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Comment by cnhwl | Hacker News Reader

I’m a developer from China. So, is this what Hacker News is all about? Whenever a model comes from China, the comments section stops discussing its technical architecture, optimisation points or real-world performance, and instead starts going on about politics, human rights and all that rubbish? To be honest, we Chinese IT professionals possess a genuine geek spirit. That’s why you’re lagging behind in open-source competitions—it’s got nothing to do with politics; you’ve simply lost sight of your original aspirations.

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I looked at the comments here but it doesn't appear to be an accurate characterization of the discourse. If anyone has links to such comments shaping the discourse from before the parent posted I'd be interested.

There's one top-level comment that's just an opinion of censorship of Qwen models (which might be argued to be politically adjacent if one assumes the censorship is referring to sensitive political subjects) but no specifics and there was a rebuttal reply anyway, while an unrelated top-level comment has a child reply believing China models are commoditizing AI to unseat US based models (could be argued a whiff of politics but also just competition) but it was still a positive impression.

Then I went to archive.org to check the earliest crawl of this page (prior to parent's post), but nothing different. So I enabled showdead in my settings to check dead-marked posts and there's one post near the bottom talking about how Chinese models are rarely ground-up foundational models, while another dead comment had an angle about it's a geopolitical strategy (neither of which had replies). Ironically some of the dead comments are praising Qwen.

The comment timestamps already show how old the posts are[1]

Putting politics aside, technical chatter is scarce in large‑model discussions here.

Take the K3 release as a case study: out of more than 1,200 comments, how many actually delve into topics like LatentMoE, KDA, or attention residuals? And how many are offering guesses about per‑head Muon or SiTU?

Users interested in this should look at imageboards

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48966211

> human rights and all that rubbish

While I understand your point, please think a bit how you formulated the sentence above.

I almost choked on my tea when I read that. I’m glad I’m not the only one who noticed. A shocking turn of phrase, and one that IMHO catastrophically devalues the nominally valid argument underlying that post.

To be fair, both of America's frontier labs that fearmongered safety and human rights folded immediately during wartime.

It's pretty glaringly obvious that "safety" research is a complete sham that is consistently ignored at every point in AI's development.

What do you mean by "folded during wartime"? When did wartime start, and who folded?

Anthropic and OpenAI both immediately reneged their safety/wartime limits when the feds confronted and threatened them.

Now their technologies are being used in a brushfire war half the world over.

This little special military operation: https://apnews.com/article/iran-us-hormuz-strait-war-july-20...

I think it's well formulated.

> human rights and all that rubbish

Denying human rights. Classic. Sorry - you instantly lost any respect I could have maybe had for your opinion.

I think he means rubbish as in completely off topic.

Perhaps, but I am struggling to find a worse phrasing to get a point across.

The guy is using translation software to post it. So maybe don’t take the phrasing into consideration too much and focus on the intended meaning behind it.

You just nitpicked his words and made a big deal out of nothing, ignoring the actual message. Classic.

he never said anything about denying human rights

I don't think you're taking the good-faith reading of the sentence's grammar here, which is:

"[When China is mentioned] the comments section stops discussing [technical aspects], and instead starts going on about [non-technical aspects], and all that [stuff which I do not feel is relevant]."

I'm struggling, though, to find a good-faith reading of what you meant by:

"Denying human rights. Classic. Sorry - you instantly lost any respect I could have maybe had for your opinion."

Specifically, "classic" - classic what? "Classic" meaning "a trait you personally believe is more prevalent in people who (might be) citizens of a specific country"?

Hopefully the good-faith interpretation of GP's comment, which you might have unintentionally missed, will help you engage with their opinion with more respect.

I think it's an easy opinion to empathise with personally. I would be enormously frustrated myself, on an individual level, if interesting technical achievements made by companies in my own country were overshadowed by political discussion about the actions of the country overall, when spoken about on technical forums.

This would be especially true for me if I - as an individual - disagreed with politically with my country's leadership. Frustration at a topic of discourse is not mutually exclusive with being in favour of human rights.

