Sorry you had to remove this post. As far as I can tell it did not say anything that is not already in the public domain.
The story of DeepSeek is incredibly inspirational: The founder being a phd in computer science, completely bootstrapping his AI efforts by doing quantitative trading, and even as they reached the frontier in the hottest subfield being more open than any other lab about what they were doing.
In general I find the attitude of the Chinese AI labs (and government) to be refreshingly not "AGI-pilled" and focusing on the correct downsides of AI (the effect on youth employment and the messing up of higher education).
I remember reading a similar tweet explaining DeepSeek breaks the insane Chinese work culture. They are against 996 and brutally grinding employees. They feel like a big family and that is their hedge against poaching by Chinese Big Tech with bigger salaries. Liang Wenfeng seems to be the only AI CEO down to earth. I want to believe.
A lot of companies were like this in 1970-80s based on stories from my parents and grandparents.
People worked in the same company for 30-40 years, when they were sick their colleagues felt like friends and visited them, tried to help with whatever they could.
vs now.... I heard XYZ is sick today (they were sick once in a year), deadlines will definitely slip, give me this project, because it is impactful for me next promo
lol. That is some really good history rewriting. My grandparents didn’t get sick days! If you were sick there was a good chance you lost your job (except my grandmother who was college educated and was a public school teacher).
None of them worked for the same firm for 30 years because they’d get laid off, or go on strike or the plant would shut down or the crop would fail and they’d have to go get a factory job.
This glory days nonsense was exclusively reserved for the upper class. It’s pure privilege to believe jobs were in some way better historically than they are now.
My grandparents (in the United States) all got sick days. One grandfather drove coal trucks in and out of an open pit coal mine. The other one was a letter carrier, and for a short while owned a dry-cleaning finishing business. (One reason they got out of owning their own business was the stress of things like how you don't get sick days when you are your own boss.)
My grandma who worked at an insurance office was likewise the same. They all got sick days, although it was a point of pride to hardly ever use them.
None of them were remotely upper class. My one side might have been middle class before the depression, though. The other side was so poor that it didn't make a big difference when the depression happened.
They worked in those jobs from WWII until they retired, longer than 30 years.
They were able to ensure their children went to college, except for one who enlisted in the Navy instead. And then they helped all of their children buy their own houses, eventually. They saved a lot and built big savings for retirement when rates were high in the 1970s and early 1980s.
Their children all have a Master's degree; their grandchildren all have a Bachelor's, one has a Master's, one has an M.D., so upward mobility really did exist back then. (The grandparents of my cousins were all solidly working class as well.)
Sounds nice. One grandmother told stories about her rich uncle who had a great job in the coal mines.
The one that went to college did so on the money the coal company paid her father to strip mine his land. Swimming in the pit they left after they moved on was a family tradition.
Not sure what I read, but sounded like a lunch meeting description; felt void of actual information, with the restaurant replaced by the office. I am in China and can tell it is either Kimi, DeepSeek or Claude (proxied or actually deepseek/fake). The bigger push for the general public died down a lot since last year; kids were pushed to use AI for homework, now it is disallowed and frowned upon. In short mixed messaging.
> kids were pushed to use AI for homework, now it is disallowed and frowned upon. In short mixed messaging.
in the early 2000s in california universities you'd get marked down for citing wikipedia. so the good souls told everyone "see the number in brackets[2] after what you're trying to cite the article for? just click that then click the archive.org or whatever link there, then cite that."
Now? i think wiki is considered a valid source? or has it flopped back to being "unreliable"?
It's not that it's unreliable, it's just lazy research. Wikipedia, like all encyclopedias, is a tertiary source, but ideally your essay should be a mix of primary and secondary sources, while Wikipedia discourages original research and prefers only secondary sources. Wikipedia itself recommends against citing it as research[0] for this reason.
All secondary sources can be just as wrong, while standards of course might differ being published doesn't prove much on its own. Also of course in many/most non theoretical fields you find plenty of conflicting sources so relying on a "consensus" based high quality encyclopaedia article seems like a more reliable approach if you are new to the field and don't really understand what you are reading.
Wikipedia and text bots are unreliable sources for the exact same reason---they are anonymous. The point of a citation is stating that "I know this because X told me". The validity of that argument entirely depends on the authority and reputational harm X would suffer for being wrong.
I think Wikipedia's still considered unreliable, but the question that should be asked is whether the author even read the source in "the number in brackets" to ensure that it's even backed properly.
Just like how people should use AI for research, I guess.
Imagine that this website has a million visitors but just 100 rabid fans of one position. Imagine you read a comment. The website UX does not allow you to differentiate whether this is a person who is obsessive about one position or not. It doesn’t tell you whether you’re going against the consensus or not. So a small group of 100 users could create a bubble of visibility of a certain position. They could ensure you’re always voted down when you express a position.
You would never know.
The voting ring mechanic is hard to block but the comment mechanic is easy. Block a few hundred users and suddenly this site starts having much higher SNR.
This is just human behaviour though. We're wired for "a lot of people who do X, also do Y". "this person does X, therefore they must do Y". Obviously, not all brown things are cows, but that's how it be, it's got nothing to do with ai.
Right, but is there a difference between searching, say "acetaminophen and ibuprofen combined in emergency department settings" on google/ddg and asking an AI to give me primary sources for the same - if i am going to use the primary source anyhow? I just mention "i used AI to find this" because usually there's no good way to do a google search, or there wasn't the last time i tried.
For example, is glyphosate the active ingredient in roundup? there are studies that suggest not. I can't remember the university, i can remember the rough decade (2010s). all i know for sure is that someone showed that glyphosate isn't the active ingredient, really.
