There's one top-level comment that's just an opinion of censorship of Qwen models (which might be argued to be politically adjacent if one assumes the censorship is referring to sensitive political subjects) but no specifics and there was a rebuttal reply anyway, while an unrelated top-level comment has a child reply believing China models are commoditizing AI to unseat US based models (could be argued a whiff of politics but also just competition) but it was still a positive impression.
Then I went to archive.org to check the earliest crawl of this page (prior to parent's post), but nothing different. So I enabled showdead in my settings to check dead-marked posts and there's one post near the bottom talking about how Chinese models are rarely ground-up foundational models, while another dead comment had an angle about it's a geopolitical strategy (neither of which had replies). Ironically some of the dead comments are praising Qwen.
While I understand your point, please think a bit how you formulated the sentence above.
It's pretty glaringly obvious that "safety" research is a complete sham that is consistently ignored at every point in AI's development.
Now their technologies are being used in a brushfire war half the world over.
Denying human rights. Classic. Sorry - you instantly lost any respect I could have maybe had for your opinion.
"[When China is mentioned] the comments section stops discussing [technical aspects], and instead starts going on about [non-technical aspects], and all that [stuff which I do not feel is relevant]."
I'm struggling, though, to find a good-faith reading of what you meant by:
"Denying human rights. Classic. Sorry - you instantly lost any respect I could have maybe had for your opinion."
Specifically, "classic" - classic what? "Classic" meaning "a trait you personally believe is more prevalent in people who (might be) citizens of a specific country"?
Hopefully the good-faith interpretation of GP's comment, which you might have unintentionally missed, will help you engage with their opinion with more respect.
I think it's an easy opinion to empathise with personally. I would be enormously frustrated myself, on an individual level, if interesting technical achievements made by companies in my own country were overshadowed by political discussion about the actions of the country overall, when spoken about on technical forums.
This would be especially true for me if I - as an individual - disagreed with politically with my country's leadership. Frustration at a topic of discourse is not mutually exclusive with being in favour of human rights.
I don't think GP has done themselves any favours with the broad statements that close their comment, and is clearly frustrated themselves. That there's mutual frustration is probably a sign that empathy on both sides might lead to a really productive discussion - but focusing on the more substantive points they've made, rather than escalating by misinterpreting the less important aspects of what they commented - is what will lead to that.
I continue to be dismayed at how simple it has become to turn people towards hate.
On the one hand, those orgs are tied to a global superpower. I couldn't name a single global superpower that has existed - ever - which hasn't committed acts I personally consider deeply immoral. I don't think we typically discuss OpenAI's work, and learn from it, in quite the same way we discuss the work of Chinese labs. OpenAI is a US defence contractor, and - whether you agree or not - it must be acknowledged that a lot of people would see actions like the invasions of Afghanistan or Iraq as deeply immoral. I don't think "which country is more evil?" or "which org is more embedded in its government?" is a productive route for this discussion - to me it seems like whataboutism. Others would disagree.
On the other hand, technical and artistic innovation has been sponsored and patronised by wealthy organisations (nation states and religions, predominantly) throughout history. That wealth was, generally speaking, acquired very violently. What does this do to the moral status of the work itself? I don't have an answer to that.
I do think I have a lot more in common with the average Chinese developer than I have in common with the average British (or American) political leader. I also believe the average Chinese developer has more in common with the average American developer than they do with the average Chinese political leader.
Lots of people might disagree with me about that, which is fine. What would be more difficult to disagree with, I think, is that I personally think I can learn a lot more from talking to people about the work we share than about the politics we do not.
Some examples: I personally think the Kimi line of models have been, for some time, by far the strongest of any lab's at creative writing tasks. I don't know how they've managed that. I'm completely obsessed with Bilibili ("China's YouTube"). I think many of its features are outstanding, and unmatched by anything a western video platform currently offers. The video content hosted there is often innovative, and occasionally artistically brilliant; the AI video usage specifically is notably more artistically advanced than anything I've seen on western platforms.
I'd love to listen and talk to some of the people who worked on this stuff, or who know more about it (perhaps in a less off-topic place!). I'd really love to work alongside those human beings. Because of geopolitics, that isn't easy. That is really frustrating to me. HN would, I think, in an ideal world, be a place that could happen.
Top comments should be criticising US torture camps in Guantanamo bay or their recent bombing of a girls school in Iran.
