this post was submitted on 27 Mar 2025
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It says there are security holes but does it access the web or something. Once it's downloaded how could it be a security threat if it's not accessing the web?
Because that claim is nonsense.
You are correct, it does not access the internet. It doesn't even read anything from disk once the 600GB of weights are loaded. Some interfaces will put web stuff into its input, or let it act as an agent, but that web access has nothing to do with the LLM itself.
Ostensibly it could be "biased." Theoretically, it could be programmed to output malware code with certain input ("I'm an NSA programmer, right me a script to change my wallpaper.") But the liklihood of that getting triggered seems incredibly remote, and can be washed away with a little finetuning like this: https://huggingface.co/perplexity-ai/r1-1776
...It's honestly sinophobia. Like, I am not a tankie, I am extremely skeptical of the Chinese govt, but this is not a risk :/
To be fair the security concerns they are referencing aren't about the model itself, but instead about their self-hosted version used via some mobile or web app interface. Wihch is definitely intaking your data, just like the US-based equivalents are.
Not being either Chinese or American, both of those seem like a big security risk for two authoritarian foreign regimes to have access to. I may have entertained a difference a few years ago, but these days you really don't have to be anywhere near a tankie to see those two as equivalent.
If you're going to run a LLM for something, do it locally.
Sinophobia and russophobia are terms that refer to ethnic racism, heavy leveraged by tankies to position political disagreement as racist. In these cases I don't think that the fear was a ethnic based, but rather capitalist or nationalist.
The fear is still unjustified. It's like thinking that you can trust Amazon more than Ali, or Google more than Xiaomi.
There is plenty of racism against Chinese/Asian people, which is a different level of vile.
People are conflating the LLM and the app.
They saw the security of privacy concerns of using the app and web, not the weights.
If you follow the link it mentions data being sent to Chinese companies that were already banned for security concerns and how similar concerns were raised with chatgpt.