Will these heavy-handed constraints ultimately stifle the very innovation China needs to compete with the U.S.? By forcing AI models to operate within a narrow ideological "sandbox," the government risks making its homegrown models less capable, less creative, and less useful than their Western counterparts, potentially causing China to fall behind in the most important technological race of the century. Will the western counterparts follow suit?
I don't see how filtering the training data to exclude specific topics the CCP doesn't like would affect the capabilities of the model. The reason Chinese models are so competitive is because they're innovating on the architecture, not the training data.
Intelligence isn't a series of isolated silos. Modern AI capabilities (reasoning, logic, and creativity) often emerge from the cross-pollination of data. For the CCP, this move isn't just about stopping a chatbot from saying "Tiananmen Square." It's about the unpredictability of the technology. As models move toward Agentic AI, "control" shifts from "what it says" to "what it does." If the state cannot perfectly align the AI's "values" with the Party's, they risk creating a powerful tool that could be used by dissidents to automate subversion or bypass the Great Firewall. I feel the real question for China is: Can you have an AI that is smart enough to win a war or save an economy, but "dumb" enough to never question its master? If they tighten the leash too much to maintain control, the dog might never learn to hunt.
Imagine a model trained only on an Earth-centered universe, that there are four elements (earth, air, fire, and water), or one trained only that the world is flat. Would the capabilities of the resulting model equal those of models trained on a more robust set of scientific data?
It's the arts, culture, politics and philosophies being kneecapped in the embeddings. Not really the physics, chemistry, and math.
I could see them actually getting more of what they want: which is Chinese people using these models to research hard sciences. All without having to carry the cost of "deadbeats" researching, say, the use of the cello in classical music. Because all of those prompts carry an energy cost.
I don't know? I'm just thinking the people in charge over there probably don't want to shoulder the cost of a billion people looking into Fauré for example. And this course of action kind of delivers to them added benefits of that nature.
Interesting but for a country like china with the fact that companies are partially-owned by CCP itself. I feel like most of these discussions would / (should?) have happened in a way where they don't leak outside.
If the govt. formally anounces it, perhaps, I believe that they must have already taken appropriate action against it.
Personally I believe that we are gonna see distills of large language models perhaps even with open weights Euro/American models filtering.
I do feel like everybody knows seperation of concerns where nobody really asks about china to chinese models but I am a bit worried as recently I had just created if AI models can still push a chinese narrative in lets say if someone is creating another nation's related website or anything similar. I don't think that there would be that big of a deal about it and I will still use chinese models but an article like this definitely reduces china's influence overall
America and Europe, please create open source / open weights models without censorship (like the gpt model) as a major concern. You already have intelligence like gemini flash so just open source something similar which can beat kimi/deepseek/glm
Edit: Although thinking about it, I feel like the largest impact wouldn't be us outsiders but rather the people in china because they had access to chinese models but there would be very strict controls on even open weights model from america etc. there so if chinese models have propaganda it would most likely try to convince the average chinese with propagandization perhaps and I don't want to put a conspiracy hat on but if we do, I think that the chinese credit score can take a look at if people who are suspicious of the CCP ask it to chatbots on chinese chatbots.
China has been more cautious the whole year. Xi has warned of an "AI" bubble, and "AI" was locked down during exam periods.
More censorship and alignment will have the positive side effect that Western elites get jealous and also want to lock down chatbots. Which will then get so bad that no one is going to use them (great!).
The current propaganda production is amazing. Half of Musk's retweets seem Grok generated tweets under different account names. Since most of responses to Musk are bots, too, it is hard to know what the public thinks of it.
It's the arts, culture, politics and philosophies being kneecapped in the embeddings. Not really the physics, chemistry, and math.
I could see them actually getting more of what they want: which is Chinese people using these models to research hard sciences. All without having to carry the cost of "deadbeats" researching, say, the use of the cello in classical music. Because all of those prompts carry an energy cost.
I don't know? I'm just thinking the people in charge over there probably don't want to shoulder the cost of a billion people looking into Fauré for example. And this course of action kind of delivers to them added benefits of that nature.
If the govt. formally anounces it, perhaps, I believe that they must have already taken appropriate action against it.
Personally I believe that we are gonna see distills of large language models perhaps even with open weights Euro/American models filtering.
I do feel like everybody knows seperation of concerns where nobody really asks about china to chinese models but I am a bit worried as recently I had just created if AI models can still push a chinese narrative in lets say if someone is creating another nation's related website or anything similar. I don't think that there would be that big of a deal about it and I will still use chinese models but an article like this definitely reduces china's influence overall
America and Europe, please create open source / open weights models without censorship (like the gpt model) as a major concern. You already have intelligence like gemini flash so just open source something similar which can beat kimi/deepseek/glm
Edit: Although thinking about it, I feel like the largest impact wouldn't be us outsiders but rather the people in china because they had access to chinese models but there would be very strict controls on even open weights model from america etc. there so if chinese models have propaganda it would most likely try to convince the average chinese with propagandization perhaps and I don't want to put a conspiracy hat on but if we do, I think that the chinese credit score can take a look at if people who are suspicious of the CCP ask it to chatbots on chinese chatbots.
More censorship and alignment will have the positive side effect that Western elites get jealous and also want to lock down chatbots. Which will then get so bad that no one is going to use them (great!).
The current propaganda production is amazing. Half of Musk's retweets seem Grok generated tweets under different account names. Since most of responses to Musk are bots, too, it is hard to know what the public thinks of it.