A Dark-Money Campaign Is Paying Influencers to Frame Chinese AI as a Threat

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xadiant@reddit

Oh god, Taylor lorenz. I would take anything she writes with a huge grain of salt and plenty of research. She's known to bend the truth and being a tankie.

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YoureVulnerableNow@reddit

can you really effectively take a credibility/anti-extremism position *and* "wish [your country] had banned islam"?

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WaitformeBumblebee@reddit

If these guys had they're way they'd make LLMs a mega corp only club, classify it as a weapon.

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WaitformeBumblebee@reddit

Here they come:

"White House Considers Vetting A.I. Models Before They Are Released"

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/04/technology/trump-ai-models.html

This is like vetting access to books with knowledge.

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Prof_ChaosGeography@reddit

It's not going to stop at Chinese models. They will attack Mistrial too and local models entirely regardless of source. They will act as anything not hosted by them as unsafe and dangerous

Their lead against other models is gone. There's little reason to use openai or anthropic models and pay their overpriced fees when Chinese models host anywhere can do the same work and local models are almost at that same exact point

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wdsoul96@reddit

I am sorry but Chinese models are NOT all LocalLLMs.

There are plenty of good if not better local LLMs if you don't like/trust the Chinese (LLms) (especially potentially dubious and questionable sources/ethics. Plenty of great Local LLMs out there made by folks all around the world (US labs included.

Questioning the sources/methods and quality/reliability, trustworthiness, security are all good pillars that people should practice regularly. (Or continue using Chinese LLMs if it floats your boat )but dont shut down one argument just because you dont like the source or their possibly evil intents.

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-p-e-w-@reddit

Sure, they’ll do that, but it doesn’t matter. Money talks. There’s no way American businesses are going to allow lawmakers to ban Chinese models, which are giving them enormous value for free.

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NoahFect@reddit

Money talks. There’s no way American businesses are going to allow...

That's what I said when Trump threatened to put tariffs on everything on the planet.

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ElementNumber6@reddit

The smarter play would be to make it prohibitively expensive for individuals to run them, and then relentlessly attack their reputation from multiple angles, so that the public doesn't feel as though they are missing out, when they absolutely are.

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soshulmedia@reddit

You mean something like insane RAM and SSD prices?

Buying RAM wafers just to stockpile them somewhere?

Stuff like that?

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More-Curious816@reddit

The stargate project collapsed last week according to news, hopefully Samsung and others learn from this by getting money up front and not just commitments. Also hopefully the ran prices become cheaper.

This also signals that nobody have the money to purchase and stockpile the world production of RAMs. The stargate project was all fake games and tricks from beginning to raise the cost for competition.

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soshulmedia@reddit

We'll see. We're dealing with geopolitics and massive social engineering of the planet's populace and those who are in charge of that frankly do not have any taboos.

Or, in other words, the RAM industry's supply chain has enough small little but critical branches and dependencies a malevolent actor can hack at for the "desired outcome" ...

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More-Curious816@reddit

To be fair the 3 ram manufacturers are the only entities that profited from the RAM apocalypse the most. Doesn't matter who hacked the system to cripple competition, they also crippled themselves as well, and money supply from investors is not infinity. Incredibly short sighted decision.

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soshulmedia@reddit

Incredibly short sighted decision.

Solely from the POV of the memory manufacturers, yes. But I still suspect "rational" actors in the background. Not good actors, but ones who understand what they are doing. And if the goal is the pod for us people and no more ownership of general purpose computing hardware, a little pain which looks like shortsightedness is probably worth it (for those who have that goal).

Maybe I am outing myself as even more of a "conspiracy theorist" here, but frankly, I think it is time for people to wake up and at least seriously consider what might be really going on.

I am also not accusing or saying I for sure know something. But I find it more realistic that incompetence or shortsightedness is a cover for rational evil actors than the other way around. Assuming default and never-ending goodwill in people who have power over others is IMO nothing less than a mental disease.

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crantob@reddit

"You must stop noticing these things, citizen."

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ElementNumber6@reddit

Yeah, but that's impossible to manufacture. To do that you'd have to be able to, like, buy all of the worlds' supply for the next few years.

