This is the major reason China has been investing in open-source LLMs: because the U.S. publicly announced its plans to restrict AI access into tiers, and certain countries — of course including China — were at the lowest tier of access. [1]
If the U.S. doesn't control the weights, though, it can't restrict China from accessing the models...
Why wouldn't China just keep their own weights secret as well?
If this really is a geopolitical play(I'm not sure if it is or isn't), it could be along the lines of: 1) most AI development in the US is happening at private companies with balance sheets, share holders, and profit motives. 2) China may be lagging in compute to beat everyone to the punch in a naked race
Therefore, releasing open weights may create a situation where AI companies can't as effectively sell their services, meaning they may curtail r&d at a certain point. China can then pour nearly infinite money into it and eventually get up to speed on compute and win the race
They are taking the gun out of USA's hand and unloading it, figuratively speaking. With this strategy they don't have the compete at full competency with the US, because everyone else will with cheaper models. If a cheaper model can do it, then why fork out for Opus?
I think it's just because China makes it's money from other sources, not from AI, and from what I've read, the advantage of China killing the US's AI advantage is killing it's stock market / disrupting.
Seems like it may have a chance of working if you look at the companies highest valued on the S&P 500:
NVIDIA, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Meta Platforms, Broadcom, Alphabet (Class C),
The share of revenue that Microsoft, Google, Meta, Apple, Alphabet and Amazon are currently deriving from the AI market as a share of their total revenue, is less than 10%.
Because they dont have the chips, but if people in countries with the chips provide hosting or refine their models they benefit from those breakthroughs.
The CCP controlling the government doesn't mean they micromanage everything. Some Chinese AI companies release the weights of even their best models (DeepSeek, Moonshot AI), others release weights for small models, but not the largest ones (Alibaba, Baidu), some keep almost everything closed (Bytedance and iFlytek, I think).
There is no CCP master plan for open models, any more than there is a Western master plan for ignoring Chinese models only available as an API.
Never suggested anything of the sort, involvement doesn’t mean direct control, it might be a passive ‘let us know if there’s progress’ issued privately, it might also be a passive ‘we want to be #1 in AI in 2030’ announced publicly, neither requires any micromanagement whatsoever: CCP’s expectation is companies figuring out how to align to party directives themselves… or face consequences.
This isn't even whataboutism, because the comparison is just insane.
The difference between the CCP, where "private" companies must actively pursue the party's strategic interests or cease to exist (and their executives/employees can be killed), and the US, where neither of those things happen and the worst penalty for a company not following the government's direction (while continuing to follow the law, which should be an obvious caveat) is the occasional fine for not complying with regulation or losing preference for government contracts, is categorical.
Only those who are either totally ignorant or seeking to spread propaganda would even compare the two.
They don't have to micromanage companies. A company's activities must align with the goals of the CCP, or it will not continue to exist. This produces companies that will micromanage themselves in accordance with the CCP's strategic vision.
I think "investing in research and hardware" is fairly relevant to my claim of "China has been investing in open-source LLMs." China also has partial ownership of several major labs via "golden shares" [1] like Alibaba (Qwen) and Zai (GLM) [2], albeit not DeepSeek as far as I know.
As far as I can tell AI is already playing a big part in the Chinese Fifteenth five year plan (2026-2030) which is their central top-down planning mechanism. That’s about as big a move as they can make.
It's obviously true that DeepSeek models are biased about topics sensitive to the Chinese government, like Tiananmen Square: they refuse to answer questions related to Tiananmen. That didn't magically fall out of a "predict the next token" base model (of which there is plenty of training data for it to complete the next token accurately); that came out of specific post-training to censor the topic.
It's also true that Anthropic and OpenAI have post-training that censors politically charged topics relevant to the United States. I'm just surprised you'd deny DeepSeek does the same for China when it's quite obvious that they do.
What data you include, or leave out, biases the model; and there's obviously also synthetic data injected into training to influence it on purpose. Everyone does it: DeepSeek is neither a saint nor a sinner.
All I'm saying is that if you want to hear your own propaganda, use your own state approved AI. Deepseek is obviously going to respond according to their own regulatory environment.
I really hate the way people like you talk about "narratives". I care about facts. Are denying it was a massacre? How many people do you think were killed?
Depends on who you ask! That's what I mean by "narratives". There's plenty of corroborating evidence that there was a large demonstration and riots. After that it gets hazy because different officials are claiming fatalities and casualties as high as 10k and as low as 300 all with differing ratios of soldier and student casualties. Wouldn't the numbers and/or ratios be similar if they were looking at the same facts?
I dunno, the US routinely just states plainly how many people they massacre and folks in the US seem okay with it.
I'd assume that when the Chinese do bad things people in China feel the same way about that as folks in the US feel about the US doing evil stuff, which is to say "very little at all". Why would they need to lie, any more than the US needs to lie? Do the average Chinese folks have more conscience then the average US citizen?
"the US routinely just states plainly how many people they massacre and folks in the US seem okay with it."
What a nonsensical thing to say. The CCP ruthlessly sensors all discussion of the massacre and every LLM created in China sensors it. So stop it with the BS whataboutism
I'm saying there's a massive disagreement both among western sources and between western sources and Chinese sources. The disagreement among western sources is what makes their reporting look made up. I'm not saying I believe what China has reported.
I recently learned about the (ancient?) greek concept of amathia. It's a willful ignorance, often cultivated as a preference for identity and ego over learning. It's not about a lack of intelligence, but rather a willful pattern of subverting learning in favor of cult and ideology.
If the U.S. doesn't control the weights, though, it can't restrict China from accessing the models...
1: https://thefuturemedia.eu/new-u-s-rules-aim-to-govern-ais-gl...