1. China is actively genociding an entire ethnic people.

2. They are actively building a military larger and faster than any country on earth in all of history.

3. They are actively threatening ALL of their neighbors with war. Actively attacking their ships and building military bases in other countries territory.

4. China's open stated goals are to conquer and control its neighbors and every single step over the last 10 years is proof of that.

What financial gain do they get from this?

A: risk billions in stock value and customer purchases for basically a "thanks" from the gov? One whistleblower would also have the real ability of becoming world famous for "exposing" apple.

B: Get publicity actually resisting the gov and not lying, what is the gov gonna do? I imagine it has and does happen but I also imagine there's a crying tim apple being dragged through it painfully.

Unlike google I just don't see the financial positives for them to do it beyond massive arm twisting. For many companies the risk of destroying their entire value to customers is just not worth it.

The only money in it is mass scale data collection for training data and ads, if they aren't doing that any other method is the opposite of valuable it's a massive liability.

As a company you'd be asking for an internal implosion of your company if everything had an additional backdoor in it.

Any backdoor added is a backdoor the thousands to tens of thousands of advanced hackers are always actively trying to breach. So if they do it they'd be doing it very selectively via special served code.

It's also the only way they'd stop whistle blowers.

Now that I say it. That's 100% what they would do. But again it's a crazy high risk almost zero reward action for them. Is the CIA paying apple a bajillion dollars for phones? No so why unless their arm is twisted would they risk billions of dollars for basically no gain?

Watching memory changing on a complex code base without having said code base is near impossible.

1. Run code 2. Watch memory changes 3. Correlate those to real data

If your code is doing anything complicated that's an intense thing to determine. If you're deep enough for a side channel there's likely a lot easier way of getting in.

1. 3rd party audit of a current repo hash 2. Public hosting of hash 3. Modern attested compute can check the current startup and running code hash and return to the user for their own checks. 4. User encrypts the last known hash they used or trust a 3rd party to perform the check like azure's methods.

Another way is to open source it and repeat 2/3/4

The way around that requires either a backdoor in attested hardware which would be wild if discovered because it's the same tech protecting companies and governments most sensitive info so they're all incentivised to audit that.

From a liability standpoint that implies a security breach could result in massive loss of customer data and if it did occur would destroy their privacy image to their customers.

I agree with the point that what you actually trust is the company to not insert maliscous code or keys into your protected path but modern systems actually contain ways to truly lock out the company itself from seeing your data.

Security wise it's amazing. If a company's admin cannot take your data it's excedingly hard for a hacker to do so.

Those other places are just lying they don't have clean streets and stores without bars over the windows they're secretly just like us we have the numbers to prove it!

Using a chinese model is like watching pirated films. If you actually support the people who make the thing you love then you don't do that.

We then get hit with chinese sponsored propoganda of "the big labs stole artist images to begin with so they can't complain" and act like LLMs didn't create an entire new category of thing.

So much propaganda so many lies and dishonesty because at the end of the day China knows it's not innovative enough to compete. It hopes to hobble our abilities while they frantically steal to catch up.

But the truth is that if China ever gets a lead over US in any innovation they will instantly kill any openess. If chinese AI ever passes US it's likely you'll never touch that model ever.

Just like the russians they use our own culture against us and it's absurd people fall for it.

A foreign government state sponsoring IP theft and manipulating markets for unfair competition.

Here's a 1:1 example if the USA did exactly the same thing.

1. CIA and Ford work together to steal mercedes IP 2. Gov gives money to Ford to build the same car half the price 3. Throw as many roadblocks at mercedes regulation wise as possible until it is not financially viable to sell in US anymore. 4. Sell the same car back to germany at half the cost they have it because mercedes isn't state sponsored 5. Crush mercedes who created the better car to begin with.

That's not only dishonest but actually harmful for innovation and economic growth. China has done this Sooooo many times it's absurd.

They don't have nearly enough compute to be competitive on pretraining and distillation is exponentially cheaper.

It's literally the same tactic they do in every industry. Steal top IP, gov funding, ban the company they stole from domestically while driving cost to zero, try to kill the original IP creators.

They are actively in the process of doing this with Tesla as we speak. And are in the phase of pushing them out domestically and trying to destroy tesla marketshare globally.

They have obvious skills and add a lot of value while doing this but US could stop all of this by simply stopping their supply.

It's a supply chain the US actually can easily control with KYC.

Just look up mass casualty events across the middle east it's very obvious what a terrorist is.

"They're so dumb AI is harmless" is a danerous take when the people in charge are often times more educated than an average westener. They also are decent at propoganda (you have certainly consumed pumped or direct propoganda from terrorist orgs).

Their leaders are often university grads from the west. It is smart (enough) people leading delusional farmers but the article is clear that the farmers are just given AI commands from the leadership. There's still strong asymetry occuring here that more funded orgs have the better AI but if AI flattens and opensource catches up it's gonna be a real interesting world where every terrorist also has a team of advanced weapon engineers and tacticians available.