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soshulmedia@reddit

But if you are the guys who make the money and thereby (essentially) steer the whole economy from the back and you fight a long, often very patient war for control of the whole planet, is it?

What do you estimate was the reason for this?

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Mayion@reddit

Not to mention buying products that do not yet exist with money you don't have, driving prices up. Debt fest then declare bankruptcy if things get a little too out of hand.

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soshulmedia@reddit

Having the power to create and destroy money at will and a plumbing system (banking, settlement, ...) to do it in basically any part of the economy is an insane level of control, and those who wield it made sure that they put a huge amount of seemingly plausible deniability on top.

I think it was a relative of someone who appeared frequently in the Epstein files who said:

"Give me control of the money supply, and I don't care who makes the law"

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mumblerit@reddit

its already happening, how many posts in the last 3 months are bots posting "what do you actually use local models for??? They seem to suck"

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ElementNumber6@reddit

And also, who cares if the model is over 64B? No one can run those. They should focus on smaller models, or nothing at all.

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mumblerit@reddit

I do think the end state is companies running small GPU farms to run their own inference

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RedParaglider@reddit

I think more likely it would be something to the effect of "If you use one of those models in your business you're not allowed to do work with the government. "

I don't know what these companies are going to do because if they charge what inference and training really costs this stuff is super expensive, and at the same time as you know Chinese inference is going to be less expensive there's almost no way it can't be with their sane energy policy, and they're manufacturing weight pivoting toward inference and memory manufacturing.

If the United States does manage to ban usage of foreign inference providers it's going to be so expensive we might just have to start hiring a bunch of programmers to start writing code for llms.😜

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Due-Function-4877@reddit

FWIW, I think you're overestimating the knowledge and engagement of the people in charge of these businesses. If a footgun looks like a short term good idea or satisfies someone's dogma, these people will pull the trigger a hundred times before they give it a second thought

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Icy_Concentrate9182@reddit

Maybe American, but the rest of the world exists

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IrisColt@reddit

This.

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power97992@reddit

Dude chinese models are still quite behind, like 6-12 months behind( 6-7 months for Opus, 9-12 months for Mythos)

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TheIncarnated@reddit

Mythos is just a better prompt and specific weights. Mind you, every leading security detection company out there is already doing what Mythos "does" but with SLMs instead.

I've say on 4 vendor calls in the past 3 months for this. Before Mythos was even mentioned in the news

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relmny@reddit

Yeah, some people keep saying "yes, but they are not at the level of..." yes, for specific tasks they might not be, but I suspect the threshold is very high and probably most people wouldn't even notice.

Some of those people moved the milestone to the definition of "hard tasks", so when somebody claims that they can do "hard tasks", then they will reply "your tasks are not really hard" (without even knowing).

Again, I'm not saying they are that level for specific/hard tasks, but I suspect that they already are for a huge percentage of people.

I still remember that 2 months ago a well-known musician/producer/youtuber (Rick Beato), made a video about "you don't need chatgpt anymore"...

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TopTippityTop@reddit

Maybe it'll fight all the Chinese propaganda I see daily on Reddit

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awebb78@reddit

Where's that? Saying you like using a Chinese nodel is not the same as trashing and fear mongering to eliminate the alternative.

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JackStrawWitchita@reddit

Worse, it appears as if big AI tech are aligning with governments to slow push out local LLMs in favour of everyone signing up to a few big US online AI services. That must be resisted at all costs. And it appears as if China innovation is a big help in stemming the migration to a uniform US AI tech world.

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soshulmedia@reddit

That must be resisted at all costs.

There seems to be a growing set of people who argue "AI bad" in a very general sense.

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Great-Gardian@reddit

In my personal online experience, it is often people from the political left who are the most anti-AI. It surprised me because as a leftist myself I think AI can be used to liberate people from work. But I see a lot of radical comments on how AI is evil to the point I ask myself if the comments are intentionaly made as a anti-ai distraction to slow down our ability to organize with the technology. I have no proof of that being true, but it would explain the anti-ai sentiment I see online.

