Single counterexample for single counterexample: Belgium's Leopold - not sure if Western colonialism is so much better (and notice I didn't even bring up "western India")
Not so much better but better in general compared to the middle eastern/eastern colonialism.. westerners have good competiton that the atrocities will be self corrected by itself but middle eastern/eastern colonies needed external western support like Korean war, hiroshima/nagasaki.. main example I can think of opposite is china under deng but there too deng had become relatively capitalist to fix the issues.
Yeah, it's planned for years and years at this point.
Sure I know there are more urgent priorities but at the moment there is no backup for GOS phones. It only works for some people in some situations. For me it never reliably worked, ever.
First shutting down working and safe nuclear power plants in favour of coal, then that.
At this rate I start wondering who actually makes this policy, at most turns exposing the country more to the energy markets issues and making them more reliant on OPEC and Putin.
If you look back at the last 30-40 years german industry was often at the leading edge of emerging technologies, e.g. different types of renewable energy (especially wind and solar), automation, robotics, machine learning and so on, advanced ADAS, and to a lesser degree with batteries and EVs (though broadly competitive with lots of investment). It's just that they get backstabbed the shit out of them by politics. Who then turn around and act all pikachu at the job losses.
I don't think there is any other country which had this many opportunities and leads into high-growth and ultra-high-growth industries and made sure none of them panned out. That's not bad timing or bad luck, it's systemic. Maybe the US's conversion into a petrostate?
It's only a matter of time until it or something like it catches on as a replacement for Telegram's "People/Groups Nearby" feature that France forced it to remove.
But also the American models (case in point: Fable) refuse to engage in *defensive* activity, so anyone who's not the American government or one of the handful American companies has no choice but to turn to Chinese models to defend themselves.
Not everyone is an attacker, but now the public discourse is "but the evil Chinese will break everything" - yeah, that's because no one is permitted to do vulnerability checks of their own software or infrastructure with the capable models.
Security team in my company is salivating seeing the news, because we have a fighting chance to find and patch many vulnerabilities we didn't previously notice, thanks to the Chinese models.
You have to wonder if any of these models, from any providers or countries, are set up to lie. i.e. tell you no vulnerabilities while quietly siphoning off the ones they do find into a database.
Yet another reason that self hosted will prove to be the only sane way forward, and it'a almost certainly necessary to have multiple different model providers working adversarially.
And that's just the model behavior. The provider itself can do whatever. Given the PRC's public record of prolific IP theft, the default assumption is that they're taking everything you send to one of their APIs.
Booz Allen is cute, but if china can train K3 on a fraction of the US compute availability, yet it benchmarks almost equivalent to Fable for a third of the cost, it’s game over for US labs in the long run.
Believe me, I wish this wasn’t the case, but open up the hardware on the device you are reading this on and tell me the majority of tech inside wasn’t made in China….
Manufacturing was lost a long time ago, this is really just another way
> if china can train K3 on a fraction of the US compute availability, yet it benchmarks almost equivalent to Fable for a third of the cost, it’s game over for US labs in the long run.
I agree. However, as of yet, most/all leading PRC models are distilled from US models. I've personally observed Deepseek, GLM, and Kimi all respond that they are Claude when asked, and the networks of tens of thousands of proxy accounts that we've found show that it's happening on a large scale.
But - if the PRC labs actually train up the domain expertise to train those models from scratch, which they are in the process of doing - then the US is cooked. They're not there yet, but it's probably only a matter of years.
Playing devils advocate, does from scratch really matter if all frontier labs are training off each other anyways? Practically speaking, businesses/consumers just care about lowest inference cost for maximizing intelligence anyways (not to mention Anthropic/OpenAI forcing KYC/litigation barrier trash for access to any cybersecurity/IT capabilities) that I literally just cancelled Claude today.
Yeah it’s sad the CCP has my information. But it’s either them or the feds, and at least Chinese models actually work for cybersecurity tasks, not to mention aren’t stupid expensive
Artificialanalysis.ai rn on opus 5 is a joke. The main intelligence benchmarks it is like 1% better than Fable, but the cost difference between that and K3 is so funny lol. It’s the same with cars— you don’t have to do it from scratch, as long as you can do it cheaper and with the same quality, hence Toyota/Honda taking over
Yeah it’s sad that American models are censored more than Chinese ones lol (outside of asking them about the CCP) but it’s where we are at I guess :(
Assuming the providers are compromised (and I agree that some of them probably are) then I doubt the angle taken will be to poison the product. That kind of thing usually gets noticed eventually.
A more likely scenario is to focus on the model users as potential victims, e.g. by logging internal infrastructure descriptions, capturing private access tokens from chats, etc. That is very deniable, because it's hard to prove where the compromised data originated.
Of course, I'm not claiming PRC is a friend of the world. And I agree with your last point, however I don't think it's feasible to self-host Kimi-3 sized inference.
Self-hosted local models can't become viable soon enough... Currently they require hundreds of thousands of dollars if not millions in capital. That needs to change!
I know it was 3 days ago, but I just got an additional data point.
In the Amazon app, the same I normally use, on my normal account, I used Switch Accounts option, and proceeded to create a separate, additional Amazon account.
I entered a different, new email address and my real name.
Amazon happily sent me a verification email, I entered the code. I was then prompted to enter a phone number, I did so (it's a number I never used with Amazon (to my second phone)).
Amazon then requested me to enter the code it sent over on *WhatsApp*.
I tried to take a screenshot but it came out all black.
I don't have WhatsApp account with this number.
There was an option to resend it through a normal text message but first it sent out a code on WhatsApp. That should never be a default.
There's a vulnerability in my bike - when I push my left handlebar hard forward when riding down a road, I can crash into a pillar.
I think a possibility of knowingly pushing the handlebar should be removed from me, just in case. After all I could do it.
And while we're at it I just realised my car has a similar vulnerability, but triggered by a slightly different mechanism, but the effect is exactly the same, I can crash into a pillar.
Edit: oops, I just discovered that if I have a banking app installed on my phone, then tap my screen in the specific places, enter several numbers, including the number I receive in text, suddenly I lose all the money.
I mean, you made a good metaphorical case for controlled handlebar slop/headset resistance in bicycles/motorcycles. Which are things that exist to mitigate crashes from oversteering on both of those vehicles!
In the bikes they're mostly aimed at preventing tank slappers/death wobble. I have a dampener on my bike myself, but it still allows me to countersteer as harsh/rapidly as I want, and that means crashing into a railing or a cliff wall if I overshoot.
No technology prevents the crash, they just lower the chance of it happening accidentally (like, say, ABS or DCT). I can remove almost all of the guardrails on my bike choosing more aggressive riding mode.
Countermeasures to the accidentally allowing a malware to "do something" already exist and were described in the original article. The comment I was responding to wants a removal of the whole capability, hence my cases.
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