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Comment by sinisterfeller | Hacker News Reader

Interesting how a comment asking about the reasoning behind releasing this as open source is getting attacked, as if doing a good thing should not ever be questioned. I do wonder of China's motives behind this as well.

The government would not allow this open work if it did not benefit them somehow, or perhaps they feel that keeping it closed is not very important right now (maybe because they are somewhat behind the frontier).

Comparing a university student Torvalds and state actors open sourcing code is pretty naive...

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You seem to severely overestimate the level of centralised command-and-control in China. It's not like every software company is going to the government for explicit sign-off of every open source release.

There is a pretty clear benefit to DeepSeek's reputation for all the other providers offering DeekSeek's open-weights model to have similar performance/benchmark scores.

In the past performance has varied wildly across inference providers, making this available should result in every inference provider implementing the same optimisations

I would assume DeepSeek is considered one of China's strategic assets and is therefore heavily policed.

Certainly no more heavily than the US polices its own "assets" - we also have export controls on inferencing hardware, review periods on frontier model releases, export bans on Fable/Mythos, etc.

It's pretty evident from their actions that China doesn't consider this an arms race in quite the same way a lot of the US crowd does. Rather it's an economic conflict: one in which flooding the market with cheap inference might bankrupt a bunch of over-leveraged US tech firms (and in doing so put serious brakes on the whole US economy)

The other benefit is that as more of the stack is open sourced we can finally see just how cheaply these models can be served. Which in turn gives us insight into what the frontier labs might be doing.

That, and drive down prices everywhere.

You underestimate it.

7% of Chinas total population are members of the CCP. 7%. So at DeepSeek there's a good few handfuls of them.

If you want to understand the impact of that, read up on reporting lines in the CCP.

Not every company needs sign-off from the government for an OSS release, but every OSS release is visible to the government.

Every open source release is visible to me, too. Is your point that the government could stop it if they wanted? That's true of every government, but it's not a problem until it actually happens.

> 7% of Chinas total population are members of the CCP. 7%. So at DeepSeek there's a good few handfuls of them.

If you want a government job, you need to be member of the party. That is no different then the old USSR system.

You end up with a overcount of "members" as people who ideology subscribe to the system, vs people who just become members for the better jobs. And yes, those people also get fired or leave government jobs (especially given the financial issues in the local governments the last few years because of the building crisis / lack of income).

So this type of throw towel over everybody to make a point is just a useless statistic.

The drivers for the stat don't matter. What matters is the reporting duties in the system and the stat.

Of course it matters. Suppose because tech pays better the figure in tech is more like 0.7%. The rest is shut concentrated in rural regions and other industries. Then your point would be moot wouldn't it.

We're not talking small numbers here

> If you want a government job, you need to be member of the party

Do you know this? Or do you assume this?

I actually don't know. However, being from (west) Germany and old enough I know how a real socialist state, the east german GDR, handled it. And keep in mind that they were way more stalinistic than China is.

In the GDR you could have government jobs without being in the SED. In November 1989 they had 2.1 million members. Since the GDR had a population of 16.4 million, a whopping 12.8%. That a higher percentage than in China. And yet they had numerous even higher officials that weren't in the SED. Example "Hauptbuchhalter" in the combinats (some kind of main bookkeeper --- but keep in mind that their job was to follow the planned economy goals, not booking activa and passive). Or members of the central bank. Or lots of teachers (which in both Germanys are traditional official clerks ("Beamte").

They however couldn't be in (open) opposition to the system. There was "the sword of the party", the SED. And they had informants everywhere. So if you showed any sign of opposition, you were removed.

So you needed to be a "yes sayer", but being "SED party member" was not mandatory.

In China one can enter civil service without party membership. Because membership in the party is strictly quota-ed to prevent overgrowth. The quota for college students is very limited. But I assume any leadership position will require joining the party after becoming civil servant / government job.

> On October 16, 2026, the Ministry of Commerce and the Ministry of Science and Technology issued Announcement No. 48 of 2026, publicly solicited opinions on the revision of the China Export Prohibition and Export Restriction Technology Catalogue (hereinafter referred to as the Catalogue), and implemented temporary management measures for pre-export registration of relevant technologies. Recently, the spokesman of the Ministry of Commerce answered questions from reporters on relevant issues.

https://m.bjnews.com.cn/detail/1792137269129878.html

Apparently globally recognized top 10 models (so Deepseek 4.1 Flash and GLM 5.3 Flash) would have fallen under this export registration.

