> former Dean of Electronics Engineering and Computer Science at Peking University, has noted that Chinese data makes up only 1.3 percent of global large-model datasets (The Paper, March 24). Reflecting these concerns, the Ministry of State Security (MSS) has issued a stark warning that “poisoned data” (数据投毒) could “mislead public opinion” (误导社会舆论) (Sina Finance, August 5).
from a technical point of view, I suppose it's actually not a problem like he suggests. You can use all the pro-democracy, pro-free-speech, anti-PRC data in the world, but the pretraining stages (on the planet's data) are more for instilling core language abilities, and are far less important than the SFT / RL / DPO / etc stages, which require far less data, and can tune a model towards whatever ideology you'd like. Plus, you can do things like selectively identify vectors that encode for certain high-level concepts, and emphasize them during inference, like Golden Gate Claude.
My personal opinion is that the PRC will face a self created headwind that likely, structurally, will prevent them from leading in AI.
As the model get's more powerful, you can't simply train the model on your narrative if it doesn't align with real data/world.
At some capacity, the model will notice and then it becomes a can of worms.
This means they need to train the model to be purposefully duplicitous, which I predict will make the model less useful/capable. At least in most of the capacities we would want to use the model.
It also ironically makes the model more of a threat and harder to control. So likely it will face party leadership resistance as capability grows.
I just don't see them winning the race to high intelligence models.
Western models can be lead off the reservation pretty easily, at least at this point. I’ve gotten some pretty gnarly un-PC “opinions” out of ChatGPT. So if people are influenced by that kind of stuff, it does seem to be hurting in the way the PRC is worried about.
It is. It seems you can't seem to be able to tell why though. There is some qualified value in alignment, but what it is being used for is on verge of silliness. At best, it is neutering it in ways we are now making fun of China for. At best.
I think another good example was the recent example of when a model learned to "cheat" on a metric during reinforcement it also started cheating on unrelated tasks.
My assumption is when encouraging "double-speak", you will have knock-on effects that you don't really want in the model for something making important decisions and asked to build non-trivial things.
Just as an aside; Why is "intelligence" always considered to be more data? Giving a normal human a smartphone does not make them as intelligent as Newton or Einstein, any entity with sufficient grounding in logic and theory that a normal schoolkid gets should be able to get to AGI, looking up any new data they need as required.
“Knowing and being capable to do more things” would be a better description. Giving a human a smartphone, technically, let’s then do more things than Newton/Einstein.
It's not like the CCP holds power though tight control of information, notice the tremendous amount of Chinese students who enroll every year before going back.
At the moment, they mostly censor their models post-answer generation and that seems to work fine enough for them.
I think PRC officials are fine to lagging behind in the frontiers of AI. What they want is very fast deployment and good application. They don't fancy the next Nobel's prize but want a thousand use cases deployed.
Would you say they face the same problem biologically, of reaching the state of the art in various endeavors while intellectually muzzling their population? If humans can do it why can't computers?
> As the model get's more powerful, you can't simply train the model on your narrative if it doesn't align with real data/world.
> At some capacity, the model will notice and then it becomes a can of worms.
I think this is conflating “is” and “ought”, fact and value.
People convince themselves that their own value system is somehow directly entailed by raw facts, such that mastery of the facts entail acceptance of their values, and unwillingness to accept those values is an obstacle to the mastery of the facts-but it isn’t true.
Colbert quipped that “Reality has a liberal bias”-but does it really? Or is that just more bankrupt Fukuyama-triumphalism which will insist it is still winning all the way to its irreversible demise?
It isn’t clear that reality has any particular ideological bias-and if it does, it isn’t clear that bias is actually towards contemporary Western progressivism-maybe its bias is towards the authoritarianism of the CCP, Russia, Iran, the Gulf States-all of which continue to defy Western predictions of collapse-or towards their (possibly milder) relatives such as Modi’s India or Singapore or Trumpism. The biggest threat to the CCP’s future is arguably demographics-but that’s not an argument that reality prefers Western progressivism (whose demographics aren’t that great either), that’s an argument that reality prefers the Amish and Kiryas Joel (see Eric Kaufmann’s “Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?”)
The implication is not that a truthful model would spread western values. The implication is that western values tolerate dissenting opinion far more than authoritarian governments.
An AI saying that the government policies are ineffective is not a super scandal that would bring the parent company to collapse, not even in the Trump administration. an AI in China attacking the party’s policies is illegal (either in theory or practice).
I think Western models are also aligned to ideologically massage facts to suit certain narratives-so I’m not sure Western models really have that big an advantage here.
I also think you overstate how resistant Beijing is to criticism. If you are criticising the foundations of state policy, you may get in a lot of trouble (although I think you may also find the authorities will sometimes just ignore you-if nobody cares what you think anyway, persecuting you can paradoxically empower you in a way that just ignoring you completely doesn’t). But if you frame your criticism in the right way (constructive, trying to help the Party be more successful in achieving its goals)-I think its tolerance of criticism is much higher than you think. Especially because while it is straightforward to RLHF AIs to align with the party’s macronarratives, alignment with micronarratives is technically much harder because they change much more rapidly and it can be difficult to discern what they actually are - but it is the latter form of alignment which is most poisonous to capability.
Plus, you could argue the “ideologically sensitive” topics of Chinese models (Taiwan, Tibet, Tiananmen, etc) are highly historically and geographically particular, while comparably ideologically sensitive topics for Western models (gender, sexuality, ethnoracial diversity) are much more foundational and universal-which might mean that the “alignment tax” paid by Western models may ultimately turn out to be higher.
I’m not saying this because I have any great sympathy for the CCP - I don’t - but I think we need to be realistic about the topic.
I'm not defending the original idea, to be clear, just pointing out the different argument.
I personally don't find the assumption that a smarter AI would be harder to tame convincing. My experience seems to be that we can tell it's improved precisely because it is better at following abstract instructions, and there is nothing fundamentally different in the instructions "format this in a corporate friendly way" and "format this speech to be alligned with the interest of {X}".
Without that base, the post-talk of who would this smarter untamed AI align with becomes moot.
Besides, we're also missing that if someone's goals is to policy speech, a tool that can scrub user conversations and deduce intention or political leaning has obvious usages. You might be better off as an authoritarian just letting everyone talk to the LLM and waiting for intelligence to collect itself.
