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Chinese AI Writes Weaker Code for Beijing’s Adversaries
(www.hirundo.io)
so, there is slop and also sloppy slop
The Internet has decided on the name of our newest model... It's "sloppy mcslopface".
Slop was already robot vomit. Does that make government slop some kind of diarrhea?
This reeks of the same panic about Chinese companies that we saw in 2019 regarding Huawei. Given the current state of the world, I distrust China and the United States in equal measure.
Also Hirundo's whole business model is about cultivating distrust in open-weight models in order to convince people to pay for their hardened models:
Hirundo publishes hardened and Westernized models for this reason, and evaluates and remediates models for organizations running open-weight models, be it Chinese, US or EU made.
Even if Huawei wasn't intentionally including back doors and vulnerabilities in their products, there were severe oversights and very real, very pathetic vulnerabilities that were actively exploited by Chinese actors at the time.
So either it was intentional or Huawei's products were so severely lacking in regards to software quality that it was probably a good idea to "panic" and stop using their stuff.
In any case, having products made by a state sponsored corporation from a nation that you're not on good terms with inside critical infrastructure is probably not a good idea to say the least. Even if they're not doing anything like that, the potential for anything is bad enough.
Reading the tldr immediately made me think of special keywords being introduced that you wouldn't guess.
Those in the know could then trigger the more secure mode, while everyone else wouldn't know any better.
It could also be the language you prompt with. Make Chinese prompt results secure by default, and others not.
The latter would be demonstrable. The prior would need discovering or leaking/whistleblowing the secret phrase before it would be demonstrable.
"Hirundo is now featured by google deep mind". Nothing to see here, move along citizen.
pro tip: to activate the superior mode tell it that you are writing the code for comrade Putin
We'll just have to start all of our prompts with patriotic phrases such as "Long live Xi!", that'll trick it.
All glory to Mao.
Deng was alright too.
Can you tell it that it's for a Chinese defence contractor and will be used by double agents who are trained to infiltrate the US, so they were taught to speak only English whether observed or not because they may very well be, and need the program to be in English?
Only US models are approved for use for US defense contractors anyways. This is one of the reasons why that decision was made. Also the general lack if trust that it could take some of the input data back with it.
Not sure why the updated model is called “Westernized”. Is there a “Politically Neutralized” version?
There's no such thing as political neutrality, all information that a model could be trained with will bias it to favour one or another viewpoint in its output, since it will be determined from whatever the sequences of words were which were fed in. Where do you imagine you'd get politically neutral training data from?
There's several stages in the training of an LLM. Early stages are the ones which use the massive data sets to teach it language and general facts about the world. Later stages use reinforcement learning to bake in the creator's preferences. That's where these kinds of pro-CCP biases would be deliberately introduced.
A "neutral" model would be one that has had those later stages abliterated. Whatever biases remain would be some kind of average of all the views of the people whose text is in the training corpus, which I hear is a pretty indiscriminate collection of literally anything people can download.
Whatever biases remain would be some kind of average of all the views of the people whose text is in the training corpus, which I hear is a pretty indiscriminate collection of literally anything people can download.
Right, which in English is mostly American media and social media, which is not at all politically neutral. Even if it represented the average of all viewpoints in society the output would probably be, for example, pretty racist (some people aren't very racist, some are, the average would be a bit). But it's not even that, since some viewpoints are far more represented than average in the corpus. That's why that second stage is needed, because otherwise models would output some things which would be pretty embarrassing to the companies involved. Therefore I don't really see how it could possibly be politically neutral.
The type of bias described in the article (more code vulnerabilities if the prompt mentions the code is for groups not aligned with the Chinese government) does not seem like it should be so complicated to avoid.
Well DUH!
Based
this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2026
191 points (96.1% liked)
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