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Comment by dofm | Hacker News Reader

> By that logic you can't trust any model, neither trained by Cohere nor trained by yourself from scratch, because it's pretrained on public data that might easily be poisoned on purpose

Yes. Even if it's poisoned training data, RLHF fuckups, or something more malignant: the model, wherever it comes from, is in your supply chain and it makes you more vulnerable.

As much as I doubt that Alibaba have any great interest in global espionage, and this is much more likely to just be a consequence of being trained on Alibaba's own products, the fact is there is a geopolitical dynamic here.

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It's much easier for the Chinese government to tell Alibaba they must perform espionage using their models than the US Government. Even if every last engineer there joined the company just for "AI Research and Development", they might be under scrutiny or forced to shutdown if they don't work with the CCP. Power is shared between corporations and the government in the west, the government is the power in China.

Doesn't the NSA have wiretaps in every ISP? Gag orders, secret courts? Do i remember wrong: the NSA backdoored a cipher suite?

I'm comfortable with the idea of my own country conducting espionage. I can believe that China does it more; but the idea "we would never" is naive.

wiretaping an ISP is vastly different from say, ordering and forcing Anthropic or OpenAI to put malicious weights into their models. Not once in my reply did I ever imply the U.S. doesn't perform espionage. Look up Five Eyes.

I think that line is getting blurrier by the day with the current administration. The companies very quickly fell in line before even any consequence of note. Donations to the ballroom, calling it super intelligence, renaming the gulf, etc.

Would you really trust that OpenAI wouldn't skew the results to tend to a certain way or that Grok will always be neutral in how it operates?

From a third world, there was a time when US products & companies were more trustworthy, I agree. But, there has been enough display from these Cos to show that they have lost that badge.

Sweet Summer Lake America Child

I mean, China regularly executes its CEOs. The only sweet summer child here is you not understanding how Chinese politics works.

Seems very efficient at preventing a techno fascist takeover. See Jack Ma being a philanthropist now instead of running around disrupting regular people’s lives.

Now you're just moving the goalpost.

I made no comment on the effectiveness of either system, but people here still seem to vastly underestimate the brutality of one over the other.

This is basically the same as hiring a new person and giving them normal network access to get their job done. Did they upload a file to Beijing? Who knows?

There are whole branches of data security, practices, and products dedicated to answering that question and managing that risk.

The similarities look obvious, but how are these situations different? Seems like an interesting question.

So why are we doing this, if it is not better?

You mean hiring North Koreans. Which US companies are doing. Already.

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