Is there any truth to the Chinese models having built in f’ery? Like phoning home or inserting backdoors. Or is that just everyone blanketing “China bad”?

Also what local models are people running and actually finding useful?

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bee_rider 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The models themselves should not be able to phone home, right? They are just piles of weights that generate text (and associated metadata), they don’t have any ability to run code.

They could be trained to generate code that would phone home. But these are just tools, anybody doing the right thing and checking and understanding every line of code that they use an LLM to generate has nothing to worry about.

	▲	allthetime 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Nobody is only generating code. Many are letting agents run commands. Agents routinely write scripts and run tools in the background. Agents who have been told they can only do `cat` and `grep` can sometimes do `cat $EVIL_PAYLOAD \| bash`. It's entirely possible for a model to have malicious commands designed for agents to execute baked in.

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deaux 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

No, there is zero truth in it. It would be trivial to detect phoning home.

On top of that, all claims of this are written on devices built on Chinese hardware. That makes it a joke to worry about hidden backdoors in Chinese models. Completely inane to pretend that Chinese model backdoors (for which there doesn't exist a sliver of evidence) would change anything when near every device in the US contains Chinese-written firmware in some shape or form.

It's All-American FUD.

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witx 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

If you think american models aren't phoning home and don't have backdoor capabillities, you're naive.

With all the sloppers not looking at the code this is bliss for that sort of things

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codemog 2 hours ago | parent [-]

We’ve detected zero cases of any Chinese models doing this. I’m quite tired of the American propaganda. If only Americans understood China really does not care about them outside of wanting to sell them things. They’re too busy building high speed rails, modern cities, and providing healthcare to their citizens. I am ashamed to be an American these days.

	▲	JumpCrisscross 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> tired of the American propaganda Not propaganda. Projected cynicism.
	▲	witx an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Yes yes my code also doesnt have any bugs because all my tests are passing. I'm a cynic, if history has taught me anything is that none of these countries are to be trusted with tools like these.