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Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

Anyone managed to try this yet? https://yiyan.baidu.com/ appears to require a Chinese phone number.

Just tried it. Not sure exactly what model is behind the scenes but it was cringe. I provided specs for a coding task, it told me that the specs are possible but too complex so it just gave me an alternative naive way of doing it. I use LLMs as a tool so I'm trying to be very exact with my requirements and wording, this felt like it was basically negotiating the requirements with me...kinda annoyed me, lol. My suspicion is that it was trained too much on chinese forums and the data was not refined enough.

You get one free question answered without a login. You can dismiss the login prompt which appears after submitting your question and use copy/paste with keyboard shortcuts or browser debug tools to retrieve the full answer (including the part hidden with CSS rules). Either use XPath of '//div[@id="answer_text_id"]//text()' or copy the text/eventstream response for the API call to https://yiyan.baidu.com/eb/chat/conversation/v2 once the SSE session has closed.[1] Clear cookies and site data and you'll get a new session and can keep going.

It can take about 20 seconds to return all tokens so it appears likely the login prompt is there to minimise resource consumption.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Server-sent...

I'm trying to figure out the same thing. They make claums about it being totally free, but everything is in Chinese and you appear to need a Chinese mobile number to register.

"Free" does not mean "available to everyone."

The tweet is in English, which strongly suggests that the product is accessible in English, but then doesn’t appear to be.

That begs the question what the point is of an announcement in English?

Great PR in a national pride kind of way. I can only imagine DeepSeeks PR earlier this year was a huge win for them internally in the country.

America, is this the future you want?

Surely, this is as inevitable as not being able to use Wechat as an American.

The models aren't what worry me anyway. China is going to kick our ass when it comes to AI integration into society and the economy.

Imagine the difficulties faced by America vs China in integrating AI into healthcare.

We are just too worried about winning this AI model sporting event even though the entire concept is flawed and doomed to failure. We actually have to figure out how to use these models for more than how many Rs are in strawberry. That appears to be the actual hard part.

Of course, none of this is helped by having wasted an entire generation of some of America's best minds on javascript programming for obscene profit.

An entire generation is not wasted. The bigger issue is that China has no concern wiping out whole classes of jobs to be replaced by the next iteration and America struggles with keeping those voters happy. Think about things like our lack of dock work automation in favor of keeping some labor unions happy.

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