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The question is not whether it is a good model, it is whether the model can be trusted to not act intentionally maliciously against certain topics or certain users.

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.

by antonvs31 minutes ago|

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> The question is not whether it is a good model, it is whether the model can be trusted to not act intentionally maliciously against certain topics or certain users.

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.

by WarmWash4 hours ago|

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Whether or not it's propaganda is different from the fact that it is owned by the CCP.

by kouteiheika3 hours ago|

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Doesn't matter, because they're open-weight, so I can just download them to my PC and... hey, look, now they're owned by me! Unlike the "good" Western counterparts which are all fully proprietary. (Except Mistral, but they're nowhere near SOTA.)

by SubiculumCode3 hours ago|

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What is hidden in the weights matters.

by kouteiheika2 hours ago|

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Ah yes, those pesky Chinese backdoors that no single instance was ever found, even though Chinese open-weight model are a thing for many years now. Many people burn through millions of tokens on these models every day - surely someone would have triggered one of those backdoors, right?

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.)

[1]: https://github.com/p-e-w/heretic

by SubiculumCode2 hours ago|

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I agree it is an empirical question. I do not know if that research has been done in the open sphere. But please, do not pretend that there isn't a real geopolitical rivalry going on that makes such questions a legitimate, non-fruity concern.

by dancemethis42 minutes ago|

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This is a fair point, alongside the one about the hidden content in the weights.

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.

by kouteiheika1 hours ago|

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Sure, but the difference is that one side (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and co.) hoards everything, keeping it proprietary behind API paywalls and constantly spewing AI doomer rhetoric while limiting what you can do "for your own safety" (especially Anthropic; Dario has been consistently doing this since GPT-2 days, every time claiming that things are "too dangerous" for the common folk to handle). While the other side (big, bad China) releases all SOTA open-weight models with which you can do whatever you want with, along with a ton of open research.

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).

by SubiculumCode1 hours ago|

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Yes, each are following their own business strategy, frontier labs have no incentives for releasing open weights, while second and third-tier labs, it is one of their few plays to gain market/mind share. But business is only part of it, as national security is another. It may be that the CCP has been relatively hands off exactly because of my concern, judging that market share and reputation is more important (for now).