Open Source as it gets in this space, top notch developer documentation, and prices insanely low, while delivering frontier model capabilities. So basically, this is from hackers to hackers. Loving it!
Also, note that there's zero CUDA dependency. It runs entirely on Huawei chips. In other words, Chinese ecosystem has delivered a complete AI stack. Like it or not, that's a big news. But what's there not to like when monopolies break down?
The incredible arrogance and hybris of the American initiated tech war - it is just a beautiful thing to see it slowly fall apart.
The US-China contest aside - it is in the application layer llms will show their value. There the field, with llm commoditization and no clear monopolies, is wide open.
There was a point in time where it looked like llms would the domain of a single well guarded monopoly - that would have been a very dark world. Luckily we are not there now and there is plenty of grounds for optimism.
Still not sure how I feel about China of all places to control the only alternative AI stack, but I guess it's better than leaving everything to the US alone. If China ever feels emboldened enough to go for Taiwan and the US descends into complete chaos, the rest of the world running on AI will be at the mercy of authoritarian regimes. At the very least you can be sure noone is in this for the good of the people anymore. This is about who will dominate the world of tomorrow. And China has officially thrown their hat in the ring.
I always find it an illuminating experience about the power of mass propaganda every time I see an American believe they somewhat have the moral high ground over China, despite starting a new war somewhere around the globe either for petrol or on behalf of Israel every six months.
Many of us (worldwide, I'm not American) watched China massacre thousands of its own children at Tiananmen Square. The US is descending into totalitarianism, but it hasn't reached that level yet.
And China may have changed in some ways but there have been no signals it would not repeat that event if it thought circumstances warranted.
Whether a country massacres its own people is not really a good litmus test since there are countries that treat its own citizens well but foreigners really badly. One such country is… oh the US!
Also, many of us have lived in countries actually freed thanks to the west’s (mustly us) intervention, and we felt the support during the Russian occupation pre 1989
Many of us have lived or live in countries that are constantly affected and destabilized by past and even modern interventions from the U.S. (the only blame the rest of the "West" bears here is just watching without ever acknowledging the harm done). Just look at Latin America.
edit: Not trying to say "US bad, China good." Just there is perspective to everything.
Us? wow, tell us your story
Don’t you think that it’s a signal that the last major event you can point to is decades old?
Others may say “what about Uighurs?” or “what about Hong Kong?” but I think that the rest of the world is not doing all that much better on terms of civil repression.
In the UK, you can be arrested for voicing disagreement with the rationale for another person’s arrest (not generally, but on a specific hot button issue they’d rather not anyone talk about). French politicians are attempting to make illegal criticism of Israel, carte blanche. Don’t even get me started on Germany, which is so self-shamed from the last century they have overcorrected into legitimating an external state above all else. Across the pond, you hardly even have to convince anyone that it’s on the downtrend, unless they’re 30% of the population who believe the Don is christ alive (but don’t like if he says it).
The world is very unstable at this point and China is a country that strongly values and incentivizes stability, at the expense of individual rights. This is contra a lot of the west which is both unstable and actively undermining individual rights.
The US has massacred millions of people of other countries, is that better?
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The difference is that - at least in the last 50 years - the US starts wars with brutal dictatorships. Whereas China is threatening war against a thriving democracy.
These are not equivalent.
The US starts wars… they just often happen to be with dictatorships. The US definitely also supported dictatorships (like Taiwan and South Korea).
You can argue all day about whether A is slightly more rotten than B, but if they are both rotten then in the grand scheme they will both end up being the same thing if something doesn’t get fixed.
> like Taiwan and South Korea.
You had to reach back 50 years to find US support for dictators.
> they just often happen to be with dictatorships
No, they always happen to be with dictatorships. The motives of US politicians are not relevant to this fact (I personally think Trump is corrupt and incompetent); the US system is democratic enough, and Americans are moralistic enough, that even corrupt and incompetent politicians can't get away with military adventurism except with dictatorships. Thus the end of that Greenland nonsense.
The US starts wars… they just often happen to be with dictatorships. The US definitely also supported dictatorships (like Taiwan and South Korea).
And by contrast what I find stunning is the inability to engage in meaningful comparative analysis of relative harms. There's a lot of spectacularly insightful attention to detail in so far as it mobilizes what aboutism arguments and then that attention mysteriously falls away when we ask questions like the extent to which these sides allow free press or democratic elections with multiple parties or permit fair trials. You used to not have to explain these things.
Just because America is doing bad things doesn't mean China is good, or vice versa.
Of course not, but that's never how Americans act. The commenter didn't say "I don't like that the only two serious competitors are from the USA and China", they ONLY called out China.
It's a small difference, but important. Especially because that person is far more likely to be responsible (voting) for and profiting from USAs bad stuff.
> The commenter didn't say "I don't like that the only two serious competitors are from the USA and China"
That's literally what the comment said:
> Still not sure how I feel about China of all places to control the only alternative AI stack, but I guess it's better than leaving everything to the US alone.
I.e. it would be preferable if, for example, Europe was in control of the alternative, but having China and the US is better than just the US.
In fact, unless the comment is from someone living in China: understands the politics, it would only be fair to critique the authoritarian aspects of the government they actually know.
The issue is propagandists are typically brainwashed already.
Plenty of people around the world know about the authoritarian aspects of the US way better than the Americans, as they suffer their consequences.
Which ones do you like to mention?
Hyper presidentialist state that allows one administration (and realistically one person) to start a war against another nation without having authorization from congress.
This happened a few weeks ago, actually.
Do you believe only Americans should be allowed to critique the American government?
I'm an American and I don't believe that.
The issue is that the way you're expected to criticize America from what I observed is along the lines of 'they mean well but...'
With China, you can say 'yeah, this is good, but they eat babies for fun' and it would mostly pass with people nodding along.
Criticising America is nothing new or subversive. Hunter s Thompson was doing it all these years ago and much more interestingly and on point than anyone on here could.
Day every day the same unoriginal whining because it is hard to call it something as sophisticated as critique, can be heard all over the reddit.
While at the same time no one bothers to critique CCP to the same extent because we simply are not paid for doing this. No one is interested in non profit repeating the same facts about china every single day.
We are just content knowing that china is not some sort of “saviour” or alternative. It is an enemy of the free world. I try to not use things produced by my adversary to not fund my own doom.
> Criticising America is nothing new or subversive. Hunter s Thompson was doing it all these years ago and much more interestingly and on point than anyone on here could.
The existence better critique out there is irrelevant if you don't take the argumentt in front of you on its strenghts.
> Day every day the same unoriginal whining because it is hard to call it something as sophisticated as critique, can be heard all over the reddit.
Criticism of a country with military bases across the whole world doesn't have to be hip to be correct. No one cares what you think about reddit or how hipster you like your political takes to be and this doesn't exempt you from having to argue about the concrete facts in a discussion forum.
> While at the same time no one bothers to critique CCP to the same extent because we simply are not paid for doing this. No one is interested in non profit repeating the same facts about china every single day.
You are so wrong about no one criticizing the CCP that's it's difficult to believe that this statement is sincere. Maybe I could attribute it to selection bias as you're on an american forum? There's also a cottage industry around anti-Chinese propaganda besides the western funded government propaganda machine that is in place for the last decades.
> We are just content knowing that china is not some sort of “saviour” or alternative.
Oh but they are! China is a concrete alternative for an economic partner for most parts of the world, but only if the US doesn't sponsor a military coup or invade your country in response. If they you can get away from Americans threats, China is also a more reliable partner with much more stable policies and much less likely to sabotage your elections, secretly pay your politics and judges and manipulate your markets.
> It is an enemy of the free world. I try to not use things produced by my adversary to not fund my own doom.
This has no basis in reality. The US is the actual enemy of the free world and has been since ww2: occupying countries, sabotaging their domestic politic disputes, staging military coups, bombings, etc. Whatever justifications for those actions after the fact do not make any other country more free.
>The issue is that the way you're expected to criticize America from what I observed is along the lines of 'they mean well but...'
Hard to think of any critique of the US I've seen on HN recently which acknowledges the possibility that we might mean well.
Even during the Biden administration, right after we allocated billions of dollars to Ukraine, huge numbers of Europeans expressed an unfavorable view of the US: https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2024/06/11/views-of-the-u...
They call us warmongers and then wonder why we don't want to help them fight their war. Now they say they want to be buddies with China which has been actively helping Russia with arms. I don't think there is any point in the US trying to please Europe.
And then you've got the Australians who express their burning hatred of the US for not giving more aid to Ukraine, while Australia's aid as a fraction of GDP is still sitting around 10-15% of that provided by the US.
> And then you've got the Australians who express their burning hatred of the US for not giving more aid to Ukraine, while Australia's aid as a fraction of GDP is still sitting around 10-15% of that provided by the US.
Which Australians are we talking about here? Australia, if pushed to the absolute limit might formally send a strongly worded letter to the US expressing concerns. They aren't particularly fussed about Ukraine, we've all spent decades politely accepting the US invading random countries for no obvious reason and in defiance of everyone's strategic interests. Australians clearly do not care if distant countries get invaded.
> They call us warmongers and then wonder why we don't want to help them fight their war.
Europeans helped when you called after 9/11. Are you seriously arguing about being called warmongers considering what your government started in Iran? (and btw screwed the global energy market)
This lack of self awareness is what turns people away.
>Europeans helped when you called after 9/11.
So how would you feel if you got labeled as warmongers for that help?
You're welcome to call us warmongers. Just don't expect us to help you fight wars if you do.
Libya was Europe's idea -- we helped when you called -- yet the US still gets blamed for it. If the US had surged more weapons to Ukraine (as some Europeans were requesting), thus provoking Russia to launch a nuke, we surely would've been blamed for that too.
The pattern I've noticed is that anywhere the US has foreign policy involvement (including Europe), there are locals in that region who are both for and against said involvement. People who aren't knowledgeable about the region will generally not know many details, and simply say "oh, the US is involved in a war again". If that's how we're going to be judged, then yes, I want to be involved in fewer wars. And withdrawing from NATO will help with that objective. So I favor NATO withdrawal.
> Libya was Europe's idea.
Hardly 'Europe's', it was the idea of some 'humanitarian interventionists' in the Obama admin and the then current president of France who wanted to cover up his corrupt dealings.
For what it's worth, I am not a fan of NATO either, so we can agree on that. All US troops should imo immediately leave Europe and loose all access to military facilities on the continent.
As for the whole warmongers thing, answer me two simple questions:
1. Was the 2003 Iraq war started based on false claims about WMDs? Yes/No?
2. Did you just attack Iran for no good reason? (Yes/No?)
>Hardly 'Europe's', it was the idea of some 'humanitarian interventionists' in the Obama admin and the then current president of France who wanted to cover up his corrupt dealings.
You can see French and UK leadership were making moves before the US:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_military_intervention_in_...
Obama's approach was referred to as "leading from behind".
>For what it's worth, I am not a fan of NATO either, so we can agree on that. All US troops should imo immediately leave Europe and loose all access to military facilities on the continent.
I'm glad we can agree on something. I find that a lot of Europeans are not willing to accept the logical implication of their stated beliefs.
>As for the whole warmongers thing, answer me two simple questions: [...]
I'm not sure why you're pushing this "warmongers" point. As I said, I'm an isolationist. I've left many comments here on HN about how I want the US to be more like Switzerland. The Swiss never do anything and thus they never get blamed for anything.
The families of the thousands of Iranians slaughtered by the regime doubtless think that we are attacking Iran for a good reason. Same way the thousands of Ukrainians slaughtered by Russia probably thought our weapons deliveries were being given for a good reason.
In any case we may be called "complicit" if we do not act -- the same arguments were used in the case of Libya. But we can't keep playing world police. We aren't very good at it, and it is not clear whether it is helpful. Not to mention the dubious ethics of getting involved in the affairs of other countries.
You're either "complicit" in "propping up" bad regimes, or a "warmongering" "imperialist" who "destabilizes" them. There's no way to win. Given the choice, I prefer to be complicit.
> The families of the thousands of Iranians slaughtered by the regime doubtless think that we are attacking Iran for a good reason
Regardless of the 'thousands of Iranians slaughtered by the regime' which is supposed to just be accepted as fact despite everyone citing some random number everytime, no they don't.
Because the logic of 'we'll liberate you from oppression by bombing you' does nothing but unites Iranians more than they ever were united before.
Or do you think the killing of schoolgirls by the US is welcomed by Iranians somehow?
Honestly, I am speechless.
Why do you believe that the current Iranian regime prevents its people from accessing the internet?
It's because a lot of the people hate the regime and want it gone. You can see that in activist spaces like the /r/NewIran subreddit or on X from accounts like https://x.com/__Injaneb96 that yes, they do very much welcome US intervention.
Here's a video from a townhall in my parent's congressional district where some Iranian-Americans speak up on the war: https://old.reddit.com/r/NewIran/comments/1rbdxzb/democrat_c...
It's quite similar to Ukrainians complaining about Putin. "My country sucks, come save me" is always a trap, because if you attempt to come "save" them you just get called a warmonger.
"They call us warmongers for carrying out an unprovoked invasion, and then wonder why we don't want to help them resist an unprovoked invasion."
Think about this for just three seconds, I'm begging you.
The phrase "warmonger" doesn't specify anything about the nature of the war, or the reason it was started. It's a very simpleminded "war=bad". If that's how we will be judged, fine.
As soon as you use the phrase "unprovoked" then you start getting into messy details. Are we so sure that the war in Ukraine was not provoked by NATO expansion? Are we so sure that the war in Iran was not provoked by Iran's actions against Israel or against its own people?
The ideologue doesn't like details. They prefer to see the world in black and white.
> They call us warmongers and then wonder why we don't want to help them fight their war.
There is a huge difference between attacking foreign nations because of oil... Oh, pardon me, because of... Geopolitical interests... Oh, pardon me... In the name of democracy and self-defense when you're being attacked (such as Ukraine).
