Can I ask an honest question? Why does that matter in the slightest? LLMs come out with completely incorrect information all the time, and Western LLMs are censored for various topics too.

It's such a weird "Gotcha" that seems to only assume that Chinese LLMs might censor something.

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eunos 22 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

My theory is that because SOTA LLM latency between Chinese and US models isn't that high, like not years give-or-take.

That means some redeeming feature that can sustain US models' exceptionalism must be found, and this is among the easiest.

Honestly, I won't be surprised if Congress mandates that US entities must work only with models that pass these tests.

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

>It's such a weird "Gotcha" that seems to only assume that Chinese LLMs might censor something.

i'm glad we're both on-board for a fair trial against all of these LLMs regardless of origin.

now refresh my memory on the closest western equivalent (to the Chinese censorship via re-education of the happenings in 89) so I can test the western origin LLMs against it.

	▲	cayleyh 31 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		the civil war was only ever and exclusively about states rights

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

I'd love to know of such an example where a U.S. LLM blatantly denies something factual. Maybe I'm living under a rock but I can't think of one

	▲	adrian_b an hour ago \| parent [-]
		On HN almost every day there are complaints from various people about how Claude or even Codex have refused to perform some normal program development tasks, because they believed that their user might attempt to do something illegal. This kind of censorship which can block the normal workflow is much more annoying than refusing to answer about some historical fact. Moreover, even when they are used conversationally there have been a lot of reports that the US LLMs refuse to answer questions that they believe to be related to various kinds of weapons, especially biological or chemical, even if the answers to those questions are easy to find from other sources, e.g. from Wikipedia. Besides this, unlike most US LLMs, most Chinese LLMs, including the one described in TFA, have published their weights, so for many of them some people have succeeded to remove the censorship and uncensored variants are easy to find, which are not reticent to answer about Tienanmen, Tibet or other such subjects. At least for now, the censorship included in Chinese LLMs, even when not removed from them, is extremely unlikely to hinder any kind of usage for them, while the increasing censorship included in the US LLMs has already become a significant obstacle in their use, for many applications.

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0cf8612b2e1e 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Hardly a gotcha. Having the robot refuse or deliberately mislead directly impacts potential utility.

Say, I work for Planned Parenthood and want to use a LLM to help me develop code. Will it refuse to run because there are mentions of abortion? Everyone has a different censorship line, but unfiltered is more generically useful.