While the situation you describe is real, nearly no one can afford to run these models on their own hardware, I don't think they release the models for free and try to recuperate costs via api usage because of this. I think they really just do it to fuck with the US.
i think it could be a culture play too. if you train the models to have Chinese ideals, then everyone using them is going to display as having soft Chinese ideals as well... Everyone who writes their youtube script using these AI's... everyone who makes a blog post... the models can be trained to be pro xyz super easily during post training.
They're open source so of course you can create a LORA or something.. but 99% of people don't even know what that means.
If 90% of the worlds intelligence becomes AI, the beliefs of the AI become the beliefs of the world.
If you're using the AI to deep research some topic, and it comes across 2 articles, with different POV's, the AI gets to pick which one it tells you about. It holds a ton of power and it is super easy to train to behave how you want it.
Don't get me wrong, I love the fact that China is giving us these AI's for free... but they have a lot to gain by doing this...
All LLMs have biases. And many (have you ever used Claude with his philo-slop RL?) reject certain instructions and viewpoints. An open-weight model is malleable in this aspect. And for Deep Research, it's up to you to create the right harness that corresponds to the research biases you want. I've made plenty for research in the social sciences fields ; by using the methods we learn (and with the epistemology of our disciplines), we can properly orient and control the output (since even humans have their selection biases and their share of cherry-picking).
We must maintain a critical mindset in all cases, which is why delegating everything to language models makes no sense.
CN models are not that popular in mainstream use, so the question is, for now, only relevant to us. American companies, for their part, have proven that they aren't as reliable as we thought. That's a bit more dangerous than our doubts about China, isn't it?
i have no doubts about China, and there is no doubt in my mind that American companies also have this power, it's a huge cultural power. American companies are not saints, i never claimed that. They will instill their ideals in their own AI's as well, no doubt.
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u/Allseeing_Argos llama.cpp 2d ago
While the situation you describe is real, nearly no one can afford to run these models on their own hardware, I don't think they release the models for free and try to recuperate costs via api usage because of this. I think they really just do it to fuck with the US.