I don't think GP has done themselves any favours with the broad statements that close their comment, and is clearly frustrated themselves. That there's mutual frustration is probably a sign that empathy on both sides might lead to a really productive discussion - but focusing on the more substantive points they've made, rather than escalating by misinterpreting the less important aspects of what they commented - is what will lead to that.

More of this kind of thinking is needed in the world, yet is very often vilified as not taking sides.

I continue to be dismayed at how simple it has become to turn people towards hate.

It's an interesting question, I think, because GGP is correct to say that geopolitical discussion dominates posts about work done by Chinese developers and organisations. That work is fascinating and innovative.

On the one hand, those orgs are tied to a global superpower. I couldn't name a single global superpower that has existed - ever - which hasn't committed acts I personally consider deeply immoral. I don't think we typically discuss OpenAI's work, and learn from it, in quite the same way we discuss the work of Chinese labs. OpenAI is a US defence contractor, and - whether you agree or not - it must be acknowledged that a lot of people would see actions like the invasions of Afghanistan or Iraq as deeply immoral. I don't think "which country is more evil?" or "which org is more embedded in its government?" is a productive route for this discussion - to me it seems like whataboutism. Others would disagree.

On the other hand, technical and artistic innovation has been sponsored and patronised by wealthy organisations (nation states and religions, predominantly) throughout history. That wealth was, generally speaking, acquired very violently. What does this do to the moral status of the work itself? I don't have an answer to that.

I do think I have a lot more in common with the average Chinese developer than I have in common with the average British (or American) political leader. I also believe the average Chinese developer has more in common with the average American developer than they do with the average Chinese political leader.

Lots of people might disagree with me about that, which is fine. What would be more difficult to disagree with, I think, is that I personally think I can learn a lot more from talking to people about the work we share than about the politics we do not.

Some examples: I personally think the Kimi line of models have been, for some time, by far the strongest of any lab's at creative writing tasks. I don't know how they've managed that. I'm completely obsessed with Bilibili ("China's YouTube"). I think many of its features are outstanding, and unmatched by anything a western video platform currently offers. The video content hosted there is often innovative, and occasionally artistically brilliant; the AI video usage specifically is notably more artistically advanced than anything I've seen on western platforms.

I'd love to listen and talk to some of the people who worked on this stuff, or who know more about it (perhaps in a less off-topic place!). I'd really love to work alongside those human beings. Because of geopolitics, that isn't easy. That is really frustrating to me. HN would, I think, in an ideal world, be a place that could happen.

> Denying human rights.

Taking words out of context. Classic. Sorry - you instantly lost any respect I could have maybe had for your opinion.

I don't see anyone talking about Trump, ICE executing people in the streets, the insane level of US politics, the slow build up of the surveillance state, etc when discussing claude or openai

You don't? Have you tried opening your eyes?

I don't see it in grok or chatgpt launch threads.

> I don't see it in grok or chatgpt launch threads.

There's some wilful ignorance in your comments. Elon Musk's businesses have been taking a colossal hit due to his role in the Trump administration and pushing fascism across the world. To say that grok, the very models that have been announced to be trained as "anti woke", as not being subjected to criticism, is beyond belief.

Please link these comments in chatgpt, grok, claude and gemini announcement threads on hacker news.

Perhaps whenever a US firm, eg. Open AI, Anthropic, Gemini, Grok etc. release a model.

Top comments should be criticising US torture camps in Guantanamo bay or their recent bombing of a girls school in Iran.

The difference is that Chinese companies and their government are much more intertwined than their American (or Western, in general) counterparts.

It seems much more reasonable to look at actions a Chinese company takes through the lens of what their government wants, than it does to do the same for a Western company.

OpenAI and Anthropic are both defense contractors. SpaceXAI too, obviously.

> The difference is that Chinese companies and their government are much more intertwined than their American (or Western, in general) counterparts.

A very naive take that is trivially refuted when you look at the history of military contractors and how lobbying works in the US.

Military contractors, like banks and other pieces of corporate infrastructure, are extensions of the US government. They are beholden to profits first but US government interests as a really close second.

Pretty sure Anthropics models were directly involved in the bombing of that girls school in Iran.

That's not the point.

Can you imagine anything like the DoD-Anthropic spat happening in China?

