alt Hacker News> I don’t see how that ties to censorship inside of China.
LLMs are parrots, when they are trained on English data they behave like English / western speakers which carries the __western__ values.
China would never want a shiny model deployed by some solemn state-own institute to pitch western values like democracy or freedom of speech.
So China is better off starting with Chinese content in the first place, but only to find out it shoots itself in the foot, because censorship __removes__ Chinese content from the Internet, and it __prevents__ truth-reflecting, i.e. quality, content from appearing.
When this is realized to be not sufficient, and they have to use English content, the English content needs to be censored, too.
So compared to other models trained on the uncensored set, the Chinese models are trained on the data sets that is likely smaller. And since high quality content is suppressed, there is likely less high quality training sets. Therefore, their models likely suck.
(Meta knows the importance of high quality training sets so that it started distilling its own employees who are smart.)
> produce GPUs that are competitive
The most recently known advanced process in China is some kind that requires multiple exposures in DUV machines. This already limits the cost to a minimum that's probably not economical.
For GPUs to be competitive, there's more to the hardware. Driver also matters. GPU drivers these days are compilers in disguise. How many high quality compiler projects have we heard of from China?
It's unlikely for both the hardware and the software of a Chinese GPU to deliver what's boasted in its marketing material.
> carries the __western__ values…China would never want a shiny model
Maybe, but that’s an opinion on what you think might happen. So far that has not been the case.
But yeah currently you can ask their models exactly the same controversial question (from the CCP perspective) in Chinese and the answer would be very different than the one in English.
> And since high quality content is suppressed, there is likely less high quality training sets
For now it seems that the Chinese labs are more interested in maximizing the quality and competitiveness of their models instead of lobotomizing them to enforce compliance with some sort of political agenda.
That might change of Chinese models might surpass Western ones in the future. Which is why competition is necessary to discourage them from doing thay.
> It's unlikely for both the hardware and the software of a Chinese GPU to deliver what's boasted in its marketing material.
Not currently sure. Chinese cars were pretty crap as well a few decades ago (and same applies to countless other example) so there is at least sufficient precedent to believe that China might close this gap eventually (and they clearly have been over the recent years when it comes to GPUs)