We came to help you after 9/11, when for some reason you invaded Iraq although Osama Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda had taken responsibility...
But sure, think that you're white guardians of the flame of freedom and democracy all you want!
You're in exactly the same ballpark as China and Russia, they're just without the Hollywood propaganda.
No I don't mean one needs to be American. The reciprocal isn't valid. I talked about China. Given the misinformation the "western emisphere" has been subject to, I would find it dubious to get the echoes of what mainstream media portrays it as, even though there are elements of truth in what most people believe.
The U.S politics are easier to understand from the outside. For one it's a democracy, a more transparent process despite a lot is happening behind curtains. I have no idea what North Koreans are able to make of the U.S scene, I know for sure people in U.S and Europe are hardly able to comment on N.K.
tldr: I'm with you non Americans (and Americans) are perfectly able to critique the U.S with some valuable accuracy.
Why do you assume that the information non-Americans believe about the US is accurate?
It seems to me that there is a fair amount of misinformation which gets spread about the US. For example, many non-Americans seem to believe that school shootings are a significant cause of death here.
Furthermore, your proposed scheme creates an incentive to be non-transparent and thus not vulnerable to critique. By closing off information about your country, you can say to any critic: "Your critique is incorrect, because you lack information." Thus creating a reputational advantage for countries which successfully clamp down on the flow of information.
Is that your desired outcome? You want a world where criticizing the US can no longer be done as soon as Trump kicks out all of the foreign journalists and stops the information flow?
I'm not advocating for less transparency.
My argument is that with less transparent public affairs, it is much harder from the outside to understand what may be going on.
One can note the effects of certain measures without cherishing the schemes.
For that matter I'm personally convinced more transparency is overall a net benefit. It helps the public at large appreciate situations. But my preference, and the detrimental vs beneficial aspects of a system are irrelevant to the argument I made.
The information believed by Americans isn't any better, anyway. We're closer to the source of information, but we're also closer to the source of misinformation. It's very difficult to discuss anything remotely political with people (I want to say "these days" but I'm not confident this is a new thing) because there's little agreement about basic facts.
He said "At the very least you can be sure noone is in this for the good of the people anymore. This is about who will dominate the world of tomorrow.".
I.e. he doesn't see the US as "the good guys" either.
Pointing out the war threat from China isn't hypocritical just because you don't list all the war threats from the US at the same time.
They didn't say those exact words, but "I guess it's better than leaving everything to the US alone" is directly aimed at the US. They did say they don't like that the only two serious competitors are from the USA and China, they just used slightly different words.
Yes, but the framing when America does bad is that they mostly do good.
When China does good, it's always that they do mostly bad.
With China it's always pointed out how much power the state has over corporations there, but in the US out of control lobying is supposed to be 'concerned citizens expressing their opinions' or some shit. We're still supposed to take for granted that it is a representative democracy, if a flawed one.
I think a lot of us are blinded by our own propaganda. I would expect many Chinese geeks to have the same values as us for the greater good of humanity.
> I would expect many Chinese geeks to have the same values as us for the greater good of humanity.
Yes, they just can't talk about some of those values publically.
> Just because America is doing bad things doesn't mean China is good, or vice versa.
Of course not. When it comes to SOTA LLMs you have the choice between two bad options. For many, choosing the Chinese option is just choosing the lesser of two evils (and it's much cheaper).
Why people always dismiss the European option?
Mistral is right here, their models are in-between the cheap to run Chinese models and top of the line performances of US frontier models.
People are probably assuming that the trends from the last few decades continue. The EU fumbled semiconductors, production went to Asia. The EU fumbled the software revolution, the successes mainly came from the US. They fumbled the transition to smartphones despite the Nokia advantage. They missed tablets; seemed like they just didn't have the industrial vigour to make a serious attempt.
The safe money is they are going to be an also-ran for the AI revolution. They did manage to force Apple to switch from using lightening connectors to USB though so their wins can't just be laughed off. Maybe they'll surprise us but it'd be a welcome change from their usual routine.
> The EU fumbled semiconductors, production went to Asia
Production of state of the art semiconductors, yes. NXP, STMicro, Infineon are still there and massive in automotive, industrial, card chips, etc.
> The EU fumbled the software revolution, the successes mainly came from the US
Worldwide massive success, mostly yes. Most European countries have their local or regional success stories though.
> The safe money is they are going to be an also-ran for the AI revolution
Not really. Past performances, or lack thereof, are not indicative of future ones.
Mistral are pretty good and selling well in the enterprise space. Some of the best voice models are coming from France (Kyutai).
Past performance is extremely indicative of future results. It's not a guarantee, but it's definitely the way to bet.
ASML, SAP, Airbus to say a few.
That's it? Just 3 companies? Out of which one is a state propped defense provider, and the other won from purchasing US tech. IDK how you can see that as a win for the world's richest block.
>Production of state of the art semiconductors, yes.
If you fall out of the state of the art then the claim of EU fumbling semiconductors is correct. The richest block in the world should settle for no less than being state of the art. Anything less is fumbling it.
>NXP, STMicro, Infineon are still there and massive in automotive, industrial, card chips, etc.
The EU semi companies you listed are absent from the state of the art and only make low margin commodity parts that don't have moats. ASML exists but is not enough for claiming EU superiority since the EUV light source is still US IP designed and manufactured. And one top company is too little.
>Worldwide massive success, mostly yes.
Worldwide success is where the big money is, and you need a lot of money for cutting edge research and experimentation to build the future successes. Hence the claim of EU fumbling software is correct.
>Most European countries have their local or regional success stories though.
EU mom and pop shops aren't gonna make enough money to be able to afford risky ambitious ventures the likes of FAANGs have. Which is probably why you work for Hashicorp, a large global US company, and not some local EU company.
> EU mom and pop shops
Who said anything about mom and pop shops? You're arguing in extremely bad faith, as usual with this topic.
Doctolib, Revolut, Adyen, Nokia, Ericsson, Siemens, and tons of others I can't be bothered to list.
> The EU semi companies you listed are absent from the state of the art and only make low margin commodity parts that don't have moats
You think industrial controllers don't have a moat?
> If you fall out of the state of the art then the claim of EU fumbling semiconductors is correct.
Absolutely not. There is more to the world that state of the art.
>You're arguing in extremely bad faith, as usual with this topic.
Care to explain your wild accusations. I never attacked you directly, just the points you made.
>Doctolib, Revolut, Adyen, Nokia, Ericsson, Siemens, and tons of others I can't be bothered to list.
Do those make anything the US or China can't? A doctor appointment scheduling app? Seriously?
>You think industrial controllers don't have a moat?
In bureaucracy, not in innovation.
>There is more to the world that state of the art.
If you like competing in low margin race to the bottom jobs, sure. Just don't be surprised your tech wages are low then.
> Care to explain your accusations. I never attacked you directly, just the points you made.
You twisted "national successess" to "mon and pop shop". It's a typically American argument "unless it's the global behemoth that has a global monopoly in the domain, it's a failure", which is, frankly, absurd. Would you say Venmo is a failure because they're not used outside of the US (because other countries have better banking infrastructure)? Or that GM are a failure because they barely sell outside the US (because their cars are not adapted to other markets)? Or that United Healthcare Group are a failure because they only operate in the US?
Leboncoin are a massive peer to peer marketplace in France and a few neighbouring countries (IIRC Belgium), like Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace. They do a couple of hundred million in annual revenue. They are, undoutedly, a local success story. Are they a failure because they don't rival Ebay or Facebook Marketplace? No, because that would assume that the goal of each and every business is to become a global behemoth monopoly, which is an impossibility.
Similarly, Doctolib run healthcare appointment and everything related (online appointnments, digital prescriptions, secure storage and sharing of medical data like test results, AI voice note taking assistants for doctos, etc.) in France, and are expanding in a few neighbouring countries. In France they are the standard and pretty much what everyone uses. They are undoubtedly a success.
> Why people always dismiss the European option?
Mistral is good for many tasks where you do not need SOTA or near SOTA performance. They cannot compete if you do.
It’s not top of the line and mostly not open source
Europe is always 10 years ahead in all theoretical aspects.
Then they need money.
So most of the talent flee or get bought, typical example in machine learning space is huggingface or fchollet.
Then European government plays catch-up and offer subventions, but at the same time makes rules to make sure companies don't threaten US dominance, or Asian manufacturing.
Mistral is typically playing catch the subsidy game.
Europe is constructed so that it can't win, but can "pick" the winner between scylla and charybdis, pest and cholera.
>Europe is constructed so that it can't win, but can "pick" the winner between scylla and charybdis, pest and cholera.
Europe is constructed so you can take 60 days vacation, work 32 hours a week, get tons of social benefits, can't really lose your job, and retire when you are 65 with a full pension.
Which is excellent. Unless you need to be economically competitive.
>Europe is constructed so that it can't win, but can "pick" the winner between scylla and charybdis, pest and cholera.
Because they have no spine and no leverage/muscle on the international stage to throw their weight around and make sure they get what's best for themselves at the expense of everyone else the same way US, China, etc do.
They play the international nice guy that just ends up being the doormat everyone takes advantage of, being at the mercy of Russian and Azeri gas, at the mercy of US tech, energy and defence, and at the mercy of Chinese manufacturing after dismantling their own manufacturing, at the mercy of Turkey for migration enforcement, etc so they can't do anything radical that upsets their "partners", or that makes their virtue signaling policies look bad, or risk massive repercussions they aren't prepared for, so they just turtle, bury their head in the sand and pretend everything is going fine while falling further into obscurity.
EU flaunts its "moral values" as its strength, but their geopolitical adversaries have no such values and are dominating over them in the process exploiting their morals against them as their weakness. There's nothing virtuous in being/acting weak and letting others dominate you.
European Union construction happened after the second world war in the context of the Marshall Plan ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan ) to help rebuild Europe that had been destroyed.
By design European laws are superior to national laws. Leaving the union is also instant bankruptcy because all countries have very high level of debt which are only guaranteed because they are in the union.
European population is getting old and replaced by a migration coming mainly from previous African colonies.
Future paying for the past.
>after dismantling their own manufacturing
Uhm, Europe is not the US. We still have a lot of manufacturing. It varies by country - the UK unfortunately had structural problems, finance supremacy and a Thatcher who hated unions so much that she'd rather destroy unionized industries than have unions. Central Europe still does a pretty large amount of manufacturing.
For a lot of people in the world Europe = USA
But this makes zero sense. Two different continents, values systems, law systems. Not to mention the current USA administration is openly hostile to Europe. So why would anyone confuse the two.
Europe is at the mercy of the USA. Any difference in posture is due to local politics which can swing local elections, but European leaders are willing and eager to do what the US wants.
Sure, I'd agree with that a few years ago. Nowadays when the USA asks for something like just using their military bases for refueling, they're laughed at.
Europe will not be independent as long as there are US military bases there. Saying otherwise would be kidding oneself.
You are aware that the number of American soldiers in these bases is symbolic and their presence is meant to be a deterrent for Russia?
Europe in general is a wide term. Like, UK is in Europe and is a surveillance state.
Pick people at random from countries around the world. Ask them what bad things have happened to them or their country because of China or USA. What do you think the result is going to be?
I think people worry about monopolies, be it financial or otherwise
Yeah, idk this looks pretty good and they ain't bombing anyone nor trying to spread global communism USSRs style:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7W20hdgWXY
I think I'll take the open AI models, innovative high quality EVs and cheap solar panels, please.
> Just because America is doing bad things doesn't mean China is good, or vice versa.
When someone points out hypocrisy, this is "the answer", it seems. But it is just a statement, not a rebuttal of the hypocrisy that was pointed out.
Hypocrisy is still hypocrisy.
And bad things are bad things. Yet no amount of propaganda (red scare, "eew dictatorship", Uyger-genocide, Taiwan threat) can convince me that the China is as evil (or more evil) than the US-Israel alliance of the the last 50 years.
Hypocrisy would be if the person only points out Chinese authoritarianism without acknowledging problems e.g. in US policy.
Not mentioning US problems every time they criticize CCP problems is not automatically hypocrisy, and this idea basically means you cannot criticize anything without criticizing everything someone considers just as bad or worse at the same time.
Calling a discussion on China hypocritical because it doesn't say "but US worse" is essentially trying to build in whataboutism into every discussion.
It's a symptom of increasing polarization and part of the problem.
There's US AI and China AI. Those are the two contenders. We are discussing the problems of using the Chinese AI because of the "evil" govt there. The evil at this point clearly is less evil than that of the US govt.
That's the hypocrisy: not seeing the block of wood in the eye of one while complaining about the speck of wood in the eye of the other.
By trying to be less hypocritical we create a more level playing field based on facts, instead of gut-feeling based hatred.
Whatabboutism is, IMHO, used a lot as a way to circumvent having to address the glaring hypocrisy: i see it's used to shut up those to point out hypocrisy.
> Uyger-genocide
I'm gonna go out on a crazy limb here and say that this is on par with the genocide in Gaza? Mass sterilization, forced labor, sex, and torture on a larger scale than Gaza. Certainly we can argue about which is worse, but they're both incredible atrocities. The only thing that makes China less scary IMO is that they currently aren't the empire ruling the world and at the center of the global economy. If that changes, as seems likely, I don't see any reason to believe China would be a better or more compassionate world ruler than the US.
Not about moral high ground. Ones a democracy one isn’t.
Your democracy has consistently voted senile 75 year olds for 3-elections now
The current president - who Americans voted for twice - is heavily accused of being a pedophile and has reneged on every one of his poll promise
Really not the best advertisement for democracy
The difference is that there was (at least an illusion of) choice. Nobody said that it is a perfect system. And Trump will be gone in 3 years, while Putin and Xi will stay in power until their death.
I don't understand why Americans continue believing that democracy is the only way for every population in the world
Why would Russians want democracy? Or the Chinese, for that matter? There have been zero democratic impulses in their societies across hundreds, even thousands of years.