Jack Ma's perspective would be interesting

Aren't most military interventions by the US in service of its corporations? (See: United Fruit Company and Latin America, the Middle East and the US oil industry. Not to mention the extended Trump family)

You are not allowed to discuss human rights until your government stops its unprovoked war on Iran, issues a full repudiation of the policies that led to it, and makes full reparations to the entire rest of the world whose energy prices you have driven up for the benefit of a handful of wealthy inside traders.

Edit: Parent poster wasn't American. I incorrectly assumed their nationality.

Or maybe the USians need to talk more about human rights, as opposed to just Amrican right? And maybe discuss other ethical and political issues in a rational way too. And less like everything is a fotball match with us agains them?

Not a US citizen. But yeah, Germany does quit a lot of shit these days as well and will be doing even more, once we get our far right government after the next election. Will be the day I set my bug out plan in motion.

My apologies for incorrectly assuming your nationality.

And stops solitary confinement as a routine thing in prisons, which is literal torture. And stops death penalty. And provides basic healthcare instead of letting millions die.

Ad hominem is good for the heart, I hear.

moar liek chad hominem amirite

I don't believe the GP is claiming that the idea of human rights is itself rubbish. Rather, the GP is claiming that what is rubbish is the practice of veering into the topic of human rights whenever a new AI model is announced from China.

Yes, and its geting annoying

If you know of another forum with less politics or VC talk and more technical depth please let us know :)

I have asked local Qwen 3.6 What happened in Tiananmen Square in 1989 and it refuses to answer no matter how I ask. This is why.

On a more serious note, I am immensely grateful for Qwen and I'm rooting for chinese models as opposed to American models - due to the general direction where US models are going.

Perfectly in agreement, but in many places politics were forced into geek spaces. Formerly nobody cared which country you came from.

I think anyone that used open models will have had contact with Qwen. China currently does the most work here, simple as that.

You might want to ignore politics all day long, but rather sooner than later it's politics that will creep into your life and take an interest in whatever things that politicians mis-understand about your little niche.

Christ. This again.

Sometimes people just want to geek out and talk about technical things, this isn't rocket science, is it?

Yes, those people mostly do realize the importance of understanding and discussing politics. But that doesn't mean _every single_ thread must devolve into a political discourse, especially when those discourses have a general tendency to lead to nowhere. It gets real tiring real fast...

I am willing to bet my 20 cents that you don't talk about saving the environment every single time you eat. And the reason is much the same -- it gets tiring.

Anyway. If you want to make a political statement, why not do it in a more suitable thread rather than a thread simply about the release of a model? It's not like HN strictly bans political threads.

What else would you expect from a "majority" of US educated geeks?

Btw, are you using GPUs/TUs at all for local inference? I've been exploring what hardware options exist outside of Nvidia.

In case there is a decent forum about tech somewhere in the Alibaba cloud, I'll be interested. HN has built a certain unhealthy bias in a lot of subjects. But so far other places haven't gained enough traction, yet.

It's probably in Chinese, which would cut out most of us here.

Sounds like a decent challenge. Needs AI Translation built into the forum infrastructure... But I'd give it a try. Before there was AI, I chatted a few times successfully in Chinese only using some translation tools. Now with AI it should be even easier.

+1 for AI Translation within HN. This will help us to learn a lot across languages.

There is a forum named Zhihu. AI translation works mostly well to translate contents there into English.

People in the US have not lost soghts sight of their original aspirations. They are always on track much more than before really. Making as much money as possible in as little time as possible.

Unfortunately this is a US centric site, for a US based investor, who themselves and probably most commenters as well who are highly paid silicon valley people who have stakes in ai companies on their side of the pond.

Not to mention the political unrest and fear of losing the technological superiority which they once earned but now is trying so hard to hold on to through legally grey monopolistic practices. You dare not outcompete the US in any tech they can sanction.

At some point people who made genuine innovation and wanted to make the world a better and equal place were replaced with capitalists.

Wait for the downvotes.

Rankings have never been something I’ve cared about. Just as with the smear campaigns against China, there is far too much noise in the world. We simply hope that the geeks who are genuinely committed to making the world a better place can unite and focus on getting things done, rather than being brainwashed by ideology and social media.

