The Irony of "Arete": Parasitizing a Chinese Base Model to Preach Western Chauvinism
"Arete" (ἀρετή) means excellence and virtue. Yet there is nothing virtuous or excellent about taking a foundational model built by the immense compute, engineering, and open-source generosity of a Chinese lab (Qwen), slapping a cheap 28k-pair SFT veneer on top of it (1,202 optimizer steps), and triumphantly declaring it "reinforced with Western values."
When an AI lab stops pushing the frontier of true capability on this release and instead resorts to encoding civilizational hierarchy—implicitly positioning "Western values" as superior to Chinese values—it stops doing science and starts doing ideological dogma.
As the great French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss famously dismantled this exact brand of Eurocentric arrogance in Race and History:
"The barbarian is, first and foremost, the man who believes in barbarism."
And as Michel de Montaigne observed centuries ago:
"Each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice; for indeed it seems we have no other test of truth and reason than the example and pattern of the opinions and customs of the country we live in."
You rely on Chinese open-source infrastructure to do the heavy lifting of intelligence, only to use the final layer of post-training to erase cultural plurality and preach parochial chauvinism disguised as "value alignment." That is neither open-source spirit nor Arete—it is intellectual parasitism dressed up as moral superiority.
CCP bots raging about this model is such a treat to watch. I hope more developers make these finetunes if not just to troll them.
OP should go watch some videos about the new Call of Duty MW game, you'll see what is propoganda.