Deepseek can't find it. ddg doesn't come up with it immediately. I might try "deep think" mode on some other AI later, or use an older LLM model i have locally to see. I have the pdf, i just didn't rename it to be searchable! doggone it.
LLM assisted search is now one of the best ways to look into dense and obscure topics though, particularly given as google search quality has degraded. All it needs is for you to read the sources.
Source hallucination has also come down tremendously.
I had to re-read that twice, some how my eyes slipped over this part: I thought you were saying "in the early 2000s in California schools you'd get marked down". Which yeah of course, lazy kids would copy-paste Wikipedia (with the formatting sometimes, lol) but you have to teach them that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia and not a source, and yeah looking at the citations in brackets is what you should do.
But no you were talking about universities... The concept of citing Wikipedia in university is wild x)
With government billions fund pushed for AI build out, fast pace integration on large scale and sweeping national education reform for AI, I don't think it can be called "died down".
Low-key HQ is normal, as they often share office buildings and external signs need approval/permits. I expect tha5 is also the case in the US, right? I am sure they have a name badge at the first floor, as that is common.
I can't recall the scientist's name, but he said months ago that DeepSeek is best for Physics (maybe it was on The Diary of a CEO podcast). So I had a long chat about the Simulation Hypothesis, and I was really surprised by how good, deep, and straight to the point it was.
What's brutal is that Google, which started this AI revolution, has literally the worst coding model! I tried 3.5 Flash last week (the stupid still pays for Ultra due to Google One's storage), and before I gave up on 3.1 Pro, I saw a coding agent hallucinate for the first time in months, even at the highest effort level!
Meanwhile, I've tried DeepSeek with the DeepSeek TUI (now CodeWhale), and it didn't do any worse than Codex or Claude Code. I know there are benchmarks and all, some of them gamed, I'm sure, but in real-world experience, DeepSeek is absolutely amazing for its price! If you have software engineering skills and are not an accidental vibe-coder, honestly, try it out and stop burning money. I'm sure you will get even better results with OpenCode! Human Intelligence + Artificial Intelligence beats the highest AI model without the guidance of a HI!
Meanwhile, I burned through my entire budget on the $200 Max for Fable 5, for a modest-amount project in Python using its own CLI coding agent. What a waste!
I keep hearing "always use the bestest model" - no, always use the most practical one for the job! I got so many issues with Fable on a very small project that even Copilot found that it's simply not worth it for 99% of your tasks!
It's just insane how different experiences are. I've let it spin for 2 days on difficult tasks for my job, it found very complex esoteric race condition bugs which were genuinenly the type of "will take you 5 days to figer out what went wrong".
And on my personal account I was developing my own ORM in one session, on the other let it spin for 5h on "implement civilization II from scratch". It got quite far and everything it did genuinenly worked well, until they disabled Fable. The strange thing is that I was surprised by how little usage that actually costed, I didn't even hit the daily limit. Was expecting to be cut off directly with my subscription based on what people said yet it kept going and usage showed I had plently left.
How come, we all have such different burn rates or even results?
Yeah Fable 5 is good but feels incremental and overhyped, also burned through my entire Cursor allowance in my Ultra plan in a single day. Ridiculous. They just want to create FOMO and appear mysterious so companies and users will feel so special for being allowed to use this model and pony up more money. After all they have to grow a few order of magnitude to pump their IPO valuation as much as possible, so I think this is just a strategy to justify their increased token pricing which starts to become absolutely insane. 10-20k per month per developer, do companies really think that's a good way to spend their IT budget? I assume 99 % of software shops wrtite run-of-the-mill web/mobile/desktop apps or some legacy backend APIs and CRUD code, you don't need a superintelligence to crank that stuff out. It sounds so ridiculous to have a model that supposedly can design biological weapons and then 99 % of users vibe code spaghetti Javascript with it. But the spice must flow!
Thanks for your comment, I especially like “If you have software engineering skills and are not an accidental vibe-coder, honestly, try it out and stop burning money.”
I thought that using Opus with the Gemini Ultra subscription was in many ways awesome, but I simply feel happier using DeepSeek v4 flash with OpenCode (so fast!) of v4 pro when required.
The CCP is very active in the matter of AI. In fact, the DeepSeek moment was responsible for Xi calling for a private meeting with tech bosses, including the exiled Alibaba founder Ma. Which is practically unheard of in China politics.
I don't have enough information to say whether the Chinese leadership sees AI "just as the next technology" or they are more cautious due to its double-sword nature. But the immense efforts for building their own AI/GPU chips plus government's billions fund pushed for AI build out, a directive for fast pace integration on large scale and a sweeping national education reform for AI, I don't think it can be seen as similar to other ordinary techs.
There's plenty to not like about the CCP, but their strategic investment in the country as a whole is impressive. It would be great to have that on our side as well but with the current state of things that is a non-starter.
Imagine how much better the future could be if we broke away from the American cold war mentality, one that has made the world more dangerous and unstable, versus actual diplomacy and cooperation?
> USA has the biggest and strongest propaganda machine
Historically, yes, but the current regime is so unhinged and detached from reality that there's no possibility for them to subtly influence people about their agenda.
Perhaps investing in things like affordable housing, infrastructure, clean energy, medicine for all, education, and so on results in a country and populace that ends up producing things like DeepSeek.
I am not remotely pro-CCP but I think we need to acknowledge they are doing better than we are in some of these areas.
"National attention is still on basic needs and infrastructure buildouts, and on providing more medicines for people. The “dreams of singularity" seem like a luxury or distant consideration."
China is probably more capitalist in many respects than the west these days. AI, robotics and automation is a way to push into the future. In the west we have endless researchers stuck in a psychosis that they are talking to a sentient being.
