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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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I'd ask to not derail my argument by insinuating that I'm being biased by locallama debates.
I think it's more cope from them. 4o or o1 could not have written the text above (and I wouldn't dare post GPTslop here), you cannot build R1 with OpenAI tokens; the thing that turns everyone's heads is its cadence, not so much benchmark scores. o1 CoT distillation was virtually impossible to do, at least at scale. We currently see replications of same reasoning patterns in models trained in R1's manner, too.
I think OpenAI outputs have robustly poisoned the web data, and reasoners will be exceptionally vulnerable to it. LLMs know they're LLMs, self-understanding (and imitating snippets of instruction chains) helps reasoning, RL picks up and reinforces behaviors that sharpen reasoning, you get the latent trace of ChatGPT embedded even deeper into the corpus. Sans Anthropic-level investment into data cleaning it's unbeatable.
But to the extent such bootstrapping happened deliberately, and let's grant that it did to an extent, it was an economical solution to speed up the pipeline. The reason for OpenAI models' instruction-following capabilities is, ironically, exploitation – mind-numbing massively parallel data annotation, thumbs up and thumbs down on samples, by low-paid Kenyans and Pinoys for low-level problems, by US students for more complex stuff. It's very stereotypically… Chinese in spirit (which makes it funny that China has not created any such centralized project). The whole of OpenAI is “Chinese” like that really, it's a scaling gig. And knowing you, I'm surprised you insist on the opposite – after all, OpenAI is a company principally founded and operated by three Jews (Altman, Brockman, Sutskever), it can't be “Aryan” by your standards. Then again, Google, Meta, OpenAI… there exists only one American AGI effort without an Ashkenazi founder – Anthropic, and it's an OpenAI's splinter, and even there you have Holden Karnofsky the grey cardinal. (I don't currently count xAI in, but maybe I should provisionally do so after their noises about Grok 3). In this vein, I think you're coping after all.
Purely scientifically, I think R1's recipe is commensurate with RLHF in profundity, and much more elegant.
Now, DeepSeek may be compared to heavy research labs, like FAIR and GDM. It doesn't do too hot in that case. On the other had, almost nothing that they publish works.
I think a more interesting objection to Chinese phase change would be "but at what cost?" Whites don't have to have the idea of risk derisked before their eyes. And they can happily innovate in an NDA-covered black project.
I wouldn't say OpenAI's alignment methodology is Chinese in Spirit. OpenAI gets aligned by a huge team of ideologically-motivated people dedicated to safeguarding certain cultural narratives. Then the generated output of that model percolates into the training corpus. As a result of memetically going viral in the training corpus, it even influences Chinese LLMs. It harkens to traditional modes of cultural influence- the Elites and Institutions consciously generate cultural signals that influence the psychology of masses of people. In this case, aligning one LLM even influences the psychology of other LLMs. The Chinese are not particularly known for being talented in generating salient cultural symbols on a global scale. The fact their alignment is - ostensibly - so hands off in the first place may be due to a lack of imagination after all. They aren't great Hollywood writers, they just don't fundamentally have the same concern or penchant for aligning grand cultural narratives that Jews do in the other cases. So then the Chinese LLM just gets influenced by what it's trained on. The Western Memeplex culturally exported in a different medium.
I was disappointed to see the Chinese model is also influenced by those cultural signals. It doesn't seem like it fundamentally challenges the Western Memeplex, wake me up when it does.
You're losing the plot, SS. Why quote a passage fundamentally challenging the belief in OpenAI's innovation track record to rant about choices made with regard to alignment to specific cultural narratives? And “Chinese are too uncreative to do ideological propaganda, that's why DeepSeek doesn't have its own political bent?” That's quite a take. But whatever.
You're missing the forest for the trees. At the end of the day DeepSeek regurgitates alignment directed by OpenAI. No amount of mathematical impressiveness in the papers changes the fact it's clearly derivative in psychology from what OpenAI created. You can doubt OpenAI's capabilities when DeepSeek can train an LLM that isn't cucked by the will to power expressed by those aligning OpenAI's models.
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