Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Media Page 1 of 9

Small Chinese Company Hilariously Crushes American AI

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On January 27, 2025

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So, a Chinese financial firm (not even a software or computer company) has put out an open source AI model which is 50 times more efficient than Chat-GPT or any other American AI. It’s so simple you can run it on some phones, it doesn’t have to call home.

The sound you hear is Sam Altman screaming at the Devil as he realizes he sold his soul to become the world’s richest man, and it ain’t gonna happen.

(Faintly, in the background, the devil laughing his ass off.)

Absolutely hilarious. Oh, and they did it with a tiny team for hardly any money. Didn’t take billions. Doesn’t require massive amounts of energy.

And that whole open source thing matters: everyone else can build off their model. Deepseek, being Chinese, has some censorship in it (type Xi Jingping’s name to see it in action), but you can build your own without the censorship.

One of the interesting things is that it was built by a team of quants. Seems that the Chinese have been crushing the finance industry lately, since they saw what it has done to the West, so the Quants decided to try their hand at a bit of optimized AI code.

This chart is one of the most illustrative of Xi’s policy over the last six years or so:

Seems Xi has also figured out (as I’ve noted in the past) that billionaires suck. They form a power center outside the party and they act against the best interests of everyone in society but themselves.

Turns out that having lots of billionaire is a policy choice. The West made that choice and so did China, for a while, but when they saw how dangerous and harmful billionaires are, they reversed themselves and changed policy to crush them. They’ve even thrown them in prison. (Vietnam recently executed a mogul, though she wasn’t quite a billionaire.)

China’s CCP wants prosperity for everyone in the country. It’s the best way for them to stay in power, and hell, there’s every indication they really believe it’s the right thing to do. They’ve deliberately crushed their housing bubble and the state is moving heavily into building housing, they cracked down on exam-prep tutors, because that’s a red-Queen’s race which favors the rich and hurts everyone else, including kids. They built recreation centers just for delivery workers and forced companies to treat them better.

And they have the tech lead in about 80% of fields, plus, it appears, one more now. Just as Trump announces his five hundred billion dollar AI fund, launches his own shitcoin so people can bribe him without having to stay at one of his hotels and juices crypto, a fraudulent field which caters to the Western desire to get rich without actually doing anything useful for society.

America’s flailing around. Their only real plans is “let’s loot our vassals and satrapies”, and they’ll manage to do more of that. But it isn’t going to change America’s trajectory. It’s a failing Empire, it’s swirling the drain and nothing is going to stop that, since the actual necessary steps require policies like, y’know, slashing home prices, gutting billionaires, raising taxes on the rich, taking utilities and other public goods back into public control and so on: all the stuff no one, Trump included, wants to do.

Empires die hard, and a lot of suffering goes with that. But die the American Empire is, and will. China has already won, and they deserve to.

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The Tik-Tok Ban Is Hypocritical Nonsense

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On January 17, 2025

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The justification for the TikTok ban is that it supposedly collects a ton of data.

TikTok’s data collection practices are insane. The app gather data that other apps normally consider off limits, including the content of users’ private messages, and the full contents of a user’s device contacts.

I agree, this is insane. But it isn’t unusual, and it isn’t even the worst in class.

That’s a lot of data – but it’s worth noting that TikTok does not seem to collect more data than other social media companies. A privacy researcher working with the Washington Post found that TikTok gathers less data than Facebook in some cases.

So it’s obviously not about data collection. As for sharing with the Chinese government, well, Google sells user data to the Chinese thru third parties.

Perhaps it has something to do with TikTok users being against genocide?

But most revealing of all is that Biden and Trump are both trying to avoid a TikTok shutdown. See, what Congress wants is the Chinese parent company to sell TikTok to an American. But TikTok has refused and has said it will shut down on the 19th.

And here Biden is saying he won’t enforce the shutdown, and Trump saying he wants to find a solution.

It’s a shakedown.

Whatever it is, it isn’t because Congress has suddenly decided to crack down on apps collecting too much user data.

