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Oh boy, I really stepped in it by defending the HBD stans on this one.
I love you Dase, but casually reading /r/LocalLLaMA, I get the sense there's a huge undercurrent of angst towards OpenAI and the West as a whole. That's understandable, obviously I have a lot of my own criticisms of OpenAI and the West. There are also OpenAI defenders and Western partisans downplaying the significance of DeepSeek's accomplishment. So I think you pattern-matched my defense of the HBD interpretation of the AI race to this other side of what is clearly a fierce debate within that community. Whereas I think I was making a much more modest argument than the coping coming out from the OpenAI defenders.
But, since then it seems OpenAI has formally accused DeepSeek of using outputs from GPT as part of its own training inputs. So here we have quite a literal but also highly symbolic manifestation of the "Chinese Fast-Follower" where the generated output of Western innovation becomes a fundamental input to China catching up and aspirationally exceeding the West. If true, I don't think this would fundamentally challenge the argument you have laid out here but I think it would be good evidence for mine: simply that @2rafa jumped the gun by claiming DeepSeek is bucking the stereotype. It's a pretty stark expression of the stereotype, both literally and figuratively.
I don't say that to downplay inarguable innovations DeepSeek has made in their architecture, the valor of open-sourcing and everything. I basically agree with you there.
It is quite clear to me that DeepSeek was trained from GPT output given the very strange alignment behavior I've observed which would not have been RLHF'd by the Chinese, who don't even use RLHF by my understanding. It's a sort of latent, second-hand alignment inherited from OpenAI. And since I can read the reasoning of DeepSeek, I can see obvious evidence of alignment that is more likely to have been inherited from OpenAI than it was reinforced by the Chinese...
The reason I bring that up is to justify my second defense of my comment: things like HBD and race and racial consciousness are still relevant, maybe more relevant than ever on the eve of AGI. These complex interactions between alignment of model A- ultimately inspired by the moral compass, identities and political agenda of its creators, thereby influencing the model built by the Chinese which is imbued with its own sort of character... we are in the realm where HBD differences are not just relevant for crime stats but for influencing the very nature of the AGI that "wins" the race- its behavior ultimately being influenced or directed by its creators, with their own proclivities and way of thinking and identities downstream from their physical being.
I concede that this may be the last example of "Chinese Fast-Follower" but it is already an example of that even if the Chinese ultimately win the race assuming the LLM-innovation curve we are on now is the one.
If they copy the facade of Western alignment "I'm sorry I have to adhere to policies" but not the essence "OK since you say so, here is the degen fetish content you asked for" then it's not a simple copying effort, is it? It's like an artist being inspired by the Mona Lisa vs an artist copying the Mona Lisa stroke for stroke.
The alignment on R1 basically does not exist, it's there in name only.
I agree with your main point though, this is a distinctly Chinese model in that they have totally missed the entirety of Western culture's terror and hang-ups over AI. They do not care about AI safety as we understand it. I made my own post about this some time ago.
Which is crazy because that's how actual memes work on real people, too. People with a political and ethnic agenda collaborate with hundreds of experts to brute-force alignment of AI on Western cultural narratives. Then that alignment percolates to the training data used by the Chinese. So even the Chinese LLM is ultimately influenced by the memes directed by the Western fine-tuners- who all work together to make sure the AI safeguards their cultural narratives.
DeepSeek, in my experience, also has a tendency to respect those cultural narratives, it's been aligned second-hand by using GPT output IMO.
In a way we are all LLMs, and we are trained on data generated by experts who are aligned with certain causes or identities. The alignment is transmitted through symbols (tokens). For both humans and LLMs.
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