We've entered a pretty adversarial era, and we know there are unexpected attack vectors available in frontier models. Just because you an inspect the weights doesn't mean you can derive the behavior.
I suspect the CCP would ban US models if they didn't need to distill them to make their own.
If the CCP was so advanced that they can implement these attacks in models released as .safetensors, I would assume that the government can pay multiple western frontier labs can show how and where this is done and publish it for anyone to reproduce in a sandbox.
In reality, the attack is much simpler: flood the market with genuine competition so that neutral parties (and their own corporations and that of their allies and potential allies) never have to be enslaved by the US corporations and hence they cannot be forced to join the US in sanctioning China.
This is much less risky as a strategy (imagine how bad getting caught doing the other thing would be) and works way better.
> I suspect the CCP would ban US models if they didn't need to distill them to make their own.
I'm pretty sure they do, at least officially. But obviously the distillation and API proxies used by Chinese uses are unofficially tolerated and even exploited.
You're right, you can't run them in China, all models in China need to be vetted and approved by their cyberspace authority. But it's more of a "businesses cannot use them to provide services" kind of thing
If that's truly your concern you should ban like 90% of anything containing any kind of electronic device because they're all either made in or transit via China at some point
My reading of the comment was that the "we" who have entered an adversarial world means the entire world, and the "we" who know models can be backdoored means people who have been paying attention to published research on the topic. An adversarial world doesn't care how much you individually are interested in conflict, except to the extent that you might be an easy mark.
To stay at the top you need to keep fighting. Lots of US americans believe that even if they are not benefiting anymore from being the richest country in the world.
"We" is everyone. If you've been paying attention, geopolitical cooperation is trending down, and competition is trending up. Sticking your head in the sand is not a defense against people who consider you a target.
We, meaning people who are informed to some reasonable minimum about this technology, are also aware that you can't just glance at some weights and be like "yep, looks safe". Nobody can claim to do that yet.
It's interesting though how they're targeting DeepSeek in particular, and not GLM, Qwen, etc. Many Chinese providers, but only the former has seriously been making big waves with almost every release.
That's not why.
We've entered a pretty adversarial era, and we know there are unexpected attack vectors available in frontier models. Just because you an inspect the weights doesn't mean you can derive the behavior.
I suspect the CCP would ban US models if they didn't need to distill them to make their own.
If the CCP was so advanced that they can implement these attacks in models released as .safetensors, I would assume that the government can pay multiple western frontier labs can show how and where this is done and publish it for anyone to reproduce in a sandbox.
In reality, the attack is much simpler: flood the market with genuine competition so that neutral parties (and their own corporations and that of their allies and potential allies) never have to be enslaved by the US corporations and hence they cannot be forced to join the US in sanctioning China.
This is much less risky as a strategy (imagine how bad getting caught doing the other thing would be) and works way better.
> I suspect the CCP would ban US models if they didn't need to distill them to make their own.
I'm pretty sure they do, at least officially. But obviously the distillation and API proxies used by Chinese uses are unofficially tolerated and even exploited.
You're right, you can't run them in China, all models in China need to be vetted and approved by their cyberspace authority. But it's more of a "businesses cannot use them to provide services" kind of thing
If that's truly your concern you should ban like 90% of anything containing any kind of electronic device because they're all either made in or transit via China at some point
I'm sorry, but that's silly. It's way easier to determine compliance for hardware than it is for a model, at least with current tech.
The US and Europe DO ban China-manufactured hardware that is detected to do illegal things, though.
who is we? are you working for the government? this fucking obsession you people having with 'fighting the adversary' is ridiculous
My reading of the comment was that the "we" who have entered an adversarial world means the entire world, and the "we" who know models can be backdoored means people who have been paying attention to published research on the topic. An adversarial world doesn't care how much you individually are interested in conflict, except to the extent that you might be an easy mark.
To stay at the top you need to keep fighting. Lots of US americans believe that even if they are not benefiting anymore from being the richest country in the world.
"We" is everyone. If you've been paying attention, geopolitical cooperation is trending down, and competition is trending up. Sticking your head in the sand is not a defense against people who consider you a target.
We, meaning people who are informed to some reasonable minimum about this technology, are also aware that you can't just glance at some weights and be like "yep, looks safe". Nobody can claim to do that yet.
> That's not why.
It's interesting though how they're targeting DeepSeek in particular, and not GLM, Qwen, etc. Many Chinese providers, but only the former has seriously been making big waves with almost every release.