alt Hacker NewsIt’s rather amusing to me to read comments like this, and then simultaneously whenever a Chinese company or team releases open-weight models or whatever there is a giant round of applause, America is so behind, and there’s nothing but positive things to say about the intelligent, creative, and well-intentioned Chinese engineers (which is true, America certainly doesn’t have a monopoly on great people). Don’t you know? Only China can release good, open weight models and American companies can’t compete. Oh by the way all the spend is for nothing because China alone can release open-weight models thus destroying American AI.
When an American company does anything? Doom. And. Gloom. The engineers? Taken to the slaughterhouse! America? Behind! The public? Bamboozeled!
> This is open weights because Meta couldn't monetize it in any other way than to cloud developer's judgement of their reputation.
I’ve been told over and over this doesn’t matter. Just needs to be cheap and open. Or maybe that’s only when Chyna is involved?
Sorry this post is a bit snarky but it really is something to behold. And certainly I don’t know the OP’s opinions on Chinese open weight models. Perhaps they agree with me.
Replies
Of the two competing models Meta compare Glimmer to in the post, one is Google's Gemma 4.
At this size open weight model, a Western company was already state of the art, Meta is joining that competition.
And my memory is that Gemma 4 got little criticism or doom/gloom. And no, it isn't Chinese.
Nobody wants to live in a world where one party dominates due to access to superior AI and the others have to fear it (well, except for a few psycopaths who would gamble on being in control of that party). So the underdog will always be the good guy in this race. It has been framed as a race between countries, so Meta fails to be the underdog because they're in the wrong country. That's all.
> When an American company does anything? Doom. And. Gloom
Meta, "an American company". Being the main driver of an ethnic cleansing in Myanmar - and just sticking your head in the sand when told about it - is just another day's affairs at the average American Acme Inc.
These are comments on a release by easily the most societally damaging Western tech company there is. They so far easily beat Flock, Palantir, Anduril and so on, as a result of their incomparable scale. You're just ignoring that and pretending any negative comments are because it's an American company rather than Meta. That's much more FUD than any pro-China comments I've seen on HN.
Get off HN Mark, you have ten million pervert glasses to sell.
Sorry this comment is a bit snarky, but yours is indeed a sight to behold.
I suspect it's just the generalized anti-West/anti-American sentiments extended into anything and everything. Anything that makes the US look anything close to good goes against their cause and therefore must be countered and talked down.
But you're not wrong about the bias here. You just don't see many comments talking about it because they get mass flagged/downvoted for obvious reasons.
There are comments like the one you're replying to on literally every Chinese model release. This is textbook goomba fallacy, btw.
Deepseek never fucked us over. zuck has. A decades of harm creation run doesn’t get excused by the US flag. Zuck is not on your team and if you can’t see that by now, oh my.
[flagged]
There is a big astroturfing going on social media platforms by the chinese. Did you notice 'day in a life of unmarried 30 yr old lady in china' videos flooding usa social media.
Regular ppl in the west now hold mildly positive views of the ccp and how 'advanced' china is than usa.
Then there are europeans who now are looking for china to give them the technology handout now that relationship with usa has soured.
I don’t think Meta is bad for releasing open models, but are you really going to ignore all the terrible things they’ve done over the years just because of that?
As for DeepSeek or any other Chinese lab, I’m not aware of any practices that would make me consider them a bad actor. Can you say the same about OpenAI, Meta or Anthropic?
Good points, I personally believe that if/when China takes the lead, they will immediately stop releasing model weights. It only makes sense as a strategy to counterbalance (current) American labs' monopoly on frontier models.
Holding both those positions would be hypocritical all right, but are you sure it's the same people commenting/voting in both cases? I don't think there's a strong consensus on Hacker News. Even something like the time of day an article is posted might get different engagement depending on who is active in which time zones.