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Comment by icedrift | Hacker News Reader

Reuters has been reporting that Chinese government is undergoing similar investigation to the US; blocking the export of domestic frontier models. They boil down to "anonymous sources" but it does seem inevitable as the tech gets stronger and stronger.

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> The recent meetings (past month) with Alibaba, ByteDance, Z.ai, etc., were primarily about overseas acquisitions, foreign investment, and tech/talent outflow controls and not blocking foreigners from using Chinese AI models.

That is just misleading reporting. Very convenient for US frontier labs. This is actually what happened.

I am afraid this is may happen soon.

Now that they have compute capacity to train larger models, there is a non-zero chance they will be in the lead by next year.

In which case they will probably stop sharing to protect their position.

It came (at least in part) from a document in May where the CCP pretty much said that they will need to review models to make sure they don't threaten national security.

Which basically translates too "Don't give away tools that can be used to undermine your own goals".

Lots of fake news out there, but you don't need to speculate any longer. Key takeaways from President Xi's speech in his first ever appearance at the World AI Conference in Shanghai:

- Started the speech by referring to his signature maxim, "great changes unseen in a century are unfolding across the world"

- Said that the world has "entered an unprecedented period of active innovation on AI technology", which means "great opportunities as well as challenges for governance”

- reaffirmed commitment to open source to promote AI "openness and win-win"

- warns against "over stretching" the concept of national security as applied to AI where one country's national security is prioritised over others

- China opposes emergence of “new historical injustices” in AI (one of the most strongly worded parts of the speech)

- China in next 5 years will provide 5000 opportunities to developing countries in "AI training and seminar programmes" and "cooperation centres" - names ASEAN, League of Arab States, African Union, CELAC, SCO and BRICS

Live blog: https://www.scmp.com/tech/policy/article/3360858/chinas-xi-j...

Complete translation: https://x.com/i/status/2077984062933762450

So much for the speculation that China was encouraging the release of free/cheap models to mess with the US AI economy.

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