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by ericmay·6d ago·view on hn ↗
It’s rather amusing to me to read comments like this, and then simultaneously whenever a Chinese company or team releases open-weight models or whatever there is a giant round of applause, America is so behind, and there’s nothing but positive things to say about the intelligent, creative, and well-intentioned Chinese engineers (which is true, America certainly doesn’t have a monopoly on great people). Don’t you know? Only China can release good, open weight models and American companies can’t compete. Oh by the way all the spend is for nothing because China alone can release open-weight models thus destroying American AI.

When an American company does anything? Doom. And. Gloom. The engineers? Taken to the slaughterhouse! America? Behind! The public? Bamboozeled!

> This is open weights because Meta couldn't monetize it in any other way than to cloud developer's judgement of their reputation.

I’ve been told over and over this doesn’t matter. Just needs to be cheap and open. Or maybe that’s only when Chyna is involved?

Sorry this post is a bit snarky but it really is something to behold. And certainly I don’t know the OP’s opinions on Chinese open weight models. Perhaps they agree with me.

19 comments
While composing a reply to a comment throwing tons of shade on American AI, I took some time to check out the commenter’s HN profile. Their comment history was about 50% such comments. Their submission history started with an article about how Russia was unfairly blamed for some hacking campaign.

It’s entirely possible that this is not a foreign influence campaign. Perhaps there’s a group here that is simply anti-American as its primary interest, and passionately so to upvote each other.

On the other hand, one should not discount the value of HN as tastemaker and trendsetter. Also, it would be fairly easy to run bots here. I wouldn’t be surprised if HN were a field of combat for many parallel influence campaigns, foreign and domestic.

> On the other hand, one should not discount the value of HN as tastemaker and trendsetter.

I would encourage dedicated readers here to aggressively and persistently discount the value of HN as a tastemaker and trendsetter.

HN is actually a trailing indicator on tastes and trends, essentially by design. Things only make it to the front page if they get submitted and voted upward by a large number of people. That means it’s all stuff that is public and seems cool to a bunch of random people browsing a website. Not exactly cutting edge.

Basically every community, online or not, over-indexes on its own importance. Like how random small towns can get so worried about international terrorists targeting them. To folks who love HN, of course the great forces of the world would be attracted to compete here. Look how obviously awesome it is, right?

Paul Graham said HN was set up on the theory that it would efficiently surface great ideas and entrepreneurs for Ycombinator. Needless to say, that did not pan out. (How often do you see PG or any YC leadership here anymore?) Honestly I am mystified as to why YC continues to operate it at all.

I think you're wrong. To gut-check, I asked a panel of AI models "What platfroms should be considered tastemaker or trendsetter for adopting new AI models". Here's the part of the answer relevant to this discussion:

> AI X/Twitter — a few hundred accounts effectively set the narrative in the first 24 hours; vibe checks here outrun benchmarks.

> r/LocalLLaMA — the open-weights kingmaker; a model that fails here doesn't get quantized, and unquantized means unadopted.

> Hacker News, and increasingly YouTube/Discord for the practitioner layer.

Source: https://pellmell.ai/s/aefaa217b57ed50be9e2a4b8c9f3173e

So - presumably you have another site in mind that is better. I'd be intrigued to know which one you would recommend.
There's literally a Chinese-funded influence campaign against American AI: https://openai.com/index/disrupting-malicious-uses-of-ai-dat...
As if US labs don't lobby politicians to get regulatory capture.

It's much easier to buy politicians in US, e.g. Elon bought POTUS for ~200M, Anthropic revenue is 40B, imagine what they can do

lol you believe this bullshit? "likely PRC-origin cluster" what an awesome amount of proof corporations need to convince the gullible.

Why not "OpenAI used simplified chinese to create a fake prc-origin campaign and media buzz to convince the public they actually love data-centers and anti-datacenter sentiment is a psyop" there's an equal amount of proof provided for either scenario.

... and I think it's a big mistake to say, as some people are, that people are opposed to data centers in their backyard because of a Chinese influence campaign. There is also reason to think that some "foreign agents" are doing it for the money

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/aug/10/indonesia-clic...

https://humsci.stanford.edu/feature/political-post-real-or-m...

