Hugging Face CEO has concerns about Chinese open source AI models
HuggingFace's CEO warns that open source Chinese AI models risk spreading censorship worldwide.
China’s open source AI models have been making the news lately for their strong performance on various AI tasks such as coding and “reasoning.”
However, they have also attracted criticism — including from OpenAI employees — for censoring topics sensitive to the Chinese government, such as the Tiananmen Square massacre.
Hugging Face CEO Clement Delangue says he has similar concerns. In a recent podcast (in French), he warned about the unintended consequences of Western companies building on top of well-performing, open source Chinese AI.
“If you create a chatbot and ask it a question about Tiananmen, well, it’s not going to respond to you the same way as if it was a system developed in France or the U.S,.” Delangue warned.
Delangue noted that if a country like China “becomes by far the strongest on AI, they will be capable of spreading certain cultural aspects that perhaps the Western world wouldn’t want to see spread.”