I wish. The government, regardless of party, wants AI for mass surveillance and perpetual war. It is paid off and lobbied and effectively another arm of the billionaires. Holding big companies responsible for their actions won't happen as long as big companies control the political apparatus. Like, when have we ever seen big companies receive more than a slap on the wrist? They are basically free to do anything, hack, murder, crash the economy, perpetuate genocide.
That's why something is a crime if you or I were to do it but not a crime when these companies do so.
But never fear, they will constantly tell us how what they're doing is for the sake of democracy or safety or ethics or whatever the doublethink of the day is.
IMO US vs Chinese data vacuuming is a false choice. One of the main benefits of these open weights models is that you can get the privacy and cost savings by hosting your own model in cloud infrastructure.
Open weights models are only 4.5 months behind closed weight ones.
The fact that US considers propping its flagship technology by blacklisting competitors demonstrates how small the US competitive advantage really is.
Hosting DeepSeek Pro yourself is gonna be wildly expensive though?
You have a wide choice of providers available, so if you can find one you trust you can get inference without data harvesting and it's still very cheap. But dedicated HW is insanely inefficient.
Opus estimates you can do it for $13k/month if you get committed pricing on the HW.
The USA has an entire economic system to financialize your personal data and obfuscate your privacy. China can just sniff on their citizens API Calls, and use that to distill models.
They could just be flagging that they're considering blacklisting as a way to get some more Trump coin sold or other bribes. Or indeed to get further money from USA companies - which way will Trump decide, only the numbers in his family's bank accounts can give us a clue.
The poor capitalists with all the money and power, making the decisions at the highest levels, guiding society's direction... can you imagine they might be responsible for the shittier and shittier turns our world is taking?
Class is the shape of power and exploitation under capitalism. Some own, others work to enrich those that own. That's all class is. Being frank about the real power differences in our society and our world isn't an ism.
It also harms US' Asian allies, which makes them more dependent on US energy, increasing US leverage to push them toward proxy war with China. Very similar to the situation in Europe!
Can you please describe this proxy war against China. I'd like to give you the benefit of the doubt but you seem to also be implying that the US made Putin invade Ukraine.
> Russia stated that Ukraine joining NATO would start a war. The US began that process knowing Russia's reaction. Russia did what it said it would do.
This has nothing to do with reality. Ukraine wanted to join NATO in 2008, but allies did not support it and that was the end of it. Yet, Russia still invaded in 2014, over the deepening EU-Ukraine economic relations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union%E2%80%93Ukraine...
Russia did not threaten anyone with war over the prospect of NATO membership. In the first years of the war, Russia did not even acknowledge that those were Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine. Russian government claimed that it was a civil war.
This is an intimidation tactic and not a real threat. If the vague threat is enough to prevent something from happening, then it has served its purpose. If not, then the vagueness gives an exit to do nothing.
Pretty much every country that has joined NATO since the end of the Cold War has seen a flood of such threats, Finland and Sweden most recently[1]:
"Finland's accession to Nato will cause serious damage to bilateral Russian-Finnish relations and the maintaining of stability and security in the Northern European region. Russia will be forced to take retaliatory steps, both of a military-technical and other nature, in order to neutralise the threats to its national security that arise from this."
Russia has attacked only Georgia and Ukraine, the two countries that did not end up joining NATO. There, the threats achieved their goal and shaped the battlefield in favor of Russia, which was then exploited. Elsewhere, the fake act of "We're soooo concerned with our national security" did not yield the desired results, and Russians moved on.
Burns and many other Western diplomats have been surprisingly ignorant of such games, treat Russians as primitive savages who are incapable of manipulating people (despite it being a deeply ingrained feature of their culture), and take their words at face value, which produces the kind of memos Burns wrote. The 2008 decision to deny Georgia and Ukraine entry into NATO is nowadays widely considered a mistake. The views Burns held and promoted in the memo made the war more likely instead of preventing it.
> Burns warned of serious consequences arising from NATO’s eastward expansion to include Ukraine and Georgia
And then Ukraine accession disappeared from the policy menu. Then Putin annexed Crimea. Pretending Putin invaded Ukraine with any more strategic coherence than Trump going into Iran reveals a reality-defying bias in a source.