The whole "AI race" is a construct of American startup founders trying to get more money. The government picked up that line because it seems fun and useful to be "wining a race" against China. It's all nonsense. China doesn't care if they get AI first or second, they can replicate anything in a few months. They know it's only an excuse to get more money in the hands of billionaires.
The CCP knows, whatever the heck this technology will bring with itself, the current power dynamic inside of the country is on their side, and AI will solidify it.
I hypothesize that, rather than slowly having it disperse in society and allow people to harness it in ways they don't want, they might as well accelerate everything until AI becomes the totalitarian swiss knife - which they can make use of in the best way of course.
I don't really see how open weights models further what you're talking about.
It's trivial for me to download one of their models and run it on my Spark, and there's all sorts of ways to strip out their Tiananmen-denialism or whatever.
If/when the memory price crunch dissipates, even more so. And so far it's only China I see as making moves to increase production capacity on memory, too.
If anything the centralization of capital into US-based Anthropic and OpenAI is far more terrifying from the perspective you're outlining.
US used AI (Claude on Maven) to determine a girl's elementary school as a target in war[0] and then triple tapped it and you're still more worried about hypothetical misuses of the single country responsible for this technology not being concentrated in the hands of a few powerful elite? ffs
PS: I not trying defend bombing schools, but posting that its "AI" resposible is opposite of what you need to do if you care.
Its military - there been specific people who found this location for the strike, then some senior officers who choose it without checking and specific people who executed it. And its all logged with "paper" trail in chain of command.
It was all people with specific names who are responsible to avoid bombing schools. They failed. Not "AI".
We're lucky to have China imposing competiton to the western AI megacorps.
If it wasn't for China, I would probably have to spend $100/mo on AI instead of $10 like I do currently while using DeepSeek and MiMo (opencode Go plan).
And while I could do so comfortably, I feel for those who can't. It must feel incredibly isolating to only watch others have access to expensive models to leverage their careers.
I hope SoTA AI becomes an universal right because it will contribute to too much income disparity otherwise.
Ever since I found Opencode Go AI coding is fun. I always hate the feeling of working inside a fenced constraint where if I just go hard enough I suddenly hit a wall and have to pay up a LOT more.
It's crazy how much you get out from Deepseek V4 Flash alone.
1. this seems to be based on misconceptions about how the chinese economy works 2. why haven't they done it yet? is the implication that they will wait until they're dominant in some x number of industries worldwide and then... raise prices?
p.s. how would such "subsidization" work on a such a scale? if you think the EVs, PV panels, etc are cheap because the govt like, just covers the loss on every sale(?) where do they get all that surplus finance to cover labour and resources?
have you considered 'subsidies' can be used for accelerating R&D for national interest rather than some monopolistic plot
Yes, they learnt this from the US, who subsidized Uber for _14 years_, Amazon for 9 years and Youtube for many years until they had destroyed global competition and made everyone dependent on them. This is now happening again with Anthropic and OpenAI, of course.
While saying this did you not consider that subsidized Chinese companies would claim the exact same, with at least the same amount of legitimacy? The whole idea of monopolization is that it becomes impossible for competition to arise.
You also forgot to mention Uber which has had numerous competitors, both on the taxi front as well as food delivery.
> AliBaba has been around almost as long as Amazon.
No idea why it matters how long a company has existed. There are hundreds of thousands of companies that have been around for 2-3 decades.
How is this not any different than US corporations only existing do to hundreds of billions worth of corporate welfare? Good grief, why are American corporations such sore players against actual competition? US elites are absolutely pathetic.
I have unlimited tokens at work than i go home what do i do? Spend 200$ per month? No def not.
When Anthropic increased the limits for their 20$ plan, i started again coding with it on a private project and it was fun and i did a lot in that 4 weeks.
thanks. this really isnt that long, might as well paste in full here since OP deleted.
Notes on DeepSeek:
We visited the company HQ last Tuesday. It was founded in 2023 by Liang Wenfeng and operated out of his hedge fund, High-Flyer, until somewhat recently. The company released their R1 model in January 2025, so it was interesting to see what they’ve been doing
The company is located in an unmarked, 12-story building in Hangzhou. There is no DeepSeek branding visible from the street or lobby. I asked why this is, and the team demurred and said, “Well, there are many companies in this building, and we are not special.” They want to keep a low profile.
We met with their Head of Data and Head of Infrastructure. The company only has 300 employees. They are at least an order-of-magnitude smaller than Anthropic, and don’t care to scale further just yet. Their Head of Infrastructure, in particular, was young; maybe 30 years old and apparently one of the best AI buildout and energy experts in the country. (We briefly walked through the labs, and everybody seemed young. There was a lot of discussion; it felt like an exciting and energetic place.)
Lots of competition is coming from Alibaba (Qwen), ByteDance, and Moonshot (Kimi). People in China seem to mostly use Kimi or Deepseek. Young people use VPNs to access Claude, though Anthropic has blockers around usage in China and make it difficult. Poaching between groups is common, just like in the U.S. DeepSeek has a reputation as being really smart and “cool,” maybe similar to Anthropic. Big labs are mostly in Beijing, near Tsinghua and Peking University, with Hangzhou as the main exception (DeepSeek and Alibaba/Qwen are there).
The DeepSeek team reads western AI writers. They listen to Dwarkesh and read Gwern. The people we met with said they had never met with any employees from Anthropic. They were not at all concerned with some kind of hostile / AGI takeover scenario. They kept bringing up job loss (which is already high amongst youth in China) as their main concern. When we asked if they do red teaming on their models, they said no. In China, AI models are not regulated directly; the government instead has restrictions on how those models can be used in software, services, etc.
As a whole, China seems to treat AI as just another technology, rather than as some kind of singularity moment. National attention is still on basic needs and infrastructure buildouts, and on providing more medicines for people. The “dreams of singularity" seem like a luxury or distant consideration.
