It seems more like the Chinese companies ar playing the dirty game, distilling through bot accounts, not letting real competition across their firewall.
So you are believing Anthropic's claim here, and it's not as if Anthropic didn't steal the data to train the model in the first place. I think the original sin doesn't give them any ability to complain.
Their is plenty of innovation happening on both sides of the Pacific.
Again, China publishes open source because they don't have another game they can play.
They distill because they don't have the compute to compete.
They are great lab, for sure, but the fundamentals are driving their behavior.
The compute deficit of Chinese Ai companies is real, and it IS THE ONLY competitive advantage that Western companies have.
The only way the U.S. keeps that edge is to prevent distillation.
The only way Chinese companies can make up for the deficit in compute is to distill.
There innovation in great supply on every side of the Ocean. Its about the chips.
And in terms of national security, for the U.S., and for China, its about the chips and the distillation that undermines that advantage.
This is an arms race.
You got that wrong. The forcing function of compute scarcity is an advantage not a detriment. The amount of investment pulverized in performative model training and dead ends (Hi Sora) should make this obvious.
Good luck not crashing the markets and the economy.
And good luck not staying behind when you can't monetize your gargantuan investments and have little incentives to make your models better as the world moves on.
Everyone here praising these Chinese companies for their smarts (sure they are smart) has been ignoring this very big fact, they're improvements have mostly been by being parasitic on the leading edge SOTA models, not from some inherent innovation advantage. They are as innovative as their western counterparts, but they lack the compute, so their keeping up within months of those SOTA models depends on other means, like distillation attacks. I don't blame them; its the obvious only strategy when you cant compete in compute. But we shouldn't be blind to the real state of affairs: equal innovation; unequal compute; distillation attacks are the only vector to keep up.
>like distillation attacks. I don't blame them; its the obvious only strategy when you cant compete in compute
>distillation attacks are the only vector to keep up
It's demonstrably wrong, they invest in architectural improvements as well, for example, DeepSeek's compressed attention. When you lack compute, you need fast training/fast inference, and distillation alone doesn't solve it. From what I understand, that kind of distillation "attack" (28 mln exchanges) only slightly improves instruction tuning/reasoning traces. If the base model is crap, distilling Claude on a few million exchanges alone won't magically make your model as good as Chinese models currently are (or magically make inference faster on the limited hardware they have). And training the base model needs a proper training run. Serving users at scale needs optimized architectures as well, especially with test-time compute and ever growing context lengths. That's where architectural innovations are happening in Chinese labs when it comes to compute.
I explicitly called out the fact that there is plenty of innovation, but that we see t
Lots of innovation in both Chinese and U.S. labs, and I don't think that there is a co.parative difference there.
The elevation of the Executive branch the last and this century has led to this primordial autocracy. Say no to the royal perogative, and accept the more limited powers of Execution of Law.
It would help if Congress wasn't sabotaged to enable this; and to have a major political party that effectively wants a king.
We were rightfully warned on the dangers of political parties and it's well demonstrated that that warning was correct in its assessment.
The fact that millions of Americans declare themselves to be loyal to their party first and foremost is terrifying. Evil people have weaponized the tribal stupidity of humans to trick them to vote against their own best interests.
I take no satisfaction in saying this, and would love to be proven wrong.
I left "my" party a long, long time ago. I wish everyone would, but people really, really want to tribe up even if doing so fractures their own nation. (And sometimes especially if it does.)
Before I got banned from redstate.com 20 years ago for sharing an unflattering fact about a particular Congress, I remember one person there being genuinely uncomfortable with the fact that I wouldn't declare myself to be in one camp or the other. They really wanted me to be in a certain bucket so they'd know how to treat me. It was unnerving to them.
That exists in every single country, your political system not being able to handle that is the main issue. The voters are never the issue, the system is.
You are right. So many parts of are system were designed for minority rule and haven't been changed in 250 years. The senate, fptp voting, no voting holidays, the electoral college and more. the wealthyvhave always and will always try to by pass democracy.
That is a good point. I do think these models would be good in the decision making. The large models are trained to use tool calling. Perhaps the small models can generate the text that would express their decision but not generate good JSON to reply with correct syntax. I do not know but this is my hunch.
You don't need no guarantee nor even trust if you have openweights, that's the beauty of it.
The real question is: what guarantee do we have from Trump that he won't pull away the software (and hardware) our society is built on?
Previously we could pretend to rely on the international order as shaped by the US itself, and as an extension on the guarantees of the US president. But with Trump, even Xi sounds like a standup guy.
So as Europe, we must scramble to disentangle the core of our societies from AWS, Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc. etc.
Is this a good faith question? It would take several hundred pages to document even a fraction of the violations.
