Update: DeepSeek confirmed working w PLA to avoid export controls.
https://x.com/andrewcurran_/status/1937141798893457470
[deleted-by-moderator]
Karma: −16
Pretty sure the double −17 downvotes for trying to hold him accountable (to the question of whether or not he has updated) is proof of my original conjecture that this community has problems with epistemic humility.
Rationality is about logic, not tone or hurt feelings.
I thought the point of rationality was not to let our human emotions get in the way of truth.
I guess “racing” is bearing a lot of weight in your description.
Because (in part due to American worries about existential AI from folks on this message board), by some measures China is already “winning” the race.
So no it doesn’t have to be a dramatic centralized investment. There is a race, ongoing, and due to their commitment to open source, they may be winning.
again, it’s like our obsession with semantics are blinding us from the truth. Whether or not China has a massive centralized strategy, they have obviously caught up.
Whether or not you admit the behavior to your definition of “race” they have caught up.
Which would make me think you and Gwen would update, from prior views that there weren’t able to catch up (bc there was no evidence they were actively “racing”).
https://x.com/natfriedman/status/1928092126614597686
It’s a very simple question and speaks to the heart of the post, which he decided to comment on.
@Connor Leahy have you updated or not?
Saying you don’t like my tone is an ad hominem. It’s not rational.
@garrison ping
ok cool, so no update!
Ladies and gentlemen, I rest my case!
FYI this was used yesterday, in this post.
maybe we can ask @gwern.
Gwern, at what point would you say you were ‘wrong’ and how would that make you ‘update’?
what line would you agree on today @garrison ? At what point would you actually ‘update’?
So far, am seeing a lot of people contesting the ‘object’ and not a lot of people updating. Which is kinda my point. Concordance with the group consensus seems to have become a higher priority than rationalism on this forum.
Does your lack of reply mean you haven’t updated at all @Connor Leahy ?
Again, the question isn’t even who was right about what, it was 1) are people on this website capable of updating, and b) are the other people on this website capable of holding each other accountable to rationalist principles.
So far, not seeing a lot of evidence of either, but by all means, happy to be proven wrong!
There are many math and coding benchmarks where models from DeepSeek, Ali baba and tencent are now leading, and definitely leading what was SOTA a year ago. If you don’t want to take my word for it I can dig them up.
The fact that their models are on par with openAI and anthropic but it’s open source.
There are people from the safety community arguing for jail for folks who download open source models.
You can’t have it both ways. Either open source is risky and an acceleration and should be limited/punished, or there is no acceptable change to timelines from open source AI and hence it doesn’t need to be regulated.
Does that make sense?
ok so what criteria would you use to suggest that your statements/gwern’s statements were falisified?
What line can we agree on today, while it feels uncertainty, so that later we’re not still fighting over terminology and more working off the same ground truth?
Sorry for my tone. Yours reads as very defensive.
So you admit you were wrong?
How have you updated your views on China or what we should do as a result?
Do you disagree that entities in China are now pushing the state of the art in an open source way?
If you disagree, then sure, you don’t have to update. But I’d argue you aren’t paying attention.
If you agree, then how did you update?
If your point is that using ‘use vs them’ framing makes thing worse, that may or may not be correct, but from the perspective of existential risk the object level determination re China is irrelevant, vs what “they” represent. A repeated game where defection by anyone one of N players leads to ruin (from the doomer perspective) and where folks in China just represent one of a very large set.
Does that make sense?
are you saying they accept your frame? because it appears they do not.
exactly
ok I will moderate my tone. I was a competitive debator and irrationality makes me upset. I thought this was a safe space for high standards wrt logic, but I can modulate. Thank you for the feebback.
There is a narrow point—people were wrong about this narrow prediction—“the ccp is scared of AI”
The broader point is that I perceive, and could be wrong, there is epistemic rot if a community dedicated to rationalism is incapable of updating. The comments I’ve seen so far are by and large consistent with that intuition. Folks seem defensive, and more concerned about my interest/tone than the thing at hand...a lot of people made decisions based off (in retrospect) bad expectations about the world. Which is fine, it happens all the time. But the thing that matters isn’t the old predictions, it’s identifying them, understand why and where they came from, and then updating.
If we want to talk about the narrow thing of “is China ready to pause AI”,it obviously is not entirely knowable, but the bigger issue is the one I think more important, are we capable of updating, because we need to be able to do that to actually investigate the small thing, going forward.
“Various things”—ugh
ok how about this ONE.
“No...There is no appreciable risk from non-Western countries whatsover” - @Connor Leahy
”Baaaaah… at no point was China appreciably behind in generative AI. Not when ChatGPT was released and not now.
OpenAI prematurely released ChatGPT as a fund raising exercise. Three years and multiple iterations later, it’s still a fundraising exercise.
At the time, Tsinghua’s Wu Dao model was the most sophisticated (most parameters and multimodal well before its time). They just were not interested in releasing an uncommercial version into the market just to fund raise.
Wu Dao’s tech is now spread out in Huawei, Alibaba, DeepSeek, Kimi, Kling etc which are in now way behind US AI offerings… with investment spend a fraction of the US.
This Westoid AI circle jerking is just that. Westoids jerking each other off in one of the few tech fields they’re still competitive in… which is hoovering up resources from everything else.”
https://x.com/doggydog1208/status/1939247596201226601