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Comment by throawayonthe | Hacker News Reader

interesting/funny: their off-peak rates apply 00:00-08:00 Beijing time, so nine-to-five for someone on the NA west coast :p

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China has a population of 1.4B, US is 349M. 0-8 Beijing time is their off-peak? How is that funny, that's literally how timezones work?

It's funny, in a good way, because their off-peak times match perfectly the werstern peak demand.

Can folks in China run US-based models? Seems like they should take advantage of this overlap in peak timing.

Yes, use VPN; they are the main clients

Why do they use a VPN?

Chinese state firewall?

Well not just that, OpenAI explicitly blocks them

Blocks Chinese users or blocks VPNs? Are they the only one?

https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/supported-countries

You can check for yourself here to see that China and Hong Kong are conveniently missing. We do see blocking from Anthropic and Gemini as well in some regions

Also even though Vietnam and the Philippines are technically supported we do see blocking from some IP addresses in those regions too

I see - I was just curious. Does China permit citizens from accessing American AI models if they were permitted by the American companies?

Well I can tell you lots of them access them no matter what, our service provides a proxy for them if a request gets blocked and lots of AI providers do the same since they access the APIs through a central server without passing along the actual users IP address

Understood, I was just curious if the CCP blocks Chinese citizens even if they were permitted by the US. It looks quite a bit like the general economic policy of China - block foreign companies and artificially drive pricing down for your products globally. I have yet to see evidence to the contrary but was just wondering

Absolutely not, OpenAI is not an organization they can "control."

OpenAI and Anthropic restricted API access for developers based in mainland China, citing geopolitical competition and national security risks.

Yes but does China also restrict Chinese citizens from using these models?

Kinda, China has the GFW so you need to circument that to access a larger part of global internet. Though that is relatively "easy" than to get a proper working SMS or KYC for Anthropic or OAI.

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