i wonder what you guys think about the open weight chinese AIs that are directly competing with the big tech AIs, isnt it a good idea to support projects that have open source and open weight only to make them more advanced than the closed ones from greedy billionaires? i say that because the AI bubble is a huge threat for the elites currently, and if we support their competition it might finally pop.
and the outcome will be a decentralized thing rather than they succeeding on replacing jobs and ruining our lives more than they already do. what yall think about this idea? remember that this is an economic war in the end, and the only way to take down the ones we despise is by decentralizing everything they want to centralize.
im asking this because i noticed people here in lemmy.zip are (justifiably) anti-ai… but only begging the govs that are directly lobbied by the elites wont work. we cannot bet on the government to bite the hand that feeds them.
The whole approach the Chinese are taking to AI is entirely different from the way the feudal techlords of the USA are going at it.
The Chinese approach is one of pragmatism: AI projects have stated goals and desired ends. They do actual engineering, chief among of which’s approach is testing. If the AI project shows measurable (important word there!) progress toward the stated goal, it is permitted to continue. If it doesn’t, it is killed rather brutally. And it’s not (necessarily) the state that does the decision-making, though it often is.
For a solid example, my Honor (a one-time brand of Huawei, spun off into its own independent company now) phone has a baked-in translator that I’d become quite reliant upon for the more difficult aspects of some of my applications. Then, one update, it was replaced with an LLMbecile chatbot that was an utter fucking nightmare. The old system was “select text, copy it, press the little widget that showed up at the end of my screen” and I’d get a translation, plus some abilities to switch things like source and target language, specific dialects, etc. Then, one day, I pressed the little widget and I got a degenerative AI chatbot. One that was so stupidly configured that it would translate selected Chinese text into Chinese. Never mind that the phone was configured for English. So there was an added step each time: type out “now translate this to English” or some such.
I stopped using the translator after that, and apparently so did a lot of other people because two updates later, the old translator was back. The experiment had been done. The stated goals were not met. The project of using an LLM for the translation engine was abandoned. Compare and contrast to how AI is infiltrating every app made by the American techlord feudalists. AI is injected. People hate it and refuse to use it. The technofeudal assholes double down and force it even harder.
So while the ethical issues of LLMbeciles remain with Chinese AI engines (it’s all based on stolen input), and while the environmental (and fiscal) costs are much lower than equivalently capable western tech—something that may mitigate some people’s concerns—at the very least the Chinese approach to incorporating AI into things is very pragmatic and not jammed down your throat harder if it makes you gag.
I still avoid LLMbeciles, even those made here in China, but I think of the evils of degenerative AI, the Chinese ones are the least evil.
But still evil.
hah thats exacly how i see it. i just want to minimize long term damage as much as possible