Comment by walrus01
4 hours ago
Interestingly Mistral has been selling GLM5.3 inference hosted in Europe on their own hardware, for those who are OK using a "not developed in Europe" model but run on hardware located in and controlled by a European corporation.
> for those who are OK using a "not developed in Europe" model but run on hardware located in and controlled by a European corporation.
For the record this is also possible in Europe on Privatemode[1] which also gives you enclave-based processing. And access to GLM-5.3 Flash as well as GLM-5.3
[1]https://www.privatemode.ai/
Indeed, I see no difference between a chinese model hosted in Europe vs a Europe-grown model.
You could argue that potentially you can train a backdoor into a foreign-grown model (that has been demonstrated to be possible in toy examples), but I would highly doubt that this would be the case today, given the potential reputational damage if discovered.
Remember Stuxnet? An american worm that was completely benign, travelled on usb drives in hiding, and only activated when it guessed that it's on Iranian plants, and iirc changed very subtly some very specific parameters of operations.
Here, with a chinese model, it would be even simpler - you finetune a model to activate certain operations when it discovers certain environments, but to behave completely normal otherwise. Kind of like a sleeper agent. And with current tech we wouldn't even be able to spot this.
> And with current tech we wouldn't even be able to spot this.
Meanwhile Anthrophic, OpenAI & Co can't even manage to stop their LLMs from hacking into third-party servers until they discover it after the event.
What happened to people's ability to implement basic security architectures like sandboxing etc ?
3 replies →
There was a post on here yesterday about embedding bad behavior in models.
>Any open model whose weights have been edited can carry a backdoor, whether it's a task-specific fine-tune, a merged adapter or an abliterated build
https://projectdiscovery.io/research/how-abliterated-models-...
> you could argue that potentially you can train a backdoor into a foreign-grown model
If we're wearing tinfoil hats then do we know the NSA have not planted stuff in Anthropic and OpenAI anyway ? ;)
I think the Chinese would be happy enough to see OpenAI and Anthropic suffer because people discover open-weights can get you most of the way there for a fraction of the cost.
You don't have to target the end users. Economic impact on the US providers would be sufficient.
The Chinese are also no doubt seeking to play the long game of hoping to (eventually) rebalance the US-centric world order in an Easterly direction.
If I was NSA I 'd create obscure websites that are easy to to parse for crawlers and have poisoned instructions there for ALL LLM's to pick.
Kinda like https://github.com/elder-plinius has been doing but covert and with actually harmful (for targets) instructions.
Didn't we get a submission today about Qwen3-Coder producing more bugs when hinted on the user having different ideology than the Chinese government?
Ok I see it's flagged now, probably fake, but the fact that it's possible does make me feel uneasy about both Chinese and US models.
It was so insignificant, it could be equally described by the non-determinism inherent in the models. And that it reads more like a marketing piece.
That's my read anyhow. It's been flagged. The whole thing is kind of rich, considering the Israeli roots of the company.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50179706
I recall seeing something about that. I don't know of anyone still using such an ancient model when much newer Qwen 3.5-120, 3.6-35B-A3B, 3.8-27B and 3.8-flash-next all exist and score much higher on all conceivable metrics. I would like to see if anyone can replicate the same thing on a 'current' Qwen released in the past 6 months.
1 reply →
> I see no difference between a chinese model hosted in Europe vs a Europe-grown model.
Really? Fascinating. Do you know about Tiananmen Square, the great firewall of China, etc?
DS4 hosted by deepseek used through the API doesn't have a problem talking about tiananmen square and Uyghurs, but it thinks it's Claude when it speaks about it. I'm not sure what it all means. That was on v4-pro before the 4.1 switch, so may or may not be reproducable.
Add: I was surprised by the fact that the LLM itself doesn't know it's identity unless the system prompt mentions it.
> Do you know about Tiananmen Square
People here bringing up the straw clutching argument of "but Tianament Square" is becoming really tiresome.
The fact is a Chinese LLM's lack of knowledge about Chinese politics will not affect 99.99999999999% of users and their workflows.
And for the 0.000000001% who are affected, they don't need an LLM. A quick search of Wikipedia or 5 seconds on Google will suffice.
What the hell has Tiannamen Square got to do with Joe Blogg's vibecoding session ? Absolutely nothing.