Who's afraid of Chinese models?
stratechery.com838 points by mfiguiere a day ago
838 points by mfiguiere a day ago
I'm rather scared of US models - if Anthropic was the only AI provider in the world, it's easy to see that common people would have no access at all. Thankfully there is OpenAI which compete 1:1 with Anthropic (at a slightly lower cost) but most importantly the Chinese models keep Anthropic, but also OpenAI in checks.
And I'm saying this as someone working for American companies.
it's a real paradox, that chinese models are what guards democratization and private use of ai while us models are moted castles with "kings" crying that you are stealing their legally stolen goods... what times we are living in...
ethics and other details are for humans. AI companies just proving it, even highest IQ teams are against ethics because they want more, even several millions is not enough for them.
AI has forced a dramatic shift in my view on intellectual property. The laws as they exist only protect corporations now.
They do not protect individuals no matter how much people want to think they do. AI has proven this.
I think to level the playing field all copyright, trademarks, and patents laws should be eliminated.
If I want to make a marvel movie, I should be allowed to and profit from it.
AI let the cat out of the bag and there is no going back. We need to let individuals profit just like corporations can from what is considered theft right now.
You are on to something. The extensive copywrite terms have ensured that the work of everyone except the oligarch corporations vanishes into the ether since it cannot be reproduced for over a century if the author lives another 30 years.
There will be no one debating the great minds of the twentieth century because the corporations made it illegal for people to republish critical editions of any such works.
The greats were recirculated every twenty or thirty years for centuries.
The smaller authors will vanish into the nothing and Western Civilization's 20th century onward will vanish and be almost forgotten forever because of that mouse. There will be more ancient literature remembered than literature after the invention of the printing press because they made it illegal to share printed materials for nigh on two centuries if an author was young when they wrote it. There will be more ancient scrolls preserved for the future than books of 20th century philosophy and science because the latter is a crime.
Only the oligarchs who pirated the books will have a cultural memory. They have cursed our era to oblivion when it comes to intellectual property because they can generate billions now for the mouse's henchmen.
Or we could build on and enforce the 300+ years of thought and trial that went into copyright law so that individuals are re-empowered.
But nah, let's do the most radical, least thought out thing, and absolutely destroy small scale creators. I'm sure Amazon will be benevolent and continue to pay writers in your scenario.
What is with 2026 and just conceding civilization to the worst actors, and then adopting the worst tactics/thoughts/concepts?
The technique is called "accusation in a mirror". By accusing the enemy of doing what you are doing, when they call out what you are doing, they look like they are just weakly repeating your own accusations because they don't have any truth. And the anger that should be directed against you (because of your practices) gets directed at the enemy.
Well implemented by the current US administration. Every accusation is a confession
The US distilled this from the Russian model.
There's no way anyone could have made a model so good, it must have been distilled from the future.
Thank you for this, I've noticed this often in politics and didn't know it has a name. Some politicians do this so often, that any accusation to me reads a confession instead.
why is it a paradox? guarding their IP overseas has been the modus operandi of American software companies since their inception
The paradox is that their IP was obtained by distillation of the collective IP of humanity.
I'm sure all those stackexchange experts will be getting their checks for helping launch countless software projects over the last 20 years any day now...
The Chinese models keep American financial markets at "To the Moon" levels rather than "Igniting Jupiter as a binary star" levels. This amount of capital pressure exerts its own gravitational pull in markets and in geopolitics, and every additional dollar of valuation can propel acquisitions, which propels valuation, et cetera. Undiluted, very quickly Amazon owns countries like it today owns county governments.
Saying GPT 5.6 Sol is 1:1 with Fable is laughable. OpenAI models are braindead in comparison and I have hundreds of hours with both.
You have hundreds of hours with a model that was barely even released hundreds of hours ago?
The perception of capability varies greatly between task. For my needs for example sol xhigh consistently outperforms fable xhigh.
No doubt Fable can outperform on many coding tasks, but the way you phrase it really exaggerates the gap and I'd suggest that for 95% of tasks, most devs simply don't need Fable level, and in fact, despite mostly using Claude, I have found codex is generally quicker at most tasks and can be even better than Fable with certain languages.