Was Russia invading South Ossetia and Crimea also engineered by the United States to switch Europe to American energy? Or is it more reasonable to just conclude that Russia is expansionist and Ukraine has been seeking the protection of an organization that has never been attacked by a major power?
Whatever the case, I'd love to hear your Asian proxy war plan. Japan and Korea vs China?
Georgia acceding to NATO was viewed no differently than Ukraine by Russia and Russia clearly stated that this would cause a war, which it did. It's strange to me that you think that the US had nothing to do with expanding NATO to these countries despite Russia's threats of war if this happened. What do you think the US' role was?
Regarding Asia, look at US' vying to have unfettered access for its Air Force over the Strait of Malacca, despite popular disfavor by Indonesians, after a $15 billion energy deal with their government. The US having command over the South Korean military - in what world is that in South Korea's interest? Vietnam's new dependence on US LNG as a result of the attack on Iran. Look at the disputes in the South China Sea despite the disputants having China as their biggest trading partner, and the disputes rising exactly at the time of the US' pivot to Asia. Same pattern with Taiwan - a plan that has been in place for decades but which has become a political token coinciding with the pivot to Asia.
Japan and Korea vs China sounds absurd doesn't it? Why would they pick a fight with their biggest trading partner, who also appears much stronger than them militarily? Surely it's not in their interest right? Yet that's exactly what we've been seeing (belligerence from Japan's PM over Taiwan is a case in point). Does rising belligerence against a key trading partner/US geopolitical rival sound familiar?
Meanwhile Russia can't defeat Ukraine but Europe is convinced it has to arm itself and join the proxy war. This aligns with the 2026 National Defense Strategy - feeding proxies into wars against US rivals, what the US euphemistically refers to as "'burden sharing".
> Georgia acceding to NATO was viewed no differently than Ukraine by Russia and Russia clearly stated that this would cause a war
You put a lot of faith in Russian rhetoric. They've made many hollow declarations before and during the war, particularly around territorial integrity and western support. Meanwhile Putin has made all sorts of claims to contradict this casus belli you cling to, e.g. Russia has a historical right to Ukraine. And I won't even start with Medvedev.
> It's strange to me that you think that the US had nothing to do with expanding NATO
I don't recall saying the US had nothing to do with it. But this wasn't the unilateral action by the US that you asserted. And Russia doesn't have veto power over NATO or Ukraine or Georgia. Their warmongering threats don't suddenly mean their neighbors are no longer sovereign. Nor does it mean "it's someone else's fault that they are forced to invade". And yes, the same also applies to Trump's stupid Monroe Doctrine 2.0.
> Japan and Korea vs China sounds absurd doesn't it?
Yes, it does. And brave rhetoric from politicians doesn't somehow equate to the US puppeteering them into a proxy war. You seem to think that US power is awful and should be resisted but when Russia tells its neighbors not to join a defensive alliance, the smaller countries should oblige. And that Japan has to walk on eggshells around China because of its military inferiority.
In any event, your only evidence of an impeding proxy war is Japanese "belligerence" and US influence. Unremarkable.
> And Russia doesn't have veto power over NATO or Ukraine or Georgia. Their warmongering threats don't suddenly mean their neighbors are no longer sovereign.
both can be true at the same time: russia does not have veto power and nobody can stop russia from invading ukraine if russia wants to keep ukraine from nato. unfortunately, being morally right does not protect you from a bully
In fact the commenter’s point is quite relevant. A central characteristic of the information war is to dismiss the “other side”’s POV as propaganda. This works to prop up one’s own propaganda.
The article makes this quite clear:
> Those words — foreign digital interference — are very important.
> The West has neglected to fight on the battlefield that has been right in front of them the entire time — the internet.
It’s remarkable that the author thinks this is true. The issue is the foreign source of the propaganda, not the propaganda itself, and in fact the solution is more propaganda, according to them.
By limiting our focus to pro-Russia edits, and refusing to acknowledge the larger context, we let ourselves become unwitting dupes, casualties in this information war.