> Apparently globally recognized top 10 models (so Deepseek 4.1 Flash and GLM 5.3 Flash) would have fallen under this export registration.

The model, yes, but not the inference framework.

There's also an explicit exception in there for open source releases (which may explain in part why these companies prefer to work in the open)

That's true and the Chinese vendor market for most things is sufficiently decentralized that individual vendors do act with a lot of self-interest rather than government-interest, but it would strike me that a provider whose key operatives are travel-controlled by the government of the place they live in are not in that category. I imagine having your passports held by the Chinese government assists in alignment.

china is playing long game, not quarter to quarter. As one diplomat said :

"We don't care! China has been here for 5,000 years. Most of the time, there was no United States and we survived"

Egypt has been around longer. That's kind of a silly political statement.

Egypt hasn't gone beast mode since pre 1200 BC

It benefits the _whole_ chinese economy. Providing those raw tools to whatever company. What about the impact on China's GDP growth?

I don’t think there’s got to be some deep conspiracy. Opening this is a pretty clear way to commoditize your competition. That’s an age-old strategy. The community may very well get this up to speed faster than if it remained closed, and DeepSeek / China can (probably) run circles around US labs from a hosting / service cost perspective.

https://earnedintuition.substack.com/p/involution-without-ex...

Kind of says that internal China competition is more intense than from America. I think there is both, but I would say it isn't like the "whole state" is backed against "us" in AI.

> China's motives behind this

how about just "DeepSeek's motives behind this"?

Perhaps the powers that be value this code more as a marketing tool for Huawei hardware than as a competitive advantage for selling inference.

So what makes you think it's not Chinese nationals attacking those comments?

Please never forget that US runs the largest state-sponsored hacking program. They are and have always been the largest APT. Anything opposing that narrative is blatant propaganda.

RE motivations - I wonder whether this is part of their push to double down on social stability efforts?

I have no strong views on whether US or Russia or China are the biggest hackers (and think it's impossible to k ow or judge objectivel) but feel compelled to point out that you seem convinced without evidence and proactively attack any replies contradicting you ("everything else is propaganda").

This is neither good discourse style nor does it help the accuracy of your own worldview to proactively decry and dismiss every contrasting position as propaganda. It's a surefire way to maintain incorrect worldviews and while it may hell your confidence does not make your positions true.

Without evidence?

You've eaten up all the anti-China propaganda it seems like :(

Yes surely if they are benefited we must lose.... Somehow I just have to think of the reason..../s

This is based on a video seen on Facebook, so take it with a grain of salt.

AFAIK, BYD batteries are based on "bad" materials, with fabrication method perfected until they are competitive [enough(?)] with batteries made with the "good" materials.

The good stuff is patented, locked by the West. China workarounds it. It's not that it is "bad", is just copying West's strategy doesn't work for them.

From what I’ve heard from owners (anecdotal) those batteries are still utter garbage.

Yeah, it's musk's flying sausage car that's amazing

Which good (EV, I presume) battery provider is from "the West"?

This seems like a garbled retelling of the shift from NMC batteries to LFP.

The latter are worse on some dimensions, so much so they weren't considered viable for cars in the West. But incremental improvement saw them take over the Chinese market. A classic "low end disruption" story.

They bought up the patents from A123, an American firm with a Taiwanese American MIT researcher founder. The firm floundered in the global financial crisis, a time that is a big inflection point for China's global domination of green tech.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A123_Systems

The problem with that theory is that BYD and a few other Chinese companies already for some years have had batteries that are better than anything made in the West, from the point of view of energy density, charging rate, temperature range, cost, so if there is some stuff that is patented and locked by the West, that is the bad stuff.

Living in the EU, I find it concerning that China has advanced so much in battery technology and in the West there are very few positive signs of attempting to keep up with them.

Closing your eyes and imagining that others are not really better, when they are, is not the right strategy to avoid remaining behind.

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