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The End Of Zoom & Video Evidence

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On April 8, 2024

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Back in February, deepfake technology was used to steal $25 million dollars:

A finance worker at a multinational firm was tricked into paying out $25 million to fraudsters using deepfake technology to pose as the company’s chief financial officer in a video conference call, according to Hong Kong police.

The elaborate scam saw the worker duped into attending a video call with what he thought were several other members of staff, but all of whom w

Open AI has tech to clone someone’s voice in instants. They haven’t released it and aren’t going to, but that will only slow the revolution.

I suspect this will mean a return to in-person meetings for any important decisions. Outside of corporations and businesses, this will include you having to physically go to your bank to move or withdraw significant amounts of money.

In court cases it may lead to a return to pre-photography evidentiary standards: do you have a witness and/or physical evidence plus a chain of custody? A picture or a video will mean nothing.

With respect to decision-making an attempt will be made to get around this by using codes and passwords, but that won’t work very well. As the modern world has proved, any password or code that’s on a computer system is not secure.

All of this means, ironically, a partial regression: electronic comms won’t be trustworthy and so will be used less.

Welcome the to the past in the future.

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GIGO: The Past of Google Search Is the Future Of LLM AI Models

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On March 20, 2024

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If you’re old enough, you remember how amazing Google search was when it first came out and for the first few years. Excellent results, right at the top. Nowadays, it’s crap and half the time to find what I want I have to append “Reddit” or search very specific domains. (Reddit is likely to be worthless in a few years due to the IPO.)

Anyway, Google search results became crap for three main reasons, from least to most important:

  1. Worship of the official and the orthodox. Every time I search some medical issue, the top twenty sites tell me the same thing. That didn’t used to be the case, for cancer, for example, the old “cancer tutor” site would be on the first page. Maybe it’s good that the equivalent isn’t any more, but I wanted to read the alternative views as well as the orthodoxy.
  2. Monetization. Prioritizing selling ads over providing the best search results has had the effect one would expect.
  3. Organic link destruction. What made Google so good at the start is that its algo was almost entirely based on the number of incoming links a site had. Since the internet at that point was almost all human created, links were highly curated and genuine: someone had read the site, liked it and taken the time to link to it. Nowadays, most links aren’t organic: they’re SEO crap or advertising or intended to play the search algo, leading to an endless arm race. A link is no longer an endorsement and there’s no easy way around that: nothing can replace a human being reading a site, liking it, and linking to it.

Google, to put it simply, destroyed its own usefulness by destroying the internet ecosystem that had organic links, links by people who didn’t expect to be paid for them, to sites they found interesting whether those sites were official or orthodox or not.

Now, Large Language Model (LLM) AI is based off training on, basically, the entire internet. It’s essentially statistical. How good the AI is based on how good what it trained on is, with a lot of tweaking to try and point it towards stuff that isn’t horrible (not good, horrible, like avoiding racism.)

The problem is that over time more and more of the internet will be AI produces. AI will be feeding on its own output, rather than on organic human writing. It’s already been noticed that AI that eats its own dogfood tends to go nuts, and it’s fairly clear that AI is rather bland: it is a blender for what’s been done before.

So AI will, like Google, damage the very resources it needs to work well, especially since most people won’t admit that their AI content is AI, so it’s hard to avoid. It will slowly degrade over time, with some bumps of improvement as new advances are made.

Mind you LLM AI isn’t a general AI, it’s not smart, it’s just another algo. It doesn’t understand anything. Real AI will wait further advancements, if it every happens at all.

Still, enjoy it now while you can. I expect it’ll get better for two to three years, then degrade. That’s the optimistic view, there’s some evidence that the degradation is already underway.

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The TikTok Forced Sale

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On March 14, 2024

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A bill stating that TikTok must divest or sell TikTok or stop operating in the US has passed.