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soshulmedia@reddit

This is going into offtopic/politics now, but I think left and right are (at least nowadays) just labels for essentially the same the-powers-that-shouldn-t-be forces in the background, just dressing their plans little bit differently for their respective audience. I personally like the voluntaryist/anarchist/decentralization perspective.

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Prince_Noodletocks@reddit

Is it growing? From personal experience it seems like there were more before, but AI is so ubiquitous that it's slowly started gaining acceptance from most of the skeptical, especially when exposed to friends and family using it. I do think it ends up galvanizing the fewer that's left, making them noisier and more aggressive like cornered animals.

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keepthepace@reddit

That's my feeling as well.

When you look at the number of users, it is incredible how many people are actually using it. There are very little people who don't use it anymore. It has been one of the tech that had the fastest adoption like ever in history. And people are realizing that a lot of the criticism is outdated. And there is a growing education about the fact that inference is actually not that expensive and that a lot of the calculations were very biased against AI.

And of course, the growing segment of local LLMs. Is also running contrary to the AI = big tech = bad narrative.

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soshulmedia@reddit

Is also running contrary to the AI = big tech = bad narrative.

I think local AI is absolutely essential in any future that is not a complete dystopia.

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keepthepace@reddit

Yes, and more generally open source and open hardware. It is the key to the post-capitalist society IMHO

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soshulmedia@reddit

Maybe, yes. But I do think there's lots of people who fear e.g. job loss and AI is the obvious target to direct the anger towards.

Of course, the obvious other side of the equation is that AI will increase productivity further (the valid, non-bubble uses) and make stuff cheaper so in the end that should mean less scarcity overall.

I do think it is part of a huge cultural shift, though: There is so much bullshit in jobs, so many bullshit jobs which can be automated away or avoided in the first place. And if I am honest, also much of what I have done in my worklife can now be automated away...

A healthy cultural shift WOULD likely be that the 8h workday is well outdated and we're looking at 2h work a day or even less. (To be clear: I mean the cultural aspect, not legal or union work or such matters. I think the latter is downstream from the former, even though many many people would disagree)

Together with other geopolitical dynamics, it seems that TPTB have decided that the time is now to reshuffle the deck and that will still leave many people in uncomfortable to desolate conditions. Add in the total surveillance and a final "Gov as God" push, the insane levels of psyoppery and deliberate social engineering going on, manufactured energy scarcity through wars and other means, ...

I don't blame AI, but I can easily see how it is both a convenient scapegoat for deeper and darker forces and also how it is easy to latch onto it as THE evil in the world (which I guess is the same as saying 'convient scapegoat', but seen from another perspective).

That said, I absolutely hate the surveillance and control angle of non-local AI. People talk all the time about "care about others!1!" but will freely chat about anyone in their surroundings to everyone gets stuck in the control grid, no matter one's personal choices.

Unless using surveilled APIs, tools, cars and so forth and involving others in the slightest (which, if you really think through happens almost immediately anyone puts THEIR personal details into such systems - it automatically entails pulling in bits of info about others and your surroundings) becomes widely understood as a fundamental disrepect of others, at the same level of "not caring for the physical well-being of others" (which, if one is honest, is and was one heck of a political battle cry in the last couple decades), nothing will change for the better.

"If you talk to ChatGPT, you use a modern car with cameras and microphones or you use unencrypted or meta-data generating means of communication when it is not meant for the public, then you are a menace to humanity and especially those around you" - I am talking about that level of cultural shift.

And, to be very clear, I am not talking about new privay laws or any such thing, which would mean leaving "responsibility and warm fuzzy feeling of proper enforcement" again at our evil govs. I am talking about a cultural understanding that Gov itself is an evil kraken against humanity.

I assume history has shown that such shifts only happen when people get burned badly. And I think the process of being burnt has started now. It is not only silent surveillance anymore. The data is coupled with enforcement (though often dressed as "care").

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UnethicalExperiments@reddit

There is a cult of anti AI out there. Look at futurology for example.

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ElementNumber6@reddit

Limiting affordability of the hardware needed to run it is another way to slow or stop the momentum of the latest and most knowledgeable / powerful models made available.