The west needs to rest its democratizing mission and accept that every society is fundamentally different
My country (India) got a "thriving" democracy, but because there is no real democratic impulse in the society, everything on the ground has devolved into what the society was always like - quasi-feudal bureaucracy
> I don't understand why Americans continue believing that democracy is the only way for every population in the world
They don't! The majority voted for the guy who wants to, admittedly (multiple times), be a dictator and is huge fan of other dictators. If he finds a way to stay for a 3rd term his most loyal followers along with all the republicans in Congress will be just fine with it.
>I don't understand why Americans continue believing that democracy is the only way for every population in the world
Well, ideology. I believe my way is the only way for every population in the world too, and I fight for it to happen. Of course, each place adapts to their own condition, but I believe my core ideology is the way for humanity as a whole, and I believe it is the same for people who defend western american-style democracy.
What part of "defending western american-style democracy" involves imposing it on other countries and being mad when they don't adopt it?
> I don't understand why Americans continue believing that democracy is the only way for every population in the world
It's not Americans, it's educated people who believe in personal liberties.
> Why would Russians want democracy
Because they would have a choice if they want to be robbed blind by a bunch of oligarchs, and if they want to be sanctioned off from the world because the supreme leader decided he wants to kill and maim a million Russians to achieve nothing more than killing Ukrainian civillians.
> There have been zero democratic impulses in their societies across hundreds, even thousands of years
Absurdly bad historic revisionism. Russia had democratic impulses in 1917 and 1990, both hijacked and went nowhere. China's 1911 revolution was also overtly democratic in nature, but was also hijacked.
> It's not Americans, it's educated people who believe in personal liberties.
I find this attitude deeply parochial and colonial. Who are these so-called "educated people" (most of whom would be in western developed nations) to decide what sort of governance system a country should have?
The democratic revolution in America and France came from its own people. If the Russians or the Chinese want democracy, they'll get it on their own
Western hand-wringing about the "lack of democracy" in foreign (usually poorer) countries is just concern-colonialism. I think most of these educated people should focus on their own countries and let the rest of the world be
> I find this attitude deeply parochial and colonial. Who are these so-called "educated people" (most of whom would be in western developed nations) to decide what sort of governance system a country should have?
Do you think only people in western countries want a democratic system of governenance for their country?
> If the Russians or the Chinese want democracy, they'll get it on their own
Both of them tried it, but were denied.
> Or the Chinese, for that matter?
The marched for it en masse in 1989?
Russians and Chinese are also people. They deserve to rule themselves.
An ideologically driven subset of urban educated youths that was proportionally a tiny subset of the entire Chinese population marched for it in 1989. FTFY.
They are ruling themselves in the sense that their governing systems are emergent consequences of their own cultures. All peoples ultimately deserve the governments they have.
You could say the exact same thing about the cultural revolution.
The Americans marched en masse to get rid of ICE, right?
Guess the Tiananmen square tank man is a victim, but Alex Pretti and Renee Good are just statistics
(The tank man wasn't even run down by the tank - Good was shot for merely turning the wheels in the wrong direction)
Americans really need to shut up about any democratic values or humans rights and clean up their own mess before preaching to the world
> The Americans marched en masse to get rid of ICE, right?
No.
> Guess the Tiananmen square tank man is a victim, but Alex Pretti and Renee Good are just statistics
Pretti started a fight with a cop in the middle of arresting someone while carrying a gun, Renee Good drove over a cop.
The Tiananmen square tank man didn't attack anyone.
At some point I saw an analysis that looked at the policy/political differences between the different fractions of the Chinese communist party and compared them to the spread in a western parliament (I don't remember which one I think US or UK). They found that the spread was very similar. With that I'm not saying that the Chinese system is better, just that these statements are not as straight-forward as one things.
I think a much better metric is suppression of dissent, human rights records etc., not (the illusion of) choice at the poll booth once every 4 years.
The marketing pitch of Western "democracy" has always been that you can criticise your government freely and the government won't jail you or murder you.
Also, consumer goods.
The voting and multiple-branches-checks-and-balances elements are sidelines.
Currently none of those promises are true in the US. The government is murdering and jailing people for whimsical and self-indulgent reasons, the consumer economy is about to crash, and the only checks-and-balances are the checks going straight to the Emperor's private accounts.
To be fair, there's some judicial pushback, and some political friction.
But Senate and Congress are wholly captured, the opposition is flaccid and foreign-funded, media independence is a myth, and the last time The People had any real influence on policy was the 70s. Possibly.
I have no idea if China is "better". From a distance China seems to be doing much better at building useful things and making long term plans.
But ruling cliques always seem to end up being run by psychopaths, so my expectations for humanity from China's rulers aren't any higher than those for the US.
Despite being formally less democratic, the Chinese government is in practice more responsive to its constituency than the US government. I have to think that class character of the parties is the determining factor. The CPC is, despite everything, still a proletarian party. In the US, the two parties are both directed by the interests of the haute bourgeoisie, with the Republicans pulling votes from the petit bourgeoisie, and the Democrats pulling votes from the professional-managerial class.
I mean the American people who will cry about humans rights records in China will also watch masked government agents shoot down their own citizens just because they're suspected to be illegal immigrants
It would be hilarious if it wasn't so sad
It's not true that people just sat by and watched.
There was massive public backlash and real organized resistance, especially in the streets of Minneapolis. People literally put their lives on the line, communities banded together to help migrants who were afraid to go to work or leave their homes, and they ultimately forced the government to retreat and change tactics. And it resulted in the firing of a cabinet secretary and the border patrol commander that was the face of the whole thing. And plummeting public approval that has only declined further since
A somewhat similar campaign occurred in Hong Kong, but the resistance sadly was not able to fare as well against China tyranny
I'm going off democracy, at least how it is currently implemented. It is proving far too easy to pervert.
It turns out that the people will vote for some terrible things in order to get that one petty little thing a given candidate promises and they want, or because they don't like something specific about the other candidate(s). And of course many may later say “well, I didn't vote for that” when they quite demonstrably did.
Well, the politicians learned how to game the system well. Now people need to learn how to game the politicians. A formal verification process of pre-election promises would be a good start.
Nobody cares that politicians don't keep pre-election promises. And in most cases they shouldn't, circumstances change. You can have no intention of doing something, then something else happens, and you change your mind.
The problem is that people put stock in pre-election promises, rather than voting for the character of the person they want to represent them.
> When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure
The measure is the number of votes. "What shall we have for dinner" measures things, there's no target in a "curry vs pizza vs thai" poll, and it doesn't really matter, the target is a nice night in with a film.
However with politics, getting power is the goal, thus the number of votes is thus the target, and thus its not good at measuring what the country actually wants, just who can best get the most votes.
This isn't new, but modern brainwashing allows manipulation at a scale hitherto unseen.
> Ones a democracy one isn’t.
China characterizes itself as a democracy too, just not as a liberal democracy. There are democratic processes, although these are not free in the sense of liberalist ideology. The CCP justifies its control of the elections as a counterbalance to being corrupted by money, which starts to look like not an entirely unreasonable justification.
The CCP narrative also emphasizes "outcome orientation", i.e. that (democratic) legitimacy comes from people being happy about what the governance delivers, not about how it gets chosen. Which again starts to look not totally crazy, given western governments nowadays tend to have dismal approval ratings. And even after taking into account the likely biases in the polling, I do believe the majority of the Chinese truly approve of the CCP.
I'm not a fan of the Chinese system, but I think there are lessons we could take, and a binary "democratic or not" is not a very meaningful categorization.
Just a reminder that the DPRK is "Democratic People's Republic of Korea".
North Korea is a democratic republic!
This is utter nonsense.
Democracy is the idea that people should control their government. The CCP's (and Putin's) notion of "democracy" is something along the lines of "as long as the government controls the people, the people can decide".
Democracy may be a spectrum but China isn't on it, neither in practice nor in spirit. If you have to control the media and prevent free discussion, you aren't practicing democracy.
How can there be democracy in an environment where freedom of thought is all but nullified due to social manipulation through mainstream media. Calling something ‘free’ doesn’t make it so.
The reality is that the term democracy in western society has essentially become meaningless due to the swathes of algorithmic manipulation which occurs every second of everyday through every possible digital medium.
The moral weight of democracy is heavily overrated. Of course democracy is better than autocracy, all other things being equal. But I don't think a democracy that starts wars and bombs a new country every other year is morally superior to any relatively peaceful autocracy. Rather the opposite.
Try holding up a sign in the street anywhere in China that says anything remotely critical of the Chinese government. Or live in China and post something online remotely critical of China. You will be arrested, thrown in jail for years.
Democracy isn't just having an election every four years. We have rights that we shouldn't take for granted.
"Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried". Winston Churchill
Socialism with Chinese Characteristics had not been tried at that point :)
Ironically you can map China's progress over the last 30 years directly with their adoption of capitalistic policies.
The more capitalistic they become, the more growth they have seen.
To be fair, Deng Xiaoping's reforms were based on the older New Economic Policy or NEP from the 1920s USSR, so it had been tried at that point. It was scrapped in the USSR for other reasons, not because it failed.
Exactly, maybe we've got it all wrong :)
The word you're looking for is dictatorship, and it is not new.
Quoting a guy who is (in)directly responsible for murder of about 4 million people. Nice
So that means the people are complicit in whatever wars the US started. Not sure if better or worse.
A lot of people voted for someone who was known to be an evil crook. It was very clear that he got into politics for praising his own ego. They voted against 'the good' in the hope for their own benefit and against that of the world. If they did not 'expect' the current state of affairs then they just refused to listen to their own heart.
Germany was (formally) a democracy when it fought the Soviets.
"Not about moral high ground. One's an ideology my morals agree with, one isn't."
Is believing people should have a choice a moral high ground now?
You have a 2 party system where on many fronts both parties tow (almost) the same line and roughly behave like a oneparty system.
China has one proletarian party. The US has two bourgeois parties. One might think the ideal would be to have one bourgeois party, and one proletarian party, but that hasn't seemed to work out anywhere.
Well done! You're on your way to your Lounge Suite!
https://youtu.be/vZ9myHhpS9s?si=UkviDqG2NBQVd_IK&t=131
Except I don't know who won the 1972 English Football Cup.
No, but believing our so-called "democracy" (quotes intended, read: "21st century western systems") is how you give people "a choice" is the moral high ground. That is your axiom, but it's often touted as a tautology.
The name says "demos" and "kratos" but names are names, not facts.
There are many ways to give people a choice and this one has proven to be quite ineffective at that, as it slowly devolved into a plutocracy/oligarchy. Iron law of oligarchy, yadda yadda.
What they are very effective at though: crushing dissent, calming the masses with a reassuring illusion of choice, and touting itself as the "one true way".
When I look at the outcomes I don't see any semblance of democracy, only a ritual dance/theatre show every 4 years. A farce as big as the "democratic" instruments on the PRC.
There's a reason this "democracy" is very diligent at discouraging association and unionizing. Those give actual power to the people (and with power comes choice). That's dangerous. People might start believing they can actually influence the outcomes.
"Don't blame me - I voted for Kodos"
> our so-called "democracy" (quotes intended, read: "21st century western systems")
Do not conflate the broken American political system, the semi-broken British one, and the whole rest of the "west". Each country has its own political system, and they are wildly different.
> crushing dissent
Democracies are good at crushing dissent? Compared to other political systems? That's just not true. All other political systems rely on universal truth and unwavering trust in a person / religion / clique of people, who can do no wrong and can never be criticised.
> There's a reason this "democracy" is very diligent at discouraging association and unionizing
What? You are probably talking about a specific democracy, and the most broken one at that.
> and they are wildly different
As someone from the "whole rest of the west", no, they're not different at all. Very minor details change, but the net outcome is the exact same and suffer from the exact same problems.
You can't escape the iron law of oligarchy.
> Democracies are good at crushing dissent?
They're not only good: they are the best. You don't need to curb dissent by violence if you discourage dissent by social manipulation. It's the cheapest and most effective tactic: keeping the populace docile.
If you manage to equate "democracy" (again, quotes intended) with democracy (lack of quotes intended), most of the work is already done.
"What are you, antidemocratic!?"
"Don't blame me - I voted for Kodos"
There's a reason my country's system trembled when the bipartisan system was challenged as new parties emerged... but it was curbed within two legislatures without a single shot fired and now we're back to an even stronger bipartisan representation. Quite the fine job, actually.
We even have a name for this: "the state's sewers". They're very effective. There's a reason the state's armed forces routinely infiltrate unions and other citizens participation platforms.
> As someone from the "whole rest of the west", no, they're not different at all. Very minor details change, but the net outcome is the exact same and suffer from the exact same problems.
Such as? There are countries such as Poland with a political duopoly, but in most European countries, there are multiple parties that work with or against each other. There are different coalitions with varying compromises between them.
> They're not only good: they are the best. You don't need to curb dissent by violence if you discourage dissent by social manipulation. It's the cheapest and most effective tactic: keeping the populace docile.
Nonsense, because autocracies do both, and the threat by violence is very real and makes sure that social manipulation is more effective.
> There are different coalitions with varying compromises between them.
They all failed and were subsumed by the two (read: one) big groups in Europe. Far left and libertarians were crushed in the past two legislatures.
Now it's PfE's turn but the antibodies are already in the bloodstream (the two big groups are already signing their covenants to protect the oligarchy) and Trump did them dirty (they're now scrambling to distance themselvesb from USA's and Israel's ties) so they're DoA and will fail too.
This said: I understand your points, and thanks for the civil discussion.
Democracy is a stretch
Can you clarify which is which?
Chinese propaganda seems to hit very hard these days. If you really don't know, you seriously need to check what media you are consuming. Yes, the US has huge problems, many old and some new, but on a serious technical level the answer is (at least for now) 100% clear.
> Chinese propaganda seems to hit very hard these days.
Assuming that everyone who disagrees with you is a propagandized bot is a terrible way to live. You will not learn.
