Yeah, the whole article reads like “China says good things, but actually, they are just bad things in disguise! Chinese AI is cheaper and in some cases better, but actually its all a master plan for world domination! Remember, guys, China bad!!!”
Of course the software created in China would intentionally try to follow Chinese laws. Just as American software follows the laws of the US. However, China made their models open-source, so people can tinker with them and (possibly) make a fork without the censorship, and run it locally without any data being sent who knows where. While ChatGPT, Gemini and all the rest are closed-source, and you have zero control over them, so you can’t even hope to circumvent the propaganda that’s built into those models.
But yeah, Tiananmen square 1989, China bad, let’s all stop thinking about anything
I don’t think this really is whataboutism. If I responded with, for instance, “But ChatGPT is way less energy efficient and wastes tons of water”, then it would be. But I believe I’m comparing apples to apples. And I’m not singling out specifically ChatGPT or Gemini or what have you, I’m saying that every LLM suffers from the same problem, whether it’s from USA, China, Russia, Argentina, Mongolia or Uganda. ChatGPT and Gemini are just big and well-known examples. Also DeepSeek is quite new, at least it’s popularity is, so we’ll have to wait and see whether these “but DeepSeek…” comments will appear.