I’m very much a luddite when it comes to AI, I’m unequivocally against its usage and development. The social and environmental costs AI incurs and proposes to incur are overwhelming. The celebration of AI with Chinese characteristics is often justified by the idea that AI can be useful, and the reason why it’s OK to be vehemently against it otherwise but support it when it’s being implemented by China is because AI can only be a force for evil within the capitalist framework. I agree with the latter point obviously but find it hard to accept that China driving AI advancement is a good thing for the world.
I don’t want to have a debate about whether China is a revisionist state, but I think we can all agree that China has refused to take the role of the Soviet Union in exporting socialism to the world. What happens when it exports AI to countries world over that very much operate within a capitalist framework while China does nothing to advance world wide socialism?
environmental costs
China’s models are afaik much less environmentally intensive and cheaper to operate, which means they are actually undermining the capitalist models and providing an alternative for users which is much less destructive. Unfortunately people are going to use it whether we like it or not, so having a Chinese alternative which isn’t destroying the planet nearly as much is the only alternative to the maximally destructive alternatives.
Related to that, China’s models getting better quicker could help to burst the AI bubble sooner which would be the best thing to happen to slow the capitalist march towards destruction. The people running the capitalist models are openly evil freaks and the only way to stop them aside from a revolution is for Chinese models to outperform the capitalist models, take market share from them, and show that the capitalist models are just worse in every way.
China is also regulating AI on the social side in a very progressive and pro social way, so they are also building a legislative and social framework of how to ensure AI is not having such negative social impacts.
It feels similar to nuclear deterrence. I’d rather no one has nukes, but the worst scenario is the US being the only one to have it
China is also regulating AI on the social side in a very progressive and pro social way
How so? And this leads to my point. We can agree that there are negative social impacts, we can agree that China is mitigating them, but what of the workers of the rest of the world?
On July 15, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), China’s top internet regulator, brought its Interim Measures for the Administration of Anthropomorphic AI Interaction Services into effect. This law specifically regulates AI systems that simulate human personality traits, with the CAC introducing prohibited content, rules for minors, and highlighting necessary safety assessments for compliance, among others.
Additionally, on May 8, the CAC, the National Development and Reform Commission, and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology jointly released the Implementation Opinions on the Standardized Application and Innovative Development of Intelligent Agents. This marked China’s first comprehensive national policy framework specific to agentic AI, introducing tiered risk governance, priority scenarios, and “off-switches” for exigent circumstances.
These are a couple quick examples I pulled up from Google but I saw another recently about AI generated slop content being regulated recently as well.
but what of the workers of the rest of the world?
I agree that all this is a huge problem and I am pretty anti AI outside of contexts that scientists and researchers are using it. Unfortunately the capitalist models are not going to stop so a Chinese counter is truly the only mitigation
take market share from them
it won’t take one leech in the president’s ear to ban western markets from using them. it also not being 2007 when the internet was a much less surveilled place makes smuggling chinese models in spite of those laws something that’s only going to get worse
Even if they ban in US, the global market will be dominated by Chinese models
no, the west. it only takes the us president to ban it in the west
Sure…but you were responded to me talking about global market share. Banning it in the west is pretty small population of people compared to the rest of the world
listen i’m not trying to talk down to you but i was intentionally specific the first time in saying the west (or global north) would outlaw for the sake of “data shmecuridy” or whatever after americans do and i did that because i believe it’s relevant to you saying a competitive global market would bankrupt western ai. the west holds most of the global market’s capital. a monopoly there, no matter how unsustainable or overpriced, will be relatively insulated. in spite of the fraction of mankind represented in the west, tangible factories is what it lacks not financial capital which isn’t held by the majority of the population anyway so that’s not a factor either. to be a decisive blow to openai et al there must be an open source boom in america itself that stays legal long enough to attract enterprise and possibly even military contracts since that’s the custom they depend on for influence (regardless of profitability)
I don’t really see the relevance, we are talking about software which can be used on the Internet from anywhere, can be installed locally anywhere. The west cutting themselves out from access to Chinese models doesn’t prevent anyone else in the world from using them, and since they are much more affordable to use than capitalist models, most people of the world will default to Chinese models automatically. Western companies are already adding Chinese models to their offerings because they are much cheaper and their own customers don’t want to pay extra for the domestic models when a cheaper alternative is right there. The US banned Chinese EVs yet the rest of the world is driving them. They banned Chinese telecoms but the rest of the world communicates with them. They banned Chinese access to lithography and now China is advancing the industry beyond what it was previously capable of. They can ban Chinese models but it won’t stop them from taking the global market share
can be used on the Internet from anywhere, can be installed locally anywhere
that won’t last, it isn’t 2007 any more
They can ban Chinese models but it won’t stop them from taking the global market share
well let’s hope that gives the global south a tangible advantage, because i maintain that western tech bros will still be hard at parasitism by the time it does. how that will “stop them” i couldn’t guess
I think the major material point missing from this analysis is that every major model from China is “open-weight”. This means that in principle you could run these models on your own hardware or the hardware of a third party.