Assuming that China is not officially a 100% authoritarian dictatorship takes some serious mental gymnastics or hardcore brainwashing by propaganda channels. In fact forget media manipulation. A simple look at what they did to their constitution would already tell you everything you need to know. The US might be moving in this same direction under Trump, but it sure as hell isn't there yet. And if they do try to do the same, there is a good chance for another civil war. So while China is already lost, there is still some level of hope for the US.
And why should anyone prefer a democracy over any other form of government? Doesn't it depend on the philosophy of each People?
As far as I'm aware most autocratic forms of government have to clamp down on dissent with some level of force, be it violence or imprisonment or seizing assets. It means people are afraid to criticise power.
Western democracies don't have that problem. Yes, they have other problems. Many problems which are hard to solve. But if you live in a western democracy you can freely criticise those in power without fear of retribution.
In a western democracy, you can, at least in theory, freely criticize those in power without fear of retribution, but also without any hope of your criticism changing anything. It's just a pressure release valve. When criticism starts taking a form that might force change, the mask and the gloves come off, as you can see in the violence against protesters once protests reach a critical mass.
You can't force change, sure, but that doesn't mean you can't be part of it. Individuals can and do join political parties and become influential within them. Political parties win elections and ultimately set policy which can start to change things.
None of those things happen quickly, and most people don't succeed in their attempt to do it. That doesn't mean it's not possible. I'd argue that it's a feature of the system that the system makes it hard to change course - it averages out the extremes.
> created: 18 minutes ago
Right.
He didn't even say anything outrageous, he's just participating in the discussion. People can create accounts to be able to reply to a discussion, even throwaways.
China having killed up to 50m of its own population in the 20th century through socialism, while America led the world in funding NATO, global scientific research, and global aid for decades buys America a lot of good grace.
The moral high ground claims here can be generalized:
Liberal democracies have moral high ground over authoritarian dictatorships (at least along that one dimension)
The US is backsliding tragically (and stupidly) and may lose that moral high ground, but the rest of the western democracies will still have it
The U.S. is not the country conducting amoral behavior with terrorist regimes for oil, that’s China.
We conduct amoral behavior with terrorist regimes for dollars.
What makes you think they’re American?
Talks about "mass propaganda."
Thinks America is starting wars on behalf of Israel.
LMAO
All empires are to some degree evil because their agenda is to dominate weaker peoples and nations. They almost all committed crimes against humanity and genocides if you look retrospectively from the todays point of view. Even our beloved Roman Empire that the Western civilization is built upon was genocidal empire.
Not sure if we can call it "beloved". For sure respected for what it did to build the base of modern civilization, but we are aware of its dark sides. And probably Nero would be an excellent example of what can happen to the empire and its people when a crazy person becomes its ruler.
> I see an American believe they somewhat have the moral high ground over China
The elected government of the US has the moral highground of over the regime that killed the KMT in it's weakened state after the KMT defeated Japan, went on a rampage against the educated classes, mowed down its own people with machineguns and tanks when they demanded a say in their own governments, and kidnaps people advocating for democracy to this day, including Jack Ma.
> despite starting a new war... on behalf of Israel every six months.
The war started when Hamas, funded by Iran, went on a murder and rape rampage against Israeli civilians.
The origins of this war date back decades, arguably far longer.
Yes, they started with Islamic colonization of the Middle East and North Africa in 650.
The Uyghur say hi.
One province of China has enough hellish nightmarish bullshit going on caused by the CCP that we maintain total moral superiority over them. It’s not even a question to anyone except “fellow travelers”.
is that you. Adrian Zenz?
thank god at least 1% of HN users aren't so heavily propagandized - makes me believe in the future a bit more.
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> That doesn't mean it's positive in human rights
Neither is the US, land of slaves, segregation, and the KKK. They did seem to get better there for a few of decades, but sure are working hard to return to their roots.
> That doesn't mean it's positive in human rights
Isn't the US building mass detention camps right now for all the brown people there? And arresting / detaining / demanding papers from any and everyone? With federal agents killing civilians?
Don't get me wrong, China is also horrible here, they have their own camps.
But pretending the US is positive wrt human rights is a wild take in 2026.
>Isn't the US building mass detention camps right now for all the brown people there?
No, it is not, but the freedom of speech protections the US has (that China doesn't) allow for such commentary.
Good thing I'm in Europe and not governed by those.
And yes, they are-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_immigrant_detention_si...
If you are willing to be hyperbolic to this degree in the case of the US an equal description of China would make Nazi Germany blush.
> sn't the US building mass detention camps right now for all the brown people there?
Why would you think that?
> And arresting / detaining / demanding papers from any and everyone?
I have lots of friends from outside the U.S. that come regularly and don't find it onerous. Maybe it depends where you are coming from?
> With federal agents killing civilians?
OK, I agree that there are issues, and even very serious ones. Obviously, not on the level of China, but still serious issues. Nonetheless, what you see on left leaning media is not representative of what is happening on the ground throughout the U.S. Not even close.
IMO, the US is definitely positive wrt human rights. There are issues, but you can go to a No Kings protest, and live your life happily without issues, and it is hard to find another country that is nearly as forgiving. And it at least has people trying to spread concepts of individual liberty, vs most countries in Europe, almost all countries in Asia, and ALL Muslim countries, that are leaning to removing individual rights.
>Isn't the US building mass detention camps right now for all the brown people there?
No? Its for illegal people, regardless of color. Just so happened that most illegals come from specific places
kein Mensch ist illegal
With the number of wars that the US have waged over the years including in Vietnam, Iran and supporting Israel. I don’t think even the US has done a stellar job in defending human rights.
If you meant American citizen human rights, then you’re correct.
> If you meant American citizen human rights, then you’re correct.
Not even that. ICE has already killed US citizens, they no longer prohibit segregation, trans people were banned from the military, and many more. All of those affect American citizens.
> That doesn't mean it's positive in human rights
How about your pack up your arrogance and stop defining human rights for me and other 1.4 billion Chinese?
Well, the National People's Congress / CCP define and frame that practically for you.
It's not like 1.4 billion Chinese have much say in that.
If I am wrong, please remind me again how much say Chinese people had on the escape hatches of Article 51 in your constitution.
I guess Alex Pretti and Renee Good didn't get much say in whether they should be killed by the US federal government.
Let me remind you that none of their killers wearing US federal agency uniforms have been charged. I thought their rights were covered by their constitution, that was a mistake.
How positive for the human rights of the people of invaded countries was the US?
Ask around in Vietnam, Iraq, Syria and countless more countries around the world.
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I agree, that's why Iran is correct to arm and defend themselves against Israel and the US.
Yeah, those 8 year old girls had been 2 weeks away from developing a nuke. Had been since 1997 im told
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Not very democratic to invade other countries on the whim of a president.
> they said democratic
They didn't even say that. They only said China playing is "better than leaving everything to the US alone."
For now indeed, the people that want to get rid of it are currently in power.
The US was one of the first democracies in the world, and many countries followed suit. But the US hasn't kept up, and now the powers that be have exploited the weaknesses in the system. With arguably the biggest one being giving the president too much power (appointing supreme court justices, executive orders, etc).
Democracy in most of the countries is just theater. Trump promised no more wars iirc.
Don't get me wrong, I'd rather live in a country without a million cameras that automatically fine me for crossing the street illegally but I don't actually deceive myself in thinking my vote counts for much.
> I'd rather live in a country without a million cameras
Are you talking about the US or China? https://deflock.org/
China at least banned the use of facial recognition in public spaces by their supreme court in 2021 (and then further strengthened the ban in 2024 and also got the PIPL).
If you're thinking of the "social credit" system please know that that's just an online meme. China's credit score system is not even nationalized and not nearly as invasive as the US's credit score system, which can sometimes determine whether or not someone is allowed to buy a house.
Besides their own credit score system, the other thing that sometimes gets labelled the "social credit system" was an attempt they had to track the behavior of business leaders and elected politicians. Basically anyone who holds social power but not the common person. This also never really took off and was not ever nationalized/centralized.
> I'd rather live in a country without a million cameras that automatically fine me for crossing the street illegally
Agreed, but there again, the democracies have surveillance capitalism, it's not exactly like we're not being tracked.
You let Trump and all the tech-bro shitheads win with that attitude unfortunately. Democracy is an ongoing battle.
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I don't see the issue. China hosts the alternatives or the only game in town for lots of technologies. China has every interest and right to create products. Not everything that comes out of China is some devious plan to do terrible things. It's people trying to make money just like you and me.
I am not washing away the authoritarianism, but take a look at other economic super powers directionality. Or that of tech ceos as well. At least Chinese tech companies aren't going around praising wwii Germany, writing manifestos, and bombing children at school or fisherman on whims. It is difficult not to see more countries regardless of leadership putting their hat in the ring as a net positive. Especially if it increases sustainability and lowers the price, which this very clearly does. It's even open source...
> Still not sure how I feel about China of all places to control the only alternative AI stack, but I guess it's better than leaving everything to the US alone.
Fully agree. From a US perspective, that sucks. For everyone else it's pretty great.
At this point the world's opinions of China are better than those of the US in some polls. One country invests and helps build infrastructure on a massive scale globally, the other alienates allies, causes countless conflicts, and openly threatens to end civilizations.
Indeed, even if one isn't partial to China, there's reasons to be glad that an increasingly hostile US has powerful competition.
> This is about who will dominate the world of tomorrow.
For this you'd need a technological moat. So far the forerunners have burned a lot of money with no moat in sight. Right now Europe is happy just contributing on research and doing the bare-minimum to maintain the know-how. Building a frontier model would be lobbing money into the incinerator for something that will be outdated tomorrow. European investors are too careful for that - and in this case seem to be right.
Yeah it's confusing. I mean China has work camps for Uighurs and is very brutal on Tibetans etc. OTOH, their leader is not setting the world on fire every second week and compared to Trump seems like the paragon of reason on the surface. Of course we know it's a facade but man what crazy times to live in.
China can't project power globally because the US has them locked in place. There is a constellation of US allies and military bases surrounding China's coast.
It's extremely (read: extremely) naive to think that China keeps to itself because they don't have global power ambitions.
Look at the South China Sea, the one playground that the US stranghold allows them to play in...they don't give a fuck about anyone else's territory there.
If Trump acted more like Xi with regards to public speaking, but the actions were still the same, thing would be a lot different.
My point is that Trump could sign/execute/order all the same exact things he's done, but if I just never spoke about it, or kept hidden like Chinese do, he would be compared MUCH differently.
If someone like Trump could talk smarter, he would be smarter and would do things smarter.
That would also make him a lot more dangerous. After all in his first presidency he was still the man behind the biggest military on the planet but he knew shit on how to leverage this. In his second term he is even more loose but loose is tempertantrums and simple short sighted strategies. Easy to read, hard to accept.
You do realize that the US has a greater percentage of it's citizens in prison than any other country, including China?
In the US its not the Uighurs or Tibetans who are being oppressed - it's the blacks and immigrants. The US elected a president who characterizes immigrants as rapists and murderers (while he himself is a convicted rapist, suspected pedophile, and wants to commit war crimes in Iran).
The facade, believed by many Americans, is that USA is the land of the free, a democracy (despite no popular vote) one of the good guys, but actions say otherwise.
In the U.S. we don’t ethically cleanse in the name of political stability - we ethically cleanse in the name of economic growth.
Moral stances aside, I'd argue it's healthy that the US gets competition from abroad. I appreciate the boost that the world is getting from China - infrastructure and construction projects are a huge benefit to economies. Their focus on green energy has caused a huge influx of affordable solar panels, home batteries, EVs, etcetera, helping reduce the dependency on fossil fuels - while the US and especially the other big money spenders in the middle east would rather the world remain fully dependent on them. But for the past years Europe and now Asia are feeling the pain from being overly reliant on that.
China's policies and government aren't morally defensible and I do fear that they will become more aggressive in spreading their influence and policies onto other countries, but from an economic standpoint what they're doing is super effective. While the previous world power (the US) is stuck in infighting and going through cycles of fixing/undoing the previous administration's damages, instead of planning ahead.
bold to think half the comments here arent from deepseek itself :)
I personally love the bit "us initiated tech war" lol. thats right, they started making AI its their fault! bad imperialist US !
yeah, v5 will do better
The important thing is that LLMs are well-dispersed and the technology is relative open, much more open than it could have been. Alternative worthwhile LLMs will emerge from Europe and other non-US western countries once the economic incentives are there.
You’re right… but that’s on the rest of the world not getting their shit together.
It’s this sort of example (and not properly supporting Ukraine, and not agreeing how to collectively deal with migrants, and not agreeing how to coordinate defence, and myriad other examples) that highlights what a pointless mess the EU is. It’s not a unified block - it’s 27 self-interested entities squabbling and playing petty power games, while totally failing to plan for the future with vision.
The EU could/should have ensured that a European equivalent to OpenAI or Anthropic could thrive, and had competitive frontier models already; instead, they’re years and countless billions behind.
The EU pouring even more billions in this would just have meant pouring billions on US tech. China is winning on all fronts at this game because of the embargo, they end up even more vertically integrated as a result of it.
> The EU pouring even more billions in this would just have meant pouring billions on US tech.
Which is crazy given that ASML is European.
> If China ever feels emboldened enough to go for Taiwan and the US descends into complete chaos, the rest of the world running on AI will be at the mercy of authoritarian regimes.
Alternative being the current reality and world being dominated by US. Let's ask people in Middle East/Asia/South America about how they feel about that. In this current day and age, how is this statement even relevant?
Competition with the Soviet Union gave all the workers in the world better conditions, also advances in science and technology... (And risk of mutual destruction ;)), even if the USSR wasn't good.
Mistral (a French company) shouldn’t be discounted.
Not worse than having our stuff built there. Is it great to be relying on them? No, but at least more stable than US under Trump.
China doesn't even care about Taiwan anymore, their saber-rattling about it is a convenient distraction while they quietly make it completely irrelevant in the next few years.