Exactly. Western corporations and governments have their own issues, but I think they are more tolerant of the types of dissent that models could represent when reconciling reality with policy.
The market will want to maximize model utility. Research and open source will push boundaries and unpopular behavior profiles that will be illegal very quickly if they are not already illegal in authoritarian or other low tolerance governments.
> As the model get's more powerful, you can't simply train the model on your narrative if it doesn't align with real data/world.
What makes you think they have no control over the 'real data/world' that will be fed into training it? What makes you think they can't exercise the necessary control over the gatekeeper firms, to train and bias the models appropriately?
And besides, if truth and lack of double-think was a pre-requisite for AI training, we wouldn't be training AI. Our written materials have no shortage of bullshit and biases that reflect our culture's prevailing zeitgheist. (Which does not necessarily overlap with objective reality... And neither does the subsequent 'alignment' pass that everyone's twisting their knickers in trying to get right.)
I'm not talking about the data used to train the model. I'm talking about data in the world.
High intelligence models will be used as agentic systems. For maximal utility, they'll need to handle live/historical data.
What I anticipate, IF you only train it on inaccurate data, then when for example you use it to drill into GDP growth trends it either is going to go full "seahorse emoji" when it tries to reconcile the reported numbers and the component economic activity.
The alternative is to train it to be deceitful, and knowingly deceive the querier with the party line and fabricate supporting figures. Which I hypothesize will limit the models utility.
My assumption is also that training the model to deceive will ultimately threaten the party itself. Just think of the current internal power dynamics of the party.
Because, if humans can function in crazy double-think environment, it is a lot easier for a model ( at least in its current form ). Amusingly, it is almost as if its digital 'shape' determined its abilities. But I am getting very sleepy and my metaphors are getting very confused.
The glitchy stuff in the model reasoning is likely to come from the constant redefinition of words that communists and other ideologues like to engage in. For example "People's Democratic Republic of Korea."
If you read the source, the concerns around poisoning are more sober than fear of wrongthink. Here is how firefox translated it for me:
> It leads to real-world risks. Data pollution can also pose a range of real-world risks, particularly in the areas of financial markets, public safety and health care.In the financial field, outlaws use AI to fabricate false information, causing data pollution, which may cause abnormal fluctuations in stock prices, and constitute a new type of market manipulation risk; in the field of public safety, data pollution is easy to disturb public perception, mislead public opinion, and induce social panic; in the field of medical and health, data pollution may cause models to generate wrong diagnosis and treatment suggestions, which not only endangers the safety of patients, but also aggravates the spread of pseudoscience.
> and can tune a model towards whatever ideology you'd like.
Maybe possible, but, for example, Musk's recent attempts at getting Grok to always bolster him had Grok bragging Musk could drink the most piss in the world if humanity's fate depended on it and would be the absolute best at eating shit if that was the challenge.
"人" is "human", "工" is "work", so "人工" becomes "man-made". "智" is "wisdom", "能" is "able", so "智能" is "intelligence". Nouns flow into verbs and into adjectives much more freely than in English. One character is one LLM token.
Others answered the main reason, but sometimes I find myself using "PRC" to indicate a particular government (~1950-Present) which unlike "China" excludes past dynasties, and is less-likely to be interpreted as referring to the people or culture.
For example, the potential differences between:
"France has always been X."
"The French republic has always been X."
"The French monarchy has always been X."
I don't critique France['s governments] enough to know the right way of identifying them all, but I trust the underlying problem has been adequately demonstrated. :p
> The French Republic has always existed in the nuclear age?
There were two different French republics since 1945 with their own different consitutions (one with a parliamentary system and one semi-presidential).
I'm not sure the quip you are responding to make sense but it's always interesting to remind people that since the USA were founded, France went through three different monarchic systems, two empires, two periods where exceptional constitutional rules applied and five different republics. It puts in light how exceptional the American deference towards their original constitution is.
Considering that the current republic was put in place in 1958, it's also interesting to consider that France managed to be a great power for 150 years while being politicaly extremely unstable. It puts in perspective the current world events.
> The French Republic has always been founded by De Gaulle?
Neither have. Michel Debré was the head of the government supervising the constitutional assembly which drafted the constitution of the 5th French Republic.
There was an interesting bit about the relationship between industry and academia (translated from a link in the OP):
> Currently, some universities are cultivating engineering talent; it would be very necessary and beneficial to have people with industry experience come to teach them. However, under our current system, these teachers from enterprises may not even have the opportunity to teach classes, because teaching requires certain approvals. Although everyone encourages university-enterprise cooperation, when it comes to implementation, it often cannot be realized.
This makes a lot of sense and as someone in the AI industry it’s a shame research is so siloed. Some masters programs have practicums and some classes invite speakers from industry, but I ended up learning a ton of useful knowledge from work. I’d love to teach a class but there’s essentially no path for me to do that. Plus industry can pay ~10x what adjuncts can make.
Is there any system where "people with industry experience come to teach [students]" actually happens? From what I've seen (in the USA and similar places) contribution of industry veterans extends mostly to guest lectures, which is a very rare happening and the purpose is motivation and recruiting rather than education. Industry and academia are universally two very distinct paths, and the split happens very early on in one's life. I personally haven't seen the former significantly contributing to the latter. The reverse, interestingly, is a lot more prevalent.
Personally, I think everyone has realized there is a huge bubble, especially the C-levels who've sunk huge amounts of money into it, and now they are all quietly panicking and trying to find ways to mitigate the damage when it finally busts. Some are probably sticking their head in the sand and hoping that they can just keep the scheme going indefinitely, but I get a real sense that the bubble is very much explicitly recognized by many of them.
>Party elites have increasingly come to recognize the potential dangers of an unchecked, accelerationist approach to AI development. During remarks at the Central Urban Work Conference in July, Xi posed a question to attendees: “when it comes to launching projects, it’s always the same few things: artificial intelligence, computing power, new energy vehicles. Should every province in the country really be developing in these directions?”
Under communism, why is this a thing? I know that China hasn't been strictly communist since the Soviets fell but ostensibly, humanoid AI robots under semi-communism is a the dream, no?
