alt Hacker NewsBy that logic you can't trust any model, neither trained by Cohere nor trained by yourself from scratch, because it's pretrained on public data that might easily be poisoned on purpose, and it's impossible to ensure 100% safety of your post-training set either. Which is not wrong and it's not even a hypothetical, a ton of people are constantly trying to poison the web in novel ways and feed it to your crawler. That's just the reality of working with gigantic datasets, you can never have full insight into them.
By the way who are they? They claim tracking provenance of training data and poisoning detection, which everybody does. Why should I trust them and not Alibaba? Because they're marketing themselves to be "sovereign" to Canada? "Globally sovereign" is an oxymoron. (that was a rhetorical question, I know who they are of course)
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> By that logic you can't trust any model, neither trained by Cohere nor trained by yourself from scratch, because it's pretrained on public data that might easily be poisoned on purpose
Yes. Even if it's poisoned training data, RLHF fuckups, or something more malignant: the model, wherever it comes from, is in your supply chain and it makes you more vulnerable.
As much as I doubt that Alibaba have any great interest in global espionage, and this is much more likely to just be a consequence of being trained on Alibaba's own products, the fact is there is a geopolitical dynamic here.
This was already a well-known problem back in the dark ages, when BERT models were cutting-edge. The model is just a compression of the data, so if the data is poisoned then the model is too.
So just like working with People :) You might have a Snowden, Mark Felt, Jeff Wigand etc working with you everyday.
Your “oh well, can’t trust anything” reaction is an insane reaction to what’s being implied.
To be clear here, the accusation is that the Chinese communist party or Alibaba itself intentionally engineered malicious secret loyalties into Qwen3.8-Flash-Next and made sure that evidence of them stays out of CoT. To compare that with “ordinary” stochastic model quality issues is bizarre and shocking. No idea if this accusation Is true, but if it is, this is an absolutely watershed moment.
> By that logic you can't trust any model
Correct!