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Is "taboo" the right word? "taboo" = "banned on grounds of morality or taste". Not sending data to known IP thieves, state actors, and competitors in China (or Russia or Israel) seems very rational.

You have the models available on Bedrock. What is the problem? It stays within your AWS account.

Why not Chinese models hosted on American hardware?

And the reasons are same. Chinese cars can't be sold in US (EU is planning a similar law to ban Chinese goods).

I think unless one is operating in a highly regulated industry, wanting to avoid "sending data to China" is a bit paranoid. For code specifically, most of it is not interesting anyways.

>Most American companies (regulated ones, definitely) can't dare to touch any Chinese models, though they knew that it makes perfect economic sense.

Weird, considering they had no issues shipping manufacturing and supply chains to China when that made economic sense.

Am I missing out? I feel like I can definitely tell the difference in quality between Claude Opus and other smaller models. The smaller models are much more likely to make mistakes or to get stuck on random stuff

Maybe I just haven't been trying the right models?

I think the situation is even more severely ridiculous than that. Google is still good enough just like it was well over a decade ago.

Most people don't have workloads that demand agentic workflows to begin with, and if their employer is pushing for that it's probably a startup that underpays or a coding sweatshop full of nepotism that fires fast.

I'll root for DeepSeek v4 Flash as well. It surprised me just how "good enough" it is for most of my needs, and also dirt cheap. Everyone should try it at least once.

It's a ludicrous amount of words to say "I use the cheap models and that makes me very smart."

> It's quite strange that it's very easy to detect AI in writing.

Or you detect only the easy to detect AI writing?

How many words before you realized it was a piece of shit though? For me it was "Because I am a Sci-Fi nerd." Yet I kept reading, because I am a fucking fool, and now I'm pissed that I spent time on it.

Something something entropy

If I ask three models to write an intro to the cold war, they'll all try to pick words that sound like they should be related-ish. I'm not saying that's how they work at all, but the output is indistinguishable from just grabbing some words in the wikipedia page.

Humans make mistakes. They'll use words they recently learned. They'll use words that sound good. Entropy still applies, but these outliers are what keeps us from a synthetic piece of writing

"I am also an engineer, which means I have a healthy respect for the practical. All this made me a fine skeptic ..." is what did it for me.

For me it’s easily the — character. Like no human would use that since it’s not in any standard keyboard

The models themselves should not be able to phone home, right? They are just piles of weights that generate text (and associated metadata), they don’t have any ability to run code.

They could be trained to generate code that would phone home. But these are just tools, anybody doing the right thing and checking and understanding every line of code that they use an LLM to generate has nothing to worry about.

No, there is zero truth in it. It would be trivial to detect phoning home.

On top of that, all claims of this are written on devices built on Chinese hardware. That makes it a joke to worry about hidden backdoors in Chinese models. Completely inane to pretend that Chinese model backdoors (for which there doesn't exist a sliver of evidence) would change anything when near every device in the US contains Chinese-written firmware in some shape or form.

It's All-American FUD.

If you think american models aren't phoning home and don't have backdoor capabillities, you're naive.

With all the sloppers not looking at the code this is bliss for that sort of things

I don't think they do at the moment, but they could be trained subtly add backdoors to code or make "phone home" api calls during dev time, triggering on certain conditions ("is user employee of xyz")

I think the fear is that it might insert some "phone home" routine into the source code that it generates.

Nvidia has to balance relations with their biggest customers. So that’s a careful decision to be made by them.

The sycophants are plied with insider / early access, with the tacit threat that such access would be revoked if they're critical of the provider.

you dont like simonw's articles?

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his blog depends upon his not understanding it."

>> In 3-5 years the NVidia hardware you buy will be several times cheaper and faster than what we have now. That will massively depreciate existing investments because it will ultimately come down to performance-per-Watt but if a theoretical G100 can do 3-4x of the inference of an H100 for the same power, the older hardware just won't be able to compete.

And this is the core of why this will all end in tears. You have race conditions and thread inversion issues, between four threads in the virtual cpu of this bubble. And you are going to experience some nasty deadlocks.

T1 is -> Depreciation and amortization

T2 is -> NVDA, AMD and others booking revenues at the time they do

T3 is -> Constraint theory at it applies to time until physical deployment and data centers energy constraints

T4 is -> US Treasury bonds rates and cost of credit

I don't think the writing style has anything to do with AI, it's just a writer without an editor.

> Is this a critique of the state of AI or Tolkien fanfic?

Por que no los dos? One of the most storied AI researchers is most known for his Harry Potter fanfic, and we all know how much the techbros love naming things after Tolkien...

It is not just you

The last notable event in American history when the meaning of words lost any semblance to reality was just before the Civil War. We are living in a post words world where words have no meaning.

> You should see how much of early print was smut

Hey, don't malign smut. It's the great technological motivator

Early print was not just smut or amateurish. Some of it was highly harmful misinformation: Malleus Maleficarem is an outstanding example that caused an immense amount of harm.

The retirement investor bailout strategy seems to have recently failed with the index fund rejection of SpaceX but therefore Anthropic and OpenAI. They’ll have to keep looking for ways to make others deal with the consequences of their actions.