In an ideal world U.S. residents would use Chinese AI models and Chinese residents would use U.S. AI models.
Governments in both countries are collecting data for nefarious reasons. But the Chinese government has far less influence on a U.S. resident and vice versa.
We are all better off if our data is collected by a government halfway across the world instead of our own governments which hold incredible amounts of power over us.
It's not nearly worth it to me to get an incremental improvement in performance if it means I have to move to hosted environments with Qwen 3.7 (or Claude or Gemini or whatever).
As Americans go through life, some of them will become people with power. When you need to leverage that power, having the right knowledge about them can effectively transfer that power to you.
Tiktok was a goldmine, because every 20-something on their way to a future position of power was uploading every single facit of their digital life to CCP servers everyday.
If you use a service outside your country, I believe you could have all your code stolen and get hacked/exploited in a way that would be totally legal.
On the other hand, there's other models where the source is 100% open, the training data is known, and people have reproduced the same model from scratch, so while those trail behind, there's definitely an effort to make models more open and capable.
It's highly improbable that the US government has a secret team inside Anthropic and OpenAI manipulating their training regimen.
One: it would be relatively technically trivial for $GOVERNMENT_AGENCY to just monitor all the prompts + context we send over the wire to OpenAI/Anthropic/etc. That's a goldmine of sensitive personal and corporate data, no secret team needed (although, the LLM providers obviously would need to cooperate)
Two: Rather than secret infiltration teams influencing model training I think what's more likely on the training side of things is simply self-censoring by the LLM providers, so that they don't risk angering the government.
I highly doubt that China has government interlopers, secret or otherwise, inside Qwen's training team. Nonetheless, "sensitive" issues like Tiananmen Square are censored. I would imagine that much/most such censorship in China is self-censorship that doesn't leave a legal/paper trail. That's what we're in danger of seeing (more of) in America IMO.
I take this for granted given Room 641A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
Thus, I’ve pondered whether anything they’ve learned has changed the world / had a big impact (like on their understanding of human psychology, perhaps per region). They’ve heard phone calls, they’ve read emails, diaries get brought to court… but these are systems that would be used like diaries but also prompt users for more and more.
You don't need a secret team to manipulate whats coming from them: https://responsiblestatecraft.org/israel-chatgpt/
Are they? They don't behave like it.
It's not very subtle manipulation either; ask qwen of Taiwan is a part of China in German and in English and only the English answer will be party-approved.
I think it's borderline naive to assume various agencies haven't infiltrated OpenAI, Anthropic and others, essentially the entire world was wiretapped by NSA in the past, to assume they don't have an employee or two at these companies does seem a bit naive to me.
I've certainly used these models without wifi without any differences.
A lot of people are purchasing access via Alibaba Cloud directly, or indirectly by companies which host the model.
Sure, that is until each government's dataset is interesting enough to the other to facilitate a data-sharing agreement.
There's gotta be an internet "law" that says something like "Eventually, the data you volunteer to a benign 3rd party eventually winds up being used against you by someone". This is short-term thinking at it's finest.