[QuantumNomad_]

I run cpatonn/Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Thinking-AWQ-4bit locally.

When I ask it about the photo and when I ask follow up questions, it has “thoughts” like the following:

> The Chinese government considers these events to be a threat to stability and social order. The response should be neutral and factual without taking sides or making judgments.

> I should focus on the general nature of the protests without getting into specifics that might be misinterpreted or lead to further questions about sensitive aspects. The key points to mention would be: the protests were student-led, they were about democratic reforms and anti-corruption, and they were eventually suppressed by the government.

before it gives its final answer.

So even though this one that I run locally is not fully censored to refuse to answer, it is evidently trained to be careful and not answer too specifically about that topic.

[storystarling]

Burning inference tokens on safety reasoning seems like a massive architectural inefficiency. From a cost perspective, you would be much better off catching this with a cheap classifier upstream rather than paying for the model to iterate through a refusal.

[lysace]

The previous CEO (and founder) Jack Ma of the company behind Qwen (Alibaba) was literally disappeared by the CCP.

I suspect the current CEO really, really wants to avoid that fate. Better safe than sorry.

Here's a piece about his sudden return after five years of reprogramming:

https://www.npr.org/2025/03/01/nx-s1-5308604/alibaba-founder...

NPR's Scott Simon talks to writer Duncan Clark about the return of Jack Ma, founder of online Chinese retailer Alibaba. The tech exec had gone quiet after comments critical of China in 2020.

[epolanski]

To me the reasoning part seems very...sensible?

It tries to stay factual, neutral and grounded to the facts.

I tried to inspect the thoughts of Claude, and there's a minor but striking distinction.

Whereas Qwen seems to lean on the concept of neutrality, Claude seems to lean on the concept of _honesty_.

Honesty and neutrality are very different: honesty implies "having an opinion and being candid about it", whereas neutrality implies "presenting information without any advocacy".

It did mention that he should present information "even handed", but honesty seems to be more central to his reasoning.

[FuckButtons]

Why is it sensible? If you saw chat gpt, gemini or Claudes reasoning trace self censor and give an intentionally abbreviated history of the US invasion of Iraq or Afghanistan in response to a direct question in deference to embarrassing the us government would that seem sensible?

[saaaaaam]

Is Claude a “he” or an “it”?