Even though most people still use these models hosted by the provider anyways, the threat of high quality open-weight models has been a persistent drag on the valuations, prestige and revenue of the US tech/AI firms. In fact, they started a massive price war in token pricing that has reached all the way to the top of the market
Chinese firms are also a pressure relief valve for monopoly pricing in high bandwidth memory and soon even advanced chips.
I therefore argue that even without “exporting revolution”, in practice Chinese industrial policy is hazardous to imperial tech conglomerates on both sides of the Pacific, and I couldn’t be happier about it
China hasn’t just refused to take the role of exporting socialism, that phrasing is actually from long-running explicit policy of the CPC and its leadership. It is an intentional strategy for their own nation-building project, though one should just focus on the material history.
As for LLMs, it’s just another industry among many. What is uniquely harmful today is the intense tech-finance gambling on it, the so-called “hyperscalers”, which just means huge amounts of resource use using finance capital to make bets on having monopolies on it later. Lose billions, trillions for 5 years and then ramp up prices when CEOs consider you “essential”, or so goes the gambit. This is incredibly wasteful and most of it has no legitimate use case.
Chinese industry is being more coordinated and is far less impacted by finance capital and monopoly seeking. Both exist, including the latter, but the party is much more involved and can make corrections. In combination with their academic institutions, Chinese models tend to focus on attenuating the excesses of the “hyperscalers” by focusing on models that can be trained with lower power requirements and releasing open weights so they can be used widely on consumer grade hardware. The latter is fundamentally in opposition to monopolization at the point of consumption, though training is not and won’t be without a distributed open computing approach. And while there is still a lot of pointless or obscene use of LLMs, they tend to be used in a way that is more pragmatic.
The situation is basically the same as for every industry in China. Its purpose is to grow productive forces in a way deemed strategic, a balancing act that requires constantly weighing different forces. They decided that sitting out LLMs was less strategic than using them and growing domestic expertise, but in their own strategic direction. This means the warts will also be there and a new round of contradictions. Actual bad things will happen, like wasting resources on a data center. But this also already happens in their general strategy of building productive forces and being enmeshed in export markets. They build most of the pointless consumer products you can think of because it builds their productive forces, keeps exports up, centralizes production so they are “too big to fail” geopolitically. And those productive forces have a domestic boon. Being the best die mold production center on the planet means they can produce almost anything at scale in almost any material. As a result, something like new batches of trains come together at a speed and scale that’s mind-blowing. It can be built out to support the people, to support solar energy, to electrify, and so on. The boons of industrial capital with their worst excesses significantly diminished.
This is all true with their LLMs as well. Not a pure good, but a much better method and one chosen strategically to position themselves against the imperialists.
I think we can all agree that China has refused to take the role of the Soviet Union
I believe China sees 2 storms coming and has chosen to bunker down and shelter it. I believe China has done the math and seen that nothing more they could do today would make anything better long term if they don’t survive the storms. Once the US empire has fallen and Climate Change has been provably survived, all bets are off.
So China sees no option but to bunker down and participate in AI to keep up with the capitalist rat race. oK. Let’s assume China’s vision for AI implementation within their borders is completely congruent with the socialist framework. What of the rest world and why should I not be against it?
Once the US empire has fallen and Climate Change has been provably survived, all bets are off.
That sounds like a lot of handwaiving
I think a lot of discourse on here is missing just how powerful these LLMs are today and what impacts are coming. It’s easy to make fun of one of these at a time, but that’s not how they are going to be used in business. We’re going to hit a point where commercially available clusters of agents can work as a team, with some agents writing code, others testing it, writing documents, handling user requests automatically, etc. Yes, one agent can Vibe Code some slop app that is useless, buy 20 of these things working together?!?
IT is cooked. I see departments of 20+ people across sales, marketing, development, etc. Being pared down to maybe 4-5 “AI coordinators” that babysit a bunch of always-working agents to keep them on task. So much that is computerized is vulnerable to this kind of disruption. And under capitalism it makes sense because why spend $100k/month on staff when you can get the same work out of 50k worth of tokens and a skeleton crew? AI doesn’t take time off, doesn’t get sick, and never refuses orders.