  > wouldn’t be surprised if HN were a field of combat for many parallel influence campaigns, foreign and domestic.
I would be shocked if it weren’t.
Would be nice if there were a hn feature, userscript, or plugin to just filter comments from new accounts. Bonus if there was some sentiment analysis or llm-based analysis to filter out unsubstantiated inflammatory comments too.
The account we're discussing is from 2014. How much earlier do you want?
> Perhaps there’s a group here that is simply anti-American as its primary interest, and passionately so to upvote each other.

Considering this site has international users, it's not hard to find this, especially right now. Hell, Canada is in this group currently.

Good points, I personally believe that if/when China takes the lead, they will immediately stop releasing model weights. It only makes sense as a strategy to counterbalance (current) American labs' monopoly on frontier models.

Holding both those positions would be hypocritical all right, but are you sure it's the same people commenting/voting in both cases? I don't think there's a strong consensus on Hacker News. Even something like the time of day an article is posted might get different engagement depending on who is active in which time zones.

> I don't think there's a strong consensus on Hacker News. Even something like the time of day an article is posted might get different engagement depending on who is active in which time zones.

Based on my own experience and reading, I do think there's a general consensus on this site but I could certainly be wrong about that. I'm less concerned about hypocrisy per se, it's more that the arguments that are used, even if by a minority, seem to apply in only circumstances in which China releases open-weight models.

I am aligned with your viewpoint as well. And I've repeatedly argued it. If China were to take the lead the US can then just release open-weight models. Folks say having the lead doesn't matter because China releases cheaper open-weight models. We can just let them take the lead and then do it back to them.

I see it as a strategy to increase capital costs for American frontier labs. By eroding the expected ROI of frontier labs, you deter private investment into them, which slows OpenAI and Anthropic in particular, giving space for the laggards to catch up.
Free models help move robots; a complement. I can foresee the models staying free.
> I don't think there's a strong consensus on Hacker News.

There are diverse viewpoints. However there are some topics and threads where it becomes obvious that the comments are going to tilt toward one viewpoint. Participating in those threads with a different opinion will get your comments downvoted to -2 within minutes even if it’s well-written and factually sound.

After this happens a couple times you learn not to engage with those threads because it only takes a few zealous downvoters to bury anything you write. So the illusion of consensus persists.

Concrete example: There was that fake (AI hallucinated) report that Meta spent $2B lobbying on something that was popular here months ago. I actually read the repo and report and noticed the AI hallucination, as well as pointed out that $2B in lobbying spend by a single company was not plausible or supported by any evidence. It didn’t matter how I wrote it, it would risk getting downvotes and angry replies about “How dare you defend Meta!” Some people are here for the anger and to feel revenge against the enemies they think they know (like the US) and will cheer on anything that goes against those enemies, regardless of the other facts surrounding it. Factually accuracy often takes a back seat to pushing agendas.

Of the two competing models Meta compare Glimmer to in the post, one is Google's Gemma 4.

At this size open weight model, a Western company was already state of the art, Meta is joining that competition.

And my memory is that Gemma 4 got little criticism or doom/gloom. And no, it isn't Chinese.

Likewise the Inkling open weights announcement, Thinking Machines model, was also not criticised.

The comment about Meta is because of particular dislike of Meta, because of their business model, and how harmful they've ultimately turned out to be for the world - disproportionately so relative to their benefits to the world, compared to other big tech companies.

The GP is claiming Meta is an awful company for what they have done and how they continue to treat their employees. That’s a perfectly ok opinion to hold, and many seem to agree.

Have DeepSeek, Moonshot, or the other Chinese AI companies done such things that attract moral outrage?

If they have, would you ever know about it? CCP controls the media, the companies, and the people. What's your evidence that Chinese employers are treating their employees better other than there's silence?
Chinese tech companies make their employees work 16 hour days, 6 days per week, compared to them Meta are absolutely saints.
The Chinese government owns half of every Chinese don't they? They've done some pretty horrific things.
Nobody wants to live in a world where one party dominates due to access to superior AI and the others have to fear it (well, except for a few psycopaths who would gamble on being in control of that party). So the underdog will always be the good guy in this race. It has been framed as a race between countries, so Meta fails to be the underdog because they're in the wrong country. That's all.
I don’t think Meta is bad for releasing open models, but are you really going to ignore all the terrible things they’ve done over the years just because of that?

As for DeepSeek or any other Chinese lab, I’m not aware of any practices that would make me consider them a bad actor. Can you say the same about OpenAI, Meta or Anthropic?

