Comment by astar1

This is so damn true. I wish people would stop taking companies in China at face value about any of their claims if the CCP has a vested interest in for geopolitical and economic reasons. Bytedance is another example.

It's telling that "South Korea has accused Chinese AI startup DeepSeek of sharing user data with the owner of TikTok in China." - source: >https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gex0x87g4o

Bytedance, which has had a CCP government official on their board for years: >https://www.reuters.com/technology/bytedance-says-china-unit...

Deepseek's claims that they used old unsanctioned gpus are probably totally fabricated as well (side point-giving signapore f35s was probably a mistake): >https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/deepseek-gpu-smug....

I mean it's not like an entity that bypasses sanctions would ever be open about it, as doing so would immediately result in more sanctions and the closing of loopholes. What does the CCP have to gain? What does it have to gain by stealing hundreds of billons of western IP in the past? 4 things: Power, prestige, riches, and the means to keep their power. This has been going in since at least 2004 (see Nortel case: https://globalnews.ca/news/7275588/inside-the-chinese-milita...)

The US winning the AI race was a clear threat to those 4 things.Hurting investor sentiment by a) distilling a model which cost billions to develop, and b)spreading propaganda and muddying the waters about costs, gpus, etc, helps them to narrow the gap. Making it open source was not done out of the goodness of their hearts, but out of self interest - another attempt to deflect from their actions (further muddying the waters) and divide the public against taking any further punitive action against the state (given the connection re: SK claims-tiktok algorithms were probably on overdrive spreading their bs) .