I'm sure this will be a terribly unpopular opinion, but I've long held the view that a Chinese AI company might screw me over at some point for a complex geopolitical reason that I don't fully understand. An American AI company will screw me over tomorrow for a quick buck.
As to the argument is that (only?) the Chinese labs are training on my data, I find this almost comical given the amount of highly-personal data companies such as Meta and Google have been harvesting for decades.
I don't trust any American company because they will switch into extraction mode eventually and squeeze every cent they can out of you.
Even if the founders didn't want that, eventually the upper ranks will fill with MBAs and the board with private equity and they will make it that way. Their bonuses are based on quarterly performance not customer experience
Long gone are the companies who served their communities for decades or centuries, providing a stable return to the owners, jobs for the workers and value to the customers.
I'd rather China have my data than America. China might do something with it one day but America built exploiting it into the business model (disclaimer that I'm not Uyghur or Taiwanese though)
> The defining characteristic of a commodity is that it is fungible: a gallon of oil is a gallon of oil; a ton of copper is a ton of copper; a bushel of wheat is a bushel of wheat.
The concept of “commodity” as defined above is a model, a simplified abstract representation of reality, but that does not match the reality perfectly (the map != the territory).
The author claims that a token isn't literally an ideal commodity, but neither is oil or wheat, many factors influence their real value (intrinsic properties, location, available storage at production, expected delivery date, etc.) so that no two gallons of oil in different contracts have the same price.
Is treating “tokens” as a commodity a worse model than treating oil this way? It depends who you ask! I'm pretty sure that a chemist working at a refinery would be more happy to see tokens being felt with like a commodity by his company than if they started viewing crude oil like one.
The post hits it spot on with unequal access to the models in terms of security. I'm developing OSS where security is important for the user ... but the frontier models like GPT 5.6 and Fable flake out and state that I cannot get the info/access.
This is extremely lopsided I'll have to resort to GLM 5.2/K3 to ensure that those security issues (hopefully) are resolved properly.
For OSS, this is one of the most counterintuitive experiences I have ever had. More than ever I'm convinced that open weight and open pipelines models are 100% critical for progress on the AI and societal fronts.
The 2 things people need to remember:
1) China can (and does) use the models to influence the west. They train in false information about Taiwan and Hong Kong. Or pretend like history is in favor of China.
2) Ignoring the models containing false information, they are incredible. But you should be scared of running inference via the model creators directly. If you think your data is safe compared to running it via model providers in the US ( either frontier or model hosts like fireworks.ai ) then please let me know your bank details so I can poke around.
https://thereallo.dev/blog/claude-code-prompt-steganography
Why should I trust a US company more than a Chinese one?
Your exhibit is an obvious anti-distillation technique. You can expect far worse from less-regulated companies.
Agree, China believes in Climate change and are at least taking steps to address it. Personally this is making me trust them more than the USA because, facts.
I mean lesser of two evils thinking, if one is intentionally leading us towards climate disaster, while the other isn't then yeah. What else can be said? Should I trust the authoritarian country who believes in engineering and science, or the one that doesn't?
>Agree, China believes in Climate change and are at least taking steps to address it.
China brought 80GW of new coal power online last year. The US added 0, and plans to add 3GW next year (we all know why).
China doesn't care about climate change, they care about energy independence, and conveniently have very little natural fossil fuels besides coal. Which they heavily mine and utilize.
China emits 3x more co2 than the US and last year their rate of increase was 2.5x that of the US.
https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-by...
"big number bad" isn't a great way of analysing the data, because China has a massively larger population.
The US emits 49% more CO2 per capita than China. And even with the much larger rate of increase, 0.79% to US' 0.3%, it'll still require 81 years to catch up to the US per capita rate [0].
The US aren't the good guys here, not by any means. Compared to my country, for instance, the US' emissions are 3x per capita that of the UK. If you want to argue that we shouldn't be using per capita (although we absolutely should), then that's 45x the UK's CO2 emissions.
[0] log(13.59/9.13) / log(1.0049) = 81.4 years
In absolute numbers China produces 1/3 of the total worlds CO2, and they are still growing the amount of CO2 they are producing.
That is not the actions of a country who “believes in climate change”.
China’s CO2 per capita is ahead of every large developed country except for the US, Australia, and Russia.
Actually, if you Google the rankings, China is 27th per capita, behind, of all places, Iceland.