It makes me wonder why this dynamic exists here, and I do wonder at times how much our conversations here are influenced by China in a top-down fashion. I'd prefer to think that HN is pretty organic, but that is probably a naive thought.
There are comments like the one you're replying to on literally every Chinese model release. This is textbook goomba fallacy, btw.
Had to look this up.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Goomba_fallacy

> When an American company does anything? Doom. And. Gloom. The engineers? Taken to the slaughterhouse! America? Behind! The public? Bamboozeled!

I think I've always had a pretty healthy amount of cynicism towards China. In recent years my cynicism towards the US has increased significantly. I don't see all of my US peers with cynicism, but I think you're living in an age of grift, corporate capture, and unheard of corruption. I also think there's nuance to both. There are some US and Chinese companies and people that I do respect regardless of what's going on politically. (Meta / Zuck isn't one of them though...)

I live in the 51st state though, so maybe I'm just overreacting...

Apparently Americans haven’t got the memo yet that the world is moving closer to China.
I don't think that's entirely true. As an example you can look at how the European Union is increasingly putting up trade barriers with China and identifying opportunities for new rules and regulations to prevent Chinese dumping as America is also trying to do.

Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and other countries participate in freedom of navigation and combined arms exercises because they perceive China to be a threat to their countries. [2]

I think it's more of a mixed bag. You see a lot of public talking points, and in Europe specifically a lot more healthy discussion about not being militarily as dependent on the United States as it has in the past and looking itself to follow Trump's lead to onshore capabilities (cloud for example) but I wouldn't read such moves as moving closer to China so much as they are hedging their bets a bit more.

Here's an article [1] that was reporting on this topic that I found interesting along with a select quote from the article:

  > Luxembourg’s Prime Minister Luc Frieden said Thursday at an EU summit that China is “an existential threat for our industries.”

  > Even Germany, whose economy has long relied on exports to China, is alarmed. Chancellor Friedrich Merz said this week that Beijing keeps its currency up to 30% undervalued, calling this “a massive competitive disadvantage.”
[1] https://www.wsj.com/economy/trade/chinese-export-flood-tests...

[2] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/u-s-and-9-allies-just-h... - this isn't the "best" article but I just grabbed one to illustrate the point.

The Americans are writing that memo.
Can you point to a lot of posts lauding the Chinese government based on the release of Chinese open models? Because that would be the equivalent to contrast with the OP.
both countries are authoritarian. both are using this "free" tech to spy on people and control them.
I suspect it's just the generalized anti-West/anti-American sentiments extended into anything and everything. Anything that makes the US look anything close to good goes against their cause and therefore must be countered and talked down.

But you're not wrong about the bias here. You just don't see many comments talking about it because they get mass flagged/downvoted for obvious reasons.

These sentiments aren’t formed in a vacuum. America is becoming increasingly oligarchic and corrupt with decades of experience of companies profiting off harming people and lying through their teeth and Meta is like one of the worst offenders. They are pissing on every ally they have and once again started a war and both have material impacts on other countries.

Americans seem to take the US’ geeat reputation for granted and don’t realize how it has slipped and what that means. They also take for granted that China BAD is truth when this sentiment basically just sprang out of nowhere when the west realized it was their geopolitical rival. But to the rest of the worlds citizens, China is not starting any wars and is the source of cheap goods and innovation to other countries. EV batteries recently. The US is now directly causing high oil prices with their war and exports their rapacious companies like “prediction markets” which are 90% sports gambling now to the rest of the world. Meanwhile the classic American move to these kinds of comments is to claim that negative sentiment MUST be part of some bot campaign because surely no one could actually dislike the great America??

Those factors are all rightly part of the sentiment.

> America is becoming increasingly oligarchic and corrupt with decades of experience of companies profiting off harming people and lying through their teeth and Meta is like one of the worst offenders.

Isn't China a single-party state that is run by a corrupt autocrat, has literally enslaved people to build products, and disappears people for saying the wrong things? If America is becoming more like China, shouldn't you dislike China more than America?

> when this sentiment basically just sprang out of nowhere when the west realized it was their geopolitical rival

Well this isn't a sentiment that sprang out of nowhere. It is a sentiment that emerged based on real or perceived behavior.

> China is not starting any wars

Maybe not yet, but they certainly aren't behaving nicely toward Taiwan or other countries in and around the South China Sea, are they? The Philippines and Vietnam come to mind immediately, of course there are others.

