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Comment by baalimago | Hacker News Reader

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I’m pretty sure this is rage bait. The idea that China is more interested in virtue signaling than pulling off a power move that will improve their chess position is not worth a serious reply.

I'm curious, are projects like Linux "virtue signaling" to you?

No, and it's also not a major player in the AI race, backed by the Chinese state

> backed by the Chinese state

as opposed to the current crop being backed by the US state? The ones that are basically crying foul at competition? The ones that unilaterally tries to dictate based on political friendliness and compliance (ala, anthropic getting banned)?

At least with open models, you can own the hardware and do the end to end. The current bottleneck is hardware availability at low cost, but i am guessing the chinese state is looking to build their own chip supply chains. I suspect they will succeed.

They've consistently open-sourced their secret sauce since the beginning: https://github.com/orgs/deepseek-ai/repositories?type=all

I don't understand why this is strange to you, some people just do things out of personal satisfaction and/or building their legacy. If it's just money, Deepseek founders are already rich because they have a hedge fund company (High-flyer).

Also I have largely understood that they are not spending that much. They are not hundreds of billions in commitments. So they can just release stuff that have comparatively nothing spend on it and still garner value.

I believe majority of the AI inference (and probably training) infrastructure runs on Linux, so I'd certainly consider it a major player in the AI race.

Perhaps this is evidence there's not as much Fu Manchu moustache twirling scheming as it seemed?

It's releasing open source code. This is a good thing for the world, even if it impacts the portfolio of US VCs.

I'm wondering how it benefits Deepseek. Why would they willingly give up their trade secrets?

It's obviously very valuable, as they are running a profitable company. It follows the same trend as when they released their cache optimizations a few months back: why do it? What followed their release of this technology was that Anthropic and OpenAI silently released models which were on-par or similarly intelligent, but "surprisingly" had much cheaper cached tokens. So their inventions were obviously just worked into their competitors, who just got much greater margins + became more profitable.

The same thing goes here: I'm sure there are inventions and optimizations which are unknown to Deepseeks competitors which yet again will be worked in. So once again, they're letting their trade secrets go.

My question is: why? How does Deepseek benefit from this? There must be some gain I'm not seeing as they keep doing this play over and over, and I doubt it's "for the good of open source", as China is practically as isolated as you can get. To believe that this is in the spirit of the open source community is heavily naive.

> I'm wondering how it benefits Deepseek. Why would they willingly give up their trade secrets?

Someone already suggested it may be same as with other open source software, but you rejected that comparison with an ad absurdum.

To rephrase: How would it benefit China? Maybe it is to show that there is no secret sauce, burst the bubble and then profit from the chaos that will ensue? Collapsing US tech giants means lesser MAGA backing, cheaper stocks, cheaper properly..

For the same reason every single open weight models gets released: it's a big flex and gets investors and developers excited.

Is it a sustainable model? Not really. Will it all blow up in our faces eventually? Maybe. But frankly, releasing code like this is far, far more sustainable than releasing whole models.

I would argue that negatively impacting the portfolios of US VCs is one of the greatest favors one can do to the world.

Why make open weights models at all, by your reasoning? Unlike the Anthropics of this world, DeepSeek isn't hell-bound on world domination

DeepSeek is a fixture among privacy-conscious local LLM advocates, but they are still battling for marketshare.

This is advertisement for them, and more so for large entities (like governments and corporations) looking for digital sovereignity: the more they are reassured they can run of their stack locally when needed, the more they will use the cloud offer too.

I am wondering how much stuff (in terms of malicious behavior) one can hide in the (open) weights?

Certainly a lot less compared to closed weights :)

That is what I am not sure about...It is like, is having a public key closer to hacking the account than not having it? Theoretically, it is, but practically, it is not...

This is silly, people do inspect weights and prune/abliterate/whatever them

Also open weight models reveal their thinking, not to mention you can airgap the network around them.

Personally I think it's a geopolitical play by China to take the US AI labs down a notch. (I'm not complaining.)

To assert dominance

well it might become something best in class ?

deepseek is a pawn. china cant compete and can't use our hardware so they'll burn it all down. the cold war continues.

If them releasing their stuff openly burns down whatever the closed ecosystem is doing just maybe that closed ecosystem isn't that great. If something can't survive less resourced option making it stuff public maybe there is lot of wrong with that something.

Seems like they're competing pretty damn well by just about every metric.

Imagine what they could have done without the chip embargo.

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