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It’s rather amusing to me to read comments like this, and then simultaneously whenever a Chinese company or team releases open-weight models or whatever there is a giant round of applause, America is so behind, and there’s nothing but positive things to say about the intelligent, creative, and well-intentioned Chinese engineers (which is true, America certainly doesn’t have a monopoly on great people). Don’t you know? Only China can release good, open weight models and American companies can’t compete. Oh by the way all the spend is for nothing because China alone can release open-weight models thus destroying American AI.

When an American company does anything? Doom. And. Gloom. The engineers? Taken to the slaughterhouse! America? Behind! The public? Bamboozeled!

> This is open weights because Meta couldn't monetize it in any other way than to cloud developer's judgement of their reputation.

I’ve been told over and over this doesn’t matter. Just needs to be cheap and open. Or maybe that’s only when Chyna is involved?

Sorry this post is a bit snarky but it really is something to behold. And certainly I don’t know the OP’s opinions on Chinese open weight models. Perhaps they agree with me.

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While composing a reply to a comment throwing tons of shade on American AI, I took some time to check out the commenter’s HN profile. Their comment history was about 50% such comments. Their submission history started with an article about how Russia was unfairly blamed for some hacking campaign.

It’s entirely possible that this is not a foreign influence campaign. Perhaps there’s a group here that is simply anti-American as its primary interest, and passionately so to upvote each other.

On the other hand, one should not discount the value of HN as tastemaker and trendsetter. Also, it would be fairly easy to run bots here. I wouldn’t be surprised if HN were a field of combat for many parallel influence campaigns, foreign and domestic.

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> On the other hand, one should not discount the value of HN as tastemaker and trendsetter.

I would encourage dedicated readers here to aggressively and persistently discount the value of HN as a tastemaker and trendsetter.

HN is actually a trailing indicator on tastes and trends, essentially by design. Things only make it to the front page if they get submitted and voted upward by a large number of people. That means it’s all stuff that is public and seems cool to a bunch of random people browsing a website. Not exactly cutting edge.

Basically every community, online or not, over-indexes on its own importance. Like how random small towns can get so worried about international terrorists targeting them. To folks who love HN, of course the great forces of the world would be attracted to compete here. Look how obviously awesome it is, right?

Paul Graham said HN was set up on the theory that it would efficiently surface great ideas and entrepreneurs for Ycombinator. Needless to say, that did not pan out. (How often do you see PG or any YC leadership here anymore?) Honestly I am mystified as to why YC continues to operate it at all.

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I think you're wrong. To gut-check, I asked a panel of AI models "What platfroms should be considered tastemaker or trendsetter for adopting new AI models". Here's the part of the answer relevant to this discussion:

> AI X/Twitter — a few hundred accounts effectively set the narrative in the first 24 hours; vibe checks here outrun benchmarks.

> r/LocalLLaMA — the open-weights kingmaker; a model that fails here doesn't get quantized, and unquantized means unadopted.

> Hacker News, and increasingly YouTube/Discord for the practitioner layer.

Source: https://pellmell.ai/s/aefaa217b57ed50be9e2a4b8c9f3173e

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The internet will always be a trailing source of these things. If you have to ask the internet, you're behind. The internet is a form of information exchange; information about the thing needs to exist before it is exchanged.

For a brief moment the readership of HN heavily overlapped with founders in Silicon Valley, and for those years HN was indeed a platform that acted as a trendsetter or tastemaker. That time has long passed. Twitter is the closest to this today, which is on that that list, and makes it a decent place to listen. r/LocaLLaMa is not bad as a support forum for GGUF and quantizer projects but it's at the level of "Windows tutorial" of software from the '90s.

If anyone is interested in being at the "edge" of this, I suggest simply going to meetups in tech hubs where people are working with AI and models. My guess is any city with a major tech presence will have more "edge" than HN. I'm fortunate enough to be in Silicon Valley right now and have friends who work at foundational lab companies so it's not hard to stay on top of what's happening. The "internet" of 2026 is just much, much bigger than the internet of 2007 when HN was founded, and so it's just a lot harder to find the information that you need.

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So - presumably you have another site in mind that is better. I'd be intrigued to know which one you would recommend.
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I don’t. It happens in-person or in private group chats these days.
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Sounds like something a bot would say!
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Which reply? Because both seem like nothing a bot would say honestly.
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You gotta touch grass and talk to people irl
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I asked my barista what they think about Qwen 3.8 Max…
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  > wouldn’t be surprised if HN were a field of combat for many parallel influence campaigns, foreign and domestic.
I would be shocked if it weren’t.
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Would be nice if there were a hn feature, userscript, or plugin to just filter comments from new accounts. Bonus if there was some sentiment analysis or llm-based analysis to filter out unsubstantiated inflammatory comments too.
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The account we're discussing is from 2014. How much earlier do you want?
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Old accounts can suffer takeovers too!
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[flagged]
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There's literally a Chinese-funded influence campaign against American AI: https://openai.com/index/disrupting-malicious-uses-of-ai-dat...
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As if US labs don't lobby politicians to get regulatory capture.

It's much easier to buy politicians in US, e.g. Elon bought POTUS for ~200M, Anthropic revenue is 40B, imagine what they can do

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lol you believe this bullshit? "likely PRC-origin cluster" what an awesome amount of proof corporations need to convince the gullible.

Why not "OpenAI used simplified chinese to create a fake prc-origin campaign and media buzz to convince the public they actually love data-centers and anti-datacenter sentiment is a psyop" there's an equal amount of proof provided for either scenario.