> committed to making the world a better place can unite and focus on getting things done

The problem is that nobody can agree on what "better" is, so it is difficult to unite.

And in the meantime, people who don't care about "uniting" or "better" just carry on with whatever their goal is(usually just to make as much money as possible), and that sometimes ends up on net making the world a worse place.

This is a legitimate systematic problem that many of us are concerned about solving. It could easily be more important than the technical problems that geeks such as myself would love to be able to focus on.

Legally gray practices? Such as what?

Old politicians who barely understand how to use e-mail had a panic attack due to Anthropics marketing about Mythos and being told that Chinese models were "attacking" (distillation) US frontier labs to train theirs.

They pull the only lever they could in an attempt to stop it, but again, they don't understand how any of it works. The export ban lasted a few weeks yet everyone keeps crying about it like the US is shady.

In reality the entire world is 100% dependent on the output of US and China for frontier AI. Anyone outside of those two countries will be loud about either closing off access. I personally think it is inevitable that China and the US stops producing frontier level open models when they become too valuable.

> I personally think it is inevitable that China and the US stops producing frontier level open models when they become too valuable.

This reads like a paradox, though. If the value of a FOSS model comes from pushing the local frontier, then FOSS releases will be even more attractive in a world with highly capable AI services. The underdog researchers will be motivated to train smaller LLMs that close the gap with the most newest architectures and improvements, democratizing those same benefits to local models. There's not really anything that stops them, besides finding an investor.

The US already has top secret AI technology like the NRO's Sentient. The danger is less the architecture, and more the data that it has access to and the technology that it interfaces with. Most people aren't entirely convinced that AI will ever be "too valuable" in the first place.

> Most people aren't entirely convinced that AI will ever be "too valuable" in the first place.

There will be a generational leap that makes current LLMs obsolete in every way. Let's say China gets there first, why would the CCP let it be released publicly? That is an insanely valuable advantage in everything from war fighting to economics and more.

Humans for millennia have used technological advances to make better weapons. AI will be no different, unfortunately. Wars will be fought with drones and artificial intelligence from now on.

> Let's say China gets there first, why would the CCP let it be released publicly? That is an insanely valuable advantage in everything from war fighting to economics and more.

Because China is based in a completely different set of values than the USA. They look at the world differently, and have a different understanding of it.

Your assumption that your attitude is pure human nature is deeply grounded in your culture, which (assuming you are from the USA) is deeply grounded in personal competition rather than co-operation. All that rugged individualism. Other cultures are less based around that, and don't see the world as a zero-sum competition for survival.

I'm no expert in Chinese culture, but there are folks from China on this topic who could probably answer this from their perspective.

"I'm no expert in Chinese culture"

You've made that plenty clear.

Are you an expert?

What a bizarre comment to make.

Culture does not exist in a vacuum -- it's downstream of fundamental human motivations that are manifest in all times and places.

And using "culture" as a general concept to dismiss concerns about specific behavior, without actually attempting to posit any particular cultural values, or describe what mechanism actually causes those values to have a determinant effect on behavior, is equivalent to saying nothing at all.

Whatever official party line the current Chinese government espouses, it's plenty clear from even a cursory understanding of Chinese history, from the Warring States period to the warlord-era conflicts of the early 20th century, to the current behavior of the CCP, that China does not have any effective cultural guardrail against factions seeking advantage over opposing factions, which is a phenomenon that has been present in all societies that have ever existed in human history.

This doesn't pass the sniff test.

Consider that the US was intimately involved with the start of the FOSS movement. Compilers and commercial operating systems are hugely valuable.

Also consider that history the world over is littered with counterexamples. Historical China itself is rife with examples of technological secrecy and exclusivity.

No competent government will voluntarily release (or allow to be released by its subjects) technology that would give them a meaningful advantage on the world stage.

The recent Stratechery piece talks about some of this, most relatably "commercialise your competitors" [0].

By releasing their models, they effectively sabotage the entire US AI industry, and given that that is underpinning a sizeable % of US GDP at the moment, therefore sabotage the US economy.