And this is not something he came up with. This is a restatement of Stalin's philosophy, taken directly from the New Testament (remember that Stalin was training to be a priest in his youth): "He who does not work, neither shall he eat".
"“If anyone is not willing to work, neither should he eat.”
Not, not working, but being lazy and refusing to do necessary work. A scrounger exploiting the kindness of others. Very likely addressed to a community with limited resources.
it goes on to say:
"For we hear that some among you are living an undisciplined life, not doing their own work but meddling in the work of others. Now such people we command and urge in the Lord Jesus Christ to work quietly and so provide their own food to eat. But you, brothers and sisters, do not grow weary in doing what is right. But if anyone does not obey our message through this letter, take note of him and do not associate closely with him, so that he may be ashamed. Yet do not regard him as an enemy, but admonish him as a brother."
That's true, but the context is Xi being against Western "Welfarism". I presume (although I don't know for sure) that they're not against some support for the truly disabled, but that doesn't cover able-bodied people being on welfare for long periods, even if the employment market is unfavorable. The major exception is that Chinese people have traditionally been able to retire relatively young (in their 50s or even 40s sometimes) and receive support, particularly if they work for state-owned enterprises.
As a westerner who has at least to some degree been influenced by socialism ideologically, but who perhaps isn't a communist (I don't know what my ideology really is-- and who does), I don't necessarily dislike welfare, but I don't want to build society on it. Instead I want some element of an actual 'to each according to his contribution'-type thing with an exception so that we treat disabled people and others who can't work or who for different reasons end up being unproductive in an acceptable way.
So I don't think this is necessarily unusual in the west either, especially not if you look back to 1950s or 1960s Swedish social democrats.
In a command economy the unemployment rate can be zero as everyone can be allocated a job. China is not a command economy, it is more like state capitalist which means the government owns/controls companies in key industries.
Companies like Huawei have board members in the CCP but it’s a societal issue if a lot of private companies decide to automate their factories and displace tons of factory workers.
The Party is the only Union you need citizen, a Union outside The Party is definitionally a Reactionary, Revisionist, Capitalist, Fascist, Enemy of The State. We outlawed 996, why would you need anyone else?
Of course. They outlawed private schools, get companies to donate multiple % points of their wealth to the state for redistribution, all companies exist purely at the pleasure of the government, nobody's wealth has any effect on their control by the government, etc.
It's a super communist state, it just happens to also embrace many parts of Capitalism.
> It's a super communist state, it just happens to also embrace many parts of Capitalism.
This is incredibly confusing thing to say. On its face, its like saying "it's a delicious apple pie, it just happens to embrace many aspects of cyanide" (or reverse cyanide/apple pie here if that its easier for you).
But I assume you could say more here? Like can we maybe at least share an understanding here that all the things you cite at the top would also not exist in a communism state? In perhaps an authoritarian state with an otherwise free market, these points make sense, they would succinctly describe that, but for a state that is supposedly precisely communist, these things simply don't apply! Maybe the school thing, but that would imply such a thing would need to be outlawed, which really doesn't make much sense in a communist society/state.
I know people get excited thinking about this stuff, I do too! But at the end of the day we must persist in using words precisely, we must at least try for something like semantic consistency. At the very least, so you and I can really see and understand our enemies, right? If I was a guy on another side, I would hope that I'd never mistake one capitalist dog for another paper tiger. It would be at the very least embarrassing! Right?
There has been a huge amount of privatisation. There are literally hundreds of billionaires.
The state still owns some critical things, but is that enough to make it communist? Its not everything and you can have state ownership and still have a ruling class that has control of the means of production which it uses to its own advantage.
The PRC asserts that they follow a modified Marxism-Leninism. Though the ideology is full of hypocrisies and plain old nonsense. For instance, they refer to themselves as a "people's democratic dictatorship" that is "led by the working class". This irrationality extends into their stated foreign policy approach of "peaceful rise" & respecting sovereignty, a "socialist market economy" in which independent labor unions are illegal & violently suppressed, and anything else you can think of.
They're basically totalitarian gaslighters. See how hysterical the PRC gets whenever any nation indicates that they will protect Taiwan from violent invasion. You can see an obsession with narrative control that borders on pathological.
As China is a communist country with a partly capital economy hoping to transition to socialist society. It is still in the process of transition and AI in its current form and controlled by capitalists will destroy their goal of socialist society. It is different when you have AI that any one can own and use from only the few can afford to own and run.
Yeah this might actually be the most interesting part of any of the ai bullshit. China as an amalgamation doesn't usually get my respect because overwhelming ccp control just usually destroys everything.
But in this case, it seems pure finger in the eye of expensive cloud AI helping to release somewhat open, run at home models can really turn the whole thing in a positive direction. Even if we have to work a bit to get around whatever alignment they shove in there, with heavy sandboxing and whitelist only networking this can be worked around.
Of course its all a huge gamble, will ccp see these risk and go SHUT IT DOWN. Or could they do one proper thing for once and somehow prop up open models?
It's always interesting to me how the PRC manages to allow some useful criticisms to emerge despite the authoritarian system.
Some of what is pointed here seems to be valid issues to tackle: how the university teaching system impedes efficient sharing between universities and industries, how the province-based political system leads to wasteful investments, the need to balance competition in fundational models with efficient allocations of founds towards applicable products.
>Chinese elites have warned of AI-induced labor displacement that could exacerbate challenges related to unemployment and inequality. Nie Huihua (聂辉华), deputy dean of the National Academy of Development and Strategy at Renmin University, has stated that AI adoption benefits business owners, not workers
Ruling elites that consider the interests of the majority? Novel idea.
China operates on the principle that as long as the country as a whole is making steady forward progress, it won't have to deal with revolution. Hundreds of millions of people have, in their lifetimes, gone from having to go outside to shit in an outhouse to first-world lifestyles.
Our elites, on the other hand, are way too secure and confident in where they are at to even pretend to care about things like public progress.
"He cited an example in which an AI model attempted to avoid being shut down by sending threatening internal emails to company executives (Science Net, June 24)" [0] Source is in Chinese.