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... and I think it's a big mistake to say, as some people are, that people are opposed to data centers in their backyard because of a Chinese influence campaign. There is also reason to think that some "foreign agents" are doing it for the money

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/aug/10/indonesia-clic...

https://humsci.stanford.edu/feature/political-post-real-or-m...

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> Perhaps there’s a group here that is simply anti-American as its primary interest, and passionately so to upvote each other.

Considering this site has international users, it's not hard to find this, especially right now. Hell, Canada is in this group currently.

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I'm a 52 year old natural born US citizen whose ancestors have been here for generations and I'm currently anti-American. Why wouldn't I be?

We've never been the shining beacon of light we would claim to be, but we're so fucking awful now.

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When you say you are anti-American, what do you mean by that? Are you, for example, wishing for the demise of the United States? Do you want to tear down the 1st Amendment and the Statue of Liberty? Are you against democracy? Do you want our businesses and factories to shut down and go out of business? Are you willing or would you support foreign countries attacking our military at home and abroad? Are you cheering against our athletes?

Could you expand on what you mean by being "currently anti-American"?

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I can't speak to the parent commenter's precise meaning, but I interpreted them to mean they oppose the current domestic and foreign policy of US political and business leadership (a distinction that blurs to the point of indistinguishability of late, courtesy of said domestic policy).

I believe that many Americans that were previously dismissive or ambivalent regarding critiques of US activity at home and abroad (either due to patriotism, realpolitik apologia, or general naïveté) are now re-evaluating some of the beliefs they hold about their country in light of the chronic political dysfunction and an absolutely breathtaking extent of corruption being perpetrated in broad daylight today (as well as indications that extensive corruption has long festered among our elite class, surfaced via the Epstein revelations).

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Yea but if they just oppose the current administration isn't that just being anti-Trump instead of anti-American? His administration is just some other administration that'll come and go like foul sewage gas. We've had 47 of them. Does the OP become pro-America when their party is in charge or when certain conditions are met?

I don't know, just asking.

But I know that in my own upbringing I've always viewed America as a place where, because it's a democracy, we are never going to all be aligned or on the same page about policy direction. Even when I disagree with the Biden Administration or the Trump Administration on some number of issues, and believe my I've got a lot of those issues with the current one, I wouldn't think of myself as anti-American or wishing harm to the country. But that's just my own experience.

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Why would you tear down a gift from France?
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Well I certainly wouldn't, but it's a cultural symbol of America and so when you think anti-American I'd think things like tearing down the symbols that represent our nation would probably be in play. Maybe not, idk. That's why I mentioned it and asked.
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> Are you, for example, wishing for the demise of the United States? Do you want to tear down the 1st Amendment and the Statue of Liberty? Are you against democracy? Do you want our businesses and factories to shut down and go out of business? Are you willing or would you support foreign countries attacking our military at home and abroad? Are you cheering against our athletes?

I am very pro the "dream" of America, in terms of liberty, democracy, etc. According to every "democracy index" I'm aware of we're not doing so hot in that regard, generally rating as a flawed/deficient democracy and the trends are going in the wrong direction, fast.

> Do you want our businesses and factories to shut down and go out of business?

Generally, no, but this is way too open-ended of a question. I want good economic opportunity for everyone, including every US citizen. But relevant to the OP if Meta got snapped out of existence I think it would be a net positive for the world.

> Are you willing or would you support foreign countries attacking our military at home and abroad?

Nope. But across our entire history ask yourself how many foreign countries have attacked the US? Now ask yourself how many the US has attacked. With those numbers in mind, does the US seem like "the good guys"? really? ...really?

> Are you cheering against our athletes?

Nope, but I'm not cheering for them either just because they are American, I'm not a tribalist.

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> I am very pro the "dream" of America, in terms of liberty, democracy, etc. According to every "democracy index" I'm aware of we're not doing so hot in that regard, generally rating as a flawed/deficient democracy and the trends are going in the wrong direction, fast.

Well, to be fair people do have different dreams. I'm not sure those indices count for a whole lot. As an example, folks who argue in favor of returning more power to the individual states are, certainly, acting in accordance with stronger democratic principles. I'd argue the EU is actually a bit anti-democratic as it removes more power from local populations and individual states/countries/entities. Yet how would individual democracy indices rate these two?

And if you disagree with my perspective on what is more democratic, well, who is right and who is wrong?

> Generally, no, but this is way too open-ended of a question. I want good economic opportunity for everyone, including every US citizen. But relevant to the OP if Meta got snapped out of existence I think it would be a net positive for the world.

I'm no fan of Meta. But they aren't the only entity where if they snapped out of existence it would be a net positive for the world. I can think of a few non-corporate entities at least.

But fair enough it's a bit open-ended. I guess if push comes to shove when you say you are anti-American do you want to see, for example, economic opportunity increase in other countries at the expense of Americans? Not all relations have to be such give-and-take, but certainly many economic opportunities are. I'm just trying to learn more about what being an anti-american means to you.

> Nope. But across our entire history ask yourself how many foreign countries have attacked the US? Now ask yourself how many the US has attacked. With those numbers in mind, does the US seem like "the good guys"? really? ...really?

I'm fine doing things like removing all of our overseas bases, leaving alliances including NATO, never again being involved in the affairs of other countries, whether that's Korea (Korean War), Kuwait, Bosnia, or Iran, or Taiwan and China, and cutting our military spending quite a bit to reflect your desire to not be the bad guys anymore. I say let's just sit back and let the rest of the world figure out their problems - why do we need to be involved?

