China's Hidden AI Economy

Well, how do the mechanics of these transfer stations work? From reading your work, it seems like many of them kind of bundle access.

And, you know, are they based in China, these transfer station services? Or are they based outside of China? Or do they connect to people or other organizations outside of China?

I think it's more like you can think of the supply chain as like three layers.

So like on the upper layer, you have upstream, which try to get access to these kind of frontier models.

So there you will have like the people who have like, for example, foreign billing address and foreign numbers, and they can like get access by in those frontier models through various means.

So I think like those services, sometimes they are based on foreign based.

And then like in the middle layer, you're trying to like aggregating all these accounts and routing them to like different users.

And that part is like, it's like somewhat technical, but there's various kind of open source project on GitHub that seems that you can just set up fairly easily to do all these kind of thing.

And then downstream, you have users based in China who really wants to use all these models in the US.

So that's how like the supply, the kind of supply chain forms.

And also, in the middle, there's various techniques you can use to try to lower down the price of the token.

I think it's like when I say that sometimes you can buy it 90% off compared to the official price, people seem to be very surprised.

So there's various things you can do.

For example, like at the minimum, you can exploit a kind of account discount.

For example, back in those days, I think like a lot of the from JAI lab used to offer enterprise and educational discounts.

So like people who are not using those accounts can sell it to like various other users.

You can also pool in expensive security.

subscriptions across many users, which means that sometimes like 10-ish users will share one CloudMax account, because actually when you're trying to maximize in the tokens, the $200 can be like split into various means of usage.

And they call it pin-true, which is carpooling.

There's also ways of exploiting the regional price difference.

It was rumored that Bolivia's cloud account is much cheaper to buy if you're using Google Pay.

And I also found several public letter boards about different pricings of cloud accounts in different regions.

so it's very interesting and there's other like sort of like less fine way to do that for example like you use stolen credit card as a mean for like laundering them they're used to also be a mechanism because anthropic used to refund all the money back to the account when they try to block an account so like some people will bulk register the account and And then they use it for several days and then they intentionally input some sensitive information for Anthropic to block them and refund.

So that's like level one of like...

It's like level one of exploiting like all these kind of existing features.