American companies want a scan of your asshole for the privilege of paying to access their models, and unapologetically admit to storing, analyzing, training on, and freely giving your data to any authorities if requested. Chinese ulteriority is hypothetical, American is blatant.
It’s not remotely hypothetical you’d have to be living under a rock to believe that. And the fusion with a one-party state government that doesn’t tolerate huge swathes of thoughtspace being freely discussed is completely streamlined, not mediated by any guardrails or accountability.
This “no harm to me” meme about a foreign totalitarian government (with plenty of incentive to run influence ops on foreigners) hoovering your data is just so mind-bogglingly naive.
As a non-American, everything you wrote other than "one party" applies to the current US regime.
Relatively speaking, DeepSeek is less untrustworthy than Grok.
When I try ChatGPT on current events from the White House it interprets them as strange hypotheticals rather than news, which is probably more a problem with DC than with GPT, but whatever.
> And the fusion with a one-party state government that doesn’t tolerate huge swathes of thoughtspace being freely discussed
That would be a great argument if the American models weren’t so heavily censored.
The Chinese model might dodge a question if I ask it about 1-2 specific Chinese cultural issues but then it also doesn’t moralize me at every turn because I asked it to use a piece of security software.
>This “no harm to me” meme about a foreign totalitarian government (with plenty of incentive to run influence ops on foreigners) hoovering your data is just so mind-bogglingly naive.
> This “no harm to me” meme about a foreign totalitarian government (with plenty of incentive to run influence ops on foreigners) hoovering your data is just so mind-bogglingly naive.
This is why I’ve been urging everyone I know to move away from American based services and providers. It’s slow but honest work.
The oppression of people in China like Uyghurs and Hong Kong, the complete lack of free speech, the saber-rattling at neighbours, and the lack of respect for intellectual property are indeed all well documented.
But for folks on the opposite side of the world, the threats are more like "they're selling us electric cars and solar panels too cheaply" and the hypothetical "these super cheap CCTV cameras could be used for remote spying"
It's a little sad that tech now comes down to geopolitics, but if you're not in the USA then what is the difference? I'm Danish, would I rather give my data to China or to a country which recently threatened the kingdom I live in with military invasion? Ideally I'd give them to Mistral, but in reality we're probably going to continue building multi-model tools to make sure we share our data with everyone equally.
> Internet comments say that open sourcing is a national strategy, a loss maker subsidized by the government. On the contrary, it is a commercial strategy and the best strategy available in this industry.
This sounds whole lot like potatoh potahto. I think the former argument is very much the correct one: China can undercut everyone and win, even at a loss. Happened with solar panels, steel, evs, sea food - it's a well tested strategy and it works really well despite the many flavors it comes in.
That being said a job well done for the wrong reasons is still a job well done so we should very much welcome these contributions, and maybe it's good to upset western big tech a bit so it's remains competitive.
It is not only that Chinese labs can undercut on price. It is that they must. They must give away their models for free by open sourcing them, and they must even give away free inference services for people to try them. That is the point of the post.
Please don't slander the most open AI company in the world. Even more open than some non-profit labs from universities. DeepSeek is famous for publishing everything. They might take a bit to publish source code but it's almost always there. And their papers are extremely pro-social to help the broader open AI community. This is why they struggle getting funded because investors hate openness. And in China they struggle against the political and hiring power of the big tech companies.
And DeepSeek often has very cool new approaches to AI copied by the rest. Many others copied their tech. And some of those have 10x or 100x the GPU training budget and that's their moat to stay competitive.
It’s not slander to say something true. These are open weights, not open source. They don’t provide the training data or the methodology requires to reproduce these weights.
So you can’t see what facts are pruned out, what biases were applied, etc. Even more importantly, you can’t make a slightly improved version.
This model is as open source as a windows XP installation ISO.
American companies want a scan of your asshole for the privilege of paying to access their models, and unapologetically admit to storing, analyzing, training on, and freely giving your data to any authorities if requested. Chinese ulteriority is hypothetical, American is blatant.
It’s not remotely hypothetical you’d have to be living under a rock to believe that. And the fusion with a one-party state government that doesn’t tolerate huge swathes of thoughtspace being freely discussed is completely streamlined, not mediated by any guardrails or accountability.
This “no harm to me” meme about a foreign totalitarian government (with plenty of incentive to run influence ops on foreigners) hoovering your data is just so mind-bogglingly naive.
As a non-American, everything you wrote other than "one party" applies to the current US regime.
Relatively speaking, DeepSeek is less untrustworthy than Grok.
When I try ChatGPT on current events from the White House it interprets them as strange hypotheticals rather than news, which is probably more a problem with DC than with GPT, but whatever.
> And the fusion with a one-party state government that doesn’t tolerate huge swathes of thoughtspace being freely discussed
That would be a great argument if the American models weren’t so heavily censored.