Is that something you agree with as well? Would that be anti-American in alignment with your views or is there other nuance here I'm not properly capturing?

> Nope, but I'm not cheering for them either just because they are American, I'm not a tribalist.

And to be clear even if America was even, say, your ideal dream since you're not a tribalist you wouldn't cheer on American athletes and would also label (not as a matter of insult but as fact) other people who cheer on their compatriots as tribalist?

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To answer most of the questions above simultaneously (to some degree):

I only care about the content of someone's character and how their actions impact the rest of the world, not the country they happen to be a citizen of, a fact which for non-immigrants (the vast majority of people) is completely random happenstance.

If already wealthy foreign agents become wealthier at the expense of impoverished Americans, I find that to be unfortunate. If already wealthy Americans become wealthier at the expense of impoverished non-Americans, I find that to be just as unfortunate.

I'm not going to cheer someone (athlete, business leader, or otherwise) on just because they are American. The fact that they are American is as irrelevant to me as the color of their eyes.

Do they seem to be a good person who treats others well? If yes, I will cheer for that person, whether they are American or not. Do they seem like an entitled asshole that treats others poorly? If yes, I will cheer against that person, whether they are American or not.

And the reason I currently label myself anti-America is that I believe that collectively we are the entitled asshole that treats others poorly. And we can't just pawn that off on Trump to be the scapegoat. He didn't materialize out of nowhere. We elected him. Twice. The second time after a failed insurrection. We have collective culpability.

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it is strange that when people are pro-american, or pro-any-ingroup, nobody asks for justification; OTOH, make a mistake of speaking from rational viewpoint based on historical events, expect a lot of hate from reddit/HN/any-ingroup-forum.

I applaud your openness to speak. I've traveled/interacted with many nationalities, and very rarely I come across someone who is open/rational enough to openly state their dislike of their country and denouncing their history.

I wish you the best in life, smart internet stranger!

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> is strange that when people are pro-american, or pro-any-ingroup, nobody asks for justification

Being pro a group can be strictly positive sum - wanting to lift that group up, likely because you consider yourself part of it or on the same team. It's possible your intentions are bad, but they certainly don't have to be.

Being anti a specific group is inherently negative. Perhaps they deserve it, but that requires justification in a way simply being positive does not.

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Good points, I personally believe that if/when China takes the lead, they will immediately stop releasing model weights. It only makes sense as a strategy to counterbalance (current) American labs' monopoly on frontier models.

Holding both those positions would be hypocritical all right, but are you sure it's the same people commenting/voting in both cases? I don't think there's a strong consensus on Hacker News. Even something like the time of day an article is posted might get different engagement depending on who is active in which time zones.

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> I don't think there's a strong consensus on Hacker News. Even something like the time of day an article is posted might get different engagement depending on who is active in which time zones.

Based on my own experience and reading, I do think there's a general consensus on this site but I could certainly be wrong about that. I'm less concerned about hypocrisy per se, it's more that the arguments that are used, even if by a minority, seem to apply in only circumstances in which China releases open-weight models.

I am aligned with your viewpoint as well. And I've repeatedly argued it. If China were to take the lead the US can then just release open-weight models. Folks say having the lead doesn't matter because China releases cheaper open-weight models. We can just let them take the lead and then do it back to them.

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> It's common, if not inevitable, for people who feel strongly about $topic to conclude that the system (or the community, or the mods, etc.) are biased against their side. One is far more likely to notice whatever data points that one dislikes because they go against one's view and overweight those relative to others. This is probably the single most reliable phenomenon on this site. Keep in mind that the people with the opposite view to yours are just as convinced that there's bias, but they're sure that it's against their side and in favor of yours. -dang [1]

The problem isn’t that people on HN have a bias, I feel it’s pretty balanced. The problem is that when there are any sides, they spend the top 100 comments rehashing the same arguments, often over a political bugbear or web design faux pas.

That pattern became a lot more obvious when there are five new front page AI posts a day.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42205856

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> The problem is that when there are any sides, they spend the top 100 comments rehashing the same arguments, often over a political bugbear or web design faux pas.

It's not even about sides, if for the last few hundred days you read a few AI related threads a day, then you notice that almost all arguments are rehashed, literally it's the same thing repeated using different words for 80%+ of comments on almost every AI thread. I started skipping most of it because there is genuinely nothing new or interesting added to these discussions.

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> The problem is that when there are any sides, they spend the top 100 comments rehashing the same arguments, often over a political bugbear or web design faux pas.

This is a problem with any upvote/downvote based site, in my experience. It only takes a couple people who are highly engaged and who have a lot of free time to refresh the comment section and downvote everyone who disagrees with them.

Some times I’ll write a polite and well-sourced comment correcting some misinformation here and the comment will go to -2 or -3 when I check back in 10 minutes. Information that goes against the angry narrative du jour is often not welcome. Later, as calmer heads read the article and peruse the comments the downvotes start to get balanced out and the comment might rise, but some times the first wave downvoters are aggressive enough to get the comment downvoted into gray text before it has a chance to be seen.

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the downvoting rings ( or bots ) are very active here. I think they're mostly bots, but who knows i guess
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I don't think they're bots and I don't even think they're organized.

In my experience with other communities, it only takes 3-5 people with a lot of free time to crush conversations they don't like. On a fast moving comment section a wrongthink comment can be buried into the bottom half of the comments with only a few early downvotes.

