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Comment by abc42

12 hours ago

No need to use a chinese provider, in case that's an issue for you. https://fireworks.ai provides this model for an ok price.

I'd rather my data go to China and directly to labs that release open weight models (DeepSeek is MIT licensed still); instead of closed labs and the NSA/CIA; who has far better ability to hurt me than China does.

Without getting too much into politics; over the past several decades, one country is going around starting wars, regime changes and other interventionism, or initiating economic warfare (Huawei sanctions because they were getting too competitive to US companies; GPU restrictions; tariffs; etc), and that's not one administration: it's US policy over the past few decades.

  • Have a look here:

    https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/human-rights-index-vdem

    • This number reports, basically, how good it is to live inside a country, while the comment that you are replying to is entirely a list of foreign policy complaints (regime changes, etc).

      It's kinda like meeting someone on the street who's protesting about animal cruelty in slaughterhouses, slyly handing them a chart showing them the nutrition facts of beef, and then walking off without another word as though you've settled your case.

      Like, I get the point you're trying to make, but I hope you're aware it's a non-sequitur in context?

      1 reply →

    • have a look at everywhere at the human cost of what the orange man is doing depending on his morning coffee. much better to send data to china than to US right now.

    • Why link to a number, which means roughly nothing, instead of the specific details on the countries you're trying to compare? I have no idea how to break down or make my own assessment of what 0.83 or 0.18 means. Does that 0.83 for the US include all of the people being shipped off without due process to El Salvador, or do they count that as part of El Salvador's Human Right Index?

      People like to bring up the Uyghurs immediately, but never really have the same smoke for the US. Also, do we include the prison population in human rights? Do we include access to healthcare? What about systems perpetuating poverty like lack of access to public transportation?

      To pre-emptively be clear on my stance or potential bias, I stand by no country in the world. I was born in Iran, and my parents left when I was young to the US because they believed in the American Dream. The irony being that the dominos of why they left were initiated by the US and UK. And long before Trump was elected, but certainly immediately afterwards, I decided to leave the US once I had the means. (Also because of the lack of public transit, the $100k medical bills after an accident, being punched by a homeless person, and having my possessions stolen repeatedly and the cops giving me a :shrug:). I moved to Japan, where I experienced blatant racism for the first time. I moved to Hong Kong (and tbh no real complaints so far), but I am technically subject to the freedom of speech constraints on China.

      I have no allegiance to any country or specific people. My allegiance is to all living beings.

      18 replies →

  • The biggest problem with this is that I can't run my company's own internal benchmarks against this API, because they will be trained into the next version of the model, making them worthless.

  • Have you ever wondered why Manus founders gave up billions of dollars from Meta and “voluntarily” moved back to Beijing? One country does things out in the open, while the other operates in the shadows. The latter worries me more.

    • It worries me far more what people are ok with us doing in broad daylight.

      > Have you ever wondered why Manus founders gave up billions of dollars from Meta and “voluntarily” moved back to Beijing?

      This country wouldn't be such a shithole if we were able to bring the wealthy to heel. I suspect most people on earth see China as the more competently governed country. Understandably, this forum tends to select for people who view private investment positively, but this is clearly insufficient by itself to produce functional societies.

    • You mean the project that literally had an anus as its mascot? Wasn’t that a joke project? Maybe the government was admonishing them for naming their company “man-anus”

      1 reply →

  • This is really a roundabout way of saying you have no plans to live, or perhaps even travel, to China.

To add to this, Fireworks (and many competitors, e.g. enumerated here[0]) offer zero-data retention inference, to anyone. DeepSeek cloud does not. It's part of their terms that anything you send them is fair game for them to train models on.

[0] https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4.1-flash

(The badges next to companies indicate their privacy terms, i.e. green/yellow/red)

  • It’s pretty clear despite what they want you to think Anthropic and OpenAI train on everyone’s data who has a subsidized plan. Only way you get ZDR is by paying API prices. Also note that it is zero retention, not zero training.

    • > "Also note that it is zero retention, not zero training"

      The "green" badges explicitly say the opposite:

      > "Private: this provider does not train on prompts and does not retain prompt data."

      I.e. for the example of Fireworks, this is the precise language they use to describe ZDR:

      > "More technically: prompt and generation data exist only in volatile memory for the duration of the request. If prompt caching is active, some prompt data (and associated KV caches) can be stored in volatile memory for several minutes. In either case, prompt and generation data are not logged into any persistent storage."

      https://docs.fireworks.ai/guides/security_compliance/data_ha...

      1 reply →

I figure (hope) buying from DeepSeek directly benefits them the most so they can release even more improvements and open-weight models.

Plus only one country has threatened to annex mine and it wasn't China.

  • Assuming canadian or dane, but maybe there are other places he’s threatened. There are canadian inference providers running deepseek, and definitely eu ones idk about ones based in denmark.

    The economic sovereignty of any nation, but especially smaller ones like canada and denmark, is harmed by sending our money out of the country when there are options available in country.

    • > The economic sovereignty of any nation, but especially smaller ones like canada and denmark, is harmed by sending our money out of the country when there are options available in country.

      I respectfully disagree. I subscribe to the comparative advantage economic principle, so I'm fine with international trade.

      6 replies →

  • It surely does. Official DeepSeek provider logs and trains off your data.

  • China has annexed (or it claims so) several countries already, so it sounds like you're only concerned with yourself - probably not what you wanted to achieve.

    (But I'd concede that in the field of genocide China doesn't come up as bad)

If one is not American, why prefer American? Chinese fine by me, I trust the US providers just as little.

There are multiple others in EU, and in US. Cheaper, more expensive, slower, faster. So much choice.

Completely unrelated, but it's so odd to see upside down '8's in the first column of the base tables on their pricing page.