Even in the absence of conspiracy, the net effect is still the same.

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Pollos1958@reddit

No need for a conspiracy when class interests align for them to push for these things at the same time. It may look like that it's all planned, but it's much better explained by the factor of class interest.

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keepthepace@reddit

Good luck with that. Apple and Google want to put that in phones. And there are so many uses for embedded LLMs or VLMs or VLAs in robotics that I don't see that happening ever.

OpenAI may be pushing for that, but when on the other side you have Google, you have Apple, you have Nvidia, I don't see them winning.

I think the fear-inducing message is more there to say "fund US AI industry and especially the closed one because otherwise we fall behind".

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mycall@reddit

So you think no more GPT-OSS refreshes?

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Lesser-than@reddit

This is going on in both directions, you can watch it play out on this sub on every major release, its too targeted to just be fanboy activism.

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BlobbyMcBlobber@reddit

Chinese models are great but it doesn't make all the issues around China suddenly disappear. It's still a semi totalitarian country with poor track of human rights, and a close friend to Iran and Russia. Definitely don't rely on Chinese models for anything related to geopolitics.

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jon23d@reddit

The US is a semi-totalitarian country with a poor track of human rights

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Baumpaladin@reddit

The way I look at it is "they are all horrible and our best choice is picking the least terrible". Frankly, it's a sad reality.

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Economy_Cabinet_7719@reddit

US is literally besieging Cuba like in medieval times, leading to blackouts, lack of medical supplies, mass hunger, etc. May need to rethink which side is "least terrible".

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BlobbyMcBlobber@reddit

US is literally besieging Cuba

Why?

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Baumpaladin@reddit

I know, I saw those news. I may add at this point that both are equally shit in a lot of areas. Both will rug pull you, if you rely on them too much.

My point wasn't that China's wrongdoings justify America's genocide, but that when you only have those two choices, to think wisely when you pick a side.

A lot of times you can avoid both parties, but in decisions where those two are the ONLY options with no option to withhold, you'll have to pick a side.

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Groundbreaking_Bee97@reddit

mahh CCP bad.. like Chinese people are living in the Gulag whereas in the US everyone is enjoying their Free Healthcare, Good Living Quality, Lower Rent!!

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BlobbyMcBlobber@reddit

Never said anything about the quality of life. But if you can get in trouble for mentioning "forbidden" history, you are not living in a free country. No place is perfect but let's not pretend everywhere is the same.

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BlobbyMcBlobber@reddit

That's silly. People don't understand what it means to actually not have rights.

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crantob@reddit

I know it up close and personal. The 'west' is not what you think it is.

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BlobbyMcBlobber@reddit

Please elaborate.

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hgshepherd@reddit

and a close friend to Russia.

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a_beautiful_rhind@reddit

Right, it's not like they told Europe to get off Russian fossil fuels or anything. And Russia (and China) are such good friends they gave satellite targeting data to the Iranians. Everyone is just singing kumbaya.

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crantob@reddit

I think Europeans should consider who their friends are anew, since the bombing of NordStream2 at latest.

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sunflowerapp@reddit

US is a country voted Trump into power, twice! I don't know how to make sense of that.

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ihppxng62020@reddit

be wary of Taylor Lorenz, this wouldnt be the first time she pushes the popular "dark money" line for clicks (Chorus article drama)

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a_beautiful_rhind@reddit

Meta is lobbying at the same time to push ID checks and de-anonymize the internet.

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Disastrous_Room_927@reddit

Meta was paying a professor of mine almost a decade ago to develop algorithms to de-anonymize data. They’ve been at it for awhile.

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draconic_tongue@reddit

that's not meta, that's everyone. we will probably end up with something like south korea sooner or later

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That_Neighborhood345@reddit

South Korea or North Korea?

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MrR33Z@reddit

Thats the neat thing, first it's one, then it's the other.

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a_beautiful_rhind@reddit

I agree they're not the only one but they were specifically identified as lobbying for it.

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dukescalder@reddit

I mean it is though... so I'm cool with it. Where can I get my paycheck? I also hate mountain view tho... Not sure who'll pay me nowadays.