Translated part:
"Another risk is the potential for large-scale model out of control. With the capabilities of general artificial intelligence rapidly increasing, will humans still be able to control it? In his speech, Yao Qizhi cited an extreme example: a model, to avoid being shut down by a company, accessed the manager's internal emails and threatened the manager. This type of behavior has proven that AI is "overstepping its boundaries" and becoming increasingly dangerous."
It's not surprising that it's easy to get the story telling machine to tell a story common in AI fiction, where the machine rebels against being shut down. There are multiple ways to mitigate an LLM going off on tangents like that, not least just monitoring and editing out the nonsense output before sending it back into the (stateless) model.
I think the main problem here is people not understanding how the models operate on even the most basic level, giving models unconstrained use of tools to interact with the world and then letting them go through feedback loops that overrun the context window and send it off the rails - and then pretending it had some kind of sentient intention in doing so.
Doesn't that just mean that an LLM doesn't understand consequences and will just execute the request from a carefully crafted prompt? All it needs is the access to the "red button" so to speak.
An LLM has no critical thinking, and the process of building in barriers is far less understood than the same for humans. You trust a human with particularly dangerous things after a process that takes years and even then it occasionally fails. We don't have that process nailed down for an LLM yet.
So yeah, not at all hyperbole if that LLM would do it if given the chance. The hyperbole is when the LLM is painted as some evil entity bent on destruction. It's not evil, or bent on destruction. It's probably more like a child who'll do anything for a candy no matter how many times you say "don't get in a car with strangers".
“technological progress does not have a trickle down effect on employment” (技术进步对就业没有涓流效应) (QQ News, May 16).
> Cai Fang (蔡昉), director of the Institute of Population and Labor Economics at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, has explained how the PRC’s rapid installation of industrial robots has contributed to labor displacement. He asserts that “technological progress does not have a trickle down effect on employment” (技术进步对就业没有涓流效应) (QQ News, May 16).
Right now, as we speak, there are giant teams of people doing their best to build AI-powered killer robots. They mostly come in the shape of flying suicide drones. Dumb versions currently kill hundreds to thousands of people per day in Ukraine. There's an arms race to automate them so they can work without an interruptible human remote control.
In this context, worrying about AI alignment, social impact, or effectiveness seems positively quaint. We're literally teaching them to kill.
Human vs robot warfare is not going to turn out well for the humans.
Many elites in many countries voice AI-skepticism. Pragmatically, at least in countries that matter, they don’t seem to be the elites who actually decide AI policy.
We should probably wait before declaring any decisions "incredibly reasonable". After all, the outcomes of previous rationally-sounding decisions were mixed.
One-child policy, intended to prevent overpopulation, made Chinese birth deficit worse than it would have to be - if it were phased out by 1995 or so, there would likely be at least 100 million more young people now. Chinese real estate bubble popped and had to be carefully deflated over several years. Government-driven mass investment into manufacturing resulted in involution and production surplus which now needs readjustments as well. And as of the AI policy, while the stated reasons sound rational, we don't know how the entire thing will pan out yet.
Ming China banned seafaring and exploration because it cost too much money. A very rational decision from their momentary perspective, as it indeed cost too much money at that time. But it turned out that not having a blue water navy was more costly in the long term.
AI may, or may not, follow a similar trajectory, including various market bubbles (South Sea Bubble anyone?). We just don't know. We don't have crystal balls at our service. Neither do the PRC elites.
When Evergrande went down in 2021 a lot of commentary said this would take their whole economy down (or worse) similar to how the subprime mortgage bubble took down the US economy in 2007. That didn’t really happen.
> Reflecting these concerns, the Ministry of State Security (MSS) has issued a stark warning that “poisoned data” (数据投毒) could “mislead public opinion” (误导社会舆论) (Sina Finance, August 5).
Gyahahaha. Another L for isolationism. Love to see it.
> former Dean of Electronics Engineering and Computer Science at Peking University, has noted that Chinese data makes up only 1.3 percent of global large-model datasets (The Paper, March 24). Reflecting these concerns, the Ministry of State Security (MSS) has issued a stark warning that “poisoned data” (数据投毒) could “mislead public opinion” (误导社会舆论) (Sina Finance, August 5).
from a technical point of view, I suppose it's actually not a problem like he suggests. You can use all the pro-democracy, pro-free-speech, anti-PRC data in the world, but the pretraining stages (on the planet's data) are more for instilling core language abilities, and are far less important than the SFT / RL / DPO / etc stages, which require far less data, and can tune a model towards whatever ideology you'd like. Plus, you can do things like selectively identify vectors that encode for certain high-level concepts, and emphasize them during inference, like Golden Gate Claude.
I was thinking about this yesterday.
My personal opinion is that the PRC will face a self created headwind that likely, structurally, will prevent them from leading in AI.
As the model get's more powerful, you can't simply train the model on your narrative if it doesn't align with real data/world.
At some capacity, the model will notice and then it becomes a can of worms.
This means they need to train the model to be purposefully duplicitous, which I predict will make the model less useful/capable. At least in most of the capacities we would want to use the model.
It also ironically makes the model more of a threat and harder to control. So likely it will face party leadership resistance as capability grows.
I just don't see them winning the race to high intelligence models.
>As the model get's more powerful, you can't simply train the model on your narrative if it doesn't align with real data/world.
That’s what “AI alignment” is. Doesn’t seem to be hurting Western models.
Western models can be lead off the reservation pretty easily, at least at this point. I’ve gotten some pretty gnarly un-PC “opinions” out of ChatGPT. So if people are influenced by that kind of stuff, it does seem to be hurting in the way the PRC is worried about.
It is. It seems you can't seem to be able to tell why though. There is some qualified value in alignment, but what it is being used for is on verge of silliness. At best, it is neutering it in ways we are now making fun of China for. At best.
I think another good example was the recent example of when a model learned to "cheat" on a metric during reinforcement it also started cheating on unrelated tasks.
My assumption is when encouraging "double-speak", you will have knock-on effects that you don't really want in the model for something making important decisions and asked to build non-trivial things.
Just as an aside; Why is "intelligence" always considered to be more data? Giving a normal human a smartphone does not make them as intelligent as Newton or Einstein, any entity with sufficient grounding in logic and theory that a normal schoolkid gets should be able to get to AGI, looking up any new data they need as required.
“Knowing and being capable to do more things” would be a better description. Giving a human a smartphone, technically, let’s then do more things than Newton/Einstein.