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When I used to run a spam factory my impression was that success on Reddit was all about avoiding the downvote brigades that would nuke you before you got your first 5 upvotes. Write a post on proggit where you confess that you are partially in it for the money or have any interest in the business of software and hoo boy, that's why I migrated to HN.
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I still think bots run the /new and what gets to the first page shrugs
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I'm certainly pro-America and anti-communist/fascist as a bias, but I don't really care about whether AI tools are open-weight or not. I just use the products that best fit my needs. I just think the arguments put forth regarding China and open-weight models and strategy are not very good. It just so happens that China is the only real competitor in the AI space and so they are who get talked about the most in comparison to the United States.

This comment isn't applicable to me, and if you believed that it applied, you'd have to add it to the OP as well since they feel strongly about Meta[1], they notice data points about Meta's behavior, and they overweight their bias against Meta[1] relative to others. Same with China "leading" and open-source/open-weight models and any time someone says China's strategy is better.

You can repeat this for any online argument or any topic.

It's not that Dang is wrong, however. It's that posting it in response to my comment(s) alone is hypocritical and pointless. Whereas Dang who is more responsible for the entire community is right to speak about it more generally. The message matters but so does the messenger, in this case.

[1] I don't use any Meta products (I don't even click on links), think social media should probably be outright banned, and Meta very likely should have been sued into the ground for the effects that their platform seems to have not just on children and young adults but also on our political system.

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I see it as a strategy to increase capital costs for American frontier labs. By eroding the expected ROI of frontier labs, you deter private investment into them, which slows OpenAI and Anthropic in particular, giving space for the laggards to catch up.
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> I don't think there's a strong consensus on Hacker News.

There are diverse viewpoints. However there are some topics and threads where it becomes obvious that the comments are going to tilt toward one viewpoint. Participating in those threads with a different opinion will get your comments downvoted to -2 within minutes even if it’s well-written and factually sound.

After this happens a couple times you learn not to engage with those threads because it only takes a few zealous downvoters to bury anything you write. So the illusion of consensus persists.

Concrete example: There was that fake (AI hallucinated) report that Meta spent $2B lobbying on something that was popular here months ago. I actually read the repo and report and noticed the AI hallucination, as well as pointed out that $2B in lobbying spend by a single company was not plausible or supported by any evidence. It didn’t matter how I wrote it, it would risk getting downvotes and angry replies about “How dare you defend Meta!” Some people are here for the anger and to feel revenge against the enemies they think they know (like the US) and will cheer on anything that goes against those enemies, regardless of the other facts surrounding it. Factually accuracy often takes a back seat to pushing agendas.

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Free models help move robots; a complement. I can foresee the models staying free.
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Maybe you're right for smaller models, but for frontier models this is the tail wagging the dog. If China has exclusive frontier model capability in the future, that's an enormous commercial and geopolitical lever. They won't throw that away to sell a few more robots. Anything beyond their competitors' capabilities will remain closed.
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You imagine robots are going to play second fiddle to models, but they could become integral parts of model training with all the data they collect. Training could even become distributed. This will enable them to be responsive to local needs.
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The robot market would have to be pretty damn valuable, to be worth throwing away a lead in the model market. Say, 10-100x as valuable.
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Of the two competing models Meta compare Glimmer to in the post, one is Google's Gemma 4.

At this size open weight model, a Western company was already state of the art, Meta is joining that competition.

And my memory is that Gemma 4 got little criticism or doom/gloom. And no, it isn't Chinese.

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Likewise the Inkling open weights announcement, Thinking Machines model, was also not criticised.

The comment about Meta is because of particular dislike of Meta, because of their business model, and how harmful they've ultimately turned out to be for the world - disproportionately so relative to their benefits to the world, compared to other big tech companies.

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> disproportionately so relative to their benefits to the world, compared to other big tech companies.

This is certainly what many people around here appear to believe, but there are lots and lots of people who get much more value out of Meta's products than those of any other tech company. Whatsapp alone is probably the most useful tech product for many, many people.

That being said, FB/Meta have done a bunch of awful stuff, but to say that they're worse than Google/Amazon/Microsoft is not necessarily obvious.

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The GP is claiming Meta is an awful company for what they have done and how they continue to treat their employees. That’s a perfectly ok opinion to hold, and many seem to agree.

Have DeepSeek, Moonshot, or the other Chinese AI companies done such things that attract moral outrage?

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If they have, would you ever know about it? CCP controls the media, the companies, and the people. What's your evidence that Chinese employers are treating their employees better other than there's silence?
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Chinese tech companies make their employees work 16 hour days, 6 days per week, compared to them Meta are absolutely saints.
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The Chinese government owns half of every Chinese don't they? They've done some pretty horrific things.
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Nobody wants to live in a world where one party dominates due to access to superior AI and the others have to fear it (well, except for a few psycopaths who would gamble on being in control of that party). So the underdog will always be the good guy in this race. It has been framed as a race between countries, so Meta fails to be the underdog because they're in the wrong country. That's all.
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I don’t think Meta is bad for releasing open models, but are you really going to ignore all the terrible things they’ve done over the years just because of that?

As for DeepSeek or any other Chinese lab, I’m not aware of any practices that would make me consider them a bad actor. Can you say the same about OpenAI, Meta or Anthropic?

