Comment by fluffybucktsnek

7 days ago

Technically, there's a risk of abliteratted model leaking data to external third party: https://projectdiscovery.io/research/how-abliterated-models-...

This problem is not unique to running Chinese models.

  • Indeed, but Chinese AI model companiea are harder to held accountable by the US than US companies, so there's some sense for the US to prefer national models over international ones.

    • A Chinese company has less incentive to use US customer's data than a US company does. Does a Chinese company have an incentive to steal national secrets or cause disruption? 100%. But any firm or project that has national secrets should be vetting everything and using in-house software anyway. And if not, then if I were China I'd be trying to breach the makers of the software (in this case Anthropic,OpenAi,etc).

      For the average person, China doesn't care about you or me. For a US company, US citizens are their gold mine.

      If anything, the competition from a Chinese company will reduce a US company's possible profits. That's the threat. That's why Chinese EVs are banned in the US and why Chinese LLMs are next.

      Just because something is made in China does not make it a threat to the US. The US trades all sorts of goods, produce, etc with China. The traded goods can be poisoned at any time. At what cost? Well we wouldn't be able to trade anymore. And that hurts both sides. But once a foreign nation does something better than a US firm, the US will put up a ban to protect its own stock market. This isn't new.

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    • If the US had comparable open models as the chinese ones, I would love to see more investment into them. But instead our government is operating a lot more in line with how individuals who stand to profit from the private frontier models would operate...

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    • > are harder to held accountable

      Well, that is not an issue. The US companies that hacked other seem to not be prosecuted at all.

      Also, no state attorney doesn't seem to prosecute them on the large scale intellectual theft. Instead content creators like movie companies or the kids book author that made the Grüffelo need to start one-after-the-other civil claims onto them.

      So US companies in the LLM area can be ruthlessly criminal. No one holds them accountable.

      There are rumors that they stole chat logs from mathemiticians running problems through them for their own math findings. Again, no one holds them accountable.

      The "hold accountable" is IMHO just CEO speach: fluff and empty air, but nothing behind it. If my opinion is true, then it doesn't matter if I can NOT hold an european company, a US company, or a chinese company accountable.

      Also, currently the US is more and more aggresive towards other countries. Haven't heard of China raising tariffs for no reason at all, but random amounts. Or bullying e.g. european companies if they want to control the the market might (and abuse of it, see e.g. their uncontractual price raises or what they did to Ukraine --- with Starlink terminals payed for by european countries!).

      China is no one friends ... don't get me wrong. But it isn't as vile as the USA currently is.

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