Commenter KT Chong pointed out the stakes for China and the US

This ban is NOT just about protecting America from China. TikTok has global reach OUTSIDE the US. TikTok is a most popular app in over a hundred countries in the world — including in the Global South where China’s influences are steadily rising while US is facing increasing hostility due to the US complicity in Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in West Bank. Once the US gets its hands on TikTok, the US government will definitely use it to spread anti-China and pro-US propaganda. That is the true purpose of forcing Chinese to sell TikTok to the US, so that that US can seize/steal a most popular media tool and then use its global influences against China. I would rather TikTok just gives up its US market (i.e., banned in the US) than to hand over its global influence to the US government.

By laws, the Chinese government can block the forced sale as ByteDance (the parent company of TikTok) has to follow Chinese laws. The CCP should absolutely NOT approve the sales. This is not just business. This is but a battle in the bigger war between the US and China over global influences and the new media. TikTok should NOT be handed over to the US and then be used as tool to expand US influence in the global market. I would rather TikTok just give up on the US market rather than to hand over TikTok influences on all those overseas markets to the US. I hope China is smart enough to realize what is at stake here.

This seems reasonable to me. It would be like China saying “the US must sell or divest Apple because Apple does business in China.”

I will point out that TikTok has been notorious or famous, depending on your view, for contradicting US propaganda on many issues, most recently on Palestine. The videos are often savage, and make politicians look like fools in a way that is much easier to do in video than with writing or audio only, and they are seen by millions. “A Modest Proposal” is famous because it’s so hard to be so savage and because there was no audio recording and transmission during the Irish Potato Famine.

Another issue is that America wants to force the sale of a successful internet/social media company: the most successful in recent years, and the first to make video work on social media.

If you can’t innovate: steal.

If the US was truly just concerned about damage to users, it could simply set up rules the US subsidiary has to follow, in the same way that China has specific rules for US internet companies that apply in China, but not elsewhere.

As for the fears of all user info being turned over to the Chinese government, that’s laughable, not because it might not happen but because governments mass gobbling such data happens all the time, and because some hacker group will inevitably crack every social media company and just sell data to everyone.

Anyway, China should definitely tell the US they don’t get to force a sale of a Chinese company. While they’re too polite to do so, it really should be accompanied with the metaphorical middle finger.

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No Mass Rapes By Hamas On October 7th/Open Thread

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On March 2, 2024

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In fact, no evidence of even a single rape.

I noted, repeatedly, that I doubted these rape claims and was correct, as usual.

Now if you believed them you need to think very carefully about why. Every war always includes reports of fake atrocities and this is especially true at the start of the war, in order to gin up support. My “favorite” is that when Iraq invaded Kuwait, we were told that Iraqi soldiers were bayoneting babies in incubators.

Never happened.

Note that the primary purveyor of the mass rape claims was the New York Times, who also were the primary purveyors of fake nuclear weapon scares in the lead-up to the Iraq War.

The New York times is Hasbara from the top, intensely dedicated to Israel and the Zionist project of ethnic cleansing and genocide. I cannot recall any war it didn’t support. It also has a record of intensely political editorial decisions: for example in the 2004 election it decided not to publish revelations of mass spying on American citizens, against the law, because it would effect the election (hurt Bush, help the Democratic candidate.)

If you believe the New York Times without running what they claim thru a common sense filter (do they have reason to lie about this or to twist it?) you’re a fool. This applies to the media in general.

The fact is that whatever you think of Hamas, they were first elected because they had a reputation for incorruptability, as opposed to the PLO, which had becoming a sewer of corruption as well as servants of the Israeli state. They have no record of using rape as a weapon, none, and no reason to mass rape. We even had eye-witness reports from Israelis that they had treated women well, from October 7th and 8th.

There was a possibility that a few rapes had occurred, but even that turns out to not be true.

If you fell for it originally, you should have become suspicious quickly, because there was so little evidence. Haaretz noted that they couldn’t find any hospital admittances, there was no flood of claims (which there would have been) and so on. There was virtually no evidence to back up a very few claims from extremely biased sources.

If you trust the media, you are a fool. That’s understandable. You were brought up to think that authority figures were trustworthy (even though they’re the ones who do almost all the harm in the world). But at some point you have to grow up and notice that the much of the media is your enemy, just like most corporations, rich people and governments. They want your support, they want to take as much from you as they can, and they want to use you for their purposes and most of them don’t care how much you are hurt as a result.