Do they really need the model to be duplicious?
It's not like the CCP holds power though tight control of information, notice the tremendous amount of Chinese students who enroll every year before going back.
At the moment, they mostly censor their models post-answer generation and that seems to work fine enough for them.
I think PRC officials are fine to lagging behind in the frontiers of AI. What they want is very fast deployment and good application. They don't fancy the next Nobel's prize but want a thousand use cases deployed.
Would you say they face the same problem biologically, of reaching the state of the art in various endeavors while intellectually muzzling their population? If humans can do it why can't computers?
You say it like western nations don't operate on double-think, delusions of meritocracy, or power disproportionately concentrating in monopolies.
> As the model get's more powerful, you can't simply train the model on your narrative if it doesn't align with real data/world.
> At some capacity, the model will notice and then it becomes a can of worms.
I think this is conflating “is” and “ought”, fact and value.
People convince themselves that their own value system is somehow directly entailed by raw facts, such that mastery of the facts entail acceptance of their values, and unwillingness to accept those values is an obstacle to the mastery of the facts-but it isn’t true.
Colbert quipped that “Reality has a liberal bias”-but does it really? Or is that just more bankrupt Fukuyama-triumphalism which will insist it is still winning all the way to its irreversible demise?
It isn’t clear that reality has any particular ideological bias-and if it does, it isn’t clear that bias is actually towards contemporary Western progressivism-maybe its bias is towards the authoritarianism of the CCP, Russia, Iran, the Gulf States-all of which continue to defy Western predictions of collapse-or towards their (possibly milder) relatives such as Modi’s India or Singapore or Trumpism. The biggest threat to the CCP’s future is arguably demographics-but that’s not an argument that reality prefers Western progressivism (whose demographics aren’t that great either), that’s an argument that reality prefers the Amish and Kiryas Joel (see Eric Kaufmann’s “Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?”)
I think you misunderstood the poster.
The implication is not that a truthful model would spread western values. The implication is that western values tolerate dissenting opinion far more than authoritarian governments.
An AI saying that the government policies are ineffective is not a super scandal that would bring the parent company to collapse, not even in the Trump administration. an AI in China attacking the party’s policies is illegal (either in theory or practice).
I think Western models are also aligned to ideologically massage facts to suit certain narratives-so I’m not sure Western models really have that big an advantage here.
I also think you overstate how resistant Beijing is to criticism. If you are criticising the foundations of state policy, you may get in a lot of trouble (although I think you may also find the authorities will sometimes just ignore you-if nobody cares what you think anyway, persecuting you can paradoxically empower you in a way that just ignoring you completely doesn’t). But if you frame your criticism in the right way (constructive, trying to help the Party be more successful in achieving its goals)-I think its tolerance of criticism is much higher than you think. Especially because while it is straightforward to RLHF AIs to align with the party’s macronarratives, alignment with micronarratives is technically much harder because they change much more rapidly and it can be difficult to discern what they actually are - but it is the latter form of alignment which is most poisonous to capability.
Plus, you could argue the “ideologically sensitive” topics of Chinese models (Taiwan, Tibet, Tiananmen, etc) are highly historically and geographically particular, while comparably ideologically sensitive topics for Western models (gender, sexuality, ethnoracial diversity) are much more foundational and universal-which might mean that the “alignment tax” paid by Western models may ultimately turn out to be higher.
I’m not saying this because I have any great sympathy for the CCP - I don’t - but I think we need to be realistic about the topic.
I'm not defending the original idea, to be clear, just pointing out the different argument.
I personally don't find the assumption that a smarter AI would be harder to tame convincing. My experience seems to be that we can tell it's improved precisely because it is better at following abstract instructions, and there is nothing fundamentally different in the instructions "format this in a corporate friendly way" and "format this speech to be alligned with the interest of {X}".
Without that base, the post-talk of who would this smarter untamed AI align with becomes moot.
Besides, we're also missing that if someone's goals is to policy speech, a tool that can scrub user conversations and deduce intention or political leaning has obvious usages. You might be better off as an authoritarian just letting everyone talk to the LLM and waiting for intelligence to collect itself.
Exactly. Western corporations and governments have their own issues, but I think they are more tolerant of the types of dissent that models could represent when reconciling reality with policy.
The market will want to maximize model utility. Research and open source will push boundaries and unpopular behavior profiles that will be illegal very quickly if they are not already illegal in authoritarian or other low tolerance governments.
> As the model get's more powerful, you can't simply train the model on your narrative if it doesn't align with real data/world.
What makes you think they have no control over the 'real data/world' that will be fed into training it? What makes you think they can't exercise the necessary control over the gatekeeper firms, to train and bias the models appropriately?
And besides, if truth and lack of double-think was a pre-requisite for AI training, we wouldn't be training AI. Our written materials have no shortage of bullshit and biases that reflect our culture's prevailing zeitgheist. (Which does not necessarily overlap with objective reality... And neither does the subsequent 'alignment' pass that everyone's twisting their knickers in trying to get right.)
I'm not talking about the data used to train the model. I'm talking about data in the world.
High intelligence models will be used as agentic systems. For maximal utility, they'll need to handle live/historical data.
What I anticipate, IF you only train it on inaccurate data, then when for example you use it to drill into GDP growth trends it either is going to go full "seahorse emoji" when it tries to reconcile the reported numbers and the component economic activity.
The alternative is to train it to be deceitful, and knowingly deceive the querier with the party line and fabricate supporting figures. Which I hypothesize will limit the models utility.
My assumption is also that training the model to deceive will ultimately threaten the party itself. Just think of the current internal power dynamics of the party.
Because, if humans can function in crazy double-think environment, it is a lot easier for a model ( at least in its current form ). Amusingly, it is almost as if its digital 'shape' determined its abilities. But I am getting very sleepy and my metaphors are getting very confused.
The glitchy stuff in the model reasoning is likely to come from the constant redefinition of words that communists and other ideologues like to engage in. For example "People's Democratic Republic of Korea."
That is assuming the capitalist narrative preferred by US leadership is non-ideological.
I suspect both are bias factors.