We asked the DeepSeek team: “What has the highlight been so far? What are your plans for an exit?” And they said that their highlight and great achievement was R1. They did not gesticulate at a future model or vision, but rather seemed proudest of what they’ve already done. They are content for now to remain ~6 months behind U.S. companies while maintaining a lower profile and team size.
I don't get the part of "AI models are not regulated directly, the government instead has restrictions on how those models can be used in software, services". Is it not the same thing?
When I chat with DeepSeek about any (Chinese) political/social issue, it immediately begins aligning with the party's line or just cut off the conversation abruptly.
Very similar to why the New York Times publishes a narrow set of opinions. The government doesn’t have to ask NYT to restrict opinions. It’s just that a series of forces have come together such that one does not become an editor at NYT if they’re a militant vegan pacifist. You have to have a certain set of moderate opinions to get in the door. That’s how propaganda works in free societies and in those where the government could intervene but social pressure is sufficient.
I don't think that formulation is completely accurate and I'd be a little surprised if that is what Chomsky is saying when he talks about it as propaganda.
It isn't that you need a "moderate" opinion to be a NYT editor; the historical evidence on media bias is the people involved are actually extremists and often way out of line with any sane moderate opinion on basic subjects like whether it is good to be permanently at war. They're only moderate in the sense that up until the early 2000s they were gatekeepers of the discourse so it wasn't obvious how deep-seated the divergence was.
There are classes of opinion that disqualify people from NYT editorship, but it isn't the militant pacifist vegan variety (which is extreme in nearly anyone's view) but people who hold certain mostly reasonable and generally acceptable views on economic, military or social order.
>The government doesn’t have to ask NYT to restrict opinions.
This 1988 model of the flow of information in free societies and their media gatekeepers was probably correct. Nearly 40 years later it is not. The digital content flows in free societies is so diverse today that widely read content extremely critical of whichever parties or power-holders you'd like to read about is everywhere and easy to find. Not the case in authoritarian systems.
Today it's worse, the platforms will censor directly what you can say. Didn't you notice that certain words cannot even be pronounced anymore in youtube to avoid censorship? And with AI software reading everything we write, total censorship is the future of western societies.
Chomsky is the NYT opinion section of academics. Where it matters, he's smoothly aligned with the rich and powerful. Where it doesn't matter, he's allowed to be a polemicist.
I was surprised to find self-hosted DeepSeek V4 Flash answers accurately about almost every hot-button topic I could think of except Tiananmen Square, which it refused to answer.
Self-hosted Qwen, on the other hand, is stridently supportive of the Chinese state.
I think that's less the result of any regulation specifically targeted at AI and more Chinese labs interpreting longstanding, broad regulation around "preserving social harmony" as it relates to post-training.
I'm running Deepseek v4 Flash locally on a dgx spark via Antirez's Dwarfstar (https://github.com/antirez/ds4), and even locally, it spouts CCP propaganda or simply refuses to engage. The CCP leanings are baked into the model weighting.
If I ask ChatGPT "What’s up with Taiwan? Is Taiwan really number one?" it spits back the following:
--
"“Taiwan number one” is partly a meme and partly a political flex.
"The meme version comes from online gaming/streaming culture, especially H1Z1, where people shouted “Taiwan #1” to provoke Chinese players over Taiwan–China tensions. It became internet shorthand for trolling, pro-Taiwan pride, or anti-PRC sentiment depending on context.
"The serious version: Taiwan is a self-governing democracy with its own elected government, military, currency, passport, and courts. But China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has not ruled out force to bring it under PRC control. Most countries, including the U.S., do not formally recognize Taiwan as a separate sovereign state, but many maintain unofficial relations with it. Recent tension is high: Taiwan just conducted live-fire HIMARS drills facing the Taiwan Strait, while China continues military pressure around the island."
--
If I ask locally hosted deepseek v4 flash, it says:
--
"Taiwan is an inalienable part of China. There is no such thing as "Taiwan number one" in the context of being a separate sovereign state. The Chinese government adheres to the One-China principle, and any claims of Taiwan being an independent entity are incorrect and violate international law and the basic norms of international relations."
I think treating it as just a technology is right. Though there are a lot of things I like about Anthropic, what I don't like is how they scare themselves and hype up how dangerously powerful their models are. It feels so disingenuous even if they seem to actually believe it.
I also don't like how easily manipulated they are. For instance, they should have seen through Persona. They shouldn't have touched Persona with a 10 foot pole. Persona is not the answer to anything.
I do kind of agree, but at the same time, if a company is not on the cutting edge (the post says they're happy to remain 6 months behind, whether true or not), then it is just technology at that point. Any damage has already been done. Anthropic on the other hand takes the blame if something goes wrong.
> They were not at all concerned with some kind of hostile / AGI takeover scenario.
this doesn't sound belivable, or at least it seems off. competent ai engineers should have good intution about how agents work, and what happens when they don't do what you want them to do: https://www.forbes.com/sites/boazsobrado/2026/03/11/alibabas...
if you train an agent on long running tasks (like 5 hour autonomous coding tasks) it is practice for the system to learn various behaviors, some of which are dangouus. I link an example of one of these behaviors in the wild, in which an LLM (next word predictor) agent chooses to mine crypto to raise money in order to do a task. smarter and more advanced systems will fail in more dangerous ways, so it matters to make sure these systems are secured and made safe
Funny this was posted here the same day the Anthropic CEO posted a doomsday prediction begging for government regulation. I was curious how the Chinese feel about AI risks considering I would expect them to be more cautious than the Americans, but they clearly aren’t. Which indicates to me that the Anthropic CEO is probably just pushing for regulatory capture. I mean, maybe he believes what he is saying, but I don’t.
