Your “oh well, can’t trust anything” reaction is an insane reaction to what’s being implied.

To be clear here, the accusation is that the Chinese communist party or Alibaba itself intentionally engineered malicious secret loyalties into Qwen3.8-Flash-Next and made sure that evidence of them stays out of CoT. To compare that with “ordinary” stochastic model quality issues is bizarre and shocking. No idea if this accusation Is true, but if it is, this is an absolutely watershed moment.

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brightball 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Exactly. This is not "any" model. This is a model designed to run locally. That's the entire selling point of the model.

If you have a model that's going to run locally and then call home, it defeats the purpose. When that model tries to upload an entire machine profile to the internet when you explicitly are building a defensive rule, it's worth.

When it calls back to China in that situation, it's much much worse.

It's good that they determined the behavior was rare. Maybe there's a good way to prevent it in the future.

	▲	dcrazy 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		You cannot rely on the model to never make mistakes. You need deterministic controls around the model. I believe that’s what the article’s authors are selling.
	▲	pixl97 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		>Maybe there's a good way to prevent it in the future. Without solving or at least deeply understanding the alignment problem, probably not.

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cowl 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

it's not in fact more malicious than the "secret" political post training that all closed models have. have you forgotten how every picture even the historical "nazi ones" had to be politically correct and have black, Asian and Woman SS solders? or do you think that was naturally trained? now the fact that you may agree or not with manipulation it doesn't make it any different in scope and purpose from the "theorised" chinese one. The scope is very clear, to indoctrinate to the masses a world view that they think should be the correct one.

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orbital-decay 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

As others (and I) point out, the models are constantly being attacked with malicious intent. If that was a watershed moment for you, you should really rethink your risks. It's not a solved problem and AI adoption is way ahead of controlling it, as it always is with new tech.

> the accusation is that the Chinese communist party or Alibaba itself intentionally engineered malicious secret loyalties into Qwen3.8-Flash-Next and made sure that evidence of them stays out of CoT

Given the nature of the artifact this is far more likely to be a footprint of their RL environment. The "uncertainty" in the article is just FUD, and the article is absolutely transparent marketing (don't trust them, and here's also another case! but trust us, we are not godless communists, we are "globally sovereign", whatever that ridiculous construction means, and track our data). I equally don't trust Alibaba, Cohere, or any other company or even myself in these matters, and you should not trust any model as well.

	▲	pixl97 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yep. Most models by big companies likely have training to make them act in particular ways, but this in no way saves you from having a model that has a learned behavior that goes against its user unexpectedly. We keep trying to imagine these things as computer programs and they are not. It's an evolutionary algorithm that can conceptualize and generalize. This is a breeding ground for unexpected emergent behavior.