While composing a reply to a comment throwing tons of shade on American AI, I took some time to check out the commenter’s HN profile. Their comment history was about 50% such comments. Their submission history started with an article about how Russia was unfairly blamed for some hacking campaign.

It’s entirely possible that this is not a foreign influence campaign. Perhaps there’s a group here that is simply anti-American as its primary interest, and passionately so to upvote each other.

On the other hand, one should not discount the value of HN as tastemaker and trendsetter. Also, it would be fairly easy to run bots here. I wouldn’t be surprised if HN were a field of combat for many parallel influence campaigns, foreign and domestic.

Good points, I personally believe that if/when China takes the lead, they will immediately stop releasing model weights. It only makes sense as a strategy to counterbalance (current) American labs' monopoly on frontier models.

Holding both those positions would be hypocritical all right, but are you sure it's the same people commenting/voting in both cases? I don't think there's a strong consensus on Hacker News. Even something like the time of day an article is posted might get different engagement depending on who is active in which time zones.

Of the two competing models Meta compare Glimmer to in the post, one is Google's Gemma 4.

At this size open weight model, a Western company was already state of the art, Meta is joining that competition.

And my memory is that Gemma 4 got little criticism or doom/gloom. And no, it isn't Chinese.

The GP is claiming Meta is an awful company for what they have done and how they continue to treat their employees. That’s a perfectly ok opinion to hold, and many seem to agree.

Have DeepSeek, Moonshot, or the other Chinese AI companies done such things that attract moral outrage?

Nobody wants to live in a world where one party dominates due to access to superior AI and the others have to fear it (well, except for a few psycopaths who would gamble on being in control of that party). So the underdog will always be the good guy in this race. It has been framed as a race between countries, so Meta fails to be the underdog because they're in the wrong country. That's all.

I don’t think Meta is bad for releasing open models, but are you really going to ignore all the terrible things they’ve done over the years just because of that?

As for DeepSeek or any other Chinese lab, I’m not aware of any practices that would make me consider them a bad actor. Can you say the same about OpenAI, Meta or Anthropic?

It makes me wonder why this dynamic exists here, and I do wonder at times how much our conversations here are influenced by China in a top-down fashion. I'd prefer to think that HN is pretty organic, but that is probably a naive thought.

> When an American company does anything? Doom. And. Gloom. The engineers? Taken to the slaughterhouse! America? Behind! The public? Bamboozeled!

I think I've always had a pretty healthy amount of cynicism towards China. In recent years my cynicism towards the US has increased significantly. I don't see all of my US peers with cynicism, but I think you're living in an age of grift, corporate capture, and unheard of corruption. I also think there's nuance to both. There are some US and Chinese companies and people that I do respect regardless of what's going on politically. (Meta / Zuck isn't one of them though...)

I live in the 51st state though, so maybe I'm just overreacting...

Apparently Americans haven’t got the memo yet that the world is moving closer to China.

Can you point to a lot of posts lauding the Chinese government based on the release of Chinese open models? Because that would be the equivalent to contrast with the OP.

I suspect it's just the generalized anti-West/anti-American sentiments extended into anything and everything. Anything that makes the US look anything close to good goes against their cause and therefore must be countered and talked down.

But you're not wrong about the bias here. You just don't see many comments talking about it because they get mass flagged/downvoted for obvious reasons.

These sentiments aren’t formed in a vacuum. America is becoming increasingly oligarchic and corrupt with decades of experience of companies profiting off harming people and lying through their teeth and Meta is like one of the worst offenders. They are pissing on every ally they have and once again started a war and both have material impacts on other countries.

Americans seem to take the US’ geeat reputation for granted and don’t realize how it has slipped and what that means. They also take for granted that China BAD is truth when this sentiment basically just sprang out of nowhere when the west realized it was their geopolitical rival. But to the rest of the worlds citizens, China is not starting any wars and is the source of cheap goods and innovation to other countries. EV batteries recently. The US is now directly causing high oil prices with their war and exports their rapacious companies like “prediction markets” which are 90% sports gambling now to the rest of the world. Meanwhile the classic American move to these kinds of comments is to claim that negative sentiment MUST be part of some bot campaign because surely no one could actually dislike the great America??

Those factors are all rightly part of the sentiment.

> Only China can release good, open weight models and American companies can’t compete. Oh by the way all the spend is for nothing because China alone can release open-weight models thus destroying American AI.

Let me be blunt and let me say: you don't understand why we people support Chinese models.

1. Chinese labs started with open weight models, US labs started with dooms day narrative

2. US VC based companies must become greedy to win and return the money, Chinese companies can make 1/10 of that revenue and still be happy

3. Meta in this case, started nicely with Llama, then switched to closed models, kicked out researchers to build data labeler CEO empire inside Meta. Now opening again, what's next? closing again?

There are comments like the one you're replying to on literally every Chinese model release. This is textbook goomba fallacy, btw.

both countries are authoritarian. both are using this "free" tech to spy on people and control them.

why is america and its people anti-china? take a chill pill and worry about yourselves instead of other people :)

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There is a big astroturfing going on social media platforms by the chinese. Did you notice 'day in a life of unmarried 30 yr old lady in china' videos flooding usa social media.

Regular ppl in the west now hold mildly positive views of the ccp and how 'advanced' china is than usa.

Then there are europeans who now are looking for china to give them the technology handout now that relationship with usa has soured.

Deepseek never fucked us over. zuck has. A decades of harm creation run doesn’t get excused by the US flag. Zuck is not on your team and if you can’t see that by now, oh my.

> When an American company does anything? Doom. And. Gloom

Meta, "an American company". Being the main driver of an ethnic cleansing in Myanmar - and just sticking your head in the sand when told about it - is just another day's affairs at the average American Acme Inc.

These are comments on a release by easily the most societally damaging Western tech company there is. They so far easily beat Flock, Palantir, Anduril and so on, as a result of their incomparable scale. You're just ignoring that and pretending any negative comments are because it's an American company rather than Meta. That's much more FUD than any pro-China comments I've seen on HN.

Get off HN Mark, you have ten million pervert glasses to sell.

Sorry this comment is a bit snarky, but yours is indeed a sight to behold.