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Chinese AI lab DeepSeek massively undercuts OpenAI on pricing — and that's spooking tech stocks
(www.businessinsider.com)
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Not a word on Chinese models being censored in the article. What an odd omission.
It should also be pretty obvious that this is following the usual Chinese MO of using massive state subsidies to destroy the international competition with impossibly low dumping prices. We are seeing this in all sorts of sectors.
There’s a strong argument that any consumer facing chatbot AI is “censored”. I’ve had chatGPT clam up in bizarre ways after it misinterprets what I’m asking. It just depends on company owning the product and what they view their legal exposure to be.
Also, we are applying huge govt subsidies to ai industry based on thin value evidence at this very moment. And we provide subsidies for many of our industries to help prop them up, sometimes to hugely bad effect. It’s what countries do to build, maintain and win industrial arms races.
Deepseek-R1 is open source and you can download it and run it offline. I’m not a power user but was able to get a functioning offline version of the 32B distill model running on a spare machine I had in a hour or so from scratch. I used online deepseek for most of the process to provide instructions and troubleshoot. I can’t comment on how amazing it is, other than to say so far it’s felt about as good as my interactions with GPT4 on the free chatGPT tier. In both cases I remain skeptical about their deep business use outside of certain areas.
From what I’ve read, you can use the base, and methodology and train your own new model if you have the technical ability and desire (rumor is meta AI has shelved their WIP and adopted deepseek as their new basis). This would imply that if you wanted to be able to talk to your LLM about topics like Taiwan, you could absolutely set up a model that would do that.
Please don't use whataboutism to downplay state censorship.
If you’re going to accuse China of state censorship, then I suppose you are also vehemently opposed to the censorship we apply to our media, social media and “AI” platforms, and since you dislike the lack of journalistic integrity in this article for pointing out that state censorship you would support similar caveats being added to articles about OpenAI, Meta, X in regards to how they handle issues like Gaza, Culture War topics and coverage of political candidates?
It’s fair to bring up comparisons when your critique is claiming an imbalance in portrayal between the “realities” of ai development in China and the US.
It's incredibly dishonest to equate Chinese state censorship with what the West is doing.
Wow what even is beehaw, I had no idea. At least China is honest about what they’re doing. The amount of bad faith in these replies is insane.
If you’re a shill, fine, good job. But if you’re not, have you paid any attention to the real world around you? We spent the last year enabling genocide, and the best fruits of our over-hyped tech and intellectual innovation factories are being revealed as the bullshit that most people always understood them to be.
The fact that you can accuse me of being dishonest, while providing no basis or evidence, while multiple federal agencies are under a strict gag order from any communication or purchasing with outside contacts… I mean really?
Like are you guys just another CIA adjacent cutout that believes in identity politics and SSRIs but has zero ability to critically assess the actual world around them?
Peak comedy right there. You're proudly defending an imperialist regime that is engaged in multiple genocides right now and has the worst body count in all of human history - but as long as it's under the red banner, that's fine by you. How shallow can you be? Are you willfully ignorant of all of these past and current crimes against humanity or does the goal of a Communist utopia (as if hyper-capitalist China would ever get there) justify it all?
Relative to people in their country, sure. But China can't and isn't interested in flying over to the US to arrest you if you talk to their AI models about Taiwan being its own country, whereas no one should have any doubt that OpenAI or any other US AI company is happy to tell Trump's administration who's been asking it about LGBT+ issues or other topics the US government is now against.
It's not whataboutism anymore, it's literally that both are evil authoritarian governments, but one (US) has physical access to US users, and the other doesn't.