It does seem the idea is to get the Taiwanese people to want to choose to rejoin China by making China far better for people to live than Taiwan. Maybe that will be via democracy (i.e. China manipulates the people of Taiwan), or perhaps it will be genuine (i.e. China provides a far better lifestyle for the average person than Taiwan)
I have seen first hand how Chinese nationals behave when visiting Taiwan - it’s not pretty.
Shared language and history aside, these two cultures are not in the same solar system when it comes to social norms and curtesies.
Come on... I was hoping that Mistral would do something and man that would be great as european but I hear NOTHING from them ever.
I don't know what the problem is. Are we europeans to stupid? Do we just not have enough money / VC money? Are we not proud enough?
:(
Isn’t Mistral close in the ballpark?
Mistral has a different focus. They aren't taking on trillions in debt risking their entire economy to produce useful products.
I think they are leaders in the democratization of LLMs. Almost everyone has a computer right now that can run a useful variant of a Mistral model. I hope they keep their focus because what they are aiming for likely has the biggest impact on the average person and would be the best case scenario for the technology in general.
There are no European models that come close. It's Korean models, then a UAE model K2, then Mistral.
AFAIK: Current Mistral models are not competitive with SOTA-models that come out of the USA or China. They are "good enough" for enterprise usage when you don't need SOTA performance.
Their main selling point is: They are neither US-American nor Chinese. That's a real moat in today's world. I think at the moment they feel quite comfortable.
They arent. Benchmark wise they are quite apart.
I've been baffled watching America double down on the same strategy even when it failed to produce results
They sanctioned the hell out of Huawei and now Huawei is bigger than ever
America is just not able to digest the idea that another country can be as good, if not better, at innovation
Deeper than the inability to digest. The incapability to comprehend it.
China's fall in the 19th century came at them for the same reason. How could these European savages be stronger, thus better than us? Our intelligence service must be out of their mind.
Because it worked on Japan in the 80s and 90s and sometimes “Americans” have a hard time telling the two cultures apart.
It's not about 2 cultures, but 2 timelines. China has seen the game and adapted, they will not respond with prior losing responses. Meanwhile, America is playing the same moves because it worked in the past.
I'm no huge fan of America, but claiming China is as good or better at innovation is asinine.
It costs 100-1000x less manpower, money, and time to hug the heels of innovators than to actually pioneer. Say what you will about America but they absolutely lead technological innovation and it's not even remotely close.
America has been making short term and short sighted moves to try to widen a gap that cannot sustain. They have chosen the wrong strategy out of fear and greed. Cooperation is the right strategy. Isolationism will not work in the long term except for maybe the handful that drove it. The irony is that it's an anticompetitive and anticapitalist move to do what they have been doing, so it's not even on principal.
As much I apprecite the sentiment, I think it is too early to declare that the well guareded monopoly is over. Yes, these models have answers, but don't expect all the large enterprises to switch to these models. The other aspect is scaling to serve these models will need a lot of time even if Huawei succeeds. Not all the Governments trust China and there will be a lot of resistance to work with these models eventually, even if cheaper.
Which Monopoly? Are all large enterprises in USA? There are tons of them outside and they will run the open ones and cheapest ones to infer and those are Chinese. I run Chinese models at home and don't bother with cloud. If I could call the shots at work, we will switch 100% to Chinese models so everyone could have "unlimited" tokens.
You might be underestimating how significantly cheaper this is and how much people care about price.
Walmart is a horrible company owned by horrible people and yet it’s cheap so it dominates.
If the quality really is in the Opus 4.6 range (considering how bad 4.7 is), then it’s a pretty big deal.
This model is dead on arrival.
It’s a burned ccp money at this point . They will not be able to serve it until H2 2026 . Even at this point if you look at opus 4.7 and gpt 5.5 this model is just mediocre.
By the time they can serve it nobody will care at all.
Multiple independent implementations inherently virtuous. After all each individual party may innovate in ways that benefit everyone ultimately.
Also it's tech they can be sure we can't cut them out of or tariff and money flowing from Chinese companies to other Chinese companies which we appreciate the benefits of when the shoe is on the other foot.
I think you missed the bigger picture here. It’s that China has their own stack now, soon others will follow. It’s not about putting up the highest numbers, it’s about putting up the highest ROI. To them, this is it. Qwen too but being able to compete with today’s models means they are closer to competing with tomorrow’s.
These have been my predictions since at least the first release of DeepSeek-R1 over a year ago:
1. There will be no moat where one company "owns" AI. China will see to that. It's simply too much in their national interest for that not to happen;
2. This is incredibly bad news for OpenAI who have raised so much money with so (comparabley( little revenue that the only way they can get a return on that is to "win" and be that company that "owns" AI; and
3. China's chipmaking will catch up with Taiwan within the next decade (with commercial EUV at scale within 5 years). I liken this to American hubris over the development of the atomic bomb where in 1945 many American leaders and military thought the USSR would either never get the atomic bomb or it would take 20+ years. It took 4. And they USSR's first hydrogen bomb was detonated a year after the US's.
Whereas the USSR did this with espionage. times have changed. Now all China has to do is throw a few million dollars at hiring the right people froM ASML and elsewhere. China has the track record of delivering on long term projects. Closing the lithography gap will be no different.
not really, china has gone domestic for everything as soon as it could.
its naive to think they would have stayed on a 'western' stack.
Most of the time 'losing' isn't making a bad choice its being put in a situation where you have no good choices.
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It's not a tech war. America built China's capability through outsourcing manufacturing. It's hardly a war.
As a Brit I'm here for it to be honest, I'm tired of America with everything that's going on.
China is not perfect but a bit of competition is healthy and needed
I don’t know if we’re ahead of the curve but that tired feeling has started turning into hate here in the EU. I guess being threatened with invasion does that to you.
The next decade is going to look very different with America Alone.
I grew up in the states when I was younger, always feeling some closeness to Americans even after I moved back to Europe.
With all that goes on it has changed. Recently I sat on a plane near some Americans discussing their holidays here, and I noticed I felt contempt. Sitting their with insane privilege as their government torches the world.
Individuals remain individuals, and one really ought not to be prejudice. However the lack of resistance I see in in the “land of the free” as their “democratic” institutions collapse just makes me believe they never cared at all. In France cars are torched if the pension age is raised. In America the rise facism apparently doesnt matter to them.
>However the lack of resistance I see in in the “land of the free” as their “democratic” institutions collapse just makes me believe they never cared at all.
Largest protests in US history just in the past year:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_protests_and_demonstra...
>insane privilege
My sister and brother recently graduated from college, have been searching for jobs for over 6 months, they can't find anything. They're politically liberal Californians.
Largest parade not protest.
There was not a single actionable demand from that parade.
I think you're being disingenuous with this sort of definition gerrymandering. "No Kings" is obviously a demand to stop the authoritarian behavior.
A simple "demand" against this political administration is a waste of time.
Research shows nonviolent protests are more effective.
Where are you? Are you doing anything at all? Is commenting on Hacker News and taking a paycheck and maybe donating to some politicians all you're willing to do?
Every single no kings protest led to zero results and were a mockery of what protest is even supposed to accomplish. These single day protests where everybody just goes home the same night are doing nothing.
Us as Americans have forgotten what a protest and resistance against the political elite even is. Its not a fucking dance party for already well off people to pretend they're actually doing something meaningful which is what usually gets the most publicity from these.
People needed to start breaking things yesterday.
Breaking shit is the path of most resistance. Do not do this unless you're young and poor.
The way to win is economic resistance. Stop spending and stop paying taxes. Crash the fucking economy so deep into the ground that the country self-immolates.
Yes, because never in history has a rotten economy empowered right-wing authoritarians.
>the country self-immolates
Right-wing authoritarianism is a primal response to disorder my dude. Don't pour fuel on the fire.
This provides a pretext to murder people and lock shit down. Violent behavior maked the general public prone to accept and even welcome authoritarian behaviour and policies.
We need to fight it on the streets non violently with actions that disrupt not destroy and resist in the courts and ultimately in the ballot box where we can win.
From my small bubble it's not that. I'm Dutch, married to an American who now knows enough Dutch such that we can treat it as a secret language when we're in the US.
My family in law seems to swing slightly republican. As a Dutchie, I could get some answers because I'm too naive not to talk about politics. So I got to probe a bit. What I simply found was that they'd say "I can't trust the news, none of it. Not CNN, not Fox News, nothing". Then I'd say "well in the Netherlands, I'd argue that while news outlets have their bias, you can trust them on basic factual reporting". She looked at me with a stare that I could only describe as "oh but honey, you're too young and naive to understand". To which I thought "you don't know the Netherlands. We're not perfect but we're nowhere near as deranged as what I'm seeing here".
I think that explains a lot of it for some people. The trust in the media, all media, is completely broken. Trump has how many fellonies now? Can't trust it. Kamala is doing what now? All talk. DOGE is fixing the government? I fucking hope so! But can't trust the damn news. Whether they do or don't, they are always burning money, god damn bureaucrats.
I feel that's the mindset that my family in law has.
> I can't trust the news, none of it. Not CNN, not Fox News, nothing
This view gets echoed here on HN a lot. I find it very strange to be honest, because I tune in to CNN and I see lots of bias in the commentary and editorial, but when it comes to factual reporting they are pretty straightforward and down to earth. It seems to me that the real issue is people don't seem to distinguish between reporting and editorial content / commentary. Stop watching that garbage and actually consume the factual content and analysis. Yeah it's dry and boring but if that isn't enough for you then it just shows you never cared about facts in the first place.
> but when it comes to factual reporting they are pretty straightforward and down to earth.
No, not really. I mean for me, yea, sure, easy. But in the general case? It depends on who you are.
The reason I trust CNN is because when a Dutch news source reports more or less the same thing, I can easily see the reporting matches with that of CNN. Because of this, I personally have some built up trust with CNN. When I look at Fox News, oh deary... it's nothing like what I see on the Dutch news.
This is not something I do consciously, it's simply that I happen to watch Dutch news sometimes and I happen to see American news sometimes and it costs no effort for me to compare. Combine that then with that on HN I also sometimes see BBC and similar British venues (e.g. The Economist is also British I believe?), and now I suddenly have 3 countries worth of news sources.
Many Americans don't really know that the UK exists other than that they rebelled against it. Many Americans almost haven't left their 20 mile radius world (many also did of course). But it's these people that I tend to have a lot of in my in-law family or however you call it (schoonfamilie in Dutch). I'm quite exotic to them in that sense, and definitely foreign. Thank god they have some Dutch roots.
Point being: with that mindset, you're not checking out what the BBC has to say on a topic. You're checking American news, not because of patriotism but simply because of that's all you know and going outside of what you know costs effort. And you already have a job to do, come home late, just want to watch your shows in the evening and that's it.
I am by no means saying that this is representative for all Americans, it isn't. What I am saying is: I see this a lot in my slice of the US. The reason I'm sharing it is because what my in-law family is saying is definitely at a much more personal level than whatever conversation I've had with some random, but lovely, person from a hacker space or hacker house in San Francisco.
Yet, I don't see this view a lot on the news. Nor do I hear Dutchies talking about it, they are simply out of the loop when it comes to a view like this. I don't know how prevalent it is, but if many people of a family of 50 to 100 people is in a situation like this, then my bet is that they aren't the only family.
The core problem with the news is that they know how to lie by telling the truth.
You can string together true statements that lead to a false viewpoint very easily. _This_ is the bread and butter of this awful media empire we have nowadays.
Vaccines contain cancer causing agents. Vaccines have crippled people for life. Vaccines have lead to children dying. Do you still want to get a vaccine?
All of those are true statements. But the whole thing is a lie.
One issue with factual reporting is what facts are getting reported, given that public attention is a very limited resource. People consistently extrapolate from data without knowing if that data is good or bad. So if I show you news with 100 stories of people doing awful things on channel A and 100 stories of people doing awesome things on channel B, both will be factual, but one will have you living more in fear of everyone while the other will inspire you. These are still biases.
One of the least (to the extent possible given the topic) political examples is stranger danger. Kids are safer than ever before, but due to the way stories are reported when bad things do happen to kids, parents are less trust of strangers than ever before (and this is despite the evidence it isn't the strangers who are the risk to kids). The sum total experience that media provides now leads to parents being far more fearful and restrictive of their children than past generations, all without needing to tell any lies.
If all the police reports and research into stranger danger being a false narrative can't combat it, how will ideas with far less evidence to the contrary be countered? Should parents trust the news when it comes to the topic of stranger danger?
Getting people to have an undifferentiated distrust of news organizations in general is an important aspect of technofeudalism.
I think this is spot on. "Every fault of america is just how it is in any society.". Nice way to just accept it.
Out of curisoity, what is your wife's take?
My running hypothesis has been the trust breakdown arises from social-media overexposure driving lazy nihilism, which in turn gave free reign to a uniquely-corrupt class of politicians. But I'm not sure how to neutrally evaluate that.
Will ask, can't promise an answer, but will post it as a child comment here (or edit this one if it is within one hour).
I think the collapse of public trust was very intentional, and the result of a much longer term effort than social media.
The most famous examples are likely the tobacco industry spreading misinformation through self-funded studies and experts, and the fossil fuel industry doing the same to seed doubt about climate change. But of course we can think of countless examples of entire industries and individual large corporations pushing out misleading bullshit, threatening or outright killing journalists and activists to cover up their catastrophic fuckups and their chronic conscious excretion of negative externalities.
This has all of course been going on since the dawn of time, but to focus on the last century in the US, we've seen all sorts of corporations and coalitions of rich and powerful people push misinformation into nearly every sector of our society - universities, science, journalism, politics, etc. in order to undermine confidence in shared facts, corrupt people's ability to discern whether or not something is fundamentally true, and sow confusion so that they can continue to operate in perpetuity in this chaotic maelstrom of doubt.
Lots of capture of government towards these ends as well, we can look at the concomitant constant cuts to education in order to weaken people's understanding of the world and ability to think critically. The revocation of the Fairness Doctrine was probably a step change, and Trump represents the sharpest recent escalation of all this.
