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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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