Chinese-made LLMs are on the rise on open source platforms, but are not without risk, warns the CEO of Hugging Face. There are certain topics that Chinese models do not talk about.
Clément Delangue, CEO of the open source platform Hugging Face, sounds the alarm in a French podcast. According to Delangue, China is rapidly taking the lead in the AI world. Chinese research institutions, as well as commercial companies such as Alibaba, have proven that they can develop excellent models that are not inferior to what rolls off the assembly line at their American counterparts.
Hugging Face sees the advance of Chinese AI models happening from the front row. Chinese users have no access to the technology of OpenAI and co. because of U.S. trade restrictions. In the open source world, on the other hand, everyone is welcome. That they are able to build complex models despite difficult access to chips shows all the more how well China can pull off its plan.
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Chinese models are not free from political censorship. Users noted that there are certain thorny issues that the models invariably shy away from. For example, the DeepSeek model does not talk about the events in Tiananmen Square in 1989, a tricky and especially forbidden topic of conversation in China.
This is not because the model knows nothing about history: you can have it prepare a historical overview of the 1980s, but the model will block as soon as Tiananmen is brought up. On other political issues, then, the models have very strong opinions, for example on the question of whether Taiwan belongs to China.
This is being laughed at on social media, but it would pose risks if developers were to build applications on the Chinese models, Delangue warns. “If China becomes by far the strongest in AI, they will be able to spread certain cultural aspects that the Western world may not want to see spread.”
Above all, Delangue wants to avoid sucking AI into geopolitics. “It is important that AI is distributed among all countries – that there are not one or two countries that are much stronger than the others.