exactly the text you are criticizing.
This is the nature of mechanical parrotlike repetition of propaganda:
a) You can have 'frontier' models with closed weights. Your sentence is basically a contraction within itself, again, the weight of ideology.
b) No one actually knows whether or not the closed weights of Bytedance are beyond all existing frontiers. Again the weight of ideology blinds you to the fact that the real 800 lb gorilla of Chinese Ai is more closed than Anthropic.
The latest ByteDance Seed model is behind Opus 4.6 in performance. It’s not even in the conversation atm.
The parent made a totally coherent commment that China closing off their open weight models would cede the frontier (and majority of AI users worldwide) to the USA. Nothing you said counters that point.
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If they did have a super powerful secret AI why would avoid:
1. Selling access to the US? 2. Ship more and better software? 3. Talk about it publicly?
If you had a secret AI better than anything currently available the mere mention of this would crater the US tech investment sentiment.
They could even host these Chinese models through AWS and sell at-cost inference on Bedrock and obliterate the US model companies.
Reuters was reporting that rumor. And then Xi made a public appearance at a conference in Shanghai where he said the opposite of that rumor.
No in that very speech Xi stated explicitly what amounted to: 'of course when we get a Mythos, it will be a state secret'.
In fact the overwhelming weight of AI use in China, the chatgpt so to say, is Bytedance's AI which is absolutely closed and uniquely opaque.
The press treatment of these matters was no good and they are slowly walking it back, e.g. NYT yesterday finally actually read the speech.
Do you have a source for that? The NYT article does not quote Xi making that statement, and I can't find a source for that. In fact, Xi delivered veiled criticism of the security posturing the US has done:
> We should put in place laws and regulations, technological monitoring, early warning and emergency response systems in order to strengthen the line of security, prevent abuses and malicious use, and ensure that AI is always under human control. In the meantime, we should jointly oppose overstretching the national security concept in the field of AI and placing one country’s security over that of others.
There was a blog post by a state-linked broadcaster cited in the NYT piece:
> “China supports openness, but this does not mean it advocates for the unconditional proliferation of all capabilities,” the blog said.
The article also quoted an American journalist:
> “If these models do reach those dangerous capabilities, they are not going to let it be a free-for-all in terms of releasing them," Mr. Sheehan said.
But a distinction has to be drawn between real dangers (which many people believe LLMs have not actually shown, to date) versus "dangers" hyped up marketing purposes or domestic regulatory-capture motives. Presumably the Chinese government is less interested in the latter.
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He just straight up did not say that or anything similar to that.
He literally just announced WAICO to make a framework to allow for open source LLMs for disadvantaged countries for the foreseeable future
We can only wait to see if this is true. Another possibility could be that it was an answer to USA's government considering a ban on chinese models. In this way, he fueled the discussion around the importance of open weight models.
Xi actually said that models of the strength to pose security issues will be permanent state secrets -- in the same speech that the first western takes translated as actually using the words 'open weights' which of course nowhere appeared. Now: when will "models of the strength to pose security issues" appear? Maybe my inference 'months' is wrong, but they seem to be advancing rapidly.
The administration blather about banning open weights is characteristically confused. Xi has already stated (what is obvious) that he will ban security-endangering weights and keep them a state secret.
What makes you state this?
Decades of xenophobic propaganda
No, reading Xi's speech. They aren't going to give their Mythos - presumably a few months away - to the Sinaloa cartel or Uighur hackers or the US military or etc etc
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Wow! Amazing observation! Wait, do you think there could have been any pro Chinese propaganda? Perhaps even some taking place at the present time? I think it could be possible?
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China bad
I'm a) quoting Xi's speech and b) projecting rapid China development to Mythos level. Either you think China will never get to 'Mythos level' because you think China bad; or you think they will release the weights, because you think China bad. Its incredible the weight of ideology over facts in this discourse
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Me.
That isn't the Chinese way. They are much more focused on undermine and extinguish. Just look at the European car industry- on its way to being non-existent after the market was flooded, bye bye manufacturing base. Undercut the US AI providers and wait them out, they will go private after they have a stranglehold
They're not even really undercutting the US right now. They are releasing their models for free. There's plenty of US businesses who's entire existence is hosting these open source models that they didn't pay any Chinese company a single dime for. If anything they're helping create a less centralized and healthier American market
> Undercut the US AI providers and wait them out
You could have said the same of linux - that it extinguished proprietary OSs at least for server usecases.
true, but the motivations of OSS contributors are benign (overall)
Even Xi's speech was as paranoid as Dario Amodei about the possibility of Chinese AI achieving something at the level of say Mythos. If you seriously believe such a thing will be on Hugging Face I really don't know what to say.
DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731 scores higher than Fable 5 on Terminal-Bench, and Fable 5 is Mythos, correct?
There is already something on HuggingFace at the level of Mythos. It's called Kimi K3 and it's running laps around Opus5, Fable5, and Sol56 at cybersecurity.
It's so good that the US government is rushing to ban all Chinese models as fast as they can.
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It is true. And only Chinese Han people can continue work on what is already released. But they will be forbidden. /s
Sarcasm aside - if the community can't get their shit together to continue improving what is currently public, well - we don't deserve free stuff and open weights.