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thereisonlythedance@reddit

Is this why llama.cpp have been weirdly sluggish about integrating support for the big new Chinese LLMs like DeepSeek V4?

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droptableadventures@reddit

No, it's because it's an open source project where these are largely submitted by community contributors.

And DS v4 is quite different from everything else, so it requires a bit of work.

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thereisonlythedance@reddit

It’s not just DS4. There’s a whole slew of PRs left hanging. I’ve been using llama.cpp basically since the beginning, support for non-Western models feels different lately. Tepid. The whole project is likely being corporatised now that HF has bought in.

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droptableadventures@reddit

It's not a giant conspiracy to sabotage Chinese models, they are just more focused on developing the features that integrate with HuggingFace.

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thereisonlythedance@reddit

How would you know? Something’s been off with llama.cpp for longer than the HF deal. Six months plus. Deepseek 3.2 still isn’t properly supported. GLM 5 only kind of works. Western models get instant love and day 1 support from that project, while rando vibe coders are left to try and integrate what are the actual cutting edge open source models.

You think I’m paranoid, I think you’re naive. Did you even read this article? There’s a lot going on at the top.

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No_Hunter_7786@reddit

Pretty wild that the same companies pushing AI safety are funding fear campaigns. Open weights matter more than ever if this is how closed labs operate

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Tommonen@reddit

Stop trying to mix the threat or chinese ai to local llms. The thread is at china hosted services and models, local models are completely different thing and has nothing to do with the threats.

How CCP handles your data from chinese services is a real threat, no getting around that.

When you download and run model locally, then you dont give your data to CCP and the issue is not there.

Yes many chinese companies give open local models which is nice, but the underlying reason for them to do that, is very likely because fools get fooled that a chinese service is ok, just because they run a open model there, which is conplete bullshit. When you run qwen on alibaba services, it really makes no difference if model is open weights or not.

And no US is no saint either when it comes to handling of data, but its nowhere as bad as china.

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kaeptnphlop@reddit

Neither our big tech companies, nor Chinese companies are to be trusted with your data.

Snowden leaks, the continued hollowing out of our 1st and 4th amendment, private companies collecting and selling your data so that law enforcement can get around getting those pesky warrants …

But, if I had to use an API, I’d rather use a Chinese one at this point because the us government doesn’t have as easy access to the data as the CCP does. But the CCP doesn’t have a police state attached to them that can do much with that data here in the US.

If US companies really were the good guys they’d do much more in regards to open-weight/open-source models.

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Tommonen@reddit

CCP can do anything they wabt with your data and are not limited by any laws or regulations. CCP is like king who can do anything with anything relating to china or chinese companies or their data.

US at least still has some byrocracy around this.

So your ”would use china api” rationale makes no sense.

EU services are only ones with sensible laws, but again china is 100 times worse than US, even if US is not ideal either. US wabts to be like china, but they need to change laws first, and i bet EU will follow soon

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hellomistershifty@reddit

You missed the point that the chinese government can do roughly fuckall with the information compared to my own government

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tavirabon@reddit

How CCP handles your data from chinese services is a real threat

Same can be said of every tech giant in the world.

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sirbago@reddit

There's plenty of evidence that hosted Chinese models are a serious risk. Is your point then that "it's ok because everyone does it"?

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crantob@reddit

The point is this is an r/LocalLLaMa, sir. The issue of local vs cloud is an old one and the principles apply regardless of country of hoster.

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crantob@reddit

The threat of using big-borg AI is equivalent whether provider is chinese or othercountry.

Not your computer? -> not your data.

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aeroumbria@reddit

Any sufficiently powerful and still power hungry government is a threat. Especially you own.

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soshulmedia@reddit

I think we'll keep hearing "But it is nowhere as bad as China" in The Free West(TM) until The West has its own USSR moment. (And it appears we're on track for that)

This is not at all meant to say that any other goverment, Chinese or otherwise, is remotely harmless or in any way better.

But repeating the propaganda mantra of The Free West(TM) becomes kind of stale along no privacy & total surveillance, "anti" terror laws, debanking to destruction of dissidents, ever-increasing collectivist-governmental micromanagement of everything (it's for the planet, it's for the children, it's for all of us, ...), a corrupt political class on all sides and everywhere, open conspiracies, entrenched monopolies and so forth.