> the source of cheap goods and innovation to other countries

But if those cheap goods run your country's businesses out of business and you have lots of people without work, is that a good thing?

> The US is now directly causing high oil prices with their war

The US didn't ask Iran to pursue building nuclear weapons, supply Russia for its ongoing war in Ukraine, or provide weapons and funding to groups in Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine which have led to instability in the region. If oil prices are too high, the rest of the world should have worked to address American concerns about Iran. They failed to act, and so the US eventually just did what it thought was necessary.

> rapacious companies like “prediction markets” which are 90% sports gambling

Before sports gambling was a thing in my state (Ohio) I seem to recall traveling to other countries and they had sports gambling too. Maybe I'm wrong?

> Meanwhile the classic American move to these kinds of comments is to claim that negative sentiment MUST be part of some bot campaign because surely no one could actually dislike the great America??

I can't speak for others but since I started this thread I'll chime in. I specifically disagree with the arguments put forth about AI strategy with respect to the US and China. I have no idea and frankly, aside from erroneously being accused of a bot once [1], have no interest in trying to guess if someone is a bot or not. Sometimes I just assume everyone is, because really what's the difference when it's all just text?

Others may feel differently and believe that there is a brigade of bots. I'd ask them for concrete evidence.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48199327

why is america and its people anti-china? take a chill pill and worry about yourselves instead of other people :)
> Only China can release good, open weight models and American companies can’t compete. Oh by the way all the spend is for nothing because China alone can release open-weight models thus destroying American AI.

Let me be blunt and let me say: you don't understand why we people support Chinese models.

1. Chinese labs started with open weight models, US labs started with dooms day narrative

2. US VC based companies must become greedy to win and return the money, Chinese companies can make 1/10 of that revenue and still be happy

3. Meta in this case, started nicely with Llama, then switched to closed models, kicked out researchers to build data labeler CEO empire inside Meta. Now opening again, what's next? closing again?

US companies published their research on transformers. The only reason Chinese companies have any models at all is open US research...

Add distillation to that, and the entire Chinese AI sphere is really just an offshoot of public US AI information...

Deepseek never fucked us over. zuck has. A decades of harm creation run doesn’t get excused by the US flag. Zuck is not on your team and if you can’t see that by now, oh my.
> When an American company does anything? Doom. And. Gloom

Meta, "an American company". Being the main driver of an ethnic cleansing in Myanmar - and just sticking your head in the sand when told about it - is just another day's affairs at the average American Acme Inc.

These are comments on a release by easily the most societally damaging Western tech company there is. They so far easily beat Flock, Palantir, Anduril and so on, as a result of their incomparable scale. You're just ignoring that and pretending any negative comments are because it's an American company rather than Meta. That's much more FUD than any pro-China comments I've seen on HN.

Get off HN Mark, you have ten million pervert glasses to sell.

Sorry this comment is a bit snarky, but yours is indeed a sight to behold.

There is a big astroturfing going on social media platforms by the chinese. Did you notice 'day in a life of unmarried 30 yr old lady in china' videos flooding usa social media.

Regular ppl in the west now hold mildly positive views of the ccp and how 'advanced' china is than usa.

Then there are europeans who now are looking for china to give them the technology handout now that relationship with usa has soured.

Propaganda in China is distributed, decentralized—ie it's the responsibility of every minor bureaucrat, clerk, and white-collar worker to produce and engage with propaganda.

See:

https://collaborate.princeton.edu/en/publications/decentrali...

https://yiqingxu.org/replications/lpxx2025.html

https://cira.exovera.com/conferences/engineers-of-the-human-...

The interesting thing is that China began as an agrarian economy and quickly modernized via influence/direction of the CCP.

The United States used to have a dominant middle class that was geographically distributed (cities & rural areas inclusive), but the advent of the tech economy has also been having a similar effect here as it did in China: massive wealth accumulation in Tier 1-3 cities and everyone else being largely left behind.

It'll be interesting to see if there's convergence in the next decade or so, especially with the GOP reducing regulation and increasing the explicit capitalist priorities here. TBH, though, as a generally well-informed political outsider, the feeling I have is that the US government is slow, bulky, inefficient, balkanized and overall poorly run compared to the Chinese government. We'll likely either slowly improve authoritarian efficiency and become more like the CCP ... or we'll pivot left and move more toward the EU model, but we're floundering around right now paying lip service to both.

I only see those type of videos on 小红书