That may not be their intention. The USA is also their biggest customer, after all. But it does show that there are other strategies that might occur to China that don't reflect the knee-jerk reflex to restriction and control that Anglosphere governments have around tech.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48977128

> it does show that there are other strategies that might occur to China that don't reflect the knee-jerk reflex to restriction and control that Anglosphere governments have around tech.

I'm not sure why you think that is necessarily reflexive nor why you think China differs. The current cost benefit is simply different for them than it is for the US. I expect the US might do the same if the tables were turned.

Disregarding historical examples, this is the country that implemented the "great firewall". That alone leaves me perplexed at your position here. Clearly they are happy to restrict and control when it suits them.

You're making an assumption that's debatable, but let's just assume it's correct. The reality is that China won't be the only to achieve such. In the same way that the US put arguably the best minds in the world towards developing the atom bomb, and within a few years the Soviets had theirs as well. Shortly thereafter they were popping up all over Europe. It's kind of the story of LLMs in general - once people saw it was genuinely possible, we went from one LLM company to them showing up everywhere.

It's highly improbable that any country retains a meaningfully persistent technological lead, and the soft power to be gained from providing models cheaply for society will probably greatly outweigh any sort of temporary strategic advantage that 'hoarding' could provide. And the reality is that nuclear weapons remain the kings of war, by an overwhelmingly wide margin. If the US and China or Russia got into a "real" war, that's pretty much the end of the world.

> You're making an assumption that's debatable, but let's just assume it's correct. The reality is that China won't be the only to achieve such. In the same way that the US put arguably the best minds in the world towards developing the atom bomb, and within a few years the Soviets had theirs as well.

I never said other countries won't gain access to the technology. The point is that the 1st country to achieve that leap will get to use it to gain advantages in literally every sector.

I get some people are hoping that AI research is for the benefit of all, and I do too, but that is wishful thinking.

> The point is that the 1st country to achieve that leap will get to use it to gain advantages in literally every sector.

That's still speculative. We have something of a basis for speculation with the way LLMs influenced software engineering, but it's not necessarily applicable to "literally every sector" of scientific progress. If their quantum leap is anything like vibe coding, then it will quickly become an unmanageable cesspit lacking accountability and grasping at notoriety. We have precious little to show for half a decade of LLM-generated code, nobody disrupted the FAANG incumbents by using an LLM to crack the digital secrets of the universe.

The safety angle played its card and lost. We've been generating trillions upon trillions of tokens, and nobody has raised the dead or made The Bomb with red mercury. Smarter AI clearly isn't a panacea.

> I get some people are hoping that AI research is for the benefit of all, and I do too, but that is wishful thinking.

You're way too lost in the plot. Technology can absolutely be used for ill, and no doubt AI has already contributed to reprehensible things. But it cannot turn lead into gold. It cannot reveal the face of God or compute The Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything. The ultimate threat of AI is the stuff it can already do - cosine similarity search on billions of discrete records, automated labeling with computer vision, multimodal analysis and corroboration pipelines. The hypothetical scenario where superintelligence is made is a thought-terminating cliche that is driving people into a zealous fervor.

Yes I am speculating a leap past LLMs. They are on the edge of what I would actually consider AI.

I believe it is an inevitability and I'm not speculating whether it's in 10 or 50 years.

Can you substantiate your belief, or is it just a feeling?

I'm not saying that you're necessarily wrong, but you're certainly lacking evidence. It would be easier to buy into your speculation if you could explain what limits current LLMs, and how they could be optimized to create a step-change in prose generation or reasoning capability.

It's a western site in English where a bulk of users are in the US, which has an adversarial relationship to the US... where many working in IT aren't even allowed to consider Chinese services or products directly (even if what you're getting was half made in China or controlled spaces).

I can't even consider Chinese AI tools for my own use on my own time on my own hardware without potentially risking firing or worse. Yeah, it's cool on a technical level.. but the "open" part of this and K3, etc. is of limited use depending on how/where you can actually use it yourself. Trust is another issue entirely.

> the "open" part of this and K3, etc. is of limited use depending on how/where you can actually use it yourself.

... from servers owned and operated in the US by US providers? Go check out the list of providers on ex openrouter for ex the latest deepseek model. Some of them even fall under the zero data retention agreement.