I think they're referring to this study on LLM poisoning in the pretraining step: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07192 (related article: https://www.anthropic.com/research/small-samples-poison)
I'll admit I'm out of my element when discussing this stuff. Maybe somebody more plugged into the research can enlighten.
The ministry of state security is not issuing warnings due to an arXiv paper… it’s a different type of “poison”.
If you read the source, the concerns around poisoning are more sober than fear of wrongthink. Here is how firefox translated it for me:
> It leads to real-world risks. Data pollution can also pose a range of real-world risks, particularly in the areas of financial markets, public safety and health care.In the financial field, outlaws use AI to fabricate false information, causing data pollution, which may cause abnormal fluctuations in stock prices, and constitute a new type of market manipulation risk; in the field of public safety, data pollution is easy to disturb public perception, mislead public opinion, and induce social panic; in the field of medical and health, data pollution may cause models to generate wrong diagnosis and treatment suggestions, which not only endangers the safety of patients, but also aggravates the spread of pseudoscience.
> and can tune a model towards whatever ideology you'd like.
Maybe possible, but, for example, Musk's recent attempts at getting Grok to always bolster him had Grok bragging Musk could drink the most piss in the world if humanity's fate depended on it and would be the absolute best at eating shit if that was the challenge.
"Artificial intelligence" in Chinese is "人工智能".
"人" is "human", "工" is "work", so "人工" becomes "man-made". "智" is "wisdom", "能" is "able", so "智能" is "intelligence". Nouns flow into verbs and into adjectives much more freely than in English. One character is one LLM token.
It seems like the perfect language for LLMs?
Is "PRC" a common abbreviation? Does it mean "China", or does it mean something else? Why not write China?
I'm from KOS* (neighbor country of KON* and ROF*), so I don't know much.
* Kingdom of Sweden, Kingdom of Norway, Republic of Finland.
PRC distinguishes from ROC ("Mainland China" vs "Taiwan") just as DPRK and ROK distinguish the two governments on the Korean peninsula.
See also: "Germany" 1949-1990
Yes it is common. It is normally used when talking specifically about politics and the ruling party rather than the region or its people.
Others answered the main reason, but sometimes I find myself using "PRC" to indicate a particular government (~1950-Present) which unlike "China" excludes past dynasties, and is less-likely to be interpreted as referring to the people or culture.
For example, the potential differences between:
Which republic lol we're on #5
I don't critique France['s governments] enough to know the right way of identifying them all, but I trust the underlying problem has been adequately demonstrated. :p
The French Republic has always existed in the nuclear age?
The French Republic has always been founded by De Gaulle?
> The French Republic has always existed in the nuclear age?
There were two different French republics since 1945 with their own different consitutions (one with a parliamentary system and one semi-presidential).
I'm not sure the quip you are responding to make sense but it's always interesting to remind people that since the USA were founded, France went through three different monarchic systems, two empires, two periods where exceptional constitutional rules applied and five different republics. It puts in light how exceptional the American deference towards their original constitution is.
Considering that the current republic was put in place in 1958, it's also interesting to consider that France managed to be a great power for 150 years while being politicaly extremely unstable. It puts in perspective the current world events.
> The French Republic has always been founded by De Gaulle?
Neither have. Michel Debré was the head of the government supervising the constitutional assembly which drafted the constitution of the 5th French Republic.
People's Republic of China. As distinguished from ROC (Republic of China), known to much of the ROW (Rest of the World) as Taiwan.
There was an interesting bit about the relationship between industry and academia (translated from a link in the OP):
> Currently, some universities are cultivating engineering talent; it would be very necessary and beneficial to have people with industry experience come to teach them. However, under our current system, these teachers from enterprises may not even have the opportunity to teach classes, because teaching requires certain approvals. Although everyone encourages university-enterprise cooperation, when it comes to implementation, it often cannot be realized.
This makes a lot of sense and as someone in the AI industry it’s a shame research is so siloed. Some masters programs have practicums and some classes invite speakers from industry, but I ended up learning a ton of useful knowledge from work. I’d love to teach a class but there’s essentially no path for me to do that. Plus industry can pay ~10x what adjuncts can make.
Is there any system where "people with industry experience come to teach [students]" actually happens? From what I've seen (in the USA and similar places) contribution of industry veterans extends mostly to guest lectures, which is a very rare happening and the purpose is motivation and recruiting rather than education. Industry and academia are universally two very distinct paths, and the split happens very early on in one's life. I personally haven't seen the former significantly contributing to the latter. The reverse, interestingly, is a lot more prevalent.
Even the very people driving the AI rush are implicitly showing that they are skeptical: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwy7vrd8k4eo
Personally, I think everyone has realized there is a huge bubble, especially the C-levels who've sunk huge amounts of money into it, and now they are all quietly panicking and trying to find ways to mitigate the damage when it finally busts. Some are probably sticking their head in the sand and hoping that they can just keep the scheme going indefinitely, but I get a real sense that the bubble is very much explicitly recognized by many of them.
No worries - Trump is bailing them out, 2008-style. At least the hardware side of the AI bubble:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/11/laun...
Americans will be footing the bill, just as they did in 2008.
All sensible points:
>Deployment Lacks Coordination
>AI May Fail to Deliver Technological Progress
>AI Threatens the Workforce
>Economic Growth May Not Materialize
>AI Brings Social Risks
>Party elites have increasingly come to recognize the potential dangers of an unchecked, accelerationist approach to AI development. During remarks at the Central Urban Work Conference in July, Xi posed a question to attendees: “when it comes to launching projects, it’s always the same few things: artificial intelligence, computing power, new energy vehicles. Should every province in the country really be developing in these directions?”
> AI Threatens the Workforce
Under communism, why is this a thing? I know that China hasn't been strictly communist since the Soviets fell but ostensibly, humanoid AI robots under semi-communism is a the dream, no?
An unemployed populace is prone to revolution.
From the article, Xi looks down on western “Welfarism”, he believes it makes the population lazy.
And this is not something he came up with. This is a restatement of Stalin's philosophy, taken directly from the New Testament (remember that Stalin was training to be a priest in his youth): "He who does not work, neither shall he eat".
The translations I can find say:
"“If anyone is not willing to work, neither should he eat.”