How about deporting people without a hearing or opportunity to present evidence about their charges. And then violating the judges order to turn the planes around.
How about systematically ignoring judicial rulings.
How about detaining people based on the color of their skin and spoken language/accent.
How about violating the emoluments clause of the constitution by accepting a personal airplane.
How about sending your son in-law, who hasn’t been appointed to any office with the advice and consent of congress as required by the constitution.
How about refusing to seat elected congress members for reasons for months.
How about singling out companies like intel for targeted trade restrictions and then demanding equity in order to lift them.
What about threatening to delay or deny a merger of a media company unless your ally is allowed to buy them.
What about refusing to enforce the TikTok ban until you can arrange a buy out to an ally.
What about a formal market with a known price for pardons and commutations.
What about stating multiple wars without congressional approval.
What about creating a fake department named Doge that withholds funds apportioned by congress and breaks contracts that have explicit obligations for payment that results in more termination fees and losses than the savings. All without congressional approval.
How about threatening to withhold federal funds from states with governors of the opposing political party but not your own? Remember the president is supposed to execute the law congress passes not make law or arbitrarily enforce it based on their own political needs or values.
And a Swiss court decided that this was illegal and disproportionate [1]. Rule of law does not mean that nothing illegal happens in the country (that's obviously impossible to guarantee). It means illegal acts have consequences.
The agency who arrested him have been sentenced to pay him 12k$ + court fees. There is a criminal case ongoing against Della Valle, former head of Switzerland's federal police. It only started after the administrative ruling and parliamentary investigation.
Thanks for providing an example. I find the that situation to be drastically different. It was noncitizen non-resident visiting for a lecture with no deep ties to the country. The US deported residents, green card holders and citizens with no hearing to countries they had no connection to and didn't speak the local language, including some in Africa.
An equal example in Europe would need the facts to be more similar
That distracts from the point in favor of what, in this context, is a detail.
There are always incidents in all democracies with millions of people, that contravene the expectations of rule of law and integrity of its systems.
The US has degenerated significantly in the past few years, to the point that when someone asks “can you give examples”, I expect a disingenuous ploy more than genuine ignorance. The list of breaches is so long, that listing it results in numbness and exhaustion of the mental muscles responsible for being aghast.
Searching and seizure of your laptops, including your personal phones without a probable cause or warrant.
Compel you to reveal your secrets, including your passwords by threatening to arrest and detain you without legal proceedings for an unspecified period.
Deny your basic human rights, particularly at the borders, especially if you aren’t a citizen.
Illegal tariffs, executive usurping congress power of the purse, Noem funding herself and friends with a commercial from an unknown entity with tax payer money, people in ICE/FBI handing over undisclosed unaccounted money in brown bags, insider trading is rampant, using funds inappropriately to fly girlfriend places that isn't official business, illegally using private money to fund public projects, taking bribes from foreign nations like jets and such violating emulation clauses, passing no bid contracts to people you know, using the pardon power inappropriately to pardon crypto scammers and other white collar crimes, moving notorious Epstein related criminals to a low security prison without going through the courts, avoiding justice for sex crimes of the rich, using the DOJ as a political cudgel, and the list goes on.
It is a commonly accepted "fact" right now, outside the US, that the US is not to be trusted (right now), due to some orange guy, and his mates, manipulating markets, running their mouths, doing all kinds of criminal and/or infantile shit.
I'd say there is quite a bit of evidence for this all around.
You could get away with throwing the TDS label around during the first term but now the con is tired and worn out. This term has resulted in the dangers his own first cabinet warned about. He single handedly destroyed the global world order with the US at the center. He is responsible for a full 1/3 of all national debt. Almost every us industry is losing global market share accept AI and He just undermined the world's faith in US led AI with time anthropic export control.
I could go on and on.
HN should be a place for serious good faith analysis not shrill insults. So leave the trump derangement comments out of the dialog next time.
Hardly obtuse. It's good to be specific when making broad claims. The graft of Trump is a big problem, IMO, but the claim was larger than that, as being something about America's system of Law and Justice, and I don't see these as being completely busted (yet) by the Orange Man
Sorry but questioning that claim at this point verges on bad faith or credulity.
Ask intel, paramount, TikTok or anthropic if they feel law will be applied equally to all companies.
Ask the blue states that had fema funding withheld when it went to red states.
Ask black families that haven’t gotten reparations when Jan 6 rioters that beat and killed cops to over turn an election will get almost $2b in reparations and then had the Supreme Court throw out their votes in Louisiana in the middle of an election to overturn the voting rights act, redraw districts, overturn their own case law and the principle that judicial review shouldn’t happen too close to an election so they could redraw the districts.
