Comment by swiftcoder
20 hours ago
You seem to severely overestimate the level of centralised command-and-control in China. It's not like every software company is going to the government for explicit sign-off of every open source release.
There is a pretty clear benefit to DeepSeek's reputation for all the other providers offering DeekSeek's open-weights model to have similar performance/benchmark scores.
In the past performance has varied wildly across inference providers, making this available should result in every inference provider implementing the same optimisations
> On October 16, 2026, the Ministry of Commerce and the Ministry of Science and Technology issued Announcement No. 48 of 2026, publicly solicited opinions on the revision of the China Export Prohibition and Export Restriction Technology Catalogue (hereinafter referred to as the Catalogue), and implemented temporary management measures for pre-export registration of relevant technologies. Recently, the spokesman of the Ministry of Commerce answered questions from reporters on relevant issues.
https://m.bjnews.com.cn/detail/1792137269129878.html
Apparently globally recognized top 10 models (so Deepseek 4.1 Flash and GLM 5.3 Flash) would have fallen under this export registration.
> Apparently globally recognized top 10 models (so Deepseek 4.1 Flash and GLM 5.3 Flash) would have fallen under this export registration.
The model, yes, but not the inference framework.
There's also an explicit exception in there for open source releases (which may explain in part why these companies prefer to work in the open)
The other benefit is that as more of the stack is open sourced we can finally see just how cheaply these models can be served. Which in turn gives us insight into what the frontier labs might be doing.
That, and drive down prices everywhere.
You underestimate it.
7% of Chinas total population are members of the CCP. 7%. So at DeepSeek there's a good few handfuls of them.
If you want to understand the impact of that, read up on reporting lines in the CCP.
Not every company needs sign-off from the government for an OSS release, but every OSS release is visible to the government.
> 7% of Chinas total population are members of the CCP. 7%. So at DeepSeek there's a good few handfuls of them.
If you want a government job, you need to be member of the party. That is no different then the old USSR system.
You end up with a overcount of "members" as people who ideology subscribe to the system, vs people who just become members for the better jobs. And yes, those people also get fired or leave government jobs (especially given the financial issues in the local governments the last few years because of the building crisis / lack of income).
So this type of throw towel over everybody to make a point is just a useless statistic.
> If you want a government job, you need to be member of the party
Do you know this? Or do you assume this?
I actually don't know. However, being from (west) Germany and old enough I know how a real socialist state, the east german GDR, handled it. And keep in mind that they were way more stalinistic than China is.
In the GDR you could have government jobs without being in the SED. In November 1989 they had 2.1 million members. Since the GDR had a population of 16.4 million, a whopping 12.8%. That a higher percentage than in China. And yet they had numerous even higher officials that weren't in the SED. Example "Hauptbuchhalter" in the combinats (some kind of main bookkeeper --- but keep in mind that their job was to follow the planned economy goals, not booking activa and passive). Or members of the central bank. Or lots of teachers (which in both Germanys are traditional official clerks ("Beamte").
They however couldn't be in (open) opposition to the system. There was "the sword of the party", the SED. And they had informants everywhere. So if you showed any sign of opposition, you were removed.
So you needed to be a "yes sayer", but being "SED party member" was not mandatory.
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The drivers for the stat don't matter. What matters is the reporting duties in the system and the stat.
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Every open source release is visible to me, too. Is your point that the government could stop it if they wanted? That's true of every government, but it's not a problem until it actually happens.
That's true and the Chinese vendor market for most things is sufficiently decentralized that individual vendors do act with a lot of self-interest rather than government-interest, but it would strike me that a provider whose key operatives are travel-controlled by the government of the place they live in are not in that category. I imagine having your passports held by the Chinese government assists in alignment.
I would assume DeepSeek is considered one of China's strategic assets and is therefore heavily policed.
Certainly no more heavily than the US polices its own "assets" - we also have export controls on inferencing hardware, review periods on frontier model releases, export bans on Fable/Mythos, etc.
It's pretty evident from their actions that China doesn't consider this an arms race in quite the same way a lot of the US crowd does. Rather it's an economic conflict: one in which flooding the market with cheap inference might bankrupt a bunch of over-leveraged US tech firms (and in doing so put serious brakes on the whole US economy)