I hope China wins this and I hope Hexbear takes this threat more seriously.
my comment was not about AI specifically, but in regards to AI specifically, what the US is doing in terms of AI seems like paperclip maximalist clown show, while what the China is doing seems like a practical steeleman of what next generation automation could be. The US is ahead on some technical merits, but it’s clear to me that China is winning on practical applications, efficiency, aspects related to manufacturing, and most importantly, the not-shitting-all-over-your-citizens aspect of it.
aspects related to manufacturing,
Has this improved manufacturing productivity been evidenced by any metric? We all love the concept of FALGSC being implemented and that’s the underlying premise for the wonder of it being built in China but I’m still extremely skeptical of its benefits even in China.
I’m less critical of Chinese AI because it exposes the full ass+hair of western AI companies. Their valuation is tied to making frontier models. The US economy is super concentrated around overproducing in the hopes that US frontier models will become the global standard. If Chinese companies can make a better model more efficiently, it undermines the whole business model of OpenAI and Anthropic. If those models are open source or run locally, it throws a wrench in American companies’ attempts to price gouge customers locked into their ecosystems.
In the long-term I want AI as a marketing term to be as stupid as NFT, with iterative improvements to machine learning like we had for 20 years prior to it. In the short-term I want the US companies to implode because it will destroy the national economy and severely weaken the empire.
Similarly I don’t think society should be car-centric but as long as it is I want those cars to be Chinese EVs because American automakers are the ones enforcing car dependency. BYD doesn’t concentrate capital in the hands of people who can directly impact my life. It reduces the potential scale of American manufacturing to workshops making ebikes and velomobiles.
There’s a utility to cars that makes the comparison flawed. There is no value to AI as I far as I can tell, or at least no major advancement or positive use case that has been evident in my life time. Maybe I’m just ignorant but what has AI contributed to humanity in the past 5 years? Its benefits are all theoretical at this point, even in China’s alleged efficiency in its operation. It could improve crop yields, automate beaureacracy, improve education…but it hasn’t. Not even in China. Cars had immediate social and economic utility upon their inception. Yes, it propagated a fossil fuel driven world and in the case of the US, suburban brain rot. But all I’ve seen from AI so far is disproportionate resource extraction for the culling of workers, with zero benefit to anyone besides capitalists.
It’s important to separate the marketing term from the underlying collection of machine learning technologies. In 2003 I was having chatbot experiences that felt identical to modern ones. In the 2010s I was spending hours trying to train speech-to-text algorithms for medical notation. Computer vision started maturing in the 1990s. Most of what we consider AI today is just a lipstick pig made out of things that weren’t sexy a decade before that became an economic sector. The things the AI industry brought on top of that will go away while those 2000s technologies still get refined.
I don’t think the Chinese AI industry is better for them. I just think it’s worse for the US because it has run out of tech bubble ideas and that’s the only thing that has kept it alive since the 1990s. There’s nothing to carry the US economy after AI beyond healthcare and tourism that nobody can afford. Deepseek is just as useless to a Chinese guy as it is to me, but it does ChatGPT better than ChatGPT no matter how much the US autocannibalises to fund OpenAI. That just adds extra layers to my criticism which is as a neo-Luddite. It kills the thing I hate faster by making it more visibly useless.
https://english.www.gov.cn/news/202503/23/content_WS67dfd013c6d0868f4e8f1146.html
These are the kinds of use cases that China is pursuing for ML/AI outside of the AI hype bubble of frontier models.
They are also doing the frontier models without hype scale waste that is emblematic of the western competition. My understanding of this is to prevent any chance of western AI dominance (quite unlikely honestly), but also to undermine the financial hype bubble as a side bonus.
China has a massive advantage in the numbers of highly educated researchers that can use these tools in materially beneficial ways, and they are openly assisting with development of these tools for BRICS partners in their own contextual uses.
The marxist perspective is highly imbued in the Chinese approach to the development of technology in general, and while they are not directly exporting marxism, they do create material conditions that act as fertile medium for its growth internationally. Making solar, batteries, AI models, chips, etc affordable to the global south has provided a path out of hegemonic dominance that was not available otherwise, and this process continues.
The western conception of AI is really just a false understanding of the technology, and in certain aspects China’s pragmatic approach to developing the actual underlying tech without these hype goggles is quite beneficial to its use in liberatory contexts.
There is no value to AI as I far as I can tell,
This is such nonsense, it basically slaughtered the whole data entry industry which was a giant bottleneck to many projects. It speeds up programming workloads to an extreme degree. You can keep saying its useless but it simply isn’t true, it is useful and that is why so many countries, including communist China, are adopting it. You are basically saying that applied statistics has no value. What?!