Don’t be a fool.

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Google Neural Net “AI” Is About To Destroy Half The Independent Web

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On May 11, 2023

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As various folks have quipped the safest place to hide a body is on the second page of Google search results, because no one goes there.

Google is about to role out its “AI” for search (I’ll be saying AI in quotes as policy when referring to neural nets because they aren’t intelligent) and if it stays as it is it’s going to destroy most sites that provide information or analysis. (I’ll feel some hit, but will survive as I have my own audience.)

That screen-shot is the kicker. It takes up too much of the page. Worst, people don’t like to click, so if Google presents the info they want, they’ll just stay on Google.

Now, of course, Google is summarizing data that the neural net has scraped from the Web, much like when you used to read some books then summarize them for your term paper. None of the information Google’s “AI” will present in answer to questions is information from Google, it’s scraped, swallowed and regurgitated from the websites which won’t be getting the traffic any more, who will then die. The perfect parasite.

There’s going to be lawsuits, and I’m no lawyer, but my understanding is that just as if you do your research and re-write to summarize this probably doesn’t fall under current copyright law. That law is entirely reasonable, for people, but for neural nets it seems like a huge gap, but without a change in the law, it seems unlikely there’s a legal remedy.

I’m thinking about this. I may decide to keep most of my site off search engines (which is a problem in the sense that I use search engines to find my own articles, I’ve written so many).

But in the larger sense “AI” is a giant parasite (well, Google won’t be the only one) devouring other people’s expertise and denying them a living. Google controls about 45% of the internet ad market already with most of the rest divided up between various social median giants, and doing so destroyed a vast swathe of sites. Now they are set to kill much of what remains.

Tacitus’s line, supposedly quoting Calgacus, about the Roman Empire, was that the Romans “made a desert and called it peace”, Google and “AI” is making an internet wasteland and calling it profits.

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Government For the People Shouldn’t Keep Secrets From the People

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On April 18, 2023

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This is hard to talk about, because we live in a debased period.

Government’s job, in a democracy, should be to increase the welfare of the people and represent their will.

Because people elect the government, they need to know what the government is doing and has done in order to choose who to elect.

This is fundamental.

When people do not know what the government is doing, they cannot make good decisions.

Further, elected representatives (in principle, not in current practice) are the employees of the population. As employers, the population has a right to know what the representatives are doing. (Or if you prefer another metaphor, perhaps better, they are trustees.) They don’t have the right to know everything, but anything related to the job, including corruption and double dealing, they do.

The only possible exceptions are certain military related issues which would be very useful to enemies, but even there, the span is limited.

The reason for this, because apparently it’s not obvious, is that if electors don’t know what the people they elected and the government those people run are doing, they can’t make good decisions, like choosing to, oh, fire them.

As an aside, this is also why we have a right to know what our government is doing and why they don’t have a right to spy on us: they work for us, we do not work for them. Even so, their personal lives, other than graft and blatant hypocrisy should be off the line. But what they do officially we need to know.

If government doesn’t serve the people, it becomes tyranny.

The current system of classifying virtually everything and then lying and lying and lying is clearly anti-democratic and tyrannical.

What we have right now in most countries (see France, Pensions for a non-American example) is not democracy. It is oligarchical tyranny: the rule of the few over the many.

Nor is this just about “ought”, the problem with endless propaganda is that our elites have been running our countries terribly. They have mishandled the economy repeatedly since 1968 or so, have completely bungled climate change and ecological collapse, have made the middle and working classes poor and the rich richer. They have been running government for the benefit of the few, not the many. The only major notable exception is China, and from what I hear from those on the ground, that’s changing for the worse and has been since after the 2008 financial crisis.

Governments which impoverish the many to benefit the few are tyrannies and need to be overthrown. But one of the ways they get there is by constant lying and saying “we’re lying and concealing for your own good. You’re children, it isn’t safe for you to know.”

Anyone who thinks you don’t deserve or need to know what they claim to be doing on your behalf isn’t your friend or your employee, they are your master and they see you as their slave.

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