Article by Rina Chandran and Viola Zhou : “The concept of machine unlearning — or removing data from an artificial intelligence system after it has been trained — was largely an academic pursuit when Ben Luria, an Israeli entrepreneur, co-founded his startup. Then, China’s DeepSeek launched its first open-weight large language model last year, and Luria immediately saw the business potential of realigning it to Western values.
A slew of Chinese open-weight models from DeepSeek, Moonshot, Z.AI, Alibabai, and Tencenti have won over users — including American businesses and startups — with their lower costs, strong capabilities, and customization options. Others fear the models are too aligned with the Chinese Communist Party, and that they are not as safe as closed systems.
“What we’re trying to do is find a way to de-risk the adoption of open-weight models,” Luria, co-founder and chief executive of AI safety startup Hirundo, told Rest of World. “What we do is like neurosurgery, an intervention that’s surgical and very specific. It is to realign the values, geopolitical perceptions, censorship, and state-aligned bias and propaganda to what American and Western companies expect from models they deploy in their workflows.”
Luria’s team edits the weights of open models to harden them and make them more secure against cyberattacks, increase their fairness, and reduce their dangerous knowledge of, for example, bio weapons, he said…(More)”.
