upvote

points

by giancarlostoro11 hours ago |
comments
upvoteby deaux10 hours ago|
next
[-]
The US has for decades been engaged in mass dumping of their products to establish monopolies all over the world, and punishing anyone who dares try do anything about it. This isn't better than corporate espionage.
reply
upvoteby eloisant11 hours ago|
prev|
next
[-]
I agree, but the same goes for the US. Remember Echelon.
reply
upvoteby stickfigure10 hours ago|
parent|
[-]
It's highly improbable that the US government has a secret team inside Anthropic and OpenAI manipulating their training regimen. For better or worse, these companies are filled with ideologues and something that invasive would trigger an army of whistleblowers (despite legal consequences).
reply
upvoteby booty9 hours ago|
parent|
next
[-]

    It's highly improbable that the US government has a secret team inside Anthropic and OpenAI manipulating their training regimen.
Two thoughts.

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.

reply
upvoteby Barbing9 hours ago|
parent|
next
[-]
> relatively technically trivial for $GOVERNMENT_AGENCY to just monitor all the prompts + context we send

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.

reply
upvoteby SoMomentary7 hours ago|
parent|
prev|
[-]
Having seen all the AI interactions that you can get through clickstream data I have no doubt that $GOVERNMENT_AGENCY can see much much more.
reply
upvoteby throwaw128 hours ago|
parent|
prev|
next
[-]
> secret team inside Anthropic and OpenAI manipulating their training regimen

You don't need a secret team to manipulate whats coming from them: https://responsiblestatecraft.org/israel-chatgpt/

reply
upvoteby Planktonne10 hours ago|
parent|
prev|
next
[-]
> these companies are filled with ideologues

Are they? They don't behave like it.

reply
upvoteby gmerc10 hours ago|
parent|
prev|
[-]
Its very hard to be so naive.
reply
upvoteby SR2Z10 hours ago|
parent|
[-]
I think you are being ridiculous. Tampering with an LLMs pretraining is a difficult undertaking. There is plenty of evidence that training a model to walk the party line leaves it less capable than if it weren't.

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.

reply
upvoteby embedding-shape8 hours ago|
parent|
[-]
Compared to what we have proof the US government have engaged in before? Do people not remember PRISM anymore? It was virtually impossible to think of the scope before it was leaked, and you'd be marked as a conspiracy theorist for believing that happened, before it was made concretely true.

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.

reply
upvoteby logicchains7 hours ago|
parent|
[-]
Agencies like the CIA have infiltrated the news agencies, so they have indirect power over the information that LLMs consume.
reply
upvoteby gcr7 hours ago|
prev|
[-]
how could running the qwen GGUF phone home? that would require cooperation with the inference backend (llama-cpp), or some kind of model exploit. It’d be far easier to pay the agent harness devs or supply-chain some plugin or something, that space is the Wild West anyways

I've certainly used these models without wifi without any differences.

reply
upvoteby HDBaseT1 hours ago|
parent|
[-]
You've used Qwen with model quantization, locally without internet connection.

A lot of people are purchasing access via Alibaba Cloud directly, or indirectly by companies which host the model.

reply