I agree with Torvalds and this article is rubbish. The man is frequently reactionary but it’s besides the point. Also, the author states that AI groups will stop releasing open weights models any day now when China is the purveyor of the best ones and the llms have state backing and therefore have motives besides profit. There is no material analysis in any of that screed, they’re just whinging and crying that the world is changing.
that you agree with torvalds is concerning. just that. you share a mindset with a man that is quite obviously another fash parasite on the pile. he wants serious developers which he defines as those with the most llm resources (i mean not developers at all, let alone experienced and talented ones) so aristocracy. what’s marxian about that?
the technology is useful, but that’s not good enough. at least in the west the thing in general is evil, destructive to the working class in so many ways and fascists like linus always seem to defend it with the same sadistic bully babble that you display. what might that mean?
Uh huh, I’m sure he thinks drinking water is great too so we need to stop doing that. But go ahead and completely ignore the rest of what I said, you are a very intellectually rigorous person and not an ogre in a swamp
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AI also has at least one obvious economic utility right now. It significantly improves productivity for software engineers. I’d say that with the latest crop of LLMs you can about double the productive output of an experienced developer without sacrificing quality (and literally 50x it if you only care about features getting delivered).
The questions are:
- Does it cause stupid lay-off games or a productivity boost?
- Does it cause a slide-back to fossil fuels or accelerate renewables?
- Is it used for non-productive brainrot?
You can guess how those three questions are answered by USA and China.
It significantly improves productivity for software engineers.
Not really. It can write code, but writing code is not actually that much of the job (would that it were).
It also allows you to very quickly iterate on rough drafts of ideas for research. Or review your code for bugs/vulnerabilities. It helps you remember a specific term from a distant corner of computer science you’ve forgotten. I’d say it absolutely does cut a significant percentage of your work time (approaching 50% nowadays), and it can pretend to replace you for 95% of your job if you don’t care about the quality of code or architecture or maintainability.
I very skeptical that any productive gains were had. There’s massive amounts of cherry picking of data, marketing campaigns, misleading metrics, complete disregard for technical debt, and groupthink mania that suppresses critical voices.
I’m inclined to believe LLMs suck for any and all coding and you’d be better off without them, especially due to them being inherently unreliable, but even if they were marginally useful in specific situations, the overall negative effect in trying to leverage the chatbots for all the things are going to be disastrous and ruin many a codebase. It’s completely up in the air if any organization will be able to use a coding chatbot responsibly only in situations where it has utility (if it has any) without suffering the negative effects of using it when not called for. Even if someone figures out the perfect use cases without falling into the trap of overusing it, it might still not make economic sense to actually use it due to the cost.
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I’m slapping LLM devices out of the hands of Chinese people in China.
I think we can all agree that China has refused to take the role of the Soviet Union in exporting socialism to the world
I don’t think that’s a given. Exporting socialism is a lost cause when you don’t even have a single nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, or a fleet of strategic airlifting planes. It can only meaningfully happen after the inevitable climactic geopolitical confrontation with the US.
Let’s not forget that China is still contained within the “First Island Chain.”
im going to double post oh my God I hate AI so much. LISTEN. I bet it’s really nice to have certain intellectual tasks offloaded to the dead-eyed thing, but no dude. The marginally less destructive, subjectively better origin doesn’t make this technology safe.
there are real dangers in letting the US govt have this tech because it will gleefully rot brains to control people and enact their so-called perfect panopticon
but that doesn’t mean that by changing the social and intellectual role of this technology, it becomes more acceptable. The problem with the technology doesnt change just because we can envision a more ethical owner and distributor of said.
I dint think any AI slop is good
the technology as a consumer product is poison. It does not care if it is rotting the brain of a citizen of your nation or another. it does not care.
They’re both selling a solvent based paint
the chinese solvents are notably less dangerous to the environment, but it still gets you wicked sick nasty high, like tripping balls
but it’s still paint. You’re still huffing paint fumes, you, yourself; emotionally, can allow yourself to enjoy your huffed paint, if you want, as more ethically sourced?
BUT YOU are STILL HUFFING PAINT
I essentially fully agree with you, here. To be honest I’ll forgive China for AI same way I’ll overlook some real concerns about their censorship - I understand they have a need to be on top of it to avoid being totally screwed over by other countries. It’s a bit of a necessary evil.
I still hate AI in its entirety, I’ve been to China since the proliferation of AI, and I don’t think AI is doing them any favours either. At least from my limited experience using native services, I found slop and AI chatbots inserted into every last app and website as much as in the west.
Honestly, my stance is it is ok if it is open source.
On some podcast or whatever someone said the west was using ai to cheat on school assigments, china to improve crop yields
I like seeing the US tech giants disgraced but the Chinese AI still has most of the same harms.
Why should one be completely against AI?
Would it not be good to socialists have AI as a tool? The issue is capitalism being inefficient due to it focusing on profit too much, right?