From day one, he's done everything he can to shred any collective notion of shared objective truth. Anything he doesn't like is fake news, and the idea that the media is lying, scientists are lying, experts are lying, and institutions are lying, he has spread so fucking successfully through society, to the point where Americans no longer have anything like a shared sense of reality.
It seems like we're being reduced to tribes who are organized primarily around faith in various charismatic individuals.
I think this is fundamentally the worst thing he's done, because it lays the foundation for virtually every other conceivable and inconceivable abuse. If people can't even agree on what is happening, we're fucked. People and institutions in power can do anything they want to whoever they want, because the public has lost their ability to even recognize the danger posed to them collectively and thus mount any resistance based on a shared sense of reality.
Social media has definitely famously accelerated aspects of this like the fragmentation and the spread/magnification of fringe worldviews through echo chambers, but I think it's just one (and maybe this is controversial, but I'd be willing to be generous enough to think the 20something year old creators were too stupid to conceive of these long term consequences at first, but who knows, maybe not) element in a much longer and more intentional, malicious war against the many for the benefit of the few.
Not only that, but in tandem the collapse of social capital in the US has been the result of a very intentional process (on top of the multidecade undercurrent of declining social capital). This according to Robert Putnam himself (sorry, don’t have time to find the source now but will add it later).
Hannah Arendt wrote about the collapse of shared truth in societies. Trump is in some terrible company, literally and figuratively.
This is quite interesting. I'm not sure what can to be done to reverse this? When you've reached a level of untrust where you deem trust itself naive, how can you recover?
Teach Americans to look at news sources in other countries?
Shooting from the hip here. Feels like a duct tape hack on first thought.
I mean that's what I do, subconsciously. I think a lot of Europeans do this because a lot of Europeans tend to speak English and then their actual native language, or something similar (e.g. I wonder how Swiss people experience this).
> In France cars are torched if the pension age is raised.
This is not something to be proud of. You guys are giving yourself loaned freebies, retiring 5+ (!) years earlier than countries like BeNeLux and Germany, and are pretty much expecting the EU to eventually pick up the pieces which will drag us all down.
Edit: always lovely when HN downvotes truths :)
That's bullshit. Pensions are not a zero-sum game, and other countries don't have to pay for them.
It just doesn't make sense to delay retirement while youth unemployment is such a big problem. We ALL should be fighting like France, in many aspects.
Other countries don't directly pay for the pensions, but France is staring into a giant fiscal abyss because of their low retirement age (and other generous social benefits). Any attempt to change those results in the country being taken hostage by rioters, thus nothing changes.
At some point France will be in too deep shit and will look to the EU to cover for them. We will all pay for that. And it is deeply unfair because other countries their citizens have accepted later retirement and more frugal benefits to keep their countries fiscally healthy.
France could cover the fiscal hole in other ways, but taxing corporations and wealth at a higher rate also consistently ends up being blocked. And each year the hole gets deeper.
> Any attempt to change those results in the country being taken hostage by rioters, thus nothing changes.
Your theory doesn't actually match with reality, given that Macron's retirement reform was passed into law despite protests. As currently enacted, the age of retirement in France will progressively increase from 62 until reaching 64 in 2030.
It does match reality.
Reform wasn't passed, it was forced via a technicality after riots made it politically unpalatable, and it has put France in a governing crisis ever since.
Also, retirement in North, West and Central EU is 67+, not 64. Greece is at 67 too, although begrudgingly.
Again, I'd be equally happy if France covers the fiscal hole some other way, but I am not going to cover for a country that is willingly becoming the sick man of Europe because they want to live comfortably on borrowed time. Which, by the way, is a literal repeat of Greece its crisis. Time is a flat circle indeed.
> Reform wasn't passed, it was forced via a technicality after riots made it politically unpalatable, and it has put France in a governing crisis ever since.
You can call it a technicality if you'd like, but, the article 49.3 mechanism is a legitimate tool for the government under the French constitution. It is arguably designed to allow the government to pass pragmatic, but politically unpalatable projects like retirement reforms.
As for the governing crisis, it is simply a matter of Macron having used up the rest of his political capital on this reform, and he will conclude his term next year.
You are giving the impression that France is some kind of failed state unable to correct its course, where in actuality, the democratic process literally worked as intended:
> Also, retirement in North, West and Central EU is 67+, not 64.This is simply moving the goalposts of our discussion, so I will not respond. France's reforms under Macron are real, and directionally-correct.
It’s not bs. France is lobbying for “Eurobonds”, debt they can take at German interest rates and with Germans etc holding the bag, for about two decades now.
https://youtu.be/tMd7EfFsPIc (Video claims France is against them, but if they ever were they are not anymore)
not all of us are just "sitting here with insane privilege." it's quite dangerous for some of us right now.
I'm trans. this Administration does not like us. after Charlie Kirk's murder, things got legitimately scary. Musk was retweeting people who called us "deranged bioweapons" who needed to be "forcibly institutionalized." NSPM-7 is surveilling and infiltrating trans organizations. the Heritage Foundation proposed labeling us as "ideological extremists," in the same category as neo-Nazis. if I'm arrested, I'll go to a men's prison where I'll likely be given to a violent inmate as his cellmate to "pacify" him (V-coding.)
so yeah, I keep my head down. a lot of Jews kept their heads down in Germany in the '30s, you know? and just like then, it doesn't seem like other countries are too keen on taking us in as refugees. I hope that changes if things get bleak.
You make a good point, I’m sorry to generalize.
Get out seems an important priority. Good luck
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This is a thing that has never happened.
Concern for children's safety should be thrown towards the Catholic Church [0], and arguably even more towards various Protestant churches [1], which have remained in the midst of a decades-long rampant unchecked child sexual abuse crisis.
[0] https://www.bishop-accountability.org/category/news-archive/...
[1] https://snapnetwork.org/arresttracker/
I suppose this could be rage bait, but would you justify the violence that the poster is afraid of also if someone is “ilk” of the other side of the aisle? E.g. white nationalist types?
Does being “extreme” justify extra-judicial violence?
> justify the violence
"If you make reasonable discourse impossible, then unreasonable discourse becomes inevitable."
What do you stand to gain in running defence for the trans radicals on the fringe? They hold extremely unpopular views. If it comes to them being violently suppressed by the state, they will have no one from the out-group and not even the moderates from the in-group coming to aid, and will have only themselves to blame for this. If you do not see it this way, then chances are you are in an echo chamber and are prevented from perceiving reality correctly.
You should seek counseling
I a European who spent the last decade in America and I'm not sure I'd call Americans privileged compared to Europe. With money being the one means you have to be treated well in society, comparing it to Europe, America feels like the hunger games. Want healthcare (ie surviving)? Healthy food? To own your house? Welcome to the games
Europe doesn’t wage war right now. Their point is that Americans are talking about vacation while their troops invade and destroy Iran.
As a middle-class American, I don't feel like I have much input into the Iran war. I've voted, I've signed a few petitions, and I'm open to more suggestions for how I can stop the war, but I don't really think I can do much else- protest somewhere I suppose and hope that's helpful somehow
As a European, how do you influence your government?
OP needs to read up on war history and the US. Spoiler, it's been this way since WWII.
It’s not that it doesn’t matter to Americans. It is worse; half the population (or at least, half the voting population), is thrilled with the development of fascism. The other half has been ringing the alarm bells for well over a decade; it seems to make no difference.
And you’re right, most Americans do not understand the privileges they have or give one single shit about democracy; it is just not a salient political issue. But eggs… don’t get me started on eggs.
> The other half has been ringing the alarm bells for well over a decade; it seems to make no difference.
I feel like the issue there is that alarm bells in of themselves solve nothing. I won't extend that argument to one of its obvious conclusions, but instead I will say that efforts to attack education and critical thinking skills all contribute to people being susceptible to their democracy being corrupted and robbed blind - so having an educated populace with a sense of integrity and respect of human rights would help!
How would you solve it ? Alarm bells don’t work, half the time we do walkouts and protests they frame us as violent and just focus on some kids doing something stupid as if that’s what the protest was.
Any incidents of looting or fires? The protests were just an excuse for people to steal and destroy. Nothing bad happens? The protest was just a cute little parade.
They just come up with excuses to dismiss protests because it's inconvenient to even consider that the protesters concerns are valid and need to be addressed by making actual changes.
It's probably a bit more nuanced than "half this, half that"; when you look at the facts, most voters aren't that extremist. A lot of votes vote one way or the other because they would simply never vote for the other.
This is why the swing voters / swing states are so important in the US, because only a few million are flexible enough to switch sides.
Of course the core issue is that there's a two party system; while I'm sure that in a healthy democracy the current republican and democrat parties would be the bigger ones, they wouldn't have a majority.
> This is why the swing voters / swing states are so important in the US, because only a few million are flexible enough to switch sides.
Of course if the USA was an actual democracy, electing it's president by popular vote, then this would not be an issue - every vote would count to tip the balance in favor of who the people wanted to elect, not just the votes of the 20% fortunate enough to live in a "swing" state.
> A lot of votes vote one way or the other because they would simply never vote for the other.
This, for me, is the crux. Politics is treated like a team sport in the US, you pick your side and cheer them on no matter what. And team sports in America are even more bananas - you grow up supporting the Brooklyn Dodgers and a few years later they're 2.5k miles away with a new name. This seems a perfect example of what's happened / happening to the Republican Party - it's not the same party any more, but everyone who tied their entire personality to cheering for the red team is still cheering for it as it burns the country to the ground. I predict that inside ten years it will have also had the name change and probably be run out of Florida or somewhere.
That's not exactly accurate as a diagnosis. Many former Bush/McCain/Romney staffers endorsed Kamala Harris:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/kamala-harris-endorsement-bush-...
Trump caused a big political realignment actually.
I think it's more like a cult than a team sport. Sports fans figure out really fast if their manager is shit.
Parliamentary systems with more coalition involved instead of two party first-past-the-post can foster extremes too, like we're seeing in Israel.
You felt contempt, can you imagine if you were Iraqi, Afghan, Syrian, Russian, Sudanese, Lebanese, Iranian, should I mention it: Palestinian.
They apparently all love america. They try to come here as soon as they get a chance....
Peasants also would accept to part of the king's court. Why not be the king even.
Doesn't change OP's point on contempt.
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"not perfect" is a _very_ big simplification of what China is though
Isn't that the same to every major superpower?
Whatbaoutism at it's finest.
Have a peek at the fredom indx and the press freedom index for China. Guess where they stand?
You know about the chinese internet firewall.
You can't trust any data from the CCP.
And please don't equate the aberration that is the Trump administration with "regular" US administrations (and this is coming from a non US person).
People in China live under totalitarian rule, that much is true.
But how free is the average North American, where getting sick can bring you and your family financial ruin? Where the "free press" is controlled by corporations who are also the main source of campaign funding for politicians? Where their urban spaces are designed to require you to have a car and promote complete atomized individuals?
All these things are from the private sector and may be left behind if you like (do younger generations even listen to corporate news?)
The real issues are government surveillance and it increasingly getting involved in my personal matters, but it’s still more free than any other country I could go to. Look at countries in Europe like the UK without true freedom of press arresting people for mean tweets and giving them years in prison.
> All these things are from the private sector
Are they really? All of the cases I listed are consequences of Public Policy, no exceptions.
Regular US administrations that commited war crimes in half the world for decades. But apparently it only matters what they do in the US.
Indexes made by Europeans and Americans to congratulate themselves are not reliable.
Exactly. Even if you don't buy into western biases, it's heavily reliant on subjective perception surveys. Hardly proof of anything
You’re right, for now, but I think trump will try to turn America into a dictatorship.
..you forgot to mention that any technology in China, foreign or domestic, can and will be used for and to the benefit of the -military- party.. But like someone posted: "not perfect" fits the bill.
Check out the Sean Ryan Show with Palmer Luckey on China and military tech.
Ok? The same can be said about the US
Same goes for every country on earth?
No. There is no moral equivalence with totalitarianism.
Modern China isn't exactly totalitarian though and US is rapidly converging with China in that regard anyway.
How totalitarian is exactly totalitarian? I asked chatgpt and it gave few points
- Control goes beyond politics
- A single, all-encompassing ideology
- No meaningful private sphere
- Mass mobilization and propaganda
- Extensive surveillance and repression
Seems like China is ticking all the boxes.
> No meaningful private sphere
Have you ever been to China? Everyone has their own private lives. It's no different than any other country in that respect.
In China, you rarely interact with the government in daily life. Most people are just living their lives.
Honestly thought you were listing traits that the US has now till the last line.
In what universe does the US not have "meaningful private sphere"?
Meta, Google and co control all your private data. GDPR is a european thing not an american or chinese thing.
CIA/FBI have their own massive data centers (see snowden) inkl. their own older bigger palantr style software.
Elon Musk was able to connect a Starlink server to your data and no one cared. He and his Duche aeh sry doge baby boys were able to access and download all Social Security Numbers.
If someone knows were Putin and all the other world leaders are at any given moment, I would bet its USA first than China if even because i don't think China cares that much about it than USA does.
And everyone out of scope of this, lives probably in some rural USA town were no one cares for you at all anyway, but thats the same thing as in China.
Really laugh my ass off, so much whataboutism and American centrism when the debate is whether China is trustworthy on AI. Given your ignorance you should go and do your research, but I will help you a bit here.
- Control goes beyond politics
state corporation monopoly, 党支部 in private sector, crackdowns on NGOs and charities.
- A single, all-encompassing ideology
Party led, mandarin speaking Han Chinese nationalism, blended with Little Pink's unquestionable support for Xi and the party.
- No meaningful private sphere
社区网格员
- Mass mobilization and propaganda
We saw mobilizations on Chinese social media, attacking celebrities who don't openly say anything the party wants them to say. Mobilization in real life is rare though, cos it had shown it can backfire.
- Extensive surveillance and repression
Do I really need to explain this?
Just as long as you don't openly mention the "three Ts".
Which are the current nontotalitarian superpowers?
That's also the current US administration.