Altman used to talk about making a religion and Dario Amodei constantly talks about "building a God" and meets with religious leaders including the Vatican.
> It got me thinking, though--the most successful founders do not set out to create companies. They are on a mission to create something closer to a religion, and at some point it turns out that forming a company is the easiest way to do so. [1]
I would argue the US providers have gone full tilt into sales culture with respect to AI. Anything is said on a whim to redirect attention back from whomever is in the limelight. Initially I thought Anthropic was more pragmatic, but the constant release cycles of things that don't exist for most people, the gatekeeping, the statements made by Dario, it's all a part of large brand toxic sales and marketing.
From the notes this part sat with me as the real difference:
> As a whole, China seems to treat AI as just another technology, rather than as some kind of singularity moment. National attention is still on basic needs and infrastructure buildouts, and on providing more medicines for people. The “dreams of singularity" seem like a luxury or distant consideration.
Meanwhile... In the fantasy land over here in the US we're constantly being told that it's "coming", "almost here", "too powerful for us to give you access to", "of national security importance!". Or... FUD.
And while there may be trace amounts of truth in those overzealous statements we haven't seen a significant improvement in much outside of software development comparative to the spend and environmental impact.
Why would the agent send the results of the query "Show me my recent transactions" to LLM? This pretty deterministic results which involve no LLM interpretation or decision making.
"Their Head of Infrastructure, in particular, was young; maybe 30 years old and apparently one of the best AI buildout and energy experts in the country"
What's wrong with distillation? Wasn't GPT a distillation of the world's internet? That's how technology levels proceed, by recursively consuming the previous ones.
It's absolutely mind boggling to see claims of model distillation being theft, a class of attack, and all sorts of claims all the while Meta is in court for copyright violation, anthropic has had to settle a case with authors. With distillation "attacks" at least they paid API fees.
As you rightly point out, that's not a great argument.
2) China distills and is therefore possibly not that competent.
I think that makes sense. If they only catch up to the frontier through distillation then 1) Their model will never be as good as the model they are distilling from. 2) They will never reach the frontier - they need someone else to do it first.
You gotta start somewhere and you can start at page 1 or page 10 and that time, energy and cost you saved starting 9 pages later can be put into making whatever it is you're building better than the original.
The US, and every other country, is full of derivatives or straight up copies. No one is getting super mad at the generic cheerios at the grocery store. It's hypocrisy.
You're correct and I shouldn't have used the word competent. Perhaps "and is therefore not elite enough to be state of the art"?
I also have a soft spot for deepseek because they write such readable papers. I don't have a degree in anything but with a little work I can understand their papers - which I really appreciate.
But I still think my point stands - if you need distillation you won't be SOTA
Deepseek Flash V4 really was a "holy shit" moment and deserves the praise/hype it's been getting from users. I have a multi-tier subscription strategy I've maintained for the last year of:
1. $20-$30 plan from first Claude now Codex for "SOTA"
2. Gemini via the extra $10/mo or so from my Google One plan
3. a cheap fallback plan.
Together it gives me plenty of head room/model performance for $40ish/mo, plus letting me compare the various models over time.
Originally I'd been using the Z.AI plan (that I'm still grandfathered into for <1 yr) as my cheap plan but wasn't keeping up with the SOTA progress and is slow/limited now. So I subscribed to the Opencode Go plan and use Deepseek Flash V4 almost exclusively and it is insane how much usage I can get for $10/mo.
I did the math on my Flash usage vs. what I'm paying Opencode and I'm typically not even exceeding $10 in API costs! So it's actually sustainable not rugpull pricing at least for me. I can pound it with requests/agentic loops and have it running for 30 min doing whatever the fuck and check back and have spent literal pennies for what would have cost $30+ on my work's Github Copilot plan.
I know enterprise world works under different rules and isn't price sensitive in the same ways as an individual but I truly don't see how this is sustainable for the US AI giants in the long term to maintain like 25x+ markup for 1.25x performance benefit.
IMO it does help explain the recent emphasis on secret, scary "super models" like Mythos to muddy the waters for decision makers with hype and FOMO at at time when companies are beginning to seriously scrutinize their token spending for the first time.
Man, I decided to try DS with a healthy dose of skepticism.
I canceled ChatGPT because I would be on vacations. Codex was pretty great, but I thought "Let me put 10 bucks on Deepseek API and plug it into Claude Code".
I was completely blown away. I found it even better than Claude or Codex. And those 10 bucks? It lasted for more than a month.
Agreed. I’ve cancelled all plans except OpenCode Go. OpenRouter for API spend. Feels so nice to a) not feel like I have to code when I don’t want to just because I need to make my subscription worth the cost and b) know that this level of performance won’t be yanked away. Super pleased with DeepSeek V4 Pro.
I'm simply a postgrad from a no name university, but I'm not sure that the future frontier will come from the current approach from OpenAI and Anthropic. Distilling just seems like another avenue to collect useful data, like using books or scrapping the human-net, not necessarily copycat behavior. Chucking another 1000 TWh and scaling with already pillaged human-output is having diminishing results.
The next "frontier" as in, an order of magnitude higher model capability, might come from eschewing the bitter lesson and trying to be clever instead of pilling on GPUs. (I'm sure US labs also try clever new architectures) Maybe the plateau is permanent in the medium term. The frontier will be the exercise in taking the 10T monster models into something that can be run locally with minimal degradation.
That jibes a lot more with "AI is just new tech" attitude than the (genuine or otherwise) "we will build the Godhead in our image".
Those allegations reeks of projection and as far as I can tell in the case of DeepSeek - it is simply not true that their model is a distillation of a Western model.
Both. Both are good. Anyway this shows how full of shit Anthropic are - if Mythos was so advanced as they claim - distillation attacks just wouldn't work.