> ahead of every large developed country
Because those are the only ones move the needle on climate change.
Almost like the entire worlds manufacturing was pushed to China the last 40 years (and is now getting moved to cheaper countries with the rising Chinese middle class). Is there a similar explanation for why the US number is so high?
Outsourced manufacturing is much less of a factor than people typically assume:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/imported-or-exported-co-e...
US numbers are insanely high because cheap hydrocarbons are locally available (=> bad incentives) and everyone is wealthy (that correlation is very strong; just compare Luxembourg, which is much wealthier and more polluting than surrounding nations) and also population density is rather low so more energy wasted for transport.
> that correlation is very strong; just compare Luxembourg, which is much wealthier and more polluting than surrounding nations
Well, your theory does not hold at all if you look at Switzerland which pollutes 1/4 of the US per capita. CO2 pollution is not and does not have to be correlated with standard of living.
You seem to think China is the evil polluter here. Just sort by per capita, and you'll see it's not even in the top 10% most polluting per capita.
There are plenty of large (depending on your definition of large) countries above it. Not just US, Australia and Russia that you are excluding for some reason, but also Qatar, Kuwait, UAE, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Canada all have significantly developed economically important countries. And they all have GDP per capita much greater than China's. What's your rationale for excluding them? There's a whole host of smaller countries with higher GDP per capita than China between those I listed above and China on the CO2 per capita results.
We should agree that ALL countries should be working to reduce CO2 emissions. But it sounds like you have a strong US bias and given Trump not only denies that climate change is even a thing, has withdrawn from international agreements on reducing emissions and even tries to pressure other countries to burn oil instead of investing in windfarms, it seems a bit disingenuous to try to make out that China is the only country that needs to improve. Before commenting on the speck in someone else's eye, first remove the plank from your own, yadda yadda...
USA emits 2165574,97709 times more than Faroe Islands. Sounds like they should be forced to limit that to some reasonable level say 2x of that of Faroe Islands. Don't think it would be too big ask right?
China produces 1/3 of the world’s CO2. They already produce more per capita than all other large developed countries except Australia, the US, and Russia. And their rate of growth is higher than all of those countries except Russia.
There’s no way to force them to do anything, but this is not that action of a nation that “believes in climate change”.
That's while being the world's factory, having lots of green energy, electric cars and an ACUTE motivation to reduce oil imports. Coal is a problem but at least they're not canceling half-finished green energy products when administrations change.
Kind of a meta point but for those who don't know, its fun to track this comment and its responses through time. I want to nominate it for the hall of fame in classic HN post genre. It will be two decades soon!
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=21&prefix=false&q...
One interesting thing would be to see how the numbers change over the years alongside the otherwise identical debates.
USA and Europe are basically equal in terms of yearly production of renewable energy. Texas + California alone rank 6th in the world.
>China believes in Climate change and are at least taking steps to address it
I've got a bridge to sell you!
If you can’t answer that question for yourself maybe you should go live in China.
Been there. Great place. High standard of living, everyone is very productive. Still a dictatorship, and you can't speak ill of the government, but a successful one.
my understanding is that you can speak ill of the government publicly? like they'll nuke your billibilli if you talk shit about xi, but you can complain privately to a friend
not saying i agree with it, i'm saying it isn't as severe as the west makes it out to be
Abstracted from the HN specific audience, there’s around 17% chance they already do, which is to compare to the "around 4%" chance they live in USA.
https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/population-by...
This is such an hilarious answer. For most of the non-Western world, we don't distrust China because they have created benefits for the developing world. Whereas the USA has been outright imperialist for the past 60-70 years, undermining and overthrowing developing democracies, putting in dictators, using international organisations as debt traps, waging and funding wars that put our lives and economies at risk.
It is so pathetic how American's see themselves, and are so deeply afraid of China. I am far more fearful of the predatory nature of the USA and its agencies than I could ever be of China who would never have any interest in me.
Thank god. I'd been hearing we screwed up catastrophically by electing an admin that took a chainsaw to our foreign aid programs, killing millions in the developing world. Such a relief to learn we were never doing that stuff in the first place.
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Hey but it’s wrapped in gold foil, much like its president’s domestic interiors.
