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straydusk

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Not defending anyone, but by that logic, you shouldn’t be using any Chinese models either.

Yes, and do you believe they are?

Why is that? Does Chinese company really equal Chinese government?

Basically yes. China doesn't have a democracy, and it's government isn't bound by it's laws. If CCP thinks deepseek or any other product/tech can be a beneficial to Chinese strategy they will come knocking, and there's no denying whatever they demand. It can be backdooring, data harvesting, etc, there's really no saying how far they might go.

The same could be said of any LLM offered by either Chinese, European, US, etc.

On the other hand at least you can self host their models. My university now has an inference cluster for students and faculty to use open source models.

Maybe if you're using their site directly, but what about the open models?

Well, not using the site probably means that you're avoiding the mini-LLMs powdered before and after the main LLM to provide filters (including some layers of censorship) and the system prompt.

So I guess it depends on how deep the bias sits. And that is something that may vary with time. Grok has been a good example of this, with the bias initially being introduced as system prompts, then apparently moved to synthetic data used to train the further generations of Grok.

Ok, good points. Thanks

Probably, as much as US company equals US government.

lol. is that really a question? even for american companies look who's at the board of those companies...

Fair enough. I'm just sick of the reflexive anti-Chinese hysteria. I wouldn't want to live there personally and condemn the human rights abuses as much as the next guy. However in international politics it's clear who the two largest terrorist regimes have been over the last fifty years and yet they're still somehow held up as the good guys.

True, though the the position of the CCP on Falun gong or Tiananmen square protests are much less likely to impact the life of a westerner than those of Elon.

At least the Chinese models are open source, so you don't need to send money to the Chinese government to use them (unlike Grok 4, where you need to send money to Elon Musk)

“Open source” doesn’t mean “independent.” Most of those labs are state-linked and operate under laws that require compliance with party policy.

The CCP plays a long game, they want dependency, not donations. Once enough people adopt their stack, they’ll set the governance norms and compliance rules around it.

It’s not paranoia, it’s policy. Go read their New Generation AI Development Plan, they’ve been explicit about it since 2017.

I agree with you. However, open weights (please let's not call these "open source", they are essentially binary blobs) are easier to fine-tune.

If I had to pick between a Chinese model and an American model based on the country's politics it would be China every time.

I wouldn't go quite as far but overall i agree

or American, using that logic

I mean I don't, so...what's your point?

Yeah, same for OpenAI because of Sama. I'm proud to say I haven't touched either for over a year. There are enough good alternatives out there.

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