alt Hacker NewsGenuine question: How safe is it to use Chinese models via their services? Surely Anthropic and OpenAI are ingesting what I push there as well, but they're at least vaguely allied with my home country geopolitically. China on the other hand seems to be interested in supporting countries like Iran and Russia.
Replies
I suggest to not look at how each company is expressing themselves on the media, look at how they are actually behaving. When I first tried out Z.ai last year, I too was concerned regarding where my data goes. I vaguely remember from their ToS (please verify yourself too) that they followed a zero data retention policy for its AI services. This of course applied to their paying customers. I do not know if it applies to their free users on chat.z.ai. I am at the stage of not caring about geopolitics at all, I've lost a lot of trust in the current US administration, they have burned a lot of international relationships thanks to the orange man. This is while Chinese companies and startups have almost closed the gap between open-weight models and proprietary models. Its thanks to their actions and open contribution in the research I can run local models at home. Just read the tweet posted and see where Z.ai is trying to position themselves, this competition benefits us (consumers) a lot!
I don't know what you consider to be safe, but I assume you're talking about privacy and data retention.
You can pay someone like Ollama, which is US-based, which runs those models in their cloud. You can also download many/most of the models to run them locally on your own computer, although the performance depends entirely on your hardware capabilities.
Ollama has their own policies about privacy and data retention here:
That's just one third-party doing this, and there are many others.
[dead]
What does China do that US does not?
They are releasing open models, so at-least up until now their advancements you can run yourself.
US frontier labs on the other hand keep it all to themselves. The moment they cut access you have nothing and your country will be stumped on and forced in making decisions not in your national interest.