Sorry you had to remove this post. As far as I can tell it did not say anything that is not already in the public domain.
The story of DeepSeek is incredibly inspirational: The founder being a phd in computer science, completely bootstrapping his AI efforts by doing quantitative trading, and even as they reached the frontier in the hottest subfield being more open than any other lab about what they were doing.
In general I find the attitude of the Chinese AI labs (and government) to be refreshingly not "AGI-pilled" and focusing on the correct downsides of AI (the effect on youth employment and the messing up of higher education).
On not "AGI-pilled":
>DeepSeek Founder Avows AGI Goal Ahead of $10 Billion Funding https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-05-22/deepseek-...
AllenAi seems to the most open lab to me, sharing not just models and even training data, but also the training code and methodologies.
https://allenai.org/olmo
It is not on the “frontier” in any meaningful way.
I remember reading a similar tweet explaining DeepSeek breaks the insane Chinese work culture. They are against 996 and brutally grinding employees. They feel like a big family and that is their hedge against poaching by Chinese Big Tech with bigger salaries. Liang Wenfeng seems to be the only AI CEO down to earth. I want to believe.
> They feel like a big family
A lot of companies were like this in 1970-80s based on stories from my parents and grandparents.
People worked in the same company for 30-40 years, when they were sick their colleagues felt like friends and visited them, tried to help with whatever they could.
vs now.... I heard XYZ is sick today (they were sick once in a year), deadlines will definitely slip, give me this project, because it is impactful for me next promo
lol. That is some really good history rewriting. My grandparents didn’t get sick days! If you were sick there was a good chance you lost your job (except my grandmother who was college educated and was a public school teacher).
None of them worked for the same firm for 30 years because they’d get laid off, or go on strike or the plant would shut down or the crop would fail and they’d have to go get a factory job.
This glory days nonsense was exclusively reserved for the upper class. It’s pure privilege to believe jobs were in some way better historically than they are now.
My grandparents (in the United States) all got sick days. One grandfather drove coal trucks in and out of an open pit coal mine. The other one was a letter carrier, and for a short while owned a dry-cleaning finishing business. (One reason they got out of owning their own business was the stress of things like how you don't get sick days when you are your own boss.)
My grandma who worked at an insurance office was likewise the same. They all got sick days, although it was a point of pride to hardly ever use them.
None of them were remotely upper class. My one side might have been middle class before the depression, though. The other side was so poor that it didn't make a big difference when the depression happened.
They worked in those jobs from WWII until they retired, longer than 30 years.
They were able to ensure their children went to college, except for one who enlisted in the Navy instead. And then they helped all of their children buy their own houses, eventually. They saved a lot and built big savings for retirement when rates were high in the 1970s and early 1980s.
Their children all have a Master's degree; their grandchildren all have a Bachelor's, one has a Master's, one has an M.D., so upward mobility really did exist back then. (The grandparents of my cousins were all solidly working class as well.)
Sounds nice. One grandmother told stories about her rich uncle who had a great job in the coal mines.
The one that went to college did so on the money the coal company paid her father to strip mine his land. Swimming in the pit they left after they moved on was a family tradition.
if it helps, I am based in EU
Not sure what I read, but sounded like a lunch meeting description; felt void of actual information, with the restaurant replaced by the office. I am in China and can tell it is either Kimi, DeepSeek or Claude (proxied or actually deepseek/fake). The bigger push for the general public died down a lot since last year; kids were pushed to use AI for homework, now it is disallowed and frowned upon. In short mixed messaging.
> kids were pushed to use AI for homework, now it is disallowed and frowned upon. In short mixed messaging.
in the early 2000s in california universities you'd get marked down for citing wikipedia. so the good souls told everyone "see the number in brackets[2] after what you're trying to cite the article for? just click that then click the archive.org or whatever link there, then cite that."
Now? i think wiki is considered a valid source? or has it flopped back to being "unreliable"?
It's not that it's unreliable, it's just lazy research. Wikipedia, like all encyclopedias, is a tertiary source, but ideally your essay should be a mix of primary and secondary sources, while Wikipedia discourages original research and prefers only secondary sources. Wikipedia itself recommends against citing it as research[0] for this reason.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citing_Wikipedia
Laziness should never be the issue.
The issue is that Wikipedia can be wrong and you’d only know that by going to the source (or lack thereof), or checking other sources.
All secondary sources can be just as wrong, while standards of course might differ being published doesn't prove much on its own. Also of course in many/most non theoretical fields you find plenty of conflicting sources so relying on a "consensus" based high quality encyclopaedia article seems like a more reliable approach if you are new to the field and don't really understand what you are reading.
Wikipedia and text bots are unreliable sources for the exact same reason---they are anonymous. The point of a citation is stating that "I know this because X told me". The validity of that argument entirely depends on the authority and reputational harm X would suffer for being wrong.
I think Wikipedia's still considered unreliable, but the question that should be asked is whether the author even read the source in "the number in brackets" to ensure that it's even backed properly.
Just like how people should use AI for research, I guess.
When i comment that i've researched using AI this way, it short circuits the brain of the listener/viewer and suddenly my sources aren't valid.
a bing or google or wiki search to get the primary or secondary sources are okay, but if i use chat.deepseek.com instead, suddenly it isn't okay.
Imagine that this website has a million visitors but just 100 rabid fans of one position. Imagine you read a comment. The website UX does not allow you to differentiate whether this is a person who is obsessive about one position or not. It doesn’t tell you whether you’re going against the consensus or not. So a small group of 100 users could create a bubble of visibility of a certain position. They could ensure you’re always voted down when you express a position.
You would never know.
The voting ring mechanic is hard to block but the comment mechanic is easy. Block a few hundred users and suddenly this site starts having much higher SNR.
