I think your vision of how the rest of the US sees the world is tinted by a massive bias.
But at work the calculus is entirely different. There is already lots of exposure to US companies (guess where our emails and tickets life), so the increase in espionage risk from adding another American company is small. Not zero, and trust towards AI companies is limited. But adding the first Chinese company to send data to would be a major risk. One nobody would sign off on, given the general reputation of the Chinese economy for widespread espionage, disregard for copyright and producing copies of successful products using insider information
Before the EU cleaned up Europe's act pretty considerably on corruption, US companies used corporate but also state-level espionage actors to level the playing field against a culture of bribes and they were fairly open about it. They absolutely needed to do it, because of the potential penalties back home if they engaged in bribery abroad.
The tables have turned, now. The EU runs much more cleanly than decisionmaking in DC, which is clearly corrupted and lubricated with cash and opportunities for failsons and faildaughters; it has accelerated radically quite recently but it was heading that way from the first Bush era.
But I'd bet the corporate-state merger of industrial espionage is in full flow.
I have zero expectation that a similar culture exists inside Chinese companies. If you think these corporate and national cultures are the same, you need to adjust your priors.
Not necessarily of the companies themselves, though; just embedded people at the right hiring level.
> Given how generally ideological the people working in these companies are
History has many examples of truly surprising spies, over the long term. Including in highly ideological environments such as animal rights and eco-campaigning groups. The embedded police spying scandals in the UK make this clear.
It is naïve to think that there are no CIA or NSA employees in some functional role at these two businesses, just as it is naïve to think that they don't have intelligence industry contacts playing them because they are naïve. You only have to look at how the NSA weakened open cryptography to see that two companies staffed by young, absurdly rich people barely out of college with wobbly moral e/acc compasses might be getting played by homegrown spooks.
> I have zero expectation that a similar culture exists inside Chinese companies. If you think these corporate and national cultures are the same, you need to adjust your priors.
I suggested absolutely nothing of the sort — I flatly was not talking about China at all.
FWIW it cuts both ways: in the dim and distant past of the early dot-com era, I remember encountering someone who wafted inexplicably between US and UK multinational companies who I thought was possibly British intelligence. An odd duck for sure.
Quite funny because if you use that phrase verbatim except swapping China with the US it could actually fit.
Good governments try to do things that are in the interest of their population, and yes it could mean opposite interests to your/someone else governments.
No reason to blame US, Israel, China, Russia, etc. They just defend their piece of cake.
Again I have to echo the previous poster's point: Most people outside of the US really do not see the US as some much better alternative than China. If anything, in the specific area of LLMs, China are the ones doing work benefitting the everyman whereas almost everything the US labs do does not.
That said, I imagine e.g. South Americans thinking very differently on this front
what did you think US-based AI is trained on
I'm pretty sure the US just jumped to the front of the list with their biggest IP heist in humankind history
China indeed has a general reputation for widespread espionage, so any Chinese company wanting to expand into the European market has to prove it isn't spying on its potential customers. US companies have traditionally been seen as friendly, so their platforms are essentially built around "trust me bro" guarantees.
In a world where both China and the US are now seen as hostile-by-default, this might actually leave some Chinese companies with an advantage in their ability to demonstrate trustworthiness.
It’s the same paradox as people claiming: “we are European, our data is safer in Europe” when actually your privacy is higher when your data is stored in China (or Russia) you are safer because it is out of reach from your local government.
The only thing I dislike, and that’s no matter the service, is that my data or information usage is shared with third-party.
For example, Anthropic conveniently forgets to mention Datadog has tons and tons of information about Claude users, or that your data transits through machines they don’t operate.
Like if they could release Ch-ythos 6 tomorrow BUT it had Western ideals, would they take the fame, clout, attention, & profit, or stick to the party line?
(hope the monolithic brush is appropriate, considering, I mean it's an impressive system/country even if I have my own strong preferences - also I've taken as true reporting about their models deflecting etc. on sensitive topics)
I use LLMs for health, design and programming.
If you want to make a political or religious pamphlet it’s not a single LLM that you should base yourself on. No matter where it comes from.