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Comment by pixelpoet | Hacker News Reader

Are these models still relevant for people outside the US? I get the impression we're stuck on GPT 5.5 and Opus 4.8 pretty much permanently now, and relying on Chinese models in future.

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Dont worry, chinese models will distill frontier ones, quite fast.

The excuse they give is borderline childish. I get the thing about slow rollout, make sure partners get to fix the bugs, etc...

But bad actors are hard working motivated entities with tens of thousand of fake ids, and american citizens working for them, for pennies.

All while the ones like or you sit at a crossfire which is borderline useless.

I cant wait to see what Qwen did with the massive distillation they made out of Opus 4.8 and Fable aka Mythos aka pretty sure they jailbroke it.

This is nothing a few felony indictments can't fix.

Pretty sure Chinese police will not cooperate with a US indictment

No, but the Americans facilitating their access sure as hell will.

You'll need to make all US customers provide personal IDs for access first. I'm not American, but I do often hear how attached Americans can be to their personal firearms and how against providing their personal ID they can be.

That was before 2020, I guess. Americans are happy to provide whatever now, afaict

What do you think login.gov is for?

Also, "all" customers? No, only customers that access the restricted models.

Anybody who used codex or claude for the last few months is sitting on directories full of session logs that -- with the right motivation and effort -- can be massages and used for fine tuning or reinforcement training on any large model.

If the US really cracks down on frontier model access, you'll see them make Chinese open models illegal. You might say "oh well, let them try", but they will just put direct and secondary sanctions on every company whose systems have used Chinese models in some way. They just have to make an example out of a few international companies and no one will dare to use Chinese frontier models, at least commercially.

This is why we can't decouple ourselves from the US fast enough.

Nobody is going to care in Europe but a handful of big corps with huge us contracts.

And good luck proving it.

Theoretically that gives edge to all other companied around the world though, no?

I don't think a critical mass of them will oppose the US. The most likely equilibrium is Chinese models being shut out of any US-aligned markets (i.e. Europe at the very least, also East Asia, etc.). Probably India, Russia, Brazil etc. will resist such pressure, but they are protectionist and resilient to trade wars anyway, at the expense of their own welfare of course.

Just because the US sanctions a country, doesn't mean the rest of the world needs to as well. As a Canadian we traded with Cuba even when the US had an embargo on them.

It's not clear what a "US-aligned market" is anymore, and I think it's reasonable to question US hegemony on any front because of its mercurial treatment toward its "allies".

Example... the USA effectively bans Chinese EVs and hoped its allies would follow suit. Canada didn't. It actually dropped its 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs down to 6% and, sure enough, seven brands of Chinese EVs are hitting Canadian shores. White House temper tantrums ensued. Shrug. And of course Europe has been importing Chinese EVs for years and loving them.

> Europe at the very least

How's life under that rock?

You're delusional, US is already seen like the biggest threat to Europe since the tariffs and Greenland threats.

If you think we're playing fools again, you're wrong.

I know that Europe thinks so (I'm from there too), but we aren't remotely competitive enough for decoupling. It's bowing to US demands or falling further behind economically. Self-made problems, of course, since the common market is still way underdeveloped, much because of nationalist egoism and coordination problems between the member states.

>US-aligned markets (i.e. Europe at the very least,

Member when Trump threatened to invade Greenland? Europe does.

Europe has been in the process of de-americanization for the past few years.

I mean, after the US just signed an export control ordering Fable access blocked to non-US users (including European nationals), I doubt European and "US-aligned markets" are eager to ban Chinese models against their own interests.

in the extremely unlikely event that they do this, what will happen is that Chinese models will become "rebranded" with a wink and a nod by the token routers (at the very least, the non-US ones). there is a zero percent chance that corporations will not work around it if the models are good and cheap.

Like Cursor, which is pretty much repackaged Kimi K2.5, and Musk paid $60b for (lol).

> but they will just put direct and secondary sanctions on every company whose systems have used Chinese models in some way

Yes, and the rest of the world would just nod worriedly and go along with it, at massive cost to their economies, rather than treating it like the protectionism it is and responding to it with crippling counter-sanctions.

I have no idea, but how is it easy to know whether somebody used these models? They can be hosted even locally.

