Hard to say, but probably not. Obviously limiting the model's access to history doesn't matter, because it is a given that models have gaps in their knowledge there. Most of history never got written down, so any given model won't be limited by not knowing some of it. Training the AI to give specific answers to specific questions doesn't sound like it'd be a problem either. Every smart person has a few topics they're a bit funny about, so that isn't likely to limit a model any time soon.

Regardless, they're just talking about alignment the same as everyone else. I remember one of the Stable Diffusion series being so worried about pornography that it barely had the ability to lay out human anatomy and there was a big meme about it's desperate attempts at drawing women lying down on grass. Chinese policy can't be seen as likely to end up being on average worse than western ones until we see the outcomes with hindsight.

Although going beyond the ideological sandbox stuff - this "authorities reported taking down 3,500 illegal AI products, including those that lacked AI-content labeling" business could cripple the Chinese ecosystem. If people aren't allowed to deploy models without a whole bunch of up-front engineering know-how then companies will struggle to form.

I don't see how filtering the training data to exclude specific topics the CCP doesn't like would affect the capabilities of the model. The reason Chinese models are so competitive is because they're innovating on the architecture, not the training data.

> less capable

Even if you completely suppress anything that is politically sensitive, that's still just a very small amount of information stored in an LLM. Mathematically this almost doesn't matter for most topics.

What do you mean by "compete"? Surely there are diminishing returns on asking a question and getting an answer, instead of a set of search results. But the number of things that can go wrong in the experimental phase are very numerous. More bumpers equals less innovation, but is there really a big difference between 90% good with 30% problematic versus 85% good and 1% problematic?

The west is already ahead on this. It is called AI safety and alignment.

This has been said of the internet itself in China. But even with such heavy censorship, there seem to have been many more internet heavy weights in China than even Europe?

> Will the western counterparts follow suit?

Haven't some of them already? I seem to recall Grok being censored to follow several US gov-preferred viewpoints.

You mean like the countless western "safety", copyright and "PC" changes that've come through?

I'm no fan of the CCP, but it's not as though the US isn't hamstringing it's own AI tech in a different direction. That area is something that china can exploit by simply ignoring the burden of US media copyright

I use Deepseek for security research and it will give me exact steps. All other US-based AI models will not give me any exact steps and outright tell me it won't proceed further.

China is already operating with less constraints.

there is only one rule in China

dont mess with the brand.

and while china is all in for automation, it has to work flawlessly before it is deployed at scale speaking of which, China is currently unable to scale AI because it has no GPU's, so direct competition is a non starter, and they have years of inovating and testing before they can even think of deploying competitive hardware, so they loose nothing by honeing the standards to which there AI will conform to, now.

Probably not.

It's the arts, culture, politics and philosophies being kneecapped in the embeddings. Not really the physics, chemistry, and math.

I could see them actually getting more of what they want: which is Chinese people using these models to research hard sciences. All without having to carry the cost of "deadbeats" researching, say, the use of the cello in classical music. Because all of those prompts carry an energy cost.

I don't know? I'm just thinking the people in charge over there probably don't want to shoulder the cost of a billion people looking into Fauré for example. And this course of action kind of delivers to them added benefits of that nature.