It seems much more reasonable to look at actions a Chinese company takes through the lens of what their government wants, than it does to do the same for a Western company.
A very naive take that is trivially refuted when you look at the history of military contractors and how lobbying works in the US.
Military contractors, like banks and other pieces of corporate infrastructure, are extensions of the US government. They are beholden to profits first but US government interests as a really close second.
Edit: Parent poster wasn't American. I incorrectly assumed their nationality.
Taking words out of context. Classic. Sorry - you instantly lost any respect I could have maybe had for your opinion.
There's some wilful ignorance in your comments. Elon Musk's businesses have been taking a colossal hit due to his role in the Trump administration and pushing fascism across the world. To say that grok, the very models that have been announced to be trained as "anti woke", as not being subjected to criticism, is beyond belief.
I think anyone that used open models will have had contact with Qwen. China currently does the most work here, simple as that.
Sometimes people just want to geek out and talk about technical things, this isn't rocket science, is it?
Yes, those people mostly do realize the importance of understanding and discussing politics. But that doesn't mean _every single_ thread must devolve into a political discourse, especially when those discourses have a general tendency to lead to nowhere. It gets real tiring real fast...
I am willing to bet my 20 cents that you don't talk about saving the environment every single time you eat. And the reason is much the same -- it gets tiring.
Anyway. If you want to make a political statement, why not do it in a more suitable thread rather than a thread simply about the release of a model? It's not like HN strictly bans political threads.
On a more serious note, I am immensely grateful for Qwen and I'm rooting for chinese models as opposed to American models - due to the general direction where US models are going.
If you know of another forum with less politics or VC talk and more technical depth please let us know :)
Btw, are you using GPUs/TUs at all for local inference? I've been exploring what hardware options exist outside of Nvidia.
I can't even consider Chinese AI tools for my own use on my own time on my own hardware without potentially risking firing or worse. Yeah, it's cool on a technical level.. but the "open" part of this and K3, etc. is of limited use depending on how/where you can actually use it yourself. Trust is another issue entirely.
... from servers owned and operated in the US by US providers? Go check out the list of providers on ex openrouter for ex the latest deepseek model. Some of them even fall under the zero data retention agreement.
there are plenty oss geeks in US, but they don't have access to similar compute, alegelly subsidized by Chinese government.
Not to mention the political unrest and fear of losing the technological superiority which they once earned but now is trying so hard to hold on to through legally grey monopolistic practices. You dare not outcompete the US in any tech they can sanction.
At some point people who made genuine innovation and wanted to make the world a better and equal place were replaced with capitalists.
Wait for the downvotes.
Old politicians who barely understand how to use e-mail had a panic attack due to Anthropics marketing about Mythos and being told that Chinese models were "attacking" (distillation) US frontier labs to train theirs.
They pull the only lever they could in an attempt to stop it, but again, they don't understand how any of it works. The export ban lasted a few weeks yet everyone keeps crying about it like the US is shady.
In reality the entire world is 100% dependent on the output of US and China for frontier AI. Anyone outside of those two countries will be loud about either closing off access. I personally think it is inevitable that China and the US stops producing frontier level open models when they become too valuable.
This reads like a paradox, though. If the value of a FOSS model comes from pushing the local frontier, then FOSS releases will be even more attractive in a world with highly capable AI services. The underdog researchers will be motivated to train smaller LLMs that close the gap with the most newest architectures and improvements, democratizing those same benefits to local models. There's not really anything that stops them, besides finding an investor.
The US already has top secret AI technology like the NRO's Sentient. The danger is less the architecture, and more the data that it has access to and the technology that it interfaces with. Most people aren't entirely convinced that AI will ever be "too valuable" in the first place.
There will be a generational leap that makes current LLMs obsolete in every way. Let's say China gets there first, why would the CCP let it be released publicly? That is an insanely valuable advantage in everything from war fighting to economics and more.
Humans for millennia have used technological advances to make better weapons. AI will be no different, unfortunately. Wars will be fought with drones and artificial intelligence from now on.
Because China is based in a completely different set of values than the USA. They look at the world differently, and have a different understanding of it.
Your assumption that your attitude is pure human nature is deeply grounded in your culture, which (assuming you are from the USA) is deeply grounded in personal competition rather than co-operation. All that rugged individualism. Other cultures are less based around that, and don't see the world as a zero-sum competition for survival.
I'm no expert in Chinese culture, but there are folks from China on this topic who could probably answer this from their perspective.