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It makes me wonder why this dynamic exists here, and I do wonder at times how much our conversations here are influenced by China in a top-down fashion. I'd prefer to think that HN is pretty organic, but that is probably a naive thought.
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> When an American company does anything? Doom. And. Gloom. The engineers? Taken to the slaughterhouse! America? Behind! The public? Bamboozeled!

I think I've always had a pretty healthy amount of cynicism towards China. In recent years my cynicism towards the US has increased significantly. I don't see all of my US peers with cynicism, but I think you're living in an age of grift, corporate capture, and unheard of corruption. I also think there's nuance to both. There are some US and Chinese companies and people that I do respect regardless of what's going on politically. (Meta / Zuck isn't one of them though...)

I live in the 51st state though, so maybe I'm just overreacting...

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Apparently Americans haven’t got the memo yet that the world is moving closer to China.
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I don't think that's entirely true. As an example you can look at how the European Union is increasingly putting up trade barriers with China and identifying opportunities for new rules and regulations to prevent Chinese dumping as America is also trying to do.

Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and other countries participate in freedom of navigation and combined arms exercises because they perceive China to be a threat to their countries. [2]

I think it's more of a mixed bag. You see a lot of public talking points, and in Europe specifically a lot more healthy discussion about not being militarily as dependent on the United States as it has in the past and looking itself to follow Trump's lead to onshore capabilities (cloud for example) but I wouldn't read such moves as moving closer to China so much as they are hedging their bets a bit more.

Here's an article [1] that was reporting on this topic that I found interesting along with a select quote from the article:

  > Luxembourg’s Prime Minister Luc Frieden said Thursday at an EU summit that China is “an existential threat for our industries.”

  > Even Germany, whose economy has long relied on exports to China, is alarmed. Chancellor Friedrich Merz said this week that Beijing keeps its currency up to 30% undervalued, calling this “a massive competitive disadvantage.”
[1] https://www.wsj.com/economy/trade/chinese-export-flood-tests...

[2] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/u-s-and-9-allies-just-h... - this isn't the "best" article but I just grabbed one to illustrate the point.

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The Americans are writing that memo.
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True.
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Can you point to a lot of posts lauding the Chinese government based on the release of Chinese open models? Because that would be the equivalent to contrast with the OP.
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I suspect it's just the generalized anti-West/anti-American sentiments extended into anything and everything. Anything that makes the US look anything close to good goes against their cause and therefore must be countered and talked down.

But you're not wrong about the bias here. You just don't see many comments talking about it because they get mass flagged/downvoted for obvious reasons.

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These sentiments aren’t formed in a vacuum. America is becoming increasingly oligarchic and corrupt with decades of experience of companies profiting off harming people and lying through their teeth and Meta is like one of the worst offenders. They are pissing on every ally they have and once again started a war and both have material impacts on other countries.

Americans seem to take the US’ geeat reputation for granted and don’t realize how it has slipped and what that means. They also take for granted that China BAD is truth when this sentiment basically just sprang out of nowhere when the west realized it was their geopolitical rival. But to the rest of the worlds citizens, China is not starting any wars and is the source of cheap goods and innovation to other countries. EV batteries recently. The US is now directly causing high oil prices with their war and exports their rapacious companies like “prediction markets” which are 90% sports gambling now to the rest of the world. Meanwhile the classic American move to these kinds of comments is to claim that negative sentiment MUST be part of some bot campaign because surely no one could actually dislike the great America??

Those factors are all rightly part of the sentiment.

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> America is becoming increasingly oligarchic and corrupt with decades of experience of companies profiting off harming people and lying through their teeth and Meta is like one of the worst offenders.

Isn't China a single-party state that is run by a corrupt autocrat, has literally enslaved people to build products, and disappears people for saying the wrong things? If America is becoming more like China, shouldn't you dislike China more than America?

> when this sentiment basically just sprang out of nowhere when the west realized it was their geopolitical rival

Well this isn't a sentiment that sprang out of nowhere. It is a sentiment that emerged based on real or perceived behavior.

> China is not starting any wars

Maybe not yet, but they certainly aren't behaving nicely toward Taiwan or other countries in and around the South China Sea, are they? The Philippines and Vietnam come to mind immediately, of course there are others.

> the source of cheap goods and innovation to other countries

But if those cheap goods run your country's businesses out of business and you have lots of people without work, is that a good thing?

> The US is now directly causing high oil prices with their war

The US didn't ask Iran to pursue building nuclear weapons, supply Russia for its ongoing war in Ukraine, or provide weapons and funding to groups in Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine which have led to instability in the region. If oil prices are too high, the rest of the world should have worked to address American concerns about Iran. They failed to act, and so the US eventually just did what it thought was necessary.

> rapacious companies like “prediction markets” which are 90% sports gambling

Before sports gambling was a thing in my state (Ohio) I seem to recall traveling to other countries and they had sports gambling too. Maybe I'm wrong?

> Meanwhile the classic American move to these kinds of comments is to claim that negative sentiment MUST be part of some bot campaign because surely no one could actually dislike the great America??

I can't speak for others but since I started this thread I'll chime in. I specifically disagree with the arguments put forth about AI strategy with respect to the US and China. I have no idea and frankly, aside from erroneously being accused of a bot once [1], have no interest in trying to guess if someone is a bot or not. Sometimes I just assume everyone is, because really what's the difference when it's all just text?

