It's also a reminder that as soon as Chinese models take the lead, they will switch to closed source too... so let's not be complacent, we need stronger, completely open data models, open source code, etc. to mitigate this risk
So the question is "How much do I trust Xi Jinpeng (or whoever is the chosen successor)?"
American companies will compromise and work with the government diplomatically. Chinese companies are the government.
Its a key distinction many fail to grasp, and hard to when you are lost in the sauce of constant American political infighting.
Obviously debatable, even then still limited to countries at the border.
What I definitely wouldn't trust are the western nation states that have been planting their flag across the globe for the last few hundred years. No matter the case they consistently view themselves as the moral superior of their enemies, whom they treat as pure evil and they aren't shy about forcing their morals on you. Whether it's prudish Victorian imperial England, or Fart sniffing San Franciscans they share the belief that they are the most enlightened and everyone else is dangerous.
China is still largely tributary, as long as you pay taxes you can do what you want, while the west is evangelical, you must adopt the same framework (moral, or technological e.g. rust) or you are a heretic.
Also if you believe that they are not burning billions for charity, in my thinking making the model closed or restricted is the way to earn return on their investment.
What specifically about their release strategy “reminded” you of that conjecture?
The premise that they only open source the models … because it somehow helps them leapfrog American labs, and once they actually can leapfrog them, they’d close source them, doesn’t really track for me. Am I missing something?
I mean I think we need our own domestic open weight labs. I just don’t particularly understand the point you’re making
If Chinese models become better than Americans, do you believe the CCP will allow the free distribution of their flagship models?
Think again if it’s the case.
They already are, to an extent. If we believe Amodei's nutjob take that Mythos/Fable are the end of the world in the wrong hands, we should have an open source Chinese model within 6-12 months that's already end-of-world level, so the cat is going to be way out of the bag long before the US labs go out of business.
that's the exact thing I'm talking about. I don't see why is half the people around here so sure that China will continue to release anything at all. they are releasing non-frontier models on a 6-month lag, yes, but the reasons why to release them are overshadowed by reasons to not do that for mythos-class models. IOW why would they give away a dual use technology just like that?
Why? What are those reasons? How come they don't already exist for DeepSeek V4 or GLM-5.2?
By the way, I'm not going to entertain the "mythos-class" phrasing because I really don't think it's important. I don't believe Anthropic's take on it being the threshold towards the end of the world that their marketing insists it is.
Anectodally, DeepSeek V4 is a very good model as well, sir. I'm not calling anything V4-class because of that.
I've only briefly tried it and it did seem quite capable for what I was doing, but not that much better than the Chinese models I've been mostly using.
In any case, this [0] seems to paint a more reasonable picture than "it's much better than anything else at everything".
[0] https://www.aisi.gov.uk/blog/our-evaluation-of-claude-mythos...
*And the ASI IMO doesn't happen without robots going full von Neumann replicator. Something I don't expect to happen any time soon.
More seriously, the epistemic doubt relating to the evolution of these machines is quite something… what do we do if “intelligence” doesn’t have a ceiling, and we end up a bunch of (comparatively) dumb monkeys with AI caretakers/handlers?
What happens if the AIs get smarter than us at doing things? Well, I always hired smarter people than myself at the things I needed to get done. But if you're worried about them realizing they can get smarter doing the things at which you are the expert, the long-term is likely BCI and even more blurring of the definitions of sentience and consciousness IMO. And with 20-30 years left on my lifeclock, I'm not sure I will live to see that day, but I absolutely do think I will be around long enough to see a few miracles like the end of cancer and Alzheimer's.
What makes you think there is a ceiling to intelligence beyond energy (of which there's a lot more to harvest yet if we just pulled our heads out of our fossil fueled asses)?