The ROI for (white) men going to China for a period of their lives is extremely high. Where else are you going to get your “Abg cmo”
Regarding point 2, I don't trust my data being safe running inference on model creators api, but neither do I trust US providers. Both use it for their own benefit, the only difference is the country of origin. The US has a lot more legal safeguards for this but I don't trust they don't do it regardless.
legal safeguards only make sense only when they’re enforced. With how “move fast and break things” Silicon Valley is law is always playing catch up (at your expense)
But hasn’t it been the same with US since the WWII? US has influenced the world through various ways sometimes even weaponising human rights to spread American superiority and its narrative?
While true, you neglect the fact that US corporations have some autonomy from the government. I doubt that any of the current American AI corporations get regular dossiers of desirable responses to sensitive political topics from Washington and implement them. That would be a reason for a major lawsuit and a major scandal.
In China, the image of the country and the preferred narrative is under much tighter control of the government and local AI shops won't have any autonomy in this regard at all. Either obey or get shut down.
BTW What you mean by "weaponizing human rights", exactly? I am curious. If anything, I would say that the US foreign policy didn't promote human rights sufficiently, especially in Latin America, where the "bastard, but our bastard" attitude was typical.
OTOH in Europe, US human rights policy was probably relevant in saving some dissenters in the former Eastern Bloc from torture or execution.
> I doubt that any of the current American AI corporations get regular dossiers of desirable responses to sensitive political topics from Washington and implement them.
That's completely true. What happens is that you get hit with a wall of bureaucratic threats and nonsense by the government out of nowhere, and usually for some unrelated matter. It's like a high level version of getting pulled over for not using your turn signal. Which is why if your company has good legal, they often act in a highly proactive manner about that kind of thing.
What constitutes sufficient rabble rousing to get put on the government's shitlist differs between both countries, but there are plenty of things that will send American politicians into having a conniption, and it's not a static criteria. McCarthyism is a pretty easy example. I'm no Muskboy, but we can point to the procedural harassment he recieved over hitting a blunt on the Joe Rogan podcast to be a related matter. Criticizing the genocide happening in the Levant is frequently saber rattled by politicians as something they're interested in making prosecutable, and there are examples of institutional authority targeting and attempting to punish people over it.
> you neglect the fact that US corporations have some autonomy from the government
In theory.
In practice, Trump picks up the phone and say "jump" and the CEO on the other end says "how high ?".
And if you say no, well, we saw what happened when Anthropic said no.
Do you seriously believe that if you ask Grok or ChatGPT their opinion about tariffs or the Iran war, they will simply regurgitate Trump's talking points because they were programmed so on the threat of shutdown?
People with no personal experience of an actual totalitarian system don't really know what they are talking about when it comes to actual information control and micromanagement by the government. Hence they make nonsensical comparisons with a straight face.
I am not going to post what I could respond on a public forum.
All I will say is that it should be perfectly apparent by now to any sane external observer that Trump does not play by any long-established rules or protocols.
An entire encyclopedia of examples could easily be provided, the most famous recent one being his phone call to FIFA about the red card suspension.
Yes, Trump is quite an outlier in his non-standard behavior, I agree on that.
That said, Americans still enjoy very robust protections of freedom of speech and association, about the strongest in the world, and your SCOTUS does not seem to be inclined to hollow them out. Many of the pending lawsuits will end there and eventually bind this administration, plus the following ones.
This just does not happen in actual authoritarian countries, where no judicial remedy is available and the justice system is just another arm of the tyrant, rubberstamping punishments pre-determined by him.
Yes, I agree that vigilance about infringements of freedom is necessary, but the current US population is plenty vigilant. Trump is nowhere near as popular as, say, Erdogan is, and cannot simply raid offices of the Democrats and shut down oppositional media.
If you're not kowtowing the worst possible characterization of someone, then you're wrong.
Is Trump a dictator with unilateral control? No.
Will you be celebrated for failing to recognize that? Yes.
No, he's not. He's more direct and brazen about it.
But he's doing the same culling, the same political demands, same everything.
Its just now in plain view rather than behind closed doors.
Exactly, people think that Biden, Obama, Bush, etc. are some sort of saints and Trump is the devil. All other presidents used to do the same things behind closed doors and Trump just doesn't care to hide it.