Comment by anon373839

11 hours ago

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.

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anon373839

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applicative  10 hours ago

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.

  • anon373839  9 hours ago

    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.

    • applicative  9 hours ago

      "Dangers" may indeed be hyped up for marketing purposes or domestic regulatory-capture motives. But as Xi stated, they will become real.

      It is just a question of being unaffected by the motives of the speakers, which is what adults learn to do.

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