← Back to context

Comment by sourcecodeplz

19 hours ago

Deepseek and all the other Chinese models have open-weights. You can host them yourself, no need to send data to China or rely on them.

There is still a risk of supply-chain attack. People give LLMs direct access to their entire infrastructure via tools, and never check the code produced. It's not difficult to steer an LLM during training so that they'd output malware only when prompted a certain way, and that wouldn't come up during the initial evaluation.

Personally I see no difference between China and America in terms of risks of them embedding "backdoors" so to speak, but I disagree when people claim that open-weight models are obviously safe just because they can be ran locally.

  • > It's not difficult to steer an LLM during training so that they'd output malware only when prompted a certain way

    Perhaps, but that's also a good way to lose users+reputation as there's no way to control when said malware is generated. Once the first instance is discovered cybersec researchers will have a field day reproducing it and showing the world.

It is not a trivial challenge setting up model serving infra for ~1T or larger models, especially in a high reliability environment (e.g. your team is using it for work, or you're using it to power production apps). Sure, there are third party providers, although the quality and reliability of their inference varies.