Nothing personally - Our customers send us highly sensitive financial documents to process. Using a foreign model to process their data (or even just for local testing) will most likely result in a u-turn.
What if you run them locally, or use a US-based provider that hosts them? IMO the provenance of the weights doesn't matter. You're right that the location of the hoster does, though.
No, it's not. They're just collections of numbers that can be harnessed to produce outputs. I check the outputs and if they're good I use them. If they're not, I ignore them and there's no harm done. Obviously I don't trust them to be accurate sources of information, but I don't trust American corporate LLMs much more.
It's not only "non-Chinese" to think about here. There's nobody really touching Qwen in the single-GPU size class and there hasn't been for a couple of generations.
All the western ones are closed while all the Chinese ones are open. The only exception is the European Mistral but performance of that model is not very satisfactory. Hopefully they make some improvements soon
They are trained to respond to certain topics in a way that does not align with real world evidence. Pretty much the opposite of what you want in such a tool.
This is trivial to test and verify yourself. Just pick any topic you think has a chance of being censored. You can do the same on American models and compare results.
To quote Scott Galloway - “Trump’s name is mentioned in the Epstein files more often than Jesus’s name in the bible, and this is why we’re going to bomb Iran”.