[HN Gopher] PRC elites voice AI-skepticism
___________________________________________________________________
PRC elites voice AI-skepticism
Author : JumpCrisscross
Score : 173 points
Date : 2025-11-24 19:50 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (jamestown.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (jamestown.org)
| Isamu wrote:
| 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?"
| fragmede wrote:
| > 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?
| xbmcuser wrote:
| 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.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| You got the order mixed up here btw, socialism is the
| precursor to communism, not the other way around!
| leosanchez wrote:
| Is it even semi-communism though? IIRC you can't even have an
| independent union in China
| cootsnuck wrote:
| It's State Capitalism.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_capitalism
| twoWhlsGud wrote:
| 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...
| kulahan wrote:
| 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.
| leosanchez wrote:
| I would assume a communist state atleast has independent
| unions. It looks more like state controls means of
| production rather than people.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| > 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?
| some_random wrote:
| 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?
| kennyloginz wrote:
| From the article, Xi looks down on western "Welfarism", he
| believes it makes the population lazy.
| tmp10423288442 wrote:
| 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".
| graemep wrote:
| 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."
| tmp10423288442 wrote:
| 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.
| graemep wrote:
| 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.
| petre wrote:
| > not doing their own work but meddling in the work of
| others
|
| Sounds like Stalin, Putin and others like them.
| impossiblefork wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway31131 wrote:
| I think that's what everybody wants. The problem is the
| statement 'to each according to his contribution' is
| subjective. Weighing "contribution" in a way everyone
| agrees on just hasn't materialized. It's probably going
| to get harder too as technology improves and changes more
| and more rapidly.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| An unemployed populace is prone to revolution.
| graemep wrote:
| 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.
| GoatInGrey wrote:
| 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.
| kelipso wrote:
| > a "people's democratic dictatorship" that is "led by
| the working class"
|
| ... You never heard of the dictatorship of the
| proletariat?
| janalsncm wrote:
| 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.
| beefnugs wrote:
| 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?
| heinternets wrote:
| Apart from the obvious, China seems to be making incredibly
| reasonable decisions lately. Especially compared to the current
| superpower.
| phs318u wrote:
| 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.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| 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.
| janalsncm wrote:
| 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.
| refurb wrote:
| 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.
| dontlaugh wrote:
| Sounds to me like you're describing effective but imperfect
| policy on the part of the PRC. That seems pretty good to me.
| countWSS wrote:
| Thats fairly tame and balanced compared to Western skeptics who
| outright dismiss it as slop/stochastic parrots with zero useful
| use-cases.
| YesBox wrote:
| 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."
| YesBox wrote:
| After some searching, something similar happened at Anthropic
| [1]
|
| [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpqeng9d20go
| lawlessone wrote:
| He is probably referring to that exact thing.
|
| Anthropic does a lot of these contrived "studies" though that
| seem to be marketing AI capabilities.
| fragmede wrote:
| 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.
| lawlessone wrote:
| >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.
| taberiand wrote:
| 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.
| paxys wrote:
| 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!!
| close04 wrote:
| 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".
| andy_xor_andrew wrote:
| > 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" (Shu Ju Tou Du )
| could "mislead public opinion" (Wu Dao She Hui Yu Lun ) (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.
| XenophileJKO wrote:
| 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.
| ferguess_k wrote:
| 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.
| boznz wrote:
| 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.
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| "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.
| cheesecompiler wrote:
| You say it like western nations don't operate on double-
| think, delusions of meritocracy, or power disproportionately
| concentrating in monopolies.
| esafak wrote:
| 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?
| intalentive wrote:
| >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.
| pfannkuchen wrote:
| 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.
| hyghjiyhu wrote:
| It doesn't really matter what you can trick it into
| saying. As long as it promotes the right ideology most of
| the time it's good enough.
| A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote:
| 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.
| XenophileJKO wrote:
| 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.
| energy123 wrote:
| Because compression is one of the outcomes of the
| optimization, it pays to have a single gate/circuit that
| distinguishes good versus bad, rather than duplicating
| that abstraction with redundant variants that are almost
| the same. This is the fundamental reason why that
| happens. I feel that this has negative implications for
| AI alignment. It is not robust to defend against a single
| bit flip. Feels more robust to have a vast heterogeneity
| of tension that generates the alignment, where
| misalignment is a matter of degree rather than polar
| extremes.
| energy123 wrote:
| Aligning subjective values (which sit off the false vs
| truth spectrum) is quite different to aligning it towards
| incorrect facts.
| cassianoleal wrote:
| How can a model judge what's correct vs. incorrect? Or do
| you just mean the narratives that are more common in the
| data set?
| narrator wrote:
| 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."
| saubeidl wrote:
| That is assuming the capitalist narrative preferred by US
| leadership is non-ideological.
|
| I suspect both are bias factors.
| vkou wrote:
| > 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.)
| A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote:
| 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.
| XenophileJKO wrote:
| 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.
| skissane wrote:
| > 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?")
| kace91 wrote:
| 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).