And using "culture" as a general concept to dismiss concerns about specific behavior, without actually attempting to posit any particular cultural values, or describe what mechanism actually causes those values to have a determinant effect on behavior, is equivalent to saying nothing at all.
Whatever official party line the current Chinese government espouses, it's plenty clear from even a cursory understanding of Chinese history, from the Warring States period to the warlord-era conflicts of the early 20th century, to the current behavior of the CCP, that China does not have any effective cultural guardrail against factions seeking advantage over opposing factions, which is a phenomenon that has been present in all societies that have ever existed in human history.
Consider that the US was intimately involved with the start of the FOSS movement. Compilers and commercial operating systems are hugely valuable.
Also consider that history the world over is littered with counterexamples. Historical China itself is rife with examples of technological secrecy and exclusivity.
No competent government will voluntarily release (or allow to be released by its subjects) technology that would give them a meaningful advantage on the world stage.
You've made that plenty clear.
It's highly improbable that any country retains a meaningfully persistent technological lead, and the soft power to be gained from providing models cheaply for society will probably greatly outweigh any sort of temporary strategic advantage that 'hoarding' could provide. And the reality is that nuclear weapons remain the kings of war, by an overwhelmingly wide margin. If the US and China or Russia got into a "real" war, that's pretty much the end of the world.
I never said other countries won't gain access to the technology. The point is that the 1st country to achieve that leap will get to use it to gain advantages in literally every sector.
I get some people are hoping that AI research is for the benefit of all, and I do too, but that is wishful thinking.
That's still speculative. We have something of a basis for speculation with the way LLMs influenced software engineering, but it's not necessarily applicable to "literally every sector" of scientific progress. If their quantum leap is anything like vibe coding, then it will quickly become an unmanageable cesspit lacking accountability and grasping at notoriety. We have precious little to show for half a decade of LLM-generated code, nobody disrupted the FAANG incumbents by using an LLM to crack the digital secrets of the universe.
The safety angle played its card and lost. We've been generating trillions upon trillions of tokens, and nobody has raised the dead or made The Bomb with red mercury. Smarter AI clearly isn't a panacea.
> I get some people are hoping that AI research is for the benefit of all, and I do too, but that is wishful thinking.
You're way too lost in the plot. Technology can absolutely be used for ill, and no doubt AI has already contributed to reprehensible things. But it cannot turn lead into gold. It cannot reveal the face of God or compute The Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything. The ultimate threat of AI is the stuff it can already do - cosine similarity search on billions of discrete records, automated labeling with computer vision, multimodal analysis and corroboration pipelines. The hypothetical scenario where superintelligence is made is a thought-terminating cliche that is driving people into a zealous fervor.
I believe it is an inevitability and I'm not speculating whether it's in 10 or 50 years.
The problem is that nobody can agree on what "better" is, so it is difficult to unite.
And in the meantime, people who don't care about "uniting" or "better" just carry on with whatever their goal is(usually just to make as much money as possible), and that sometimes ends up on net making the world a worse place.
This is a legitimate systematic problem that many of us are concerned about solving. It could easily be more important than the technical problems that geeks such as myself would love to be able to focus on.
All things considered, it seems plenty obvious to me that "rubbish" is used to express the commenter's frustration.
More particularly, their frustration about how the discussion always devolves into non-technical discourse (the actual thing that they are referring to when they say "rubbish", and "human rights" is one example of such discourse) anytime China is mentioned.
They are frustrated because they think this is in direct contrary to the Hacker part of Hacker News, because Hackers should be more interested in the technology.
So do you agree that we developed quite a profile of low-quality software under Chinese techs whose UI and logic are pure not-well-thought-through and even disgusting to use.
Do you really think Alibaba would make their model open-sourced if the model gets to be the best of the world
And how would you comment on the fact that CCP recently restricted high-profile model trainers' freedom of movement by requiring a license whenever they want to leave the country?
They also did the same thing to Manus' Xiao Hong(who is not a model trainer in this case), who looks like a good person
Ummmm....
I see both technical and political topics being discussed and I think the balance is fine right now. The pricing is also very suspicious such that people raising suspicion about it being subsidized is not that surprising to me.
the lag is because closed ai orgs are sucking up most of the talent and monopolizing resources.
Not that your criticism of HN comments aren't deserved-- but the people commenting here are not usually people who would be doing something useful otherwise.
look, it's just a matter of priorities ¯ \ _ (ツ) _ / ¯