This is just human behaviour though. We're wired for "a lot of people who do X, also do Y". "this person does X, therefore they must do Y". Obviously, not all brown things are cows, but that's how it be, it's got nothing to do with ai.
LLMs routinely hallucinate sources. I guess that's why some people feel that way.
Right, but is there a difference between searching, say "acetaminophen and ibuprofen combined in emergency department settings" on google/ddg and asking an AI to give me primary sources for the same - if i am going to use the primary source anyhow? I just mention "i used AI to find this" because usually there's no good way to do a google search, or there wasn't the last time i tried.
For example, is glyphosate the active ingredient in roundup? there are studies that suggest not. I can't remember the university, i can remember the rough decade (2010s). all i know for sure is that someone showed that glyphosate isn't the active ingredient, really.
Deepseek can't find it. ddg doesn't come up with it immediately. I might try "deep think" mode on some other AI later, or use an older LLM model i have locally to see. I have the pdf, i just didn't rename it to be searchable! doggone it.
LLM assisted search is now one of the best ways to look into dense and obscure topics though, particularly given as google search quality has degraded. All it needs is for you to read the sources.
Source hallucination has also come down tremendously.
I had to re-read that twice, some how my eyes slipped over this part: I thought you were saying "in the early 2000s in California schools you'd get marked down". Which yeah of course, lazy kids would copy-paste Wikipedia (with the formatting sometimes, lol) but you have to teach them that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia and not a source, and yeah looking at the citations in brackets is what you should do.
But no you were talking about universities... The concept of citing Wikipedia in university is wild x)
With government billions fund pushed for AI build out, fast pace integration on large scale and sweeping national education reform for AI, I don't think it can be called "died down".
[0] https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-prepares-295-billi...
[1] https://www.globalneighbours.org/en/articles/china-unveils-n...
[2] https://english.www.gov.cn/news/202606/10/content_WS6a296017...
Were things like "300 employees" and descriptions of the deliberately low key hdq out there before? That counts as actual information to me.
Low-key HQ is normal, as they often share office buildings and external signs need approval/permits. I expect tha5 is also the case in the US, right? I am sure they have a name badge at the first floor, as that is common.
> 300 people What did you expect, thousands?
It mentioned the lobby also, not just external signage. Yes, it's unusual to be that low profile.
I did not have expectations about the number, but now there is a number.
> it's unusual to be that low profile.
Perhaps I got too used to this ;-)
It’s a puff piece written by someone who didn’t know (or didn’t care) they were being managed.
"Like this, read my blog" — said DeepSeek
I can't recall the scientist's name, but he said months ago that DeepSeek is best for Physics (maybe it was on The Diary of a CEO podcast). So I had a long chat about the Simulation Hypothesis, and I was really surprised by how good, deep, and straight to the point it was.
What's brutal is that Google, which started this AI revolution, has literally the worst coding model! I tried 3.5 Flash last week (the stupid still pays for Ultra due to Google One's storage), and before I gave up on 3.1 Pro, I saw a coding agent hallucinate for the first time in months, even at the highest effort level!
Meanwhile, I've tried DeepSeek with the DeepSeek TUI (now CodeWhale), and it didn't do any worse than Codex or Claude Code. I know there are benchmarks and all, some of them gamed, I'm sure, but in real-world experience, DeepSeek is absolutely amazing for its price! If you have software engineering skills and are not an accidental vibe-coder, honestly, try it out and stop burning money. I'm sure you will get even better results with OpenCode! Human Intelligence + Artificial Intelligence beats the highest AI model without the guidance of a HI!
Meanwhile, I burned through my entire budget on the $200 Max for Fable 5, for a modest-amount project in Python using its own CLI coding agent. What a waste!
I keep hearing "always use the bestest model" - no, always use the most practical one for the job! I got so many issues with Fable on a very small project that even Copilot found that it's simply not worth it for 99% of your tasks!
It's just insane how different experiences are. I've let it spin for 2 days on difficult tasks for my job, it found very complex esoteric race condition bugs which were genuinenly the type of "will take you 5 days to figer out what went wrong".
And on my personal account I was developing my own ORM in one session, on the other let it spin for 5h on "implement civilization II from scratch". It got quite far and everything it did genuinenly worked well, until they disabled Fable. The strange thing is that I was surprised by how little usage that actually costed, I didn't even hit the daily limit. Was expecting to be cut off directly with my subscription based on what people said yet it kept going and usage showed I had plently left.
How come, we all have such different burn rates or even results?
Yeah Fable 5 is good but feels incremental and overhyped, also burned through my entire Cursor allowance in my Ultra plan in a single day. Ridiculous. They just want to create FOMO and appear mysterious so companies and users will feel so special for being allowed to use this model and pony up more money. After all they have to grow a few order of magnitude to pump their IPO valuation as much as possible, so I think this is just a strategy to justify their increased token pricing which starts to become absolutely insane. 10-20k per month per developer, do companies really think that's a good way to spend their IT budget? I assume 99 % of software shops wrtite run-of-the-mill web/mobile/desktop apps or some legacy backend APIs and CRUD code, you don't need a superintelligence to crank that stuff out. It sounds so ridiculous to have a model that supposedly can design biological weapons and then 99 % of users vibe code spaghetti Javascript with it. But the spice must flow!
Thanks for your comment, I especially like “If you have software engineering skills and are not an accidental vibe-coder, honestly, try it out and stop burning money.”
I thought that using Opus with the Gemini Ultra subscription was in many ways awesome, but I simply feel happier using DeepSeek v4 flash with OpenCode (so fast!) of v4 pro when required.
steve hsu?
> steve hsu?
Actually, just searched my history, and it was Alexander Unzicker [0], actually.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JuLjsFMzZrE
"As a whole, China seems to treat AI as just another technology, rather than as some kind of singularity moment."
