FTFA: American labs need to release frontier-grade open-weight models under licenses that startups can actually build on.
oh now i see, the Chinese government is funding the training and release of their best models to pressure OpenAI, Anthropic, and others to do the same for competition's sake. I don't buy it, this seems more like a way to get SOTA models RL'd to comply with Chinese government approved information distribution. If I have to trust a black box of answers to questions i would trust one from a US for-profit publicly traded company subject to market forces over one approved, and heavily subsidized, by the Chinese government.
No, it’s consistent with what China is doing in other markets, which is dumping product to drive others out of business.
I had a shower thought on how to counteract this, specifically related to the AI dumping. If China is losing substantial money on every token, why wouldn’t an adversary try to maliciously increase consumption? This strategy is not really viable against physical goods dumping because demand is finite and there are large environmental costs. Software demand is infinite and the environmental costs are quite low compared to the financial cost to make it, even with ultra cheap Chinese tokens
Because it's not losing money on each token? Aside from most global people using American inference providers to run the models, I suspect the cloud inference products of the Chinese labs are profitable, at least on the inference costs (ie: not including model training, salaries, etc).
What tools do we have to countermeasure the state sponsored bias in the Chinese models? Doesn’t seem like a smart plan if individuals can just compensate for the bias.
Also, the choice right now is between an open weight Chinese model that is hypothetically censored to block / sabotage routine engineering flows vs a closed weight service that is definitely censored to block / sabotage those things.
First anthropic guardrails blocked totally normal stuff on fable and knocked you down to opus. At this point, they kick you off fable, then opus, then sonnet. Claude then automatically builds up memories of techniques to bypass the guardrails in my long running sessions (the coordinator agent notices the subordinates got shot in the head and their sessions were pulled from context, so it parses out the lost context from ~/.claude json files, then reformulates parts of the task and uses partial results until the guardrail doesn’t trip.
If I were paying for the API, this dance would cost $50-100 a pop, but I’m not, so whatever (for now).
I worry that AI will be so fundamental to how we do things in the future, companies can mold human behavior via access to the AI tools.
For instance, I worked at FICO. When I mention this, people wonder what they do. The average person only knows FICO as a “score.”
FICO was founded in Silicon Valley.
The average person doesn’t think about how credit scores work, fundamentally.
It’s just software, at its core. FICO incentivizes certain behaviors.
Ever been banned from an online forum?
Now imagine if a corporation could shut you off from a technology that’s literally indispensable.
Same idea.