I don't think that's what the parent was getting at. The US and China are in an ongoing "cyber war". Both sides of that conflict actively use their computers to send messages/signals to other computers, hoping that the exploits contained in those messages/signals can be used to exfiltrate data from and/or gain control of the computer receiving the message. It would really be weird to flatly discount the possibility that some OpenAI data was leaked, however closely guarded it may be.
I flatly discount the possibility because OpenAI can't produce evidence of a breach. At best, they'd rather hide the truth than admit a compromise. At worst they show incompetence that they couldn't detect such a breach. Not a good look either way.
> It would really be weird to flatly discount the possibility that some OpenAI data was leaked, however closely guarded it may be.
It’s even weirder to raise it as a possibility when there is literally nothing suggesting that was even remotely the case.
So if there is no evidence nor even formal speculation, then the only other reason to suggest this as a possibility would be because of one’s own opinions regarding Chinese companies. Hence my previous comment.
> Because that would be jumping to conclusions based purely on racial prejudices.
Not purely. There may be some prejucide but look at Nortel[1] as a famous example of a situation where technological espionage from Chinese firms wreaked havoc on a company's fortunes and technology.
I too would want to see the evidence and forensics of such a breach to believe this is more than sour grapes from OpenAI.
Nortel survived the fucking great depression. But a bunch of outright fraudulent activity by it's C-Suite to bump stock prices led to them vastly overstating and overplanning and over-committing resources to a market that was much much smaller than they were claiming. Nortel spent billions and billions on completely absurd acquisitions while they were making no money explicitly to boost their stock price.
That was all laid bare when the telecom bust happened. Then the great recession culled some of the dead wood in the economy.
Huawei stealing tech from them did not kill them. This was a company so rotten that the people put in charge right after this huge scandal put the investigative lights on them IMMEDIATELY turned around and pulled another scam! China could have been completely removed from history and Nortel would have died the same. They were killed by the same disease that killed and nearly killed a lot of stuff in 2008, and are still trying to kill us: Line MUST go up.
Nobody is accusing them, just stating it’s a possibility, which would also be true if they were an American or European company. Corporate espionage is just more common in China.
At some point these straw men start to look like ignorance or even reverse racism. As if (presumably non-Han Chinese) Americans are incapable of tolerance.
There are plenty of Han Chinese who are citizens of democratic nations. China is not the only nation with Han Chinese.
America, for instance, has a large number of Asian citizens, including a large number of Han Chinese. The number of white, non-Hispanic Americans is decreasing, while the number of Asian Americans is increasing at a rate 3x the decrease in whites. America is a melting pot and deals with race relations issues far more than ethnically uniform populations. The conversations we have about race are because we're so exposed to it -- so racially and culturally diverse. If anything, we're equipped to have these conversations gracefully because they're a part of our everyday lived experience.
At the end of the day, this is 100% a geopolitical argument. Pulling out the race card any time China is criticized is arguing in bad faith. You don't see the same criticisms lobbied against South Korea, Vietnam, Taiwan, or Singapore precisely because this is a geopolitical issue.
As further evidence you can recall the conversations we had in the 90's when we were afraid Japan would take over. All the newspapers wrote about was "Japan, Japan, Japan" and the American businesses they were buying up and taking over. It was 100% geopolitical fear. You'll note that we no longer fill the zeitgeist with these discussions today save for a recent and rather limited conversation about US Steel. And that was just a whimper.
These conversations about China are going to increase as the US continues to decouple from Chinese trade. It's not racism, it's just competition.
There are users and there are trolls. There is nothing racist in calling a government of a superpower interested and involved in the most revolutionary tech since the Internet.
It used to mean someone who's trying to enrage people by baiting ("trolling"), and now it can also mean someone arguing in bad faith. And Chinese troll I guess means someone doing this on behalf of the Chinese govt.
Yup we agree then. Claiming an argument to be racist is a bad faith attempt at guilt tripping Americans; a form of FUD and whataboutism. It is not done by normal users, they don’t need it.
Or it can just be a normal user who's wrong this time. He looks like a normal user. In theory it could all be a cover, but that'd be ridiculous effort just for HN boards. Throwing those accusations around will make this place more like Twitter or Reddit.
There’s ordinary xkcd wrong on the internet and there’s repeating foreign nation state propaganda lines. Doing it in good faith does not make it less bad.
Belief that the CCP is behaving poorly isn’t racial prejudice, it’s a factual statement backed by a mountain of evidence across many areas including an ongoing genocide.
Extending that to a new bad behavior we don’t have evidence for is pure speculation, but it need not be based on race.
Yea but I think the OPs point is something along the following lines. Not everything you buy from China, or every person you interact with from China is part of a clandestine CCP operation. People buy stuff everyday from Alibaba and its not a CCP scheme to sell portable fans, or phone chargers. A big chunk of the factories over there are US funded after all... Just like how it's not a CCP scheme to write a scientific paper, or create a ML model.
Similarly, I see no evidence (yet) that DeepSeek is a CCP operated company anymore than saying any given AI start up in the US is a three letter agencies direct handiwork or a US political party directive. The US has also supported genocides and a bunch of crazy stuff, but that doesn't mean any company in YC is part of a US government plot.
I know of people who immigrated to China, I know people who immigrated from China, I went to school with people who were on visas from China. Maybe some of them were CCP assets or something, but mostly they appeared to me to be people who were doing what they wanted for themselves.
If you believe both sides are up to no-goodery thats in the face of the OPs statement. If you think it's just one, and the enemy is in complete control of all of its people doing all of their commerce then I think the OP may have a point.
Absolutism (“Every person”, “CCP operated”, etc) isn’t a useful methodology to analyze anything.
Implying that because something isn’t clandestine it can’t be part of a scheme ignores open manipulation which is often economy wide. Playing with exchange rates or electricity subsidies can turn every bit of international trade into part of a scheme.
In the other direction some economic activity is meaningfully different. The billions in LLM R&D is a very tempting target for clandestine activities in a way that a cheap fan design isn’t.
I wouldn’t be surprised if DeepSeak’s results where independent and the CCP was doing clandestine activities to get data from OpenAI. Reality does need to conform to narrative conventions, it can be really odd.
I completely agree with you and apologize for cheapening both the nuance and complexity where I did.
My personal take is this. What deepseek is offering is table scraps for the CCP's actual ambitions with what we call AI. China's economy is huge on industrial automation, and they care a lot about raw materials and manufacturing efficiently than say the US's interests.
