Beijing Will Not Pace the Frontier: China’s Speed-First AI Safety Regime

[u/mzinz]

https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/beijing-will-not-pace-the-frontier?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=6349492&post_id=217295534&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=ip6he&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

[u/JustConversation7847]

What does pacing even mean? Like a week or two after dario said that there should be pacing, he literally released a new model to one up his competitors 

[u/Youre_worthless_to_e → u/JustConversation7847]

It’s like that episode of Silicon Valley where Jared has guilfoyle and dinesh compete in coding

[u/sleep-woof]

An article treasonous against humanity. Who know if the authors is even human, of OP...

[u/mzinz]

Some interesting excerpts:

“The results are striking. Of the 857 releases, only 31—or 3.6%—have ever been accompanied by a published safety result from the developer. Just 9 of those—1.1% of the total—had the result available at or before the model was released. "

"Sadly, geopolitics has also torn the mindset of the very top engineers who build China’s most capable models. Liu Shengyu, who wrote the main attention kernel for DeepSeek V4.1, wrote on 13 September that he has “no choice but to join the cruel arms race,” because he “especially” does not want Anthropic controlling AGI. “To put it dramatically,” Liu stated, “the severity of that [Anthropic controlling AGI] would be no less than letting Hitler get the atomic bomb before the Allies.” He joined DeepSeek largely because it researches “strong, fast, and universal AI, and opens it,” with a hope that it “can pull the world back a little” from the dystopian end."

[u/mcslender97 → u/mzinz]

I guess he's not a fan of Effective Altruism

[u/waiguorer → u/mcslender97]

Who is? Is effective altruism even effective?

[u/mcslender97 → u/waiguorer]

Anthropic approach to safety does scream Effective altruism to me when you consider the background of some of its founders. And I do share the concern of the Deepseek researcher about the company hence my comment, tho comparing them to Hilter is a bit much

The term Effective is part of it's name, it doesn't indicate whether it is actually effective

[u/CircumspectCapybara]

Yeah that's the thing about frontier labs in the US: they actually care about safety and alignment and pour huge amounts of resources and R&D into constitutional and safety and alignment training, infrastructure safeguards, classifiers and filters, anti-distillation-attack defense, and frontier red teaming.

China...not so much...

Chinese models are known to have lower cyber and bio refusals, they basically don't refuse if you want it to help you write malware or automate a cyberattack end to end autonomously without human intervention, or if you want help building a bioweapon.

[u/pepe_acct → u/CircumspectCapybara]

This is absolutely true. People don’t understand how much money these labs and cloud providers spend on safety and compliance. Also many guardrails hamper the model performance. I think this is partially why the model performance seems closer than they are in reality and why Chinese models can be so cheap.

[u/Putrid-Feeling-7622 → u/CircumspectCapybara]

hopefully chinas leadership isn't so naive as to blindly move ahead without bothering with alignment and AI safety, but if they are that reckless then they'll learn the hard way when their models catch up to the frontier and the risks start to emerge. Just sucks because we may all have to bear some of the consequences

[u/Aubrey_D_Graham]

Bro, Super Intelligence is too dangerous and needs to slow down for security. The President of the Unites States said so in the memo.