All that is left now is this hollow saying "but at least The West is not (X)".

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Mochila-Mochila@reddit

until The West has its own USSR moment. (And it appears we're on track for that)

It's not "The West" but Anglos. And Anglos' USSR moment was revealed by Edward Snowden in 2013.

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soshulmedia@reddit

I am European, not Anglo nor American. I see the same patterns everywhere. (public debt, totalitarianism, psyops without ends, ...)

Where is your pocket of freedom and privacy?

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a_beautiful_rhind@reddit

In a way the west saw the Chinese system and thought "why don't we have that here". I don't like it, but it's starting to look the part.

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kaeptnphlop@reddit

Starting? Have you heard of Palantir?

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Kholtien@reddit

Why is it a threat?

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a_beautiful_rhind@reddit

Hacking, industrial espionage. I don't hear much about US groups doing that in Chinese systems. If you know some under publicized cases, share away.

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Kholtien@reddit

Why does it affect personal use?

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a_beautiful_rhind@reddit

It doesn't at all. Only signing up for their APIs does. Many people will go that route for the larger models. I also notice that Chinese hosters are less forgiving of VPNs and demand only gmail or phone numbers. Things that link your history with your identity.

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Tommonen@reddit

There are many quite complex reasons and expecting me to give full rundown on that topic in reddit comment is asking bit too much.

Since you likely are familiar with LLMs, i recommend asking about that from them, instead me having to do it for you and just copypaste tye answer here. That way you can also much easier ask follow up and clairfying questions

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ItilityMSP@reddit

Dude answer like that are how accounts get blocked.

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thread-e-printing@reddit

His employer will buy him a new one

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Automatic-Arm8153@reddit

Dumbass

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tavirabon@reddit

Oh, you don't even know what you're talking about then.

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itsmebenji69@reddit

I mean if you can’t argue for your own point, doesn’t that kinda show you’re talking out of your ass ?

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soshulmedia@reddit

This is a non-answer.

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thread-e-printing@reddit

And no US is no saint either when it comes to handling of data, but its nowhere as bad as china.

That's just your feeling, and it doesn't matter

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pixelpoet_nz@reddit

Anyone watching influencers already is on par with your average hamster in terms of critical thinking

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crantob@reddit

And they banned trisodium phosphate, so the brains all come out.. dirty

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Pleasant-Shallot-707@reddit

Oh…great…let’s lock the US out of the tools that the rest of the world is going to move to and force them to pay the Altman tax for anything useful

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Luvirin_Weby@reddit

That is the US economic model: build monopolies or oligopolies by using any and all dirty tricks, including regulatory capture and fearmongering.

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crantob@reddit

This goes back a long way to the Railroads, Canals and Andrew Clay's "American System".

The story of concentrated economic power's interplay with the state is fascinating for those tired of fiction.

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NetZeroSun@reddit

US is going to be increasingly isolated as it blocks international (and cheaper) goods and services, while the rest of the world moves on.

And you can have plenty of US company lobbyists ready to bribe, er politically donate to ensure that.

That and be ready for an onlsaught of 'bad china' news sound bytes as they amplify every fault or concern raised with them.

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BillDStrong@reddit

At the same time, open source and open weights Chinese models are an influence campaign. So, shrug.

They are both motivated by the same things, both politics and by money.

Open source itself is a political tool.

I don't get people not realizing this at all.

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crantob@reddit

Yeah open-source / foss is a tool that libertates the common man.

Thank you for the models, China.

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sunflowerapp@reddit

How? These models are open weights and hosted locally, how could them being a threat?

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CalBearFan@reddit

They advance Chinese propaganda which is ironic. Ask them about Tiananmen Square, the Uyghurs, or anything else China would prefer the world believe a false narrative about. For all we know, all the people in this post talking about how awful this is are Chinese bots.

It's a subtle form of propaganda, the same way 'news' derived from watching TikTok is never critical of China but rather promotes their ideas. Propaganda doesn't have to be WWII level posters (which all countries used), the Chinese have figured out how to be a lot more subtle and play the long game.