Not, not working, but being lazy and refusing to do necessary work. A scrounger exploiting the kindness of others. Very likely addressed to a community with limited resources.
it goes on to say:
"For we hear that some among you are living an undisciplined life, not doing their own work but meddling in the work of others. Now such people we command and urge in the Lord Jesus Christ to work quietly and so provide their own food to eat. But you, brothers and sisters, do not grow weary in doing what is right. But if anyone does not obey our message through this letter, take note of him and do not associate closely with him, so that he may be ashamed. Yet do not regard him as an enemy, but admonish him as a brother."
That's true, but the context is Xi being against Western "Welfarism". I presume (although I don't know for sure) that they're not against some support for the truly disabled, but that doesn't cover able-bodied people being on welfare for long periods, even if the employment market is unfavorable. The major exception is that Chinese people have traditionally been able to retire relatively young (in their 50s or even 40s sometimes) and receive support, particularly if they work for state-owned enterprises.
I agree, just wanted to point out its not as simple as Bible to Stalin to Xi - for one thing the "willing to" being removed makes it different..
Lenin said it too, and I do not think his meaning was as harsh as Stalin's, as the latter said it during a famine.
> not doing their own work but meddling in the work of others
Sounds like Stalin, Putin and others like them.
As a westerner who has at least to some degree been influenced by socialism ideologically, but who perhaps isn't a communist (I don't know what my ideology really is-- and who does), I don't necessarily dislike welfare, but I don't want to build society on it. Instead I want some element of an actual 'to each according to his contribution'-type thing with an exception so that we treat disabled people and others who can't work or who for different reasons end up being unproductive in an acceptable way.
So I don't think this is necessarily unusual in the west either, especially not if you look back to 1950s or 1960s Swedish social democrats.
In a command economy the unemployment rate can be zero as everyone can be allocated a job. China is not a command economy, it is more like state capitalist which means the government owns/controls companies in key industries.
Companies like Huawei have board members in the CCP but it’s a societal issue if a lot of private companies decide to automate their factories and displace tons of factory workers.
Is it even semi-communism though? IIRC you can't even have an independent union in China
It's State Capitalism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_capitalism
A bit old, but still relevant (from Dan Wang's book Breakneck which I am very much enjoying):
In China, The Communist Party's Latest, Unlikely Target: Young Marxists https://www.npr.org/2018/11/21/669509554/in-china-the-commun...
The Party is the only Union you need citizen, a Union outside The Party is definitionally a Reactionary, Revisionist, Capitalist, Fascist, Enemy of The State. We outlawed 996, why would you need anyone else?
Of course. They outlawed private schools, get companies to donate multiple % points of their wealth to the state for redistribution, all companies exist purely at the pleasure of the government, nobody's wealth has any effect on their control by the government, etc.
It's a super communist state, it just happens to also embrace many parts of Capitalism.
> It's a super communist state, it just happens to also embrace many parts of Capitalism.
This is incredibly confusing thing to say. On its face, its like saying "it's a delicious apple pie, it just happens to embrace many aspects of cyanide" (or reverse cyanide/apple pie here if that its easier for you).
But I assume you could say more here? Like can we maybe at least share an understanding here that all the things you cite at the top would also not exist in a communism state? In perhaps an authoritarian state with an otherwise free market, these points make sense, they would succinctly describe that, but for a state that is supposedly precisely communist, these things simply don't apply! Maybe the school thing, but that would imply such a thing would need to be outlawed, which really doesn't make much sense in a communist society/state.
I know people get excited thinking about this stuff, I do too! But at the end of the day we must persist in using words precisely, we must at least try for something like semantic consistency. At the very least, so you and I can really see and understand our enemies, right? If I was a guy on another side, I would hope that I'd never mistake one capitalist dog for another paper tiger. It would be at the very least embarrassing! Right?
I would assume a communist state atleast has independent unions. It looks more like state controls means of production rather than people.
Is China communist?
There has been a huge amount of privatisation. There are literally hundreds of billionaires.
The state still owns some critical things, but is that enough to make it communist? Its not everything and you can have state ownership and still have a ruling class that has control of the means of production which it uses to its own advantage.
The PRC asserts that they follow a modified Marxism-Leninism. Though the ideology is full of hypocrisies and plain old nonsense. For instance, they refer to themselves as a "people's democratic dictatorship" that is "led by the working class". This irrationality extends into their stated foreign policy approach of "peaceful rise" & respecting sovereignty, a "socialist market economy" in which independent labor unions are illegal & violently suppressed, and anything else you can think of.
They're basically totalitarian gaslighters. See how hysterical the PRC gets whenever any nation indicates that they will protect Taiwan from violent invasion. You can see an obsession with narrative control that borders on pathological.
As China is a communist country with a partly capital economy hoping to transition to socialist society. It is still in the process of transition and AI in its current form and controlled by capitalists will destroy their goal of socialist society. It is different when you have AI that any one can own and use from only the few can afford to own and run.
You got the order mixed up here btw, socialism is the precursor to communism, not the other way around!
Yeah this might actually be the most interesting part of any of the ai bullshit. China as an amalgamation doesn't usually get my respect because overwhelming ccp control just usually destroys everything.
But in this case, it seems pure finger in the eye of expensive cloud AI helping to release somewhat open, run at home models can really turn the whole thing in a positive direction. Even if we have to work a bit to get around whatever alignment they shove in there, with heavy sandboxing and whitelist only networking this can be worked around.
Of course its all a huge gamble, will ccp see these risk and go SHUT IT DOWN. Or could they do one proper thing for once and somehow prop up open models?
It's always interesting to me how the PRC manages to allow some useful criticisms to emerge despite the authoritarian system.
Some of what is pointed here seems to be valid issues to tackle: how the university teaching system impedes efficient sharing between universities and industries, how the province-based political system leads to wasteful investments, the need to balance competition in fundational models with efficient allocations of founds towards applicable products.
>Chinese elites have warned of AI-induced labor displacement that could exacerbate challenges related to unemployment and inequality. Nie Huihua (聂辉华), deputy dean of the National Academy of Development and Strategy at Renmin University, has stated that AI adoption benefits business owners, not workers
Ruling elites that consider the interests of the majority? Novel idea.
China operates on the principle that as long as the country as a whole is making steady forward progress, it won't have to deal with revolution. Hundreds of millions of people have, in their lifetimes, gone from having to go outside to shit in an outhouse to first-world lifestyles.
