They return instructions for you to do something, and you or a script you permit chooses to execute what the model tells you and return the result to the model.
Only that it’s a fairly meaningless grouping. When japan first entered the car market in north america there might have been some commonality, but now what characteristics do they share that some american cars don’t have? They’re not even imported a lot of the time.
Given that, it does start to feel tinged with racism if someone insists on grouping things together that don’t really belong together.
As for Chinese LLMs, the term doesn’t “feel” pejorative to me - but i also don’t see a totally clear set of attributes they share. Not all are open-weight. Some are small and can be run on consumer hardware, some are huge. They even have a variety of answers to what happened june 3rd 1989
Typically the answer is "reliability", which is a positive trait, which makes the original callout about negative connotations very odd to me.
Better overall design?
The term seems to have the connotation of "competitive at 1/10 the price of Claude", so I don't see the problem.
It's not Harbor Freight Chinese (and heck even they have decent stuff sometimes now too).
You don't think people still talk about Japanese cars as a distinction in quality from US or European ones?
Edit: Downvoting something doesn't make it false.
[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
And even if the Chinese Communist Party provided funding, the result is still transparently released. So even if it is some kind of propaganda, I don't see what the problem is.
Is the monopolistic greed of American companies 'good', and China's greed 'bad'? I do have that question.
We live in a time of a great geopolitical rivalry and high tensions with an emergent technology with tons of national security implications. To pretend otherwise is silly, and to fail to ask the question, dangerous.
We absolutely know that we can't trust the American model not to do that - it's "by the oligarchs, for the oligarchs" - so it's not clear what the claim really is.
Or that pesky CCP censorship and propaganda baked into the model, which any random guy can remove from whichever model they want as a single weekend side project with an off-the-shelf tool[1]. (Try it. It's fun. I've done it myself.)
Exactly why my prime suspect would be the one country with focus on proprietary models, and the one country prone to bombing others, including with nuclear weapons.
So yes, there is geopolitical rivalry, but one side is deliberately antagonistic (not releasing anything in the open, putting arbitrary restrictions, spewing toxic rhetoric, applying sanctions, etc.) while the other side is letting everyone (including their rivals) to use what they've produced with little-no-to restrictions.
I'm under no illusion that if the situation was reversed China would most likely do the same, but as things stand you can probably guess which side I'm rooting for here (at least until the roles reverse).
China is a communist country with elements of capitalistic markets baked in. But the capitalistic elements are mostly a facade. Underneath, the state retains full ownership and control of all business. The CCP runs all aspects of the government (including the courts/judges), and is the single entity that decides what directions the country (and it's businesses) will move in.
The CCP, who defacto owns everything and has ultimate final say on everything, has one leader that has the ultimate final say on _everything_, Xi Jinping.
So while the waters of CCP models feel warm and free, understand it's not organically like that.
While I get the point you're making (it should be pretty obvious to anyone who's held a newspaper), I think it's important regardless to point out that Chinese companies AFAIK aren't worker-owned or -controlled, so you can't exactly call it communism, either. And they obviously do not have a "free market capitalism", as you just discussed.
It's simply a highly authoritarian state then, I guess?
As such, the state owns everything in both countries, the only differences are to what extent they control things.
I wouldn't even call the USA a capitalist system anymore, the economy is so heavily regulated and interfered with. It's a "managed economy", like pretty much every other nation's economy in the present day.
I have a feeling you'd be slightly salty at people saying "Google and Tesla are making CIA models"
Since its development, IQT has invested in over 750 startups spanning diverse technological sectors, including:
- Artificial Intelligence
- Space Technologies
- Microelectronics and Quantum Computing
- Life Sciences
- Cybersecurity
- Hardware
- Energy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel
https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2012/07/16/15...
In China it's all one entity with these mock facades of privatization. Trump cannot instruct Google to put picture of dogs on their homepage. If Xi wakes up and wants dogs on Alibaba's homepage, give it 30 minutes.
It's wholly ignorant or dishonest to make the comparison.
Tim Apple and the other tech CEO constantly groveling at Trump’s feet indicates that he might be able to do that.
Just like threatening TV networks about having their licenses revoked of blocking mergers unless they fire the people making fun of him on TV (of course with slightly mixed success)
Sundar Pichai would personally be barking on a livestream on the homepage.
Trump is quite literally the one president showing that the US has zero rules or anything to hold power back from the white house, really not the example you want.
Sundar can do whatever he wants, but he has no legal obligation to do any of it.
I'm sorry, but that was a horrible example. Corporations have no obligation to donate money to the ballroom yet Google has donated millions.
Imagine living in a country where they have the obligation.
e.g. he had Colbert fired (and who knows what else) by threatening to block the Paramount/Skydance merger