Others may feel differently and believe that there is a brigade of bots. I'd ask them for concrete evidence.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48199327

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I say China is not starting any wars, you gesture at some vague "not behaving nicely" as if this is equivalent to a war or some damning proof that they will start a war - these are nowhere near the same thing. China has killed maybe 50 people outside it's borders since 2000. The US has killed 100,000-250,000 in that time period. There is no amount of rationalization that can reverse the deaths of those people or the cities turned to rubble.

The attitude towards Iran is also just arrogant. The US believes they have the unilateral authority to dictate who has nuclear weapons and who doesn't, and is morally in the right for bombing their cities and killing their citizens if they don't comply. Sovereignty be damned, we are gods, fuck you. Same thing with literally kidnapping the president of another country. Not to mention, the Iraq war was started on the exact same WMD excuse and it turned out they never had any real evidence of WMDs back then, they just said they did and it was really about oil. And the government now is 10x more corrupt and cruel and xenophobic than it was back then, and back to a huge focus on fossil fuels - don't you have to be a little naive to just trust them at face value now?

I can tell you the prevalence of sports gambling and betting is exploding in Canada now that Kalshi is directly tying up with banks to put gambling inside fucking banking apps. I'm sure it was prevalent in many countries, I'm also sure it will scale up to huge levels and enter new countries with the amount of marketing and money and influence these US companies will bring, who also happen to have DJT's son on their board. Making them markets also frees them to manipulate and trade against their users covertly in ways that cannot be detected and that a traditional sportsbook could not do.

People who actually visit China or talk to Chinese citizens are all quite optimistic about it. The tropes people keep throwing around about autocracy are very inaccurate to anyone who actually reads anything about day to day life there. I can't explain all of it here but you can try reading something from Arnaud Bertrand if you're interested [1]. There’s a comical level of propaganda against China since the west recognized them as rivals that does not match reality at all. Anyways, I always see incredible whataboutism these days when talking about the US' problems now. This is what I think your original post that I replied to does too - the parent was criticizing Meta, and you said but what about China? And the thing is, we're talking about Meta because we live in the West and the horrible shit they do impacts us much more directly than whatever China does! It's not really productive to say China Bad!! in that scenario, it's really just saying "yes we suck, but they suck more!" and that doesn't solve anything.. it channels what should be a focus about huge corruption and threats to democracy in western countries into a pissing match on some other country, and its very sad to see how many people are falling for that.

[1] https://arnaudbertrand.substack.com/archive?sort=new

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> Only China can release good, open weight models and American companies can’t compete. Oh by the way all the spend is for nothing because China alone can release open-weight models thus destroying American AI.

Let me be blunt and let me say: you don't understand why we people support Chinese models.

1. Chinese labs started with open weight models, US labs started with dooms day narrative

2. US VC based companies must become greedy to win and return the money, Chinese companies can make 1/10 of that revenue and still be happy

3. Meta in this case, started nicely with Llama, then switched to closed models, kicked out researchers to build data labeler CEO empire inside Meta. Now opening again, what's next? closing again?

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US companies published their research on transformers. The only reason Chinese companies have any models at all is open US research...

Add distillation to that, and the entire Chinese AI sphere is really just an offshoot of public US AI information...

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Science doesn't work this way, someone could claim only reason World is successful because Chinese invented paper, so please don't go there.

Regarding distillation, you can also say Anthropic and OpenAI stole /distilled books, articles, blogs from everyone who published things without knowing their work might be used against them

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> Science doesn't work this way, someone could claim only reason World is successful because Chinese invented paper, so please don't go there.

Perfectly valid claim. It could be debated though, since you are talking about a centuries long diaspora of processes.

I'm talking about an architecture that was invented, published, and pioneered by US companies just a few years ago. Not really the same argument IMO.

> Regarding distillation, you can also say Anthropic and OpenAI stole /distilled books, articles, blogs from everyone who published things without knowing their work might be used against them

Yes. I would argue that anthropic et al are only able to exist because of the massive body of work in the anglosphere, both in books and online. That goes hand-in-hand with my view of the Chinese AI sphere.

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All LLM’s are distillation of stolen copyrighted materials, some of which are the outputs of other LLM’s.
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US companies started by publishing their research, but then they have stopped abruptly, seduced by the mirage of heaps of money that could be obtained by having a monopoly on AI.

During the last few years, the published research from USA was only a small fraction from that published from China.

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There are comments like the one you're replying to on literally every Chinese model release. This is textbook goomba fallacy, btw.
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Not applied accurately with respect to my comment, but it is a funny one and also new to me in the naming.
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> It’s rather amusing to me to read comments like this, and then simultaneously whenever a Chinese company or team releases open-weight models or whatever there is a giant round of applause, America is so behind, and there’s nothing but positive things to say about the intelligent, creative, and well-intentioned Chinese engineers

It is absolutely applied accurately. You're commenting on the alleged hypocrisy of people simultaneously criticising American open-source while praising Chinese open-source, and then attributing your perception of hypocrisy to the website as a whole. The reality is the behaviour you've observed comes from completely different individuals, not some kind of HN hivemind. Your comment is such a typical case that it could go in the wiktionary page as the example excerpt teaching people what the goomba fallacy is.

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both countries are authoritarian. both are using this "free" tech to spy on people and control them.
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why is america and its people anti-china? take a chill pill and worry about yourselves instead of other people :)
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There is a big astroturfing going on social media platforms by the chinese. Did you notice 'day in a life of unmarried 30 yr old lady in china' videos flooding usa social media.

Regular ppl in the west now hold mildly positive views of the ccp and how 'advanced' china is than usa.