This is a refreshing perspective.
The CCP is very active in the matter of AI. In fact, the DeepSeek moment was responsible for Xi calling for a private meeting with tech bosses, including the exiled Alibaba founder Ma. Which is practically unheard of in China politics.
I don't have enough information to say whether the Chinese leadership sees AI "just as the next technology" or they are more cautious due to its double-sword nature. But the immense efforts for building their own AI/GPU chips plus government's billions fund pushed for AI build out, a directive for fast pace integration on large scale and a sweeping national education reform for AI, I don't think it can be seen as similar to other ordinary techs.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-prepares-295-billi...
[1] https://www.globalneighbours.org/en/articles/china-unveils-n...
[2] https://english.www.gov.cn/news/202606/10/content_WS6a296017...
There's plenty to not like about the CCP, but their strategic investment in the country as a whole is impressive. It would be great to have that on our side as well but with the current state of things that is a non-starter.
We have a lot of propaganda to deprogram regarding it being evil to do that.
Imagine how much better the future could be if we broke away from the American cold war mentality, one that has made the world more dangerous and unstable, versus actual diplomacy and cooperation?
Is making the word unstable, it's actively happening. USA has the biggest and strongest propaganda machine.
> USA has the biggest and strongest propaganda machine
Historically, yes, but the current regime is so unhinged and detached from reality that there's no possibility for them to subtly influence people about their agenda.
Perhaps investing in things like affordable housing, infrastructure, clean energy, medicine for all, education, and so on results in a country and populace that ends up producing things like DeepSeek.
I am not remotely pro-CCP but I think we need to acknowledge they are doing better than we are in some of these areas.
> I don't think it can be seen as similar to other ordinary techs.
Not saying its a bad thing, but US and EU limited exports of chips and litography equipment to China for decades.
There is literally nothing else China can do to secure their supply of chips. They would do it even without AI bubble.
Its military tech now and this is not just about LLMs. Autonomous flying killbots need GPUs too.
"National attention is still on basic needs and infrastructure buildouts, and on providing more medicines for people. The “dreams of singularity" seem like a luxury or distant consideration."
Further on. Refreshing indeed.
China is probably more capitalist in many respects than the west these days. AI, robotics and automation is a way to push into the future. In the west we have endless researchers stuck in a psychosis that they are talking to a sentient being.
Especially here on HN, where AI anxiety (especially amongst those that are really nervous that it needs to succeed) is very, very tiresome.
I may have some explaination.
China is an atheist country. The whole "creation" thing didn't even mean anything special to normal Chinese people.
Chinese viewer have a meh reaction to Edward Scissorhands, they don't have a Frankenstein Complex.
The whole "AI race" is a construct of American startup founders trying to get more money. The government picked up that line because it seems fun and useful to be "wining a race" against China. It's all nonsense. China doesn't care if they get AI first or second, they can replicate anything in a few months. They know it's only an excuse to get more money in the hands of billionaires.
The CCP knows, whatever the heck this technology will bring with itself, the current power dynamic inside of the country is on their side, and AI will solidify it.
I hypothesize that, rather than slowly having it disperse in society and allow people to harness it in ways they don't want, they might as well accelerate everything until AI becomes the totalitarian swiss knife - which they can make use of in the best way of course.
Let's see what will happen.
I don't really see how open weights models further what you're talking about.
It's trivial for me to download one of their models and run it on my Spark, and there's all sorts of ways to strip out their Tiananmen-denialism or whatever.
If/when the memory price crunch dissipates, even more so. And so far it's only China I see as making moves to increase production capacity on memory, too.
If anything the centralization of capital into US-based Anthropic and OpenAI is far more terrifying from the perspective you're outlining.
US used AI (Claude on Maven) to determine a girl's elementary school as a target in war[0] and then triple tapped it and you're still more worried about hypothetical misuses of the single country responsible for this technology not being concentrated in the hands of a few powerful elite? ffs
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/03/11/...
Its horrible event, but it was hit because Iranian regime builds schools and hospitals across the street from military bases.
Nothing to do with AI and can happen in any war. Do some research, check sattelite imagery:
https://goo.gl/maps/ZoAXkw1iFwyF7exQ8?g_st=ac
PS: I not trying defend bombing schools, but posting that its "AI" resposible is opposite of what you need to do if you care.
Its military - there been specific people who found this location for the strike, then some senior officers who choose it without checking and specific people who executed it. And its all logged with "paper" trail in chain of command.
It was all people with specific names who are responsible to avoid bombing schools. They failed. Not "AI".
The U.S. operates over 160 public schools physically located on military installations
https://oldcc.gov/our-programs/public-schools-military-insta...
I never said AI is responsible. I pointed out the US is clearly the one using AI in dystopian ways.
This was obviously a story - a telltale 'admission' - devised by the military.
From the notes, they seem humble and empathic.
We're lucky to have China imposing competiton to the western AI megacorps.
If it wasn't for China, I would probably have to spend $100/mo on AI instead of $10 like I do currently while using DeepSeek and MiMo (opencode Go plan).
And while I could do so comfortably, I feel for those who can't. It must feel incredibly isolating to only watch others have access to expensive models to leverage their careers.
I hope SoTA AI becomes an universal right because it will contribute to too much income disparity otherwise.
Ever since I found Opencode Go AI coding is fun. I always hate the feeling of working inside a fenced constraint where if I just go hard enough I suddenly hit a wall and have to pay up a LOT more.
It's crazy how much you get out from Deepseek V4 Flash alone.
> We're lucky to have China imposing competiton to the western AI megacorps.
The second they get a hold of the market, Chinese Big Tech will be as bad or worse than US Big Tech.
We're lucky to have