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Comment by WarmWash | Hacker News Reader

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The present US administration and its backers don't want diversity, democracy and non-whites. Where does that leave non-Chinese and non-US citizens ?

Waiting until the next election, mid-terms are in a few months.

They can do that without open sourcing their weights. In fact, that would be the best way to do it. So why are they open sourcing their weights?

To create goodwill! Nefariously!

The US truly can't consider foreign policy that doesn't help propagate the military industrial complex.

It's like the idea of diplomacy and collaboration are two words that do not exist.

> They would be looking to do large scale espionage, whether it be corporate secrets or personal secrets.

The US token providers started the ball rolling on large-scale copyright infringement in order to make their models work.

They built their business on IP laundering, so it's very difficult for me to feel sorry for them now.

Not sure I follow your point, are you confusing espionage with IP theft? The victims are entirely different in each case, I am sure china would not restrict itself to corporate espionage.

> Not sure I follow your point, are you confusing espionage with IP theft?

Espionage is IP theft.

What did you think that word means?

I may have got it a little mixed up with sabotage :/

In your take, why are they producing and giving away such good local models? Mindshare? Promotion?

Soft power primarily (see my original comment),and less data for western labs to train on, less money for western labs to have.

The state can use their AI as a tool to bolster their standing, which is working well. Chinese AI labs don't have to worry about making money or affording more compute. The state will (and does) give them whatever they need.

Oh no! A group of people doing useful and good things to increase their reputation! That's terrible!

But seriously, if it works so well, why don't we do it too?

Because the US is a democracy and there is blowback for pissing off the public. So allocating hundred of billions of taxpayer money to AI would be enormously unpopular. We have private markets that can spend their money however they chose.

China just has the state with one leader than thats it.

But the US did allocate hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to AI...

Not who you are replying to, nor do I agree with their take (no sign of irony, complete lack of self awareness, and just blatantly xenophobic. not suprised by it either). but they did already address this:

> it's called soft power, look at endless glazing, it works

So people in countries adversarial to the US, or even demographics at risk domestically like illegal migrants have nothing to worry about dumping their info OpenAI or Anthropic servers? But the Chinese are going to spy on people using open weight models running on private or third party servers? Do you hear yourself? Do you have any grasp of theory of mind at all? Is your vision of Chinese "ethnonationalism" white people picking cotton? Is that what you are afraid of?

The untold capital and effort, the disciplined, complex long game operation, all to get 10 million people a second asking "are there timezones in space?" or "excel bar chart colors?" or "do you think I'm beautiful?"

It's hard to truly grasp the enormity of the evil, really.

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