Business leaders are sucking up to curry favor. That by definition isn’t the rule of law it’s the rule of dispensation. It’s the spoils system.
If you have a counter argument you’d better make it now or you will tip your hand.
Well, the system allowed Trump to be elected, twice, and the system hasn't (so far) prevented him from abusing his office in the ways mentioned. So it's fair to conclude that the US system is the problem, not the symptom called Trump. And if that's the case, it's also fair to conclude that the US is no longer trustworthy, because Trump could happen again.
It isn't completely busted, unless the Trump administration has a personal interest in overriding the law. As sometimes happens when some foreign power, or just a random politician in another nation, does something he doesn't like. Or, when Trump has a personal stake in some other outcome. Who wants to gamble that Trump won't decide to wreck your businesses, sabotage your defenses, or spy on European citizens? We now know most of the major tech companies won't object to information requests, and probably won't even reveal that they've given access to the US government. US citizens maybe still have some protections, but everyone else seems to be fair game.
Frankly, I'm surprised there's not more urgency on the part of Europeans to reduce dependence on US tech. I don't like it. I'm an American in tech. But, the US can't be trusted, at this time. And, given how irresponsible tech leadership has been, in kowtowing to Trump, I don't see how they can reasonably be trusted, either.
They are moving swiftly actually. France announced the government is moving to Linux, several other countries are moving off of aws and Microsoft.
I invest in startups and companies at every stage are losing contracts in Europe specifically for this risk. I can’t say who but it’s a multi front trend.
It obviously does not. But, there is nothing preventing it. The US has given away all of our foreign scientists, if Europe wants them. All Europe has to do to take the lead in tech is ramp up research spending by an order of magnitude or two to match what the US used to spend (the US still outspends Europe on research, even after massive haphazard cuts and disruptions). Europe also has to welcome immigrants. Another thing many European countries have not always been great at, and some recently have become quite bad about. The regressive nationalist right is ascendant in many places, including some European countries.
I am going to ramp up building open source alternatives to every part of the stack. I am encouraging every YC founder to do the same. I am buying as much hardware as I can afford to have my own inference and training stack and funding researchers at Duke and CM to strengthen local and open source AI.
I am also assembling the largest in home robotics training data set available which will be open source.
Kinda, yea. I've never been able to afford to fully prioritize values-alignment in my work, but it is something I care about, and building anything proprietary and US-controlled feels increasingly bad, because even if a company's mission isn't evil, the state has demonstrated a strong willingness to force their hand if they can be useful to them at all, and punish them arbitrarily if they do anything that the ruling party dislikes. I do have bills to pay, but if you can meet my relatively (as tech workers go) modest needs and have a real plan to make something that enables rather than impedes digital sovereignty, I'd be interested in hearing what I could do to help
The kind of funding it takes to take on US tech corporations, especially in AI, will be astronomical. For an open source solution, it will take state action, and given how unpopular AI is with average folks (an entirely reasonable position for average folks to take when they see the new robber barons who're leading the AI charge), I'm not confident there's political will for it. If a few of the larger rich European nations really committed to funding research at a level competitive with the US, though, even if not specifically AI-related, the result would be an eventual end to US tech hegemony.
I was hoping the European AI companies and projects like Mistral and Apertus would, you know, do something good. But, their models trail not only US models, but Chinese models, including smaller ones, by a significant amount. I guess there's also the ethical component. Mistral is reportedly not plagiarizing like US companies, and isn't distilling US models like the Chines companies. Cheating gives one a leg up if there are no referees.
Anyway, I work for a robotics company, and I'm always interested in what's happening with open robotics stuff, including AI.
any US tech? not even for specific purposes?
yeah, if there was some kind of forcefield around the US, most of the world would have tech troubles at one level or another. but so would the US.
and really, the topic here is reducing a transgressive President from infringing tech activities elsewhere (used to be mainly about surveillance, but then trump happened).
How about spying on, experimenting on, and conducting in-person psyops on a US citizen for reasons of calling the Spy Agencies terrorist organizations on social media and whistleblowing their online astroturfing accounts? My whistleblowing consisted of calling particular online accounts as deep state accounts, and I was reaching thousands of voices.
They decided that spying on me in a commune in Hawaii, and then following me after to other public spaces was fine. I'm certain something was put in my food based on behavior I saw in communal meals, and I can't say I took video or photo evidence though I wish I did.
I'm of Pakistani descent, held a former secret clearance, and I did not break any oaths or violate any laws though the way I was treated was certainly how the above person described rule of law: our spy agencies for example operate completely without accountability and regularly commit atrocious behavior against US citizens beyond just me.
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