Recently, China’s open source AI model has been attracting attention for its powerful performance in various AI tasks such as coding and ‘reasoning’.
But they have also faced criticism, including from OpenAI employees, for censoring topics sensitive to the Chinese government, such as the Tiananmen Square massacre.
HuggingFace CEO Clement Delangue said he had similar concerns. In a recent podcast (in French), he warned of the unintended consequences of Western companies building on top of performant open source Chinese AI.
“If you create a chatbot and ask it about Tiananmen, it will not respond in the same way as a system developed in France or the United States,” Delangue warned.
Delangue noted that if a country like China “becomes the most powerful country in AI, it will probably be able to spread certain cultural aspects that the Western world doesn’t want to see spread.”
Delangue has previously said that Chinese AI is quickly catching up with Western AI thanks to its embrace of the open source movement.
Delangue warned in the podcast that the strong concentration of top open source models coming from China is “a fairly new development and, frankly, a little bit concerning.” “It is important that AI is deployed in all countries, meaning there are not one or two countries that are much stronger than others.”
HuggingFace is the world’s largest platform for AI models and a popular venue for Chinese AI companies to showcase their latest LLMs. In fact, HuggingFace’s CTO announced this week that HuggingChat’s base model is Qwen2.5-72B-Instruct, developed by Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba.
This particular model does not appear to censor questions about the Tiananmen Square massacre or other issues that the Chinese government typically censors.
But the QwQ-32B, a different model from Alibaba’s Qwen family available on HuggingChat, certainly works when TC asks:
TechCrunch previously reported that DeepSeek, another Chinese model that has gone viral in the AI community for its inference capabilities, also widely censors topics deemed sensitive by the Chinese government.
Chinese AI companies are in a difficult situation as the Chinese government forces them to “embody core socialist values” in their models and comply with its already extensive censorship system.
A HuggingFace spokesperson declined to comment further, but pointed out that Delangue recently predicted that China will begin leading the global AI race in 2025.