Then there are europeans who now are looking for china to give them the technology handout now that relationship with usa has soured.

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The interesting thing is that China began as an agrarian economy and quickly modernized via influence/direction of the CCP.

The United States used to have a dominant middle class that was geographically distributed (cities & rural areas inclusive), but the advent of the tech economy has also been having a similar effect here as it did in China: massive wealth accumulation in Tier 1-3 cities and everyone else being largely left behind.

It'll be interesting to see if there's convergence in the next decade or so, especially with the GOP reducing regulation and increasing the explicit capitalist priorities here. TBH, though, as a generally well-informed political outsider, the feeling I have is that the US government is slow, bulky, inefficient, balkanized and overall poorly run compared to the Chinese government. We'll likely either slowly improve authoritarian efficiency and become more like the CCP ... or we'll pivot left and move more toward the EU model, but we're floundering around right now paying lip service to both.

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USA has to fall behind China much further before its people can make up their minds to pick a road forward.
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I only see those type of videos on 小红书
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEpo4yCut2E

i thought youtube and instagram are blocked in china. how are these ppl posting these?

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Propaganda in China is distributed, decentralized—ie it's the responsibility of every minor bureaucrat, clerk, and white-collar worker to produce and engage with propaganda.

See:

https://collaborate.princeton.edu/en/publications/decentrali...

https://yiqingxu.org/replications/lpxx2025.html

https://cira.exovera.com/conferences/engineers-of-the-human-...

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Deepseek never fucked us over. zuck has. A decades of harm creation run doesn’t get excused by the US flag. Zuck is not on your team and if you can’t see that by now, oh my.
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> When an American company does anything? Doom. And. Gloom

Meta, "an American company". Being the main driver of an ethnic cleansing in Myanmar - and just sticking your head in the sand when told about it - is just another day's affairs at the average American Acme Inc.

These are comments on a release by easily the most societally damaging Western tech company there is. They so far easily beat Flock, Palantir, Anduril and so on, as a result of their incomparable scale. You're just ignoring that and pretending any negative comments are because it's an American company rather than Meta. That's much more FUD than any pro-China comments I've seen on HN.

Get off HN Mark, you have ten million pervert glasses to sell.

Sorry this comment is a bit snarky, but yours is indeed a sight to behold.

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I'd also argue this is the case for any company releasing open weights. They're not righteous, they're marketing. That's not necessarily a bad thing! They're releasing some great stuff for free and we benefit from that. Every company doing this has a motivation to not release these for free.

Alibaba, Google, Moonshot, Thinking Machines, etc are not releasing their models for free because they love to. They want to grab market share. I'll take it.

I still will not use a hosted Meta product, but damn this model looks solid.

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This model doesn’t look solid at all. It comes months after the Qwen model, and in almost half the benchmarks, it performs worse than that. Plus, the next Qwen 3.8 is going to be announced this week. So, this model is DOA.
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I don't really care that much about benchmarks, but having tested it on one of my puzzle prompts I can tell you that it solves it well, writes clearly, isn't noticeably slower than Qwen 3.6 27B and is much more terse in its reasoning (which will help with preserve-reasoning).

It also has a knowledge cutoff inside this year.

The main limitation is the smaller maximum recommended context.

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Meta can never be redeemed, but it's still valid to admit that FB at one point had a very badass engineering culture.

They're one of 2 companies I would absolutely never work for (weapons etc aside). FB's recruiters hounded me so often I requested that they blackball me. The day they became Meta, I learned this by checking my email to see that they started trying to reach out again. I once again requested that they blackball me. This by extention taints OAI, the other company I'll never work for.

After a few hours with Glimmer I'm pretty impressed. It's better than the benchmark scores seem to indicate compared to Qwen 3.6 27B. I'm very excited for 3.8

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> FB at one point had a very badass engineering culture

Perpetually kneecapped by one of the worst management cultures I've ever seen

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I'm going there: Bosworth is the problem. He should never have got near being CTO.
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Would you say those badass engineers were/are managed by Careless People?
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My impression is that they had created a system where management cared very deeply about "number go up", and very little about "which number?"
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The book title is a reference to The Great Gatsby: "They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” ― F. Scott Fitzgerald
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> It's better than the benchmark scores seem to indicate compared to Qwen 3.6 27B. I'm very excited for 3.8

Is it worth considering if it's only marginally better than Qwen 3.6 though? Qwen 3.8 27B is almost there, and will probably be better suited as drop-in replacement for 3.6. Not even considering there's probably going to be a 3.8-35B-A3B too - which will have even better performance.

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Qwen3.6 is very token inefficient with it's thinking. Quantized versions often get into loops.

Glimmer is trained with 4 effort levels, not just thinking on/off. Maybe it's more token efficient in general. There's official 4 bit quantizations with reported 1% loss across 15 benchmarks -- so quants probably work good.

IMO that alone is worth trying for, even if they're otherwise equal.

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It takes 10 minutes to download and try, any model is worth at least that. In my experience benchmarks are generally dogshit
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FB/Meta have had "don't recruit me" databases for a long time that are very easy to get yourself added to, thankfully.
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What is the other company that you would never work for?
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He said OpenAI in the comment (if I read it correctly)
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Ah, my bad. Thanks for pointing that out :)
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Meta doesn't need to be "redeemed". They have two of the most popular social media apps in the world. And theyll prob survive without ever having you work there
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I read that as, "Meta is a piece of shit but they're rich and don't care."

(Which I guess I agree with.)