TL;DR Every business operating in China, by law, is beholden to the whims of the Chinese Communist Party.

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TheIncarnated@reddit

"Ask it about these specific things, SEE I'M RIGHT! CHINA BAD, U.S. GOOD!"

This talking point is so bad... Yes, obviously, they don't want the training data to include those items. But have you ever thought about the fact that people who care about those items, will see the LLM refuse and then idk... Go read up on it elsewhere?

LLMs are not a source of truth, they are a context function engine.

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CalBearFan@reddit

But people assume they are a source of truth and China models deliberately obscure that truth. It's not that they reply "Sorry, I can't tell you about the Uyghurs", they flat out lie and say "Nope, they're all terrorists who we had to jail to protect the Han majority".

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TheIncarnated@reddit

I always get "I'm an AI assistant and can help you with anything!"

I don't get any messages related to propaganda, outside of it flat out ignoring the statement. Interesting.

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kaeptnphlop@reddit

They threaten their bottom line.

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Athabasco@reddit

Local LLMs really are an existential threat to these LLMs as a service companies. If a single H100 can save a team of developers thousands in operating expenses per month, what do these LLMs as a service offer?

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xspider2000@reddit

AI giants fear fair competition with open source models

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DocHavelock@reddit

Taylor Lorenz is a hack, who accepts dark money from Saudi oil princes

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octopus_limbs@reddit

Their lead is gone. Even their lead against local is gone and the only way they make it competitive is by buying up all the RAM

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m3kw@reddit

and then you have other money that is funding wired to say stuff to go the other way?

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dogesator@reddit

Do people not understand how many degrees of separation this is? Virtually everyone in the world is mathematically within 5 direct degrees of separation from each-other.

The story here is that a campaign is funded by a certain non-profit, and the non-profit is linked to a certain superpac, and the superpac is bankrolled by the entites in question. That is already 3 degrees of separation, on the low end it would be atleast tens of thousands of other entities that you can try and draw a line and connect to such a campaign with 3 degrees of separation.

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thetaFAANG@reddit

I prefer my astroturfing to come from government social media interns

Not a weird corporate layer on top of the government so we can pretend to be different

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Bill_Salmons@reddit

What does she think China is doing? I mean, we know for a fact they brigade and bot all sorts of negative shit about American AI companies.

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soshulmedia@reddit

But centralized, surveilled general purpose AI ("chatbots") are a huge problem, no matter which gov or country ...

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oldcryptoman@reddit

And yet this sub regularly promotes the use of centralized, surveilled Chinese AI's.

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soshulmedia@reddit

It is a bunch of individuals here, not "this sub". But some certainly do.

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johnnyApplePRNG@reddit

Right as the rhetoric coming out from the CCP is turning borderline violent against the Jewish religion... very interesting.

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srigi@reddit

Typical western pigs. Instead of fighting with product (releasing own open weighrs) they release FUD. Not gonna lie, the Chinna’s approach is more likeable to me.

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leonbollerup@reddit

Western is typical a term used to define even EU.. might i suggest you to moderate your language.. EU.. is not involved in this.. this is american corps.. not all "western" is bad here..

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soshulmedia@reddit

Rest assured, the EU does all its own variants of bullshit to lead people into dystopian omnisurveilled technocracy.

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leonbollerup@reddit

Ohhhh yes… but atleast we pay for it… (no, that is not even a good thing)

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a_beautiful_rhind@reddit

China has gait detection surveillance deployed on public streets. I've seen the demos of tracking people down with their networks. The west is trying to catch up to that. EU, US, doesn't matter. Everyone's shit stinks.

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soshulmedia@reddit

This will only change when the vast majority realizes that govs are essentially glorified mafias.

How optimistic should one be about that?

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a_beautiful_rhind@reddit

As someone who actually saw 9/11 while in school and watched the rise of the internet and just how pilled people have gotten; very very pessimistic.

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soshulmedia@reddit

Things are changing, though. But yes, I tend to share the pessimistic outlook.