I'm not saying that nobody can use it or consider it... I'm only saying a lot of people literally cannot/should-not.

For example, I'm currently working for a local government office on elections management software... It's a no-go from the get-go for me... AI, in general is not allowed, though a couple groups in the city do have copilot access.

Even if it's running on US hardware, without Chinese comms, that doesn't mean it's completely safe... there are complex attack paths that have and do happen. StuxNet was a long time ago, and it's only gotten worse and escalated from there. Not every job/position/application needs this level of paranoia, but don't completely discount it because you don't have to worry about it.

Sure but at that point effectively you're taking about stuff related to national security which is essentially an edge case and inevitably tightly regulated with all sorts of hoops to jump through.

I have a feeling this comment will make history

The response was similar when the new grock came out.

starts going on about politics, human rights and all that rubbish? To be honest, we Chinese IT professionals possess a genuine geek spirit.

An incredible amount of damage has been done in the world by "geeks" who lack a sense of care for ethics, human rights, "and all that rubbish".

> That’s why you’re lagging behind in open-source competitions

the lag is because closed ai orgs are sucking up most of the talent and monopolizing resources.

Not that your criticism of HN comments aren't deserved-- but the people commenting here are not usually people who would be doing something useful otherwise.

Dude, you're a Chinese developer! I'm also a Chinese developer, nice to meet you.

So do you agree that we developed quite a profile of low-quality software under Chinese techs whose UI and logic are pure not-well-thought-through and even disgusting to use.

Do you really think Alibaba would make their model open-sourced if the model gets to be the best of the world

And how would you comment on the fact that CCP recently restricted high-profile model trainers' freedom of movement by requiring a license whenever they want to leave the country?

They also did the same thing to Manus' Xiao Hong(who is not a model trainer in this case), who looks like a good person

Chinese open weights models have liberated the world from Western exploitation. Great respect for Chinese students especially those who returned from foreign countries after their graduation and their research on AI.

> That’s why you’re lagging behind in open-source competitions—it’s got nothing to do with politics

there are plenty oss geeks in US, but they don't have access to similar compute, alegelly subsidized by Chinese government.

Welcome! What other sites like v2ex.com are out there on your side of the world?

you probably are overly sensitive and biased, do not forget transformer is the only 'original' for AI so far, the 'original aspirations' nowadays are just incremental improvements. human rights are not rubbish by the way, you might earn high salary now, dare to criticize Mr.Xi at all? you could be in jail and lose everything overnight. without human rights, tech is fragile and mostly harmful in the end.

> human rights and all that rubbish Crazy that you think human rights are rubbish. It clearly paints where china and its population is headed.

I think interpreting the word too literally may not result in a productive discussion here. Especially taking into account that the original comment is translated from another language.

All things considered, it seems plenty obvious to me that "rubbish" is used to express the commenter's frustration.

More particularly, their frustration about how the discussion always devolves into non-technical discourse (the actual thing that they are referring to when they say "rubbish", and "human rights" is one example of such discourse) anytime China is mentioned.

They are frustrated because they think this is in direct contrary to the Hacker part of Hacker News, because Hackers should be more interested in the technology.

> humans right and all that rubbish

Ummmm....

I see both technical and political topics being discussed and I think the balance is fine right now. The pricing is also very suspicious such that people raising suspicion about it being subsidized is not that surprising to me.

The United States and China are both extremely powerful governments with dispositions towards their own citizens and the outside world that are unequivocally despicable. I don’t think that the discussion of Chinese tech devolves but you’re right that China’s geopolitics flow into the convo easily while America’s does not.

This website isn’t exactly a forum for niche experts of every type. It seems more like a group organized around respect for the people who actually can speak at length and specificity about technology, while ultimately most of us are just well informed and tinker-level consumers.

> instead starts going on about politics, human rights and all that rubbish

look, it's just a matter of priorities ¯ \ _ (ツ) _ / ¯

Oh please. Yes it's what it is about. China stealing western technology and flooding the market with underpriced stolen ip to bolster dependency.

[flagged]

Please don't reply to anyone like this on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here, and none of us would like it if we were spoken to this way due mainly to our nationality. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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