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Comment by johndhi | Hacker News Reader

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You can see not from clicking on their name, I wouldn’t assume every positive comment about China is a ‘shill’ - there are many people unhappy with our current neo-cold war.

Astroturf/shill accusations are also against the HN ethos. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11257034

I’m American. Just giving some background to the feeling. There’s some discontent with some western communities (localllama) that Chinese developers have been open weighting all of their models while most western models have been closed weights.

Meta seems to have now stepped out of the running despite being the local LLM catalyst. Anthropic has done nothing. IBM's Granite and Microsoft's Phi are both very far behind. AWS doesn't even attempt to compete. Grok failed to make good on their promise. OpenAI only even entered the game yesterday so it's hard to tell if they're actually serious since they released such an overly censored model that isn't really better than Qwen options and at its smallest still requires a decent computer. Google seems to be the only domestic contender on the level of what Chinese companies are doing and they're being very careful to not cannibalize Gemini with Gemma.

Right now though China is dropping huge improvements across the entire spectrum of model sizes with Qwen, Kimi, DeepSeek, GLM, and Yi. We've also got Mistral doing competitive self-hosted models too, but they're French. Local AI tooling is plainly _not_ being driven forwards by the United States.

China has a business model where you can lose money and it doesn't matter. The state's modus operandi is just fund things until the leader changes his mind about it.

This is why the Chinese labs are so open, they don't ever need to make a profit, they just need to make good AI.

Sure, except all of these Chinese labs are attached to large, profitable Chinese tech & finance companies. But yeah, it's all unfair competition.

I don't follow

Xi Jinping has set AI as a national priority. This means that lenders (Chinese party run banks) will "lend" money to AI orgs with no financial strings attached. No business evaluation needed. This is how China does growth, they just fund it in the direction they want without much attention to profitability or returns. It's how you get billion dollar high speed rail lines that transport 50 people a day along the route.

Despite the many capitalist facets of China, it's core operations are still planned communist economy.

That you do not follow is apparent from your comment. I don't think this will be a productive discussion - you're speaking in such broad generalities about provable facts about specific companies (Alibaba, Baidu, etc.) that it is difficult to respond. Take care.

Sure. The US isn't morally any better on this though. VC backed companies and the "get users, figure out profitability later" strategy that have made outside countries unable to compete have been enabled by the US government tweaking interest rates and the supply value of the dollar. And the US backs all sorts of unprofitable things through grants, contracts, and bail outs.

The US government just hasn't yet found a reason to directly pay for a domestic country to release open models. But it's not like we're above that at all.

There isn't really question of morality here, China simply operates different than the US. US companies will need to provide a return to investors and want a secret competitive edge. Chinese companies will need to provide the state with AI, money isn't a concern.

As for why the US gets all the VC love, it's because the US has an extremely friendly business environment. People leave their home countries to start businesses in the US because of it. Europe has done a pretty good job suffocating their tech industry in comparison.

The US government only plays a relatively minor role in this too, because unlike China the US is not a planned economy.

> US government tweaking interest rates

They actually don't do that and, if you're up to speed on current events, Trump is pretty upset about it.

Let's say any country create the most powerful - and thus best - LLMs. They over time infiltrate it with their political will. Over 20-30 years, I'd imagine people asking those LLMs will have their minds' shifted.

But. That's just me, my pessimism-sci-fi scenario.

I think that just as how perplexity had actually created a deepseek(fine-tune?)[1], then there is more and more incentive towards making uncensored models though I am gonna be honest, Kimi K2 isn't that censored but I tried the gguf variant of this model on local pc and it definitely is censored / biased towards china (like taiwan is part of them and so on)

But still, the most recent version of american foss model gpt-oss is just so filled with censorship that its just not worth it in the name of "safety", so to me both are doing censorship but I'd much rather use chinese censorship since its only censored on chinese topics and I mean, I personally wouldn't be ever asking chinese models chinese questions but maybe that's just me.

And even if I would, I would probably ask it on some uncensored, in fact I was actually thinking of creating a fine tune like the perplexity, or just this idea to break chinese censorship.

I also think that some better idea needs to come up with multi modal approach so that censorship could be removed by mixing and matching american and chinese models, I do think it is far from reality but I read a recent comment about harmony which gpt-oss uses and it does look promising I am not sure.

[1]: https://huggingface.co/perplexity-ai/r1-1776

The problem I've had with Chinese models is that when they get confused they revert to Chinese which is just gibberish to me of course. American models revert to English in those situations but that's fine for me.

And models can be abliterated to remove the censorship. I use llama3 that way.

individualized recommendation systems are enough to drive everyone nuts

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