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Comment on Chinese AI lab DeepSeek massively undercuts OpenAI on pricing — and that's spooking tech stocks

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.

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DdCno1@beehaw.org ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

There’s a strong argument that any consumer facing chatbot AI is “censored”.

Please don’t use whataboutism to downplay state censorship.

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- Hotspur@lemmy.ml ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  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.
  
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  - DdCno1@beehaw.org ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    It’s incredibly dishonest to equate Chinese state censorship with what the West is doing.
    
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    Hotspur@lemmy.ml ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    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?
    
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    t3rmit3@beehaw.org ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    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.
    
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TehPers@beehaw.org ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

There’s a strong argument that any consumer facing chatbot AI is “censored”.

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.

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- Hotspur@lemmy.ml ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  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.
  
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  - TehPers@beehaw.org ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    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.
    
    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 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.
    
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    Hotspur@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    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.
    
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- Hotspur@lemmy.ml ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  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.
  
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