alt Hacker NewsThat's probably pretty likely, but if we're honest, are LLMs built and funded by a hostile Chinese authoritarian regime any more dangerous or harmful than LLMs built and funded by a hostile American authoritarian regime?
China absolutely does not have my best interests at heart, but America's technofascism is probably more immediately dangerous and harmful. Americans genuinely have more to fear from America than China at this point.
Replies
You're moving the goal post here. The parent never mentioned anything about the Chinese models themselves being dangerous or harmful; that's a totally different topic.
The point they were making was that the most successful open models- those coming out of China- are made my companies that are using those open models to get exposure in Western markets. The goal is to undercut the Western dominant players, not out of any particular "open source" philosophy, so it wouldn't be wise to expect them to continue providing open models long term.
Define technofascism lol.
Fascism was laid out by Mussolini in the 1920s - it amounts to the idolatry of the state.
"All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state." B Mussolini
Also defined as Corporatism: the union of state and corporate power.
Which country do you think is closer to Mussolini's model ?
One big difference is that the US doesn't have much public record of using state espionage resources to steal industrial secrets to give domestic industry a leg up in the market, whereas CCP very much does.
And while I use and love the open weight models, it seems likely to be pretty hard to prove conclusively that they have no reinforcement-learning-trained proclivity towards curling specific URLs if the topic happens to be some very specific thing that the government is interested in, when used to drive agents.
So it depends who you are. If you're a company, you might have something to fear. If you're a private citizen, maybe not so much.