| XenophileJKO wrote:
| 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.
| skissane wrote:
| 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.
| kace91 wrote:
| 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.
| immibis wrote:
| "Reality has a liberal bias" referred to "liberal" as the
| opposite of "conservative" which is identical to "right
| wing" - reality has an anti-right-wing bias.
|
| Actual political factions are more nuanced than that, but
| you have to dumb it down for a wide audience.
| StopDisinfo910 wrote:
| 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.
| faxmeyourcode wrote:
| 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.
| christina97 wrote:
| The ministry of state security is not issuing warnings due to
| an arXiv paper... it's a different type of "poison".
| cma wrote:
| > 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.
| ksynwa wrote:
| 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.
| lenkite wrote:
| PRC just needs to sponsor a "Voice of China" and pay
| Y=Y=Y=/$$$/EUREUREUR/[?][?][?] to "journalists" and seed the
| web with millions of "China is Great" articles. Make sure to
| have 10k "contributors" on Wikipedia too. (I think they already
| do this).
|
| Also use the NPM registry - put CCP slogans in the terminal!
| They will come in billions of ingestible build logs.
|
| Problem will be easily solved.
| JohnKemeny wrote:
| 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_.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| People's Republic of China. As distinguished from ROC (Republic
| of China), known to much of the ROW (Rest of the World) as
| Taiwan.
| i_am_proteus wrote:
| 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
| paxys wrote:
| Yes it is common. It is normally used when talking specifically
| about politics and the ruling party rather than the region or
| its people.
| Terr_ wrote:
| 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."
| bloppe wrote:
| Which republic lol we're on #5
| Terr_ wrote:
| 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
| MengerSponge wrote:
| The French Republic has always existed in the nuclear age?
|
| The French Republic has always been founded by De Gaulle?
| StopDisinfo910 wrote:
| > 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 Debre was the head of the government
| supervising the constitutional assembly which drafted the
| constitution of the 5th French Republic.
| GabrielTFS wrote:
| Very minor nitpick but I'd have said France went through
| four different monarchic systems in that time frame
| (1776-1790 Ancient Regime, 1791-1792 Constitutional
| monarchy, 1814-1830 Bourbon Restoration and 1830-1848
| July Monarchy)
| StopDisinfo910 wrote:
| I was lumping the brief period of constitutional monarchy
| with the convention in one of the exceptional rules, the
| other being another lumping of Vichy and everything that
| followed until the fourth while I folded the Consulate
| into the first empire but yes, you are entirely right,
| I'm oversimplifying.
| tiahura wrote:
| 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.
| tensor wrote:
| 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.
| zrn900 wrote:
| 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.
| zonghao wrote:
| This may already be a bubble in social or financial terms, but
| at least for me personally, my capabilities have been greatly
| expanded (especially when it comes to coding and accessing
| information).
| aiiizzz wrote:
| > Reflecting these concerns, the Ministry of State Security (MSS)
| has issued a stark warning that "poisoned data" (Shu Ju Tou Du )
| could "mislead public opinion" (Wu Dao She Hui Yu Lun ) (Sina
| Finance, August 5).
|
| Gyahahaha. Another L for isolationism. Love to see it.
| janalsncm wrote:
| 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.
| paxys wrote:
| 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.
| intalentive wrote:
| >Chinese elites have warned of AI-induced labor displacement that
| could exacerbate challenges related to unemployment and
| inequality. Nie Huihua (Nie Hui Hua ), 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.
| vkou wrote:
| 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.
| stickfigure wrote:
| 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.
| 127 wrote:
| 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.
| letmevoteplease wrote:
| "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-...
| AndriyKunitsyn wrote:
| "Artificial intelligence" in Chinese is "Ren Gong Zhi Neng ".
|
| "Ren " is "human", "Gong " is "work", so "Ren Gong " becomes
| "man-made". "Zhi " is "wisdom", "Neng " is "able", so "Zhi Neng "
| 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?
| zonghao wrote:
| I think this might be why, during the reasoning process of GPT
| and Gemini, even for purely English prompts the model may
| choose to think in Chinese. That may make it easier for the
| model to express what it means, and thus be more conducive to
| its reasoning. Of course, a better way to reason is to think in
| vector space rather than by producing tokens that humans can
| read.
| intended wrote:
| This caught my eye -
|
| "technological progress does not have a trickle down effect on
| employment" (Ji Zhu Jin Bu Dui Jiu Ye Mei You Juan Liu Xiao Ying
| ) (QQ News, May 16).
|
| > Cai Fang (Cai Fang ), 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" (Ji Zhu Jin Bu Dui Jiu Ye Mei You Juan Liu Xiao Ying
| ) (QQ News, May 16).
|
| Read the source, and its a nuanced economic take.
| StopDisinfo910 wrote:
| 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.
| nephihaha wrote:
| They are still run by Marxists so believe in a very rigid view of
| the world which they can't think outside of. Some of them only go
| along with Marxism for the sake of their careers but it is a very
| pervasive way of thinking.
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