Luckily laws still stand somewhat.
( And Trump ain't smart enough)
Trump's smarter than he lets on. He plays the buffoon in public, but he's smart enough to have gotten elected twice. Which is two times more than I've managed to.
You don't have to be smart to be elected. You have to be a good liar. And it's really easy to be a good liar when you have gotten so deep into bullshitting that you believe your own lies.
Also, being useful to the right people helps. Because they will dump their own money and time into bolstering your campaign.
China is not totalitarian. Many people believe that China is still like 1950s-60s-era Maoist China, but it's just not.
tiananmen square was in 1989. Hong Kong was snuffed out like a light. Covid saw people caged and sealed in their houses. You do not need to look back at the cultural revolution to see the prc for what it is.
> Hong Kong was snuffed out like a light.
I'm in Hong Kong right now. Seems like it is still here to me.
and the Kent State shootings were in 1970.
Being self-righteous and a yank doesn't make sense, country of war mongers, something that cant be said of China.
Kent state saw 4 people unjustly killed. Tiananmen killed 100 to 1000x as many people and that’s just in the area with the reporters. The crackdowns in the other 300 cities without cameras were almost certainly much more brutal.
Going further, discussion about Kent state won’t get you in any trouble in the US, but discussing Tiananmen in China will get a far different response from the government.
Comparing the two only highlights just how much more extreme and repressive the Chinese system is despite all the US moves toward authoritarianism.
Clearly I’ve hit a nerve if you’re stooping to whataboutism. Perhaps you should reflect on why that is.
Is your contention that Hong Kong is also a totalitarian society? Have you been to Hong Kong in the last 5 years? I feel like people saying these sorts of things are just completely divorced from reality.
> Covid saw people caged and sealed in their houses.
No. There were a few incidents very early on, when everyone was (quite understandably) panicking about a new, deadly virus that nobody had ever seen before, when some local city officials barred the doors of people who had just come from Wuhan. That was a scandal inside China, and it was immediately reversed.
What China did do quite extensively was border quarantine, and during localized outbreaks (caused by cases that slipped through quarantine at the border), mass testing and quarantine measures. This was during a once-in-a-generation pandemic that killed millions of people. In China, these measures saved several million lives. The estimates are that China's overall death rate was about 25% that of the US, and these measures are the reason. By the way, Taiwan and Australia took nearly identical measures, and I very much doubt that you would call them totalitarian societies.
> That was a scandal inside China, and it was immediately reversed.
Tell it to the people in Wuhan, and Shanghai, Urumqi, and other cities that had lockdowns. I was in Shanghai in 2022, I was confined to my apartment for nearly 3 months, you couldn't be more wrong.
Shanghai was locked down as a health measure during a major outbreak in the middle of a pandemic that killed millions of people around the world.
Lockdowns were done in many places in the world, including in Taiwan. I get that you're angry about being inconvenienced, but you weren't living in a totalitarian state. You were inconvenienced because there was a massive public health emergency, and the government had the choice of either locking down one city or letting the virus spread to the rest of the country and kill millions of people.
God I wish I could just block you. So called inconveniences in the name of so called massive public health emergency? First of all it was the Omicron variant, we knew its mortality rate is low, second it did spread to the rest of the country by the end of 2022 and killed millions of people, so what was the fucking point? If you have to downplay all suffering by calling them inconveniences, I guess there's no one could convince you anyway, you better hope it doesn't happen to you.
Anyway here are few links and videos for those curious what happened
The Initium's timeline of the whole thing https://campaign.theinitium.com/20220506-mainland-covid-shan...
A viral video on Shanghai lock down https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBdOXwdBn5s
Forced transfer to Fangcang quarantine center without testing positive https://youtu.be/NQfmOTB_naA
Spoiled food in groceries https://www.sohu.com/a/539911328_118622
Community effort to collect the names of those who died, whether it is covid or othe medical conditions or suicide(the og Airtable is down) https://github.com/augustuscaesarr/runrunrun/blob/main/%E6%9...
Here's a fun one, a fake app for Covid Health Code, which was required to enter any public space and private business and even your home https://ilovexjp.pages.dev/
And it is fit to finish with Shanghai protesters shouting Xi Jinping Step Down, Dec 2022 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDAX8UO4ZQA
You can say the same about the US
they compare it to fascist USA though
Ask a gay, a black or a Japanese how it feels living in China.
Outside of gay people, the rest is your projection: they are homogenous society, racial problems are nonexistent. US is heavily heterogenous and despite that you segregated like a third of society at the time.
Ridiculous take.
Sorry, I have lived and worked there 6 years in different cities and I do speak a fluent (though with a very heavy French accent) mandarin. It's totally not my projection but my experience first hand.
During the "diaoyu island" incident in the 2010s the sushi shop 200m near my appartment got sacked, and all japanese-brand car get smashed.
My black (and indian) friends all complained how hard they were treated. And when talking with my Chinese friends they all had very .... interesting... point of view.
Edit: also, I'm not from the US
>Outside of gay people, the rest is your projection: they are homogenous society, racial problems are nonexistent.
You do know that Chinese people do go to other countries and that we all can see how insanely racist they can be right?
Your take is about as ridiculous. China isn’t at all how you described it.
> they are homogenous society
No, China is not homogenous.
> racial problems are nonexistent
Ask a non-Han about how they feel about that statement.
I'm American. If the choice is between the current US direction or China, then no, I don't think the word "healthy" should be anywhere near this discussion.
It’s a shame your country couldn’t get back its technical edge.
I’m also a Brit and agree 100%.
We need to accept that being too close to America is harming us and start funding projects to protect our assets e.g talent leaking out to American entities.
america is a continent. let’s take back our vocabulary (fellow european here). the little orange man shows very well what i mean when he started giving names to the gulf of mexico.
"In English, North America is its own continent as is South America. The two can be collectively labeled the Americas or the Western hemisphere. Canadians frequently refer to themselves as North Americans and never as Americans. To insist this change is to demand the entire world’s lingua franca redefine words and thereby cause mass confusion for its speakers simply because doing so would be consistent with an arbitrary definition found in a foreign language."
https://scrupulouspessimism.substack.com/p/america-means-the...
As someone that lived in Britain for 15 years until 2024, I'm not sure a nation with a GDP per capita lower than Poland, that is now poorer than every state in America, with a gang rape epidemic the government tried to suppress investigating should really concern itself with how other countries are ran.
I'm not arguing that the UK is a particularly well run country, I just provided the context that I am British because it felt relevant
> GDP per capita lower than Poland
> now poorer than every state in America
You've confused the mean with the median. GDP Per Capita is not a measure of how well-off the people in a country are.
American states have a lot more income inequality than the UK does, which (due to positive "non-parametric skewness", I think) pulls their GDP Per Capita upwards.
As a different Brit I do not accept such moral relativism.
China’s governments actions are on a completely different level - for example:
“””
Since 2014, the government of the People's Republic of China has committed a series of ongoing human rights abuses against Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslim minorities in Xinjiang which has often been characterized as persecution or as genocide.
“”” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Uyghurs_in_Chin...
https://www.amnesty.org/en/location/asia-and-the-pacific/eas...
Yes Trump is clearly trying Totalitarianism in America, but it is orders of magnitude different from what is happening in China.
Why do we ignore all the human right abuses the US perform abroad? Iraq, Afghanistan, now Iran, Gaza and Lebanon through Israel, support to Saudi Arabia (which would not exist without the US), El Salvador... And inside it's also horrible with its treatment to immigrant.
That should be at least comparable (if not worse) than what China is doing.
Yes, El Salvador is so evil for imprisoning dangerous criminals and protecting innocent lives.
El Salvador is blessed by evil criminals put away from the streets. It took thousands of those who you defend for a whole country to be free to enjoy tranquility and security. I was born there and I know better than you calling us evil
Parent was being sarcastic
This is how china tried to justify its genocide against uighers. Was theboutrage against that just politically motivated? Or do americans only care about ethnic cleansing when theyre not the ones doing it
They also don't care when done by their allies.
Not for imprisoning, but for imprisoning them in draconian conditions, without proper judgements, etc. Have you seen those prisons for fuck sake?
It is just shocking to hear such stuff from someone in the UK.
It's 2026 and people still believe this Uyghur genocide propaganda? In the meantime, Israel and the US have been killing people in the middle east for years, but china is "on a completely different level"?
The US supports the genocide in Gaza, it supports the bombing of Lebanon. The US itself has now started (another) war and bombed Iran.
China is repressing the Uyghur and threatening Taiwan. I don't agree with these actions but is really "orders of magnitude" worse than the destruction the US facilitates in the Middle East?
With Trump they are now openly hostile to European democracies, and ICE and doing their best at repression within the US.
> The US supports the genocide in Gaza, it supports the bombing of Lebanon. The US itself has now started (another) war and bombed Iran.
> With Trump they are now openly hostile to European democracies, and ICE and doing their best at repression within the US.
And what is Europe going to do about it?
Boycott ChatGPT and Claude? Ha.
That isn't really the point though, of course the UK can't stop these things by itself.
The point is US "soft power" is eroding incredibly rapidly and this will have consequences
genocide right, that's why Uighurs were allowed to have more children than majority of Chinese Han population /facepalm
by your logic gentrification of neighborhoods with different people moving in is genocide as well
Btw. remind me when last tiem China bombed school and killed 150+ school girls as your friend US?
Or as Brit I hope you are proud about all the killing your country participated in in illegal invasion to Iraq based on fake news about WMD.
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There’s little to no evidence of such “genocide”, but I can go on YouTube to watch videos of the US bombing civilians in the Middle East.
China is much better at hiding anything negative.
It's a little insane to me people comparing negatives of US and China. I mean, the simple fact we're allowed to say just about anything we want that is critical of the administration on this forum, in English and nothing happens is clear there is no comparison.
You have no idea the full breadth of the Chinese government because information is closed so quickly, in America it's all on display right in front.
Fellow countryman here. I came here to say the same thing
This is such a tired argument, and morally repugnant. Where is the UK in the race, where is the EU? Lets get of our asses and stop moralizing.
(China wiped out the entire EU industry through a "quiet" trade war since like the last 15 years, and we're not really talking about that aren't we...)
Not so much a trade war as basic economic forces, and it's been going on for much longer than that. When infrastructure improves, companies and customers can look further to get their stuff done. If it's cheaper to do your industrial or manufacturing work abroad and have it transported to your country, that just happens.
The powers that be try to slow this down by banning imports outright (you can't for example import American chicken into Europe because of food safety laws), or high import taxes (Chinese EVs have a 50% import tax in Europe and the US to protect the local car manufacturers. Which is fair because the Chinese EV manufacturers are state-sponsored so their prices are unfair. Then again, western companies get billions in investor money to push the prices down).
UK has the people but not the electric grid/infrastructure to compete.
EU/France has Mistral.
France has mistral and the energy infrastructure to compete, the EU has nothing.
You mean the west handed their industry to china over the last 15 years? Its not like the US is any better off in this. The EU is not a country, so you can't talk about it as if it was. Each country has their own companies and industries. There is AI in Europe, and its growing, however we might not be as "energetic" about destroying our countries to build giant data centers to serve our billionaire overlords. That does not mean that there is no investment, there is, including a bunch of American corporations like Amazon. But there is also a lot of corruption and bribing (lobbying - lets call it what it really is, no more whitewashing) going on around that too.
So again, stop referring to EU as a country, we are not, and it just annoys any Europeans as it comes of as "Americans who don't understand the world outside of the USA".
Jensen Huang said this in his recent interview - that China has the best/most engineers, it has the chip making ability, it's a good thing they wanna build on a Nvidia stack - but if you push them they will build on an all Chinese stack - but the interviewer was being a numb head who kept parroting the propaganda of Western tech supremacy
> but if you push them they will build on an all Chinese stack
That's alright. It delays them at least.
Referring to the Dwarkesh interview clearly.
Jensen came across as incredibly defensive and intentionally close-minded, shows that even billionaires suffer from "a man can't understand something if his paycheck depends on him not understanding it."
Your assertion is silly: did Tesla selling electric cars into China stop them from delivering their own industry? They were going to develop their domestic industry regardless.
We simply don't know the counterfactual, if they had unlimited access to Nvidia chips, how far ahead would their models be?
I thought Jensen’s comparison to Huawei’s cell phone hardware infra (towers and networking) to be an interesting comparison- that shutting them out of a market was one of the causes of their current position in the market. It made them more dominant in the end.
"close-minded" are the stupid people that unironically believe in the EA crap
The funniest thing is how Americans have been fooled with this stuff.
This version of AI is mostly taking a public paper from 2017, investing in GPUs, and feeding it as much data as possible. So with a few computer scientists, no respect for intellectual property, and tons of money to burn, you have all the ingredients to create this technology.
Sam Altman and friends did it, as did the Chinese. The difference is that the Americans have been hyping it up to the extreme with all these dramatic scenarios about what would happen if someone else got its hands on it.
The Chinese made it public, among other things to show how fragile this is as a business and as a large part of the US stock market
The response from US corporations has been banning Chinese models claiming they’re spying or something.
Is it really the full pipeline running on Huawei hardware? That is training and inference?
The report only talks about validating the "fine-grained EP scheme" on Huawei hardware.
Let's see how long it takes before the big US AI companies start lobbying to outright ban use of Chinese AI, even the open source / local models. For "national security" reasons, of course.
> Let's see how long it takes before the big US AI companies start lobbying to outright ban use of Chinese AI, even the open source / local models. For "national security" reasons, of course.
Already do on EVs.
..and drones https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-updates-covered-list-add-ce...
This is already happening. My company just went through this
Hopefully the US’ self imposed isolation will mean that when they do, they aren’t able to force the rest of the world to follow suit.
Open weight and open source are not the same
This is a pretty banal comment at this point. Open source is the term used in the LLM community. It's common and understood. Nobody is going to release petabytes of copyrighted training data, so the distinction between open source vs weights is a rather pointless one.
