Hacker News Reader

Comment by olalonde | Hacker News Reader

Almost certainly VPN traffic. Most major LLMs block both China and Hong Kong (surprisingly, not the other way around), so Singapore ends up being the fastest nearby endpoint that isn't restricted.

View on HN

It’s not VPN traffic all data is aggregated by billing payment information so it’s Singaporean billing details.

Ah, you're right. Still, I wonder if it's because of Chinese people and companies using Singaporean bank accounts. It just seems odd that such a small country is so overrepresented here.

Why do major LLMs block china? Isn't that a potentially huge market for them?

I'm not sure, but my guess is that it's due to pressure (or perceived pressure) from the U.S. government.

It's their own decisions they made long before the controls and presure. Besides being in bed with the US gov, people that run big AI shops tend to be fervently nationalistic and politically ambitious on their own. Leopold Aschenbrenner's dystopian rant [1] or Dario Amodei's [2] [3] are pretty representative.

[1] https://situational-awareness.ai/

[2] https://www.darioamodei.com/essay/machines-of-loving-grace

[3] https://www.darioamodei.com/post/on-deepseek-and-export-cont...

Early on there was a lot of distillation going on, apparently. Note that OpenAI introduced ID verification for high volume accounts and I think it was for that reason. It does raise questions about how much of the Chinese model's performance is entirely home grown. At least historically, it was quite hard to crawl the English web from behind the Great Firewall.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com