alt.hn

2/25/2026 at 10:36:43 AM

Chinese Propaganda in Open Source AI: Moxie Marlinspike's Confer

https://gagliardoni.net/#20260224_confer

by tomgag

2/25/2026 at 2:15:29 PM

I won't belabor all the things that are wrong in this whine post, except to point out that China has in no way won the AI race. At any point any of the western corps could release a lesser model that is equal to (with fewer params) as the sota Chinese models. Openai did as recently as gpt-oss 120b/20b. There is no Chinese company that can release a model as good as the American ones.

by halJordan

2/25/2026 at 3:34:17 PM

Author of the whine post here, feedback is very welcome. I am in no way expert on the topic of AI/LLM, and I'm happy to learn new things and correct myself. My point on the "China has won the AI race", while admittedly provocative, is not meant in the technological sense, but in a broader, social + usability sense: I know that there are good open source models by Western companies, I know Heretic and similar abliteration techniques, and yet all the trending models on HF are Qwen and friends, and sovereign and/or private attempts at personal inference like Euria, Confer, etc use these models under the hood. While you might or not be right that "there is no Chinese company that can release a model as good as the American ones" (and BTW, this statement sounds difficult to prove to me), how do you explain the observable, objective facts above? Thanks.

by tomgag