The Chinese model might dodge a question if I ask it about 1-2 specific Chinese cultural issues but then it also doesn’t moralize me at every turn because I asked it to use a piece of security software.
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The USA has one of the highest percentages of their population in prison.
Even for minor stuff like beeing addicted to drugs.
Looks pretty totalitarian to me.
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>This “no harm to me” meme about a foreign totalitarian government (with plenty of incentive to run influence ops on foreigners) hoovering your data is just so mind-bogglingly naive.
yes, this is exactly what I'm saying.
It’s an open model? So you can run it yourself if you want to
> This “no harm to me” meme about a foreign totalitarian government (with plenty of incentive to run influence ops on foreigners) hoovering your data is just so mind-bogglingly naive.
This is why I’ve been urging everyone I know to move away from American based services and providers. It’s slow but honest work.
The oppression of people in China like Uyghurs and Hong Kong, the complete lack of free speech, the saber-rattling at neighbours, and the lack of respect for intellectual property are indeed all well documented.
But for folks on the opposite side of the world, the threats are more like "they're selling us electric cars and solar panels too cheaply" and the hypothetical "these super cheap CCTV cameras could be used for remote spying"
Thousands of years with no invasions, hundreds of years with thousands of invasions.
China is a nation built for peace, while western nations are built for war.
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And you're saying Americans aren't banned from criticising their elites?
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As someone with Tibetan friends and as someone from India, Chinese ulterior motives are way more clear.
Same as USA. Happy to see some competition.
It's a little sad that tech now comes down to geopolitics, but if you're not in the USA then what is the difference? I'm Danish, would I rather give my data to China or to a country which recently threatened the kingdom I live in with military invasion? Ideally I'd give them to Mistral, but in reality we're probably going to continue building multi-model tools to make sure we share our data with everyone equally.
Lol EU pats you on the head
Its sad to see how you have regulated yourselves into a position where Mistral is your only claim.
I don’t care about whatever “ulterior motives” they might have
My country’s per capita income is $2500 a year. We can’t pay perpetual rent to OAI/Anthropic
Same
if you want to understand why labs open source their models: http://try.works/why-chinese-ai-labs-went-open-and-will-rema...
> Internet comments say that open sourcing is a national strategy, a loss maker subsidized by the government. On the contrary, it is a commercial strategy and the best strategy available in this industry.
This sounds whole lot like potatoh potahto. I think the former argument is very much the correct one: China can undercut everyone and win, even at a loss. Happened with solar panels, steel, evs, sea food - it's a well tested strategy and it works really well despite the many flavors it comes in.
That being said a job well done for the wrong reasons is still a job well done so we should very much welcome these contributions, and maybe it's good to upset western big tech a bit so it's remains competitive.
It is not only that Chinese labs can undercut on price. It is that they must. They must give away their models for free by open sourcing them, and they must even give away free inference services for people to try them. That is the point of the post.
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Open weight!
Please don't slander the most open AI company in the world. Even more open than some non-profit labs from universities. DeepSeek is famous for publishing everything. They might take a bit to publish source code but it's almost always there. And their papers are extremely pro-social to help the broader open AI community. This is why they struggle getting funded because investors hate openness. And in China they struggle against the political and hiring power of the big tech companies.
Just this week they published a serious foundational library for LLMs https://github.com/deepseek-ai/TileKernels
Others worth mentioning:
https://github.com/deepseek-ai/DeepGEMM a competitive foundational library
https://github.com/deepseek-ai/Engram
https://github.com/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V3
https://github.com/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1
https://github.com/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-OCR-2
They have 33 repos and counting: https://github.com/orgs/deepseek-ai/repositories?type=all
And DeepSeek often has very cool new approaches to AI copied by the rest. Many others copied their tech. And some of those have 10x or 100x the GPU training budget and that's their moat to stay competitive.
The models from Chinese Big Tech and some of the small ones are open weights only. (and allegedly benchmaxxed) (see https://xcancel.com/N8Programs/status/2044408755790508113). Not the same.
DeepSeek's models are indeed open weight. Why do you feel that pointing this out would be considered slander?
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It’s not slander to say something true. These are open weights, not open source. They don’t provide the training data or the methodology requires to reproduce these weights.
So you can’t see what facts are pruned out, what biases were applied, etc. Even more importantly, you can’t make a slightly improved version.
This model is as open source as a windows XP installation ISO.
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Weights are the source, training data is the compiler
Training data == source code, training algorithm == compiler, model weights == compiled binary.
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isn't it more like the data is the source, the training process is the compiler, and the weights are the binary output.
Do they also open-source censoring filter rules? Like, you can't ask what happened at Tiananmen Square in 1989.
> I know if the potential ulterior motives.
And you think the US tech giants don't have any ulterior motives?!
I think their motives are pretty transparent, as are china’s, as ever, you have to pick the lesser of two evils.