The problem is this goodwill seemingly never works both ways.
When the western side of things does something bad or controversial, it's all about how the west is bad and any comment on other actors is deflecting.
When the eastern side of things does something bad though, we must never stop reflecting on how the west is also bad, and also be aware of how our biases might actually paint an unfairly worse picture of the east.
Which, funny enough, would be an ideal result of western propaganda.
First of all, I'd like to thank you for a more nuanced and substantial comment. It stands in stark difference from the one I responded to.
While I agree the author of the article is either ignorant of or conveniently ignoring the fact that the West has certainly done plenty to "...fight on the battlefield...[of] the internet", I also think it's a mistake to simply refer to Pravda-fr.com or Storm-1516 as merely "the other side". It's manifestly propaganda.
I have lots of energy for talking about all the messed up things the US government has and continues to do, esp. in the information space. I just don't know why we can't talk about Russian or Chinese imperialism or propaganda without doing so. It's not zero-sum; saying bad things about Russia is not saying great things about its enemies, and vice-versa.
I never said this was zero sum game. I just think its humorous when folks get spun up about russian or chinese propoganda, as if our own intelligence agencies aren't actively managing (to a far greater degree, I assume, due to their location in western datacenters) online sources like wikipedia.
It's all propaganda. They even wrote a book (the book) about it:
Why can't I get "spun up" about Russian or Chinese propaganda AND US propaganda?
Why is it that you are free to assume that the magnitude of US interference is far greater than that of Russian or Chinese interference, but we can't even suggest that Russia is perpetrating what you've characterized as a relatively small operation?
As I said, I'll spend all day talking about the crimes of the US government, but it won't stop me from similarly litanizing those of China or Russia. I don't factor the former in my judgement if the latter, and vice versa.
> Why can't I get "spun up" about Russian or Chinese propaganda AND US propaganda?
You absolutely can.
> Why is it that you are free to assume that the magnitude of US interference is far greater than that of Russian or Chinese interference, but we can't even suggest that Russia is perpetrating what you've characterized as a relatively small operation?
I gave my reasoning: the servers are hosted in western nations and I assume that western intelligence agencies have far more control over them. If we were talking yandex, I'd assume the russians had more influence. It's a reasonable assumption, but I'm not too wedded to it.
> As I said, I'll spend all day talking about the crimes of the US government, but it won't stop me from similarly litanizing those of China or Russia. I don't factor the former in my judgement if the latter, and vice versa.
Human rights are a pretext of US controlled media to advocate for expanding US imperial interests. Notice how US support of Israel, Gulf state dictatorships, South American dictatorships are glossed over whenever warmongering toward China or Iran is advocated with the thin excuse being human rights.
Anyone who claims a one sided information war has let themself become a casualty of that war.
Whether is a pretext or not is less important. I don’t mind if the U.S is overthrowing a dictatorship for his own interests while using democracy and human rights as a pretext if at least is trying to enforce a human rights and democracy agenda once the new gov and usually U.S does it with more or less success.
You can’t really expect people to go to war with no national interest. I think for a while democracy was more than a pretext as it helped the U.S keep away communism from its own shores.
> while using democracy and human rights as a pretext if at least is trying to enforce a human rights and democracy agenda once the new gov and usually U.S does it with more or less success.
You mean like in Chile and Indonesia where there were legitimately elected leaders who we got kicked out of power leading to mass killings?
I recommend a book called The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins. It really knocked me back and was a pretty sad story.
The US installs dictatorships, overthrows democracies, supports genocide, mass targets civilians in its bombing campaigns. It doesn't care about human rights or democracy except as an excuse to start new wars which only harm the people it claims to want to help with its wars.
it does care about human rights but of course the national interest is first otherwise why they didn’t just support dictatorships in South Korea, West Germany, Japan, Taiwan etc ? The U.S is not great but is the best alternative. China, Russia and pretty bad because they don’t have freedom not even for their own people
That's why something is a crime if you or I were to do it but not a crime when these companies do so.
But never fear, they will constantly tell us how what they're doing is for the sake of democracy or safety or ethics or whatever the doublethink of the day is.
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