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Should have clarified. I meant my comment to be read as [random online person] is not particularly valuable and his comment gasing himself up as a high value meta acquisiton is polluting online discourse.

Tech equivalent of "I wouldn't date Sydney Sweeney, I'm not into blondes". Cool story bro

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Mind telling me roughly what you had on your resume that had meta /fb hounding you for a job? ( Of course so I can avoid having this situation happen to me, naturally)
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Simply don't get flown out by IG to be their first mobile dev.
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Muse Glimmer doesn't redeem Meta, but it's a contribution to the commons and the Apache 2.0 licensing is an improvement from the restricted licenses attached to Llama. If even Meta can use a permissive license for its model weights, so can any other company.
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How is this non-sequitor the top comment?
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Thomas Bayes would say that the population of people who hate Facebook is really big and the population of people who are scrupulous about whether or not their comments are specific to the matter at hand is relatively small
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Certain topics bring out the hidden Reddit inside.
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First time here?

Unfortunately there are a few topics that short circuit some terminally only people. One of them being anything related to meta. Few others recently emerging is Flock or Musk. It's really exhausting since you can't have a discussion relating to anything that may be adjacent to said topics. It's like a black hole.

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Heaven forbid people have a moral compass and communicate it
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This is par for the course, HN is far worse than reddit on balance, especially involving upvoting/downvoting decorum.

Go vibecode something to auto upvote all downvoted posts, call it "Antiechochamber.HN" or something, and if enough people used it this website might improve a bit.

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Lol at Internet points decorum.
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Think real hard about that. What does it mean if the only hacker chat group on the planet despises meta this much? Think.
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You think this is the only hacker chat group on the planet?
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It's trendy to hate on Meta just like it's trendy to handwave on Apple.

One can do no right regardless, the other can do no wrong.

At least in HN.

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There is literally not a single comment like this, the only off topic comment like this is yours.
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Your lamentations and opinions are noted. Do you have anything to say about the model? Something useful or substantive? Or is this just a place for you to let us all know what you are thinking these days?
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You’re conflating the release of a local dense model that can benefit the ecosystem with the adverse effects of a digital ad system.
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The latter bankrolled and continues to bankroll the former. It is not incorrect to conflate them.
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To be honest the main issue with meta has never been around open/closed software. They've also done react, Cassandra and some other bits. But this, like their open weights is like a feather pressing down on the scale compared to things like promoting genocide in Myanmar, enabling Cambridge analytica, creating a huge closed ecosystem which dominate(s/d) local community communication, mandating doxxed communication, trying to replace actual community communication with algorithmic nonsense etc.
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Crazy idea, maybe people can be happy a new open model got released, and still have nuanced ideas on meta as a whole.

A company is a big thing there's a lot of moving pieces, why do we have to evaluate it as a whole instead of just seeing it as it is?

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  > being bankrolled by the slaughterhouse.
Thanks, that was a very loud LOL.
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If it’s open, do you care so much that it’s from Meta? At least it should be able to give you an honest answer about Tiananmen Square.
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You can say the same about planet Earth.
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More meta derangement syndrome on HN, what a surprise.

We all benefit when companies invest their resources in producing open models. No one thinks this absolves anyone of being terrible elsewhere. But we can still be happy about it.

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This is Apache 2.0, which is quite permissive. Just accept the gift.

These kind of responses are hilarious.

Someone gives something for free (and indeed this is entirely free) and the top comment is pure complaint.

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All models come with some bias. Given Meta's track record, I would not touch anything from them with a 10 feet pole.
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Any retort to do this like “but why would they just openly release this”[1] pretty much answers itself. Public relations.

If a company can spend money to redeem itself then, well, it can (game theoretically or whatever) do whatever it wants in the future and then spend money to wipe the slate clean.

[1] By which I mean: the very act of being prompted to ask such a question, of planting a seed like hmm, Meta might have some aspects which are good for us. You don’t have to be convinced of it. Just the seed itself can pay for itself.

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Meta and its products, as a whole, is a threat to your kids, your mental health, your community's health and the planet as a whole. It is just sad and very repulsive everyone fell so easily addicted to their social drug. Yes - it is a drug, and it is hard to get off from.

Nothing redeems them at this point of time, they are doing exactly ZERO to redeem. Tossing open weight models (not opensource!!) is not a basis for redemption, and does not constitute remorse in any way. Trying to portray it as such is complicity to META's crimes against humanity.

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Social media, often owned and perpetuated by Meta, has poisoned the world. It is not redeemable at this point.
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I think it’s also worth pointing out that that there are numerous less evil options to choose from.

Perhaps none of the AI companies are shining examples of high ethics, but basically all of them have ethical high ground over Meta.

At least Anthropic isn’t sending private videos from pervert glasses to contract workers in Africa. It’s a low bar but it’s a bar nonetheless.

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I personally don’t like, and wouldn’t work for Meta; but it’s an Apache 2.0 model.

I’m liking it, and I don’t see a personal moral contradiction here. Do you use React for frontend for example?

I also wish this HN post is a bit more focused on the release, and less noise around Meta.

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There’s no moral contradiction, but there is a moral decision.

I don’t use React for front end nor do I willingly use any Meta product.

I would like to focus on the release of the Volkswagen Beetle and hear less noise about Adolf Hitler.

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They're still using Elon's servers, though. Not like their models are any good anyways
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what makes Meta so bad ???? they just your average billion dollar company
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I can't take any Big Tech company that still uses PHP seriously. Sorry.
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