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Comment by foldr | Hacker News Reader

Any mainstream consumer product based on LLMs is going to put guardrails around them of some kind. China might give you different guardrails, but it's a bit naive to assume that a Chinese company would impose fewer restrictions overall than an American one.

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I extensively use open source Chinese LLM’s for coding. Reading the reasoning traces, especially when planning and debugging code, is valuable. I will pause the llm when immediately when it’s made incorrect assumptions. Often I see I mention erroneous stuff in the reasoning that doesn’t show in the final response. And I’ll copy/paste phrases directly from the reasoning traces and explain why this is incorrect.

the key word is consumer product. apps can (and should) set their own rules but models need to stay neutral and capable of producing harmful content.

they should never generate it unless asked to by the user but its important that the capability is there and users/app developers can turn off all guardrails if they want to. open source gives you a guarantee that if one version drops without censorship you can keep using it forever even if its replaced by a censored one on the api.

I think you’re overestimating the market for such models. Most people don’t want a model that’s prone to generating extremely offensive output. If you want something “uncensored”, then open source models already exist, as you say. But the model itself has already been extensively tuned to produce desired outputs and not produce undesired outputs, so it doesn’t really make sense to distinguish “uncensored” raw models from “censored” apps or harnesses.

There’s a big difference between uncensored models and those that are specifically set up to only output things a panel of wealthy ivory tower Bay Area progressives would deem to be the “correct” or “inoffensive” take on a given topic.

Sure, but ChatGPT and Claude aren't actually like that. They're perfectly happy to express right wing political views if you prompt them to do so.

If you're genuinely worried about 'censorship' in this context, look first at how US AI companies are working with oppressive regimes around the world (e.g. https://sherwood.news/tech/report-openai-may-tailor-a-versio...)

> Any mainstream consumer product based on LLMs is going to put guardrails around them of some kind. China might give you different guardrails, but it's a bit naive to assume that a Chinese company would impose fewer restrictions overall than an American one.

Exactly. The GP must have his head up his butt. The Chinese have far stricter guardrails on their models than America does. I mean, FFS, the country famously has a massive censorship apparatus and regulations to make sure the police can show up on your doorstep if you start talking out of line.

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