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mystery_biscotti@reddit

Whether or not influencers are getting paid for amplifying this viewpoint, there is a growing unrest in my social circle about Gen AI of any sort.

Between this and OS age gating, I wonder how long it'll take before we have to hide our free OS and our models. As in, physically hide the drives.

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Django_McFly@reddit

Is it really even dark money? Dario is constantly out there screaming that they need to close the door and the competitors that exist now should be the only competitors ever allowed to exist.

The Chinese Firewall totally cuts off outside traffic. Building a firewall like that would be un-American but America totally wants an Great American Firewall. The solution to the Great Chinese Firewall was the Great American Moneywall. Americans keep their total freedom, we just sue the hell out of any foreign site that let's Americans use it. Eventually they'll start banning Americans on their own or they'll agree to demands that are like suicide for them. We get to say we have no great firewall but we totally have a thing that provides the exact same benefits for the exact same reasons. It was the Biden Administration's crypto policy so it's not like McFly you're talking about something from 80 years ago, that would never happen today! Two years ago they were doing this and Trump seems way more willing to take unconventional approaches x he hates everything not American unless they're bending the knee.

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Turbulent_Pin7635@reddit

This is the bread and butter of US propaganda.

For cars, social media, electronics...

It is a modus operandi:

Latin America? Promote political instability and profit;

Europe? Pretend to be a partner, promote internal and border conflicts and profit.

Middle east and Africa? Dehumanize and brute force through war...profit

Asia? Restrain it economically and propagand that they are a threat... profit

Disclaimer: the people of US are victims of its own corporations and monopolies just like the rest of the world, don't take it personally.

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Mayion@reddit

Disclaimer: the people of US are victims of its own corporations and monopolies just like the rest of the world, don't take it personally.

No way. Take it personally lol. They have benefited from it for far too long and have the audacity to keep barking like dogs about freedom and peace that their glorious country stands Not all of them, but still - fuck the ones who turn a blind eye.

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draconic_tongue@reddit

still better than the eu. and there was a reason everyone with a brain went to the us in the last century. try not having wars or dumb shit trying to bring 50 different countries to the same page. it took 16 years to get rid of a dictator in an eu country because the eu doesn't do shit

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En-tro-py@reddit

what a braindead take... as if the US hasn't just proven their a house of cards, the rules don't matter - the swamp is full and you're ruled by a cabal of pedophiles

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ea_man@reddit

It's funny because when I get those bots posting pro GPT I just post them the table with the cost per token of DeepSeek / Kimi / Alibaba. When you have a clearly inferior offer I don't see how spamming lies on discussion forum would help.

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Direct_Turn_1484@reddit

Golly where could that money be coming from?

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pneuny@reddit

https://dnyuz.com/2026/05/01/a-dark-money-campaign-is-paying-influencers-to-frame-chinese-ai-as-a-threat/ full article, no paywall.

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ServiceOver4447@reddit

A dark money campaign is paying influencers to pretend that dark money campaign is paying influencers to blame chinese ai

chinese ai is full on stealing from western ai

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Hipcatjack@reddit

found one!

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Weird-Consequence366@reddit

I have a slur ready to go for any AI influencers I meet

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Fastest_light@reddit

If the source of money is known, it is not dark. US and industries have the right to be concerned about what their rivals are doing. Now one has to wonder if Wired was paid for post like this by Chinese AI companies.

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-dysangel-@reddit

And China is doing the same back. Surprise!

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Zeioth@reddit

I've been using deepseek since day one and for daily research, the chain of thought thingy works on an entirely different level.

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Gargantuan_Cinema@reddit

China winning the ASI arms race is the biggest threat to democracy and the West. Recursive self improving AI will be the greatest invention in human history and I don't want the CCP to be in control of it. This power should not be concentrated in a few people and needs democratic oversight whereever it is developed first.

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NNN_Throwaway2@reddit

The biggest threat to western "democracy" is the united states.

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thread-e-printing@reddit

If you don't want me to use your mouth, then why are you walking around on your knees

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Automatic-Arm8153@reddit

Regardless of AI China has/had already won.

They own manufacturing, eventually the pieces would’ve fallen even if LLM’s never came into existence

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