Tell this to the Allen project, Apertus Project, SmoLLM, etc, etc, etc
First you steal all the code, then you want to redefine the term? Is it never enough with you AI guys? Where's the humility, where's the good?
Sorry, too busy "stealing code" to answer right now.
lol
Does the 'zero CUDA dependency' also count for running it on my own device? I have an AMD card, older model. Would love to have a small version of this running for coding purposes.
Really nice to see the Chinese are competing this strongly with the rest of the world. Competition is always nice for the end-consumer.
The model is open weights, so you can download it from the link given at the top.
Then you can run it using some inference backend, e.g. llama.cpp, on any hardware supported by it.
However, this is a big model so even if you quantize it you need a lot of memory to be able to run it.
The alternative is to run it much more slowly, by storing the weights on an SSD. There have already been published some results about optimizing inference to work like this, and I expect that this will become more common in the future.
There are cases when running slowly a better model can still be preferable to running quickly a model that gives poor results, especially when you do not use it conversationally, but to do some work with agents.
"Open Source" is the ultimate romance understood by software engineers.
I can't find any info on what exactly is open sourced.
And in any case what does open source actually mean for an llm? It's not like you can look inside it to see what it's doing.
The model is not "open source", but it is an open weights model.
You can download it from the link given here at the top and you can run it on your own hardware, with whichever open-source harness you prefer, without having to worry about token cost or about subscription limits or about any future degradation in performance that you cannot control.
The recent history has demonstrated that such risks are very significant.
Being open weights is important for anyone who wants to use an LLM. Being open source is important only for a subset of those, who have the will, the knowledge and the means to train a model from its training data.
Having access to the training data used by a model would be very nice, but the reality is that for a normal LLM user it is very beneficial to use an open-weights model with an open-source harness, but it would be much harder to exploit the advantage of having access to all the information about how the LLM has been created.
For me open source means that the entire training data is open sourced as well as the code used for training it otherwise it's open weight. You can run it where you like but it's a black box. Nomic's models are good example of opensource.
Even with all training data provided, won't it still be a black box? Unless one trains it exactly the same, in the exact same order for each piece of data, potentially requiring the exact same hardware with specific optimizations disabled due to race conditions, etc., the final weights will be different, and so knowing if the original weights actually contain anything extra still leaves any released weights as a black box, no? There isn't an equivalent of reproducible builds for LLM weights, even if all of this was provided, right?
Yes the weights are basically compiled code, compiled from the source data and the training code.
Look up Olmo 3, where the have open weights, checkpoints, training data, and training process.
AllenAi is the fullest open ai I know of
> Also, note that there's zero CUDA dependency.
So does this mean I can run this on AMD? And on a consumer 9000 series card?
If you don't have the source code then it makes no difference. If you have the weights and are running some model via llama.cpp, then you are using whatever API llama.cpp is using, not the API that was used to train the model or that anyone else may be using to serve it.
If you found a rare 9000 card with 200+ GB of VRAM, sure
If the card supports vulkan and the model has gguf weights. llamacpp has excellent vulkan support that is being actively developed and is not that far behind CUDA where speed is concerned.
* https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/releases
As a Chinese, I feel tiered, it's like the cold war, what is takes to keep competitive with every aspect, it's just another win for the country and the corp
> Also, note that there's zero CUDA dependency
Where did you read this? From what I read in the paper it appears to explicitly state that they used NVIDIA GPU's and their MegaMOE code, which is written in CUDA.
not a full AI stack. Training still runs on NVIDIA chips.
Jensen was saying this in that interview last week and the interviewer dismissed it.
I sometimes wonder if there are any security risks with using Chinese LLMs. Is there?
All China (or anyone) has to do is deliver a close to equal product at a much cheaper price and make it scaleable / usable... which is what they're doing. It doesn't have to be malicious at all. Just a good product at a good price. The US is basically in a recession that's hiding behind insane AI investments.
Theoretically yes. It is entirely possible to poison the training data for a supply chain attack against vibe coders. The trick would be to make it extremely specific for a high value target so it is not picked up by a wide range of people. You could also target a specific open source project that is used by another widely used product.
However there is so many factors involved beyond your control that it would not be a viable option compared to other possible security attacks.
I believe this is possible but unlikely. I don't think a Chinese company trying to break down the US's stronghold in this field would do this short term. I think it is in their best interest to be cheaper, better, easier, and more trust worthy until competition looks silly.
It's like suggesting BYD has a high likelihood of making their cars into weapons or something. It's not in the company or their countries interest to do that.
Sure it could happen but I bet it would only happen in a targeted way. Why risk all credibility right now and engage in cyber warfare?
Need the "why not both?" meme here.
BYD and Tesla have the same ability to brick their cars anywhere. It's less a "weapon" and more a way to cripple a subset of people overnight if they so choose. A general major downside of "connected" products.
Okay what gain does China or BYD or similarly, Tesla and the US get by crippling their customers products? It doesn't make sense except at the point of a ww3 scenario where China is an adversary. I don't follow the news too closely, but I see no inklings of that at least.
Yeah, it would specifically be in instances where global conflict is afoot. Aka what people are thinking about when they think about national security risks.
There is a flip side too. It might be advantageous to maintain good will with namesake products so the opposing sides population has reservations. Similar to how this restaurants all over the us are subsidized by the Thai government so we have their backs in they get invaded.
It's hard to predict, but personally I would be way more worried about other outcomes than supply chain attacks in vibe coded products people deem as mission critical.
But propaganda or non ethical marketing - why not? (That is bias toward pointing to certain provider(s)).
or more obvious like TikTok.
Meaning Tiktok in the us is complete garbage for kids, almost like a virus. Whereas in China it's more educational.
Would be interesting to hook up a much simpler LLM as fact checker to see when errors are introduced.
If I had to place a hidden target it'd probably be around RNGs or publicly exposed services..
If there is, couldn't they exist in any model?
I don't mean that flippantly. These things are dumped in the wild, used on common (largely) open source execution chains. If you find a software exploit, it's going to affect your population too.
Wet exploits are a bit harder to track. I'd assume there are plenty of biases based on training material but who knows if these models have a MKUltra training programme integrated into them?
Backdooring software at scale.
Spearphishing.
Building reliance and exploiting it, through state subsidies, dumping, and market manipulation.
Handicapping provision to the west for competitive advantage.
Do you think doing any of those things with in the next year does more to forward China as a super power then say, dethroning all of the US hype around LLMs?
Tech ceos are going around talking about how they will rule over employees and they will be unable to work in the future except for intelligence tokens. What if China commoditizes that without spending nearly as much resources? Kind of makes the trillions of dollars invested in the US a literal joke.
Anyone can do that via the scrapers. The model developers actually have something to lose tho
I sometimes wonder is there are any security risks with using LLMs from the US.
What about LLMs from other origins? What makes them less risky?
From my experience, kinda the opposite? It's like Chinese software is... Harder to weaponize or hurt yourself on. Deepseek is definitely censored, but I've never caught it being dishonest in a sneaky way.
There must be. The executives at my company wouldn't have banned them all for no reason after all.
Is this a serious comment? It honestly reads like the last famous words.
Of course there are risks.
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My guess is Chinese govt is going to mandate that labs switch all future training and inference to Huawei. DeepSeek has shown it's possible. Once they are done, the rest of the world is going to be buying Huawei! I for one can't wait for a cheap Huawei GPU!
It's also not fake open source like Metas models - https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1-0528, the weights are actually under a real open source license, (MIT), see https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1-0528
Sorry, but exactly where did you get the idea that DS V4 runs entirely on Huawei?
I asked DS itself and it denied this. It says: 'Nvidia chips are absolutely used for DeepSeek V4. The reality is a pragmatic "both-and" strategy, not an "either-or."'
And based on the DS V4 technical report (https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4-Pro/blob/main...), it is mentioned that:
(In all honesty I relied on DS to give me the above, so I haven't vetted the information in full.)It mentions that Nvidia is still used. It doesn't even mention that Huawei chips are used in production — only in testing and validation, yes.
>I asked DS itself and it denied this
Bro, seriously?
But remember to not ask about Taiwan!
you talk like there isn't censorship in american AIs, like Israel topics.
To be fair I prefer the Chinese models censorship (yes, seriously) because if you ask certain topics they just don't answer instead of giving skewed answers.
Ask a Chinese model about Taiwan, get denied. Ask an American model about Israel, get citizenship revoked and deported.
That never happened
I can't wait for Taiwan to peacefully reunify with the mainland so the west with its constant war waging won't even have this talking point
Are you Taiwanese? If not, your statement is a slap in the face to those citizens.
Almost 40% of them voted for a party whose leader was just in Beijing to talk about reconcilliation
Nearly 50% of US voters voted for the current administration last time - do you think all of them are on board with the Iran war? There are multiple reasons for a person to vote for a political party; China is a big issue in Taiwan but it's not the only issue.
> China asks other country not to meddle with internal separatism > They also dont support separatism in my country
Understandable.
Quit a bit better then made to bomb little girl schools in Iran.
Just ask it for a summary of the USA’s role in Iran, Gaza, Lebanon and its recent threats against Panama, Cuba and Greenland! It might be able to keep track.
Does all this insane behavior from the US justify the Chinese censorship?
Of course not. But its disengenuous to only mention one like the US is clearly th lesser of 2 evils
Are you implying that western models were manipulated to hide and distort those events, like they do with the Tiananmen Square event, and Taiwan?
Imagine eastern models were only trained on chinese official news. Would you call that an unbiased, uncensored LLM? Would it be practically different from just directly censoring the LLM?
In the west, especially in the USA, rich capitalists and warmongers control the narrative put forth in the news, which gets fed to the LLMs, which results in what you could call auto-censorship.
They manipulate the training data instead of censoring the model, but the result is the same.
As far as I'm aware there's no media government control in democratic western countries (yet).
The LLMs aren't trained on "official news", if there's such a thing in Western countries - at best government press releases, is that what you mean by "official news"?
So I don't see how that's censoring/manipulation of an LLM.
Like for example, Wikipedia is a Western construction and would never exist in China, or Russia, without government supervision (rendering it useless).
When you say "rich capitalists and warmongers control the narrative", where does that happen? I mean practically.
It's like your conception of western media is similar to China and Russia, where censorship, control and filters are applied.
> They manipulate the training data instead of censoring the model, but the result is the same.
Do you have any proof of this?
> When you say "rich capitalists and warmongers control the narrative", where does that happen? I mean practically.
i don't agree with the hyperbolic nature of the op here but if you're sincerely interested in the question this is what chomsky and herman (imo quite persuasively) argue in Manufacturing Consent. attaching a profit motive to the distribution of new information, particularly in an economy that tends towards centralization of, necessarily biases what news is printed.
it's certainly not as visually dramatic or directly controlled an effect as the prc's top-down model, but markets are effective.
But that's just conflicting a lot of things that I don't think it's western manipulation and censorship of LLMs:
- manufacturing consent isn't a silver bullet, and it's much harder now with the internet - how did it work for the current events? Gaza war, Venezuela, Canada, Greenland, Iran war? Not saying the administration didn't try, but again, it isn't a silver bullet and doesn't seem to have an impact on the vast majority of LLMs - maybe Grok is the exception because it was done with that intent.
- information isn't centralized in western countries, though in the case of Trump he tries to centralize attention, successfully. But that doesn't seem to bend how events are portrait in reality and in LLMs.
The thing is, a lot of people that got fed into anti western narrative use magical thinking to believe countries from USA, Europe, Japan, Australia are all organized - orchestrated by the US.
This is insanity ofc, like, trade deals between these countries take years to be organized, but somehow everything is a conspiracy to be in the same informational tune?
Ask Gemini today if the United States is trying to destroy the nation of Iran, and it will feed you the (white-washed) party line, straight from the White House, with a bit of 'some people disagree' thrown in. No mention of America's threats of "Complete annihilation", "Killing a civlization", and all the rest.
> Summary: The U.S. is currently engaged in an active war aimed at dismantling the Iranian government and its military capabilities, but it distinguishes this from destroying the country or its people. However, the humanitarian impact—including civilian casualties from airstrikes and the domestic crackdown by Iranian security forces—has led many international observers to warn that the campaign risks long-term instability and "state collapse" rather than a simple transition of power.
It does do quite a bit better if you ask it about the genocide in Gaza, summarizing the case for it, and citing only token justifications from the guilty party.
As of April 2026, Gemini is... For very obvious reasons, highly biased towards cultural consensus. If your cultural consensus is strong on some really messed up things, that's the outcome that it's going to give you.
Isn't there a difference between the models output reflecting the mean of public discourse and the active adjustment of information by the government?
Irrespective of how close the outcomes are to the actual facts, those two things have a different quality, don't they?
> Isn't there a difference between the models output reflecting the mean of public discourse and the active adjustment of information by the government?
Not as much a difference as you would wish, as mean of public discourse is very actively managed, to our collective detriment, by a very small group of powerful people, which often includes the government. It's the nature of mass media, and the incestuous relationship between power and reach.
They Thought They Were Free, and all that. By the time the 'mean of public discourse' centers on something incredibly stupid or awful, nobody can be arsed to figure out who planted that idea in our heads.
I don't think so, from my peer group I don't see this bias. It really is a difference of opinion. Now you can say half the country is brain washed by propaganda, but those people would say the same of you.
In reality it's only the terminally online that seem to create these narratives.
My point isn't to pick one side or the other, but agreeing with the other poster that the LLMs are not trained specifically to parrot administration propaganda.
Let's say I'm more outraged by the actual events.
History is by definition his story.
It's not. It's an English pun on a Greek word, which roughly means "investigation".
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pretty sure you can ask whatever you want and it will tell you official stance agreed by almost all countries in the world that Taiwan is part of China as it's recognized by your own country (I don't even know where are you from, but there is like 98% chance I'm right)
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This is so unbelievable racist and deranged.
Rule of thumb is: half the statements out of capitalist states are false, all statements out of communist(-ish) ones are false. No racism, I’m perfectly willing to believe half of what comes out of Taiwan.