There's something wrong with the West's ethos if we think contributing significantly to the progress of humanity is malicious. The West's sickness is our own fault; we should take responsibility for our own disease, look critically to understand its root, and take appropriate cures, even if radical, to resolve our ailments.
Who does this?
The criticism is aimed at the dictatorship and their politics. Not their open source projects. Both things can exist at once. It doesn't make China better in any way. Same goes for their "radical cures" as you call it. I'm sure Uyghurs in China would not give a damn about AI.
Which reminded me of "Whitey On the Moon" [0]
Oh dear
it's quite like Trump's 'CHINA!' yelling
I don't know, just a guess
They literally published all their methodology. It's nothing groundbreaking, just western labs seem slow to adopt new research. Mixture of experts, key-value cache compression, multi-token prediction, 2/3 of these weren't invented by DeepSeek. They did invent a new hardware-aware distributed training approach for mixture-of-experts training that helped a lot, but there's nothing super genius about it, western labs just never even tried to adjust their model to fit the hardware available.
It's extremely cheap, efficient and kicks the ass of the leader of the market, while being under sanctions with AI hardware.
Most of all, can be downloaded for free, can be uncensored, and usable offline.
China is really good at tech, it has beautiful landscapes, etc. It has its own political system, but to be fair, in some way it's all our future.
A bit of a dystopian future, like it was in 1984.
But the tech folks there are really really talented, it's long time that China switched from producing for the Western clients, to direct-sell to the Western clients.
So yes, DeepSeek-R1 appears to be not even be best in class, merely best open source. The only sense in which it is "leading the market" appears to be the sense in which "free stuff leads over proprietary stuff". Which is true and all, but not a groundbreaking technical achievement.
The DeepSeek-R1 distilled models on the other hand might actually be leading at something... but again hard to say it's groundbreaking when it's combining what we know we can do (small models like llama) with what we know we can do (thinking models).
Not that the leaderboard isn't useful, I think "is in the top 10" says a lot more than the exact position in the top 10.
But the claim I'm refuting here is "It's extremely cheap, efficient and kicks the ass of the leader of the market", and I think the leaderboard being topped by a cheap google model is pretty conclusive that that statement is not true. Is competitive with? Sure. Kicks the ass of? No.
Having tested that model in many real world projects it has not once been the best. And going farther it gives atrocious nonsensical output.
Maybe we don't need momentum right now and we can cut the engines.
Oh, you know how to develop novel systems for training and inference? Well, maybe you can find 4 people who also can do that by breathing through the H.R. drinking straw, and that's what you do now.
Additionally there are claims, such as those by Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang on CNBC 1/23/2025 time segment below, that DeepSeek has 50,000 H100s that "they can't talk about" due to economic sanctions (implying they likely got by avoiding them somehow when restrictions were looser). His assessment is that they will be more limited moving forward.
OpenAI literally haven't said a thing about how O1 even works.
I'm pointing out that nearly every thread covering Deepseek R1 so far has been like this. Compare to the O1 system card thread: https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=42330666
Very different standards.
It’s also curious why some people are seeing responses where it thinks it is an OpenAI model. I can’t find the post but someone had shared a link to X with that in one of the other HN discussions.
https://www.chinalawtranslate.com/en/generative-ai-interim/
In the case of TikTok, ByteDance and the government found ways to force international workers in the US to signing agreements that mirror local laws in mainland China:
https://dailycaller.com/2025/01/14/tiktok-forced-staff-oaths...
I find that degree of control to be dystopian and horrifying but I suppose it has helped their country focus and grow instead of dealing with internal conflict.
The vast majority are completely ignorant of what Socialism with Chinese characteristics mean.
I can't imagine even 5% of the US population knows who Deng Xiaoping was.
The idea there are many parts of the Chinese economy that are more Laissez-faire capitalist than anything we have had in the US in a long time would just not compute for most Americans.
Do you want an Internet without conspiracy theories?
Where have you been living for the last decades?
/s
And they somehow yolo it for next to nothing?
yes, it seems unlikely they did it exactly they way they're claiming they did. At the very least, they likely spent more than they claim or used existing AI API's in way that's against the terms.