Comment by tomalaci

> The question is also what game they're playing. Deepseek came out of a hedge fund. I think it's no coincidence that their publications tend to have a large impact on AI stock prices.

Its revealing that they always seem to publish after some big announcement by American AI companies. But regardless, this is one of the benefits of a duopoly.

I always see these malicious speculations without evidence, simply because these companies are from China.

The framing that Chinese labs open-source because they're behind assumes it's purely a competitive tactic. But there's a structural dimension: DeepSeek operates under a completely different funding model than US labs. They're backed by a quantitative hedge fund that views AI as infrastructure, not as a product to monetize directly. The ROI for them comes from trading alpha, not API revenue.

Chinese AI companies also face a domestic market where open-source distribution is often the only way to reach enterprise clients who won't pay SaaS premiums. The business logic aligns with openness in a way that US labs' VC-funded models don't.

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The world runs on incentives. Altruism/Self-serving are down stream of that.

Wikipedia is altruistic, and serves humanity quite well.

Agreed

Very interesting take

You mean more predictable, not more reliable.

It's even worse than that. China publishes stacks upon stacks of policy documents in which they explain clearly what they will do and why. This includes why they do poverty alleviation and why they believe big monopolies that own everything are bad. But almost no western observers care to read those documents. Instead, western observers, including HN, speculate endlessly about China's intentions, and "it would be naive to believe they would not do X" or drawing equivalences to Soviet Union or whatever. And the "journalists" sell this notion that Chinese state intentions are "untransparent" and "unknowable" while pretending the policy documents don't exist.

Meanwhile, Xi Jinping has published his 5th book on how governance in China works and what they're after. These are not books written for a western audience: they're compilations of speeches that he already gave to the Chinese party and state apparatus, so the contents are not sanitized for foreign audiences. But there are no English reviews of summaries of this 5th book at all by the usual China experts that distribute what western audience know about China.

This extends to beyond the government. Even though "for the people but only against the government" is an often-heard mantra, nobody seems to listen to what Chinese AI companies themselves say about why they publish open models. DeepSeek and GLM have said multiple times publicly what their motivations are, yet people on HN still speculate like they usually do.

Truly mind-boggling. I get that a lot of people don't like China. But setting aside the question of whether their dislike is justified, it would at least be rational to properly understand China, even if it's to defeat it. And listening to what China says themselves is absolutely essential for proper understanding. But people don't bother to? And they seem mostly happy with sticking to speculations that match preconceived notions, even if that hurts their chances of defeating China.

This is a really bad, poorly thought out take, and historically inaccurate. Also, we're not afraid China will somehow be like us. If they were like us, that would be great. The problem is that China is already behaving like it is ready to abuse the power it has on a scale that the US never has.

Russia, China and Iran all make public statements as if they abide by international law and everyone else are the law breakers, while their measurable actions are shockingly contradictory.

It is their actions that have caused the US reactions, but many people present them as if they occur in a vacuum.

The AI race sits within this context, with a constellation of concerns that most people do not think about. Of course the AI engineers have their own motivation, the companies will share some of that motivation combined with their business trajectory and governments will get involved with it for the justifications they see.

> I say this because we see the same thing used as an argument against China. "If they overtake us, they'll do imperialism (like us)." Again, it says more about us than them.

Or because they're human and that's what humans have always done. If the US is no longer a check on China, what will happen to Taiwan?

Frankly, you seem to be arguing that the US is somehow uniquely bad when, in actuality, The US has been hegemonic during a time of incredible peace and minimal imperialism.

I'm not sure I'd put Google in that list, but either way: Because they think they have enough capital that they can catch up and don't need the reputational boost of this.

Google at least still releases open source models to the public.

Gemini 3.1 is still up there, though? If Google started to compete on price they could be very successful.

Wait, are you claiming that these companies haven't contributed to the ecosystem via research and open source?

No idea I don’t work there.

What do you think is the underlaying motivation?

Not a greed thing. It’s a national security thing.

This is the way! Open source models will benefit, and once open source models reach the state of "good enough" the hyped up US AI companies will fear, since the availability of free, good enough, AI models will set the ceiling for how much they can charge. Then the bubble will pop.

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My understanding of Deepseeks raise is that it's basically do that they can give equity grants, as they were losing lots of people to competitors.

If they’re expecting profits like the VC backed US companies how come they behave so differently?

The CCP's approach has historically been to subsidize their companies far more than other countries do. Why would LLMs be any different?

https://www.oecd.org/en/data/dashboards/magic-database-indus...

Even if they were fully self-financed, which isn’t the case, they would expect something in return.

Are you reading the comments?