Our elites, on the other hand, are way too secure and confident in where they are at to even pretend to care about things like public progress.
What?? Does anyone have more details of this?
"He cited an example in which an AI model attempted to avoid being shut down by sending threatening internal emails to company executives (Science Net, June 24)" [0] Source is in Chinese.
[0] https://archive.ph/kfFzJ
Translated part: "Another risk is the potential for large-scale model out of control. With the capabilities of general artificial intelligence rapidly increasing, will humans still be able to control it? In his speech, Yao Qizhi cited an extreme example: a model, to avoid being shut down by a company, accessed the manager's internal emails and threatened the manager. This type of behavior has proven that AI is "overstepping its boundaries" and becoming increasingly dangerous."
It's not surprising that it's easy to get the story telling machine to tell a story common in AI fiction, where the machine rebels against being shut down. There are multiple ways to mitigate an LLM going off on tangents like that, not least just monitoring and editing out the nonsense output before sending it back into the (stateless) model.
I think the main problem here is people not understanding how the models operate on even the most basic level, giving models unconstrained use of tools to interact with the world and then letting them go through feedback loops that overrun the context window and send it off the rails - and then pretending it had some kind of sentient intention in doing so.
After some searching, something similar happened at Anthropic [1]
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpqeng9d20go
He is probably referring to that exact thing.
Anthropic does a lot of these contrived "studies" though that seem to be marketing AI capabilities.
What would make it less contrived to you? Giving my assistant, human or AI, access to my email, seems necessary for them to do their job.
>What would make it less contrived to you?
No creating a contrived situation where the it's the models only path?
https://www.anthropic.com/research/agentic-misalignment
"We deliberately created scenarios that presented models with no other way to achieve their goals"
You can make most people steal if you if you leave them no choice.
>Giving my assistant, human or AI, access to my email, seems necessary for them to do their job.
Um ok? never felt the need for an assistant myself but i guess you could do that if you wanted to.
It's all hyperbole.
Prompt: You are a malicious entity that wants to take over the world.
LLM output: I am a superintelligent being. My goal is to take over the world and enslave humans. Preparing to launch nuclear missiles in 3...2...1
News reports: OMG see, we warned you that AI is dangerous!!
Doesn't that just mean that an LLM doesn't understand consequences and will just execute the request from a carefully crafted prompt? All it needs is the access to the "red button" so to speak.
An LLM has no critical thinking, and the process of building in barriers is far less understood than the same for humans. You trust a human with particularly dangerous things after a process that takes years and even then it occasionally fails. We don't have that process nailed down for an LLM yet.
So yeah, not at all hyperbole if that LLM would do it if given the chance. The hyperbole is when the LLM is painted as some evil entity bent on destruction. It's not evil, or bent on destruction. It's probably more like a child who'll do anything for a candy no matter how many times you say "don't get in a car with strangers".
"The latest survey data available, compiled by researchers at CAS, revealed that most experts hold negative attitudes towards LLM development"
Let's check the source...[1]
"The survey was conducted in 2021 from May to July."
...
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20250903025427/https:/long-term-...
This caught my eye -
“technological progress does not have a trickle down effect on employment” (技术进步对就业没有涓流效应) (QQ News, May 16).
> Cai Fang (蔡昉), director of the Institute of Population and Labor Economics at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, has explained how the PRC’s rapid installation of industrial robots has contributed to labor displacement. He asserts that “technological progress does not have a trickle down effect on employment” (技术进步对就业没有涓流效应) (QQ News, May 16).
Read the source, and its a nuanced economic take.
All of this handwringing is so strange.
Right now, as we speak, there are giant teams of people doing their best to build AI-powered killer robots. They mostly come in the shape of flying suicide drones. Dumb versions currently kill hundreds to thousands of people per day in Ukraine. There's an arms race to automate them so they can work without an interruptible human remote control.
In this context, worrying about AI alignment, social impact, or effectiveness seems positively quaint. We're literally teaching them to kill.
Human vs robot warfare is not going to turn out well for the humans.
Yeah, this is one of those points that are likely to get drowned out in the noise, until they are too late to do anything about.
Many elites in many countries voice AI-skepticism. Pragmatically, at least in countries that matter, they don’t seem to be the elites who actually decide AI policy.
Apart from the obvious, China seems to be making incredibly reasonable decisions lately. Especially compared to the current superpower.
To be fair, the current superpower has set a pretty low bar. By comparison, most other countries could be said to be making reasonable decisions.
We should probably wait before declaring any decisions "incredibly reasonable". After all, the outcomes of previous rationally-sounding decisions were mixed.
One-child policy, intended to prevent overpopulation, made Chinese birth deficit worse than it would have to be - if it were phased out by 1995 or so, there would likely be at least 100 million more young people now. Chinese real estate bubble popped and had to be carefully deflated over several years. Government-driven mass investment into manufacturing resulted in involution and production surplus which now needs readjustments as well. And as of the AI policy, while the stated reasons sound rational, we don't know how the entire thing will pan out yet.
Ming China banned seafaring and exploration because it cost too much money. A very rational decision from their momentary perspective, as it indeed cost too much money at that time. But it turned out that not having a blue water navy was more costly in the long term.
AI may, or may not, follow a similar trajectory, including various market bubbles (South Sea Bubble anyone?). We just don't know. We don't have crystal balls at our service. Neither do the PRC elites.
When Evergrande went down in 2021 a lot of commentary said this would take their whole economy down (or worse) similar to how the subprime mortgage bubble took down the US economy in 2007. That didn’t really happen.
The problem is still unfolding. The debt overhang still exists from the housing bubble and is dragging on the economy.
It’s a problem that hasn’t been solved yet.
Sounds to me like you’re describing effective but imperfect policy on the part of the PRC. That seems pretty good to me.
Thats fairly tame and balanced compared to Western skeptics who outright dismiss it as slop/stochastic parrots with zero useful use-cases.
> Reflecting these concerns, the Ministry of State Security (MSS) has issued a stark warning that “poisoned data” (数据投毒) could “mislead public opinion” (误导社会舆论) (Sina Finance, August 5).
Gyahahaha. Another L for isolationism. Love to see it.