101
Chinese AI lab DeepSeek massively undercuts OpenAI on pricing — and that's spooking tech stocks
(www.businessinsider.com)
this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2025
101 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
38114 readers
580 users here now
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.
If the model is not allowed to spew Nazi propaganda or tell the user to end themselves, that is censorship. Censorship is not automatically bad, but the kind of censorship can make it bad.
This reeks of excluding all nuance to equate two things that are equal only at surface level. You're bad because you punched the other person (ignoring that they stabbed your SO 15 times and kicked your dog across the room).
Chinese state censorship is well researched and extremely well documented. It does not equate to censorship against violent or inappropriate language. It is political censorship.
At best, western models are biased, not politically censored. You can make them say just about anything, but they will bias towards a particular viewpoint. Even if intentional, this is explainable by evaluating their training data, which itself is biased because western society is biased. You are not prevented from personally expressing or even convincing a western model from expressing dissenting political viewpoints.
I’m gonna take a second stab at replying, because you seem to be arguing in good faith.
My original point is that online chatbots have arbitrary curbs that are built in. I can run GPT 2.5 on my self host machine, and if I knew how to do it (I don’t) I could probably get it to have no curbs via retraining and clever prompting. The same is true of the deepseek models.
I don’t personally agree that there’s a huge difference between one model being curbed from discussing xi and another from discussing what the current politics du jour in the western sphere are. When you see platforms like meta censoring LGTBTQ topics but amplifying hate speech, or official congressional definitions of antisemitism including objection to active and on-going genocide, the idea of what government censorship is and isn’t becomes confusing.
Having personally received the bizarre internal agency emails circulating this week encouraging me to snitch out my colleagues to help root out the evils of DEIA thought in US gov’t the last week has only crystallized it for me. I’m not sure I care that much about Chinese censorship or authoritarianism; I’ve got budget authoritarianism at home, and I don’t even get high-speed rail out of the bargain. At least they don’t depend on forever wars and all of the attendant death and destruction that come with them to prop up their ponzi-scheme economies. Will they in the future, probably? They are basically just a heavily centralized/regulated capitalist enterprise now, so who knows. But right now? Do they engage in propaganda? Cyber-espionage? Yes and Yes. So do we, so do you, so does everyone who has a seat at the geopolitical table and the economy to afford it.
The point of all of this isn’t US GOOD CHINA BAD or US BAD CHINA GOOD. The article is about the deepseek models tearing out the floor of US dominance in AI. Personally, having deployed it and played with it, yeah. None of these products are truly useful to me yet, and I remain skeptical of their eventual value, but right now, party censorship or not, you can download a version of an LLM that you can run, retrain and bias however you want, and it costs you the bandwidth it took to download. And it performs on par with US commercial offerings that require pricey subscriptions. Offerings that apparently require huge public investment to keep afloat.
Where I disagree with you is not that the US is bad - the US is terrible, and there is plenty of evidence of that. I don't even disagree with there being censorship in the US. In fact, Trump is objectively a piece of shit who wants nothing more than to become Xi/Putin himself.
What I disagree with is equating censorship in the US with Chinese censorship. I can call Trump a piece of shit online without worrying that the FBI will show up at my door. The models that are trained in the west will happily entertain any (non-violent) political discussions I want. There may be bias, and Trump may be trying to create censorship, but it's not quite to that level yet.
I am concerned that the US will become as bad as China in terms of censorship, which is part of why I'm trying to leave right now. However, it's not there yet. They are not yet equal, nor are they even close yet.
Yeah ok, I do basically agree with you. It’s not an accurate equivalency, yet. We’re trending bad though. I’d say the example of Stephen Miller sort of accidentally hinting that they shut down USAID because they all donated to the Harris campaign had some chilling implications for example. He could just be assuming that, since that’s a safe assumption for populous urban areas generally, but they could also have cross checked lists of employees against political contributions.
You say Chinese state censorship is an understood quantity. Could be. But I’d say that my points about equivalencies are to illustrate that what we think is true, is often much more grey. I’ve been to China, and while I was impressed and shocked at how much more advanced it was than I expected, I also couldn’t imaging living there. It doesn’t change the fact that a stagnant late-stage capital mafia state that lives off defense contracting is performing ooorly against a centrally controlled capitalist state that has set different priorities (that’s right boy, deepseek-r1 is a side project of a…. CHINESE HEDGE FUND). It’s value neutral. But if you dismiss reality based on a conception of political censorship that I doubt you’ve deeply engaged with, enjoy.
The so called free market certainly didn’t seem to take much reassurance in deepseek being compromised by communist censorship this morning though. Probably because the deepseek news isn’t exceptional because of China, or what it is, but because of what it isn’t, compared to the bloated tech carcasses that the US has pinned its hopes on.