> but they will just put direct and secondary sanctions on every company whose systems have used Chinese models in some way

What about this: companies stop providing AI tokens to their employees entirely and instead, give a monthly budget for developer tools? They can even go as far as saying "if we realise that you use Chinese AI, you will get a warning and then be fired".

It's not like one can identify code coming from Chinese AI, right? As long as a company doesn't pay for those subscriptions, it may just be the employees writing the code all by themselves :-).

Not yet, but I could see them requiring some sort of signing in the future.

I don't see how. I could have written that code myself, it's not like anyone could prove it.

> If the US really cracks down on frontier model access, you'll see them make Chinese open models illegal.

We don't give a fuck about US laws - respectfully, the rest of the planet.

We're already sick of your shit and this will only add to it. Just look at the Iran shit show. What a joke. Ooooooo wooooooo sanctionzzz scary. Sanctions only work if they're enforceable.

You think the US can tell the rest of the world "we're the only ones allowed to use frontier models" and that the rest of the world will just comply? There's just no way. Not even close US allies would go along with that.

And the chinese will just lie down and take this without doing anything?

You shouldn’t build a business that relies on any of these models. It’s a geopolitical and sovereignty risk now. Someone could just rug pull your entire stack.

Not only that, but using Opus 4.8 [1m] right now outside the US, and suddenly I only have a 500k context window. I really hope this is just a strange Claude Code bug, but I had access to a 1 Million window before, and it wouldn't entirely surprise me if context window length becomes another US export restriction.

The Anthropic page here seems to say that Max users should have access to the full 1 Million window for 4.8:

https://support.claude.com/en/articles/8606394-how-large-is-...

I was already setting up my infra to experiment with GLM 5.2 and its 1 Million token window before this happened. I think I'm glad I did.

EDIT: Found a solution, seems Claude Code 2.1.193 (or an earlier version I didn't notice) changed default settings, so that if you have Autocompact turned on it occurs at 50% of the context window. If you turn off Autocompact, the full 1 Million context window is restored. Another example of Claude Code quietly changing default settings sigh

You want to compact early though as sending the whole chat you will end up with a lot of tokens not in the cache which 1. Costs way more and 2. Will slow the request down as it has to process it all.

I do agree in cases where I'm using API and not the subscription, this would be very costly via API. Not sure why the tokens wouldn't be in the cache though? Seems everything should be cached as long as I'm within the 1 hour caching window? If I'm wrong about how token caching works, I'm eager to learn!

My other concern is, it isn't really a 1 Million context window if we can only use the first 500k, right? But now that I've found that I can re-enable it, I'm happy.

I've previously had sessions go to 700k tokens and still be okay, though it does start drifting at that 700k point. I'm regularly at 300k with no problem.

Hopefully. I hope this eventually nudges my employer to use Deepseek or other Chinese models.

That’s assuming China would not start controlling the access to their models.

China has no reason to do that. The US is freely handing them the international market for AI.

Are they though? I see this as a precautious method by US to maintain AI model superiority so the Chinese companies cannot distill from the US frontier models. Let's see how fast Chinese models would improve without access to latest US models and if they keep on releasing open models

> Let's see how fast Chinese models would improve without access to latest US models and if they keep on releasing open models

Chinese tech has been on an exponential growth trajectory. If they see the need for AI superiority then there's really no moat for AI companies.

They do see the importance of AI superiority. The whole modern infrastructure as well as national security relies on AI superiority. Imagine a system smart enough to find vulnerabilities and get into any system that’s connected to internet. Which country wouldn’t want to have it

It doesn't matter how much more superior the US's models are if international companies are worried that the US government may cut off access arbitrarily and without warning.

US just needs their internationally usable model to be better than China's. If China catches up, US starts releasing more powerful models.

If US models cost 20x compared to China, they have to be at least 20x better.

Maybe, but the cheap models aren't the subject of the clamp-down here

Let’s see how fast China would catch up. This would be a good indicator on how much Chinese companies relied on US frontier models to improve their own

Chinese companies can make a killing selling on prem AI systems to the rest of the world now.

Big boxes with Huawei GPUs and Chinese open models to run inside your company without network access.

They could, but I can imagine if US keeps on blocking the cutting edge models, China would never ship the cutting edge models and would still make a killing shipping models that are powerful enough for most of business cases

Serious question: why not?

Because China doesn't have the hardware to do this? Or the brains?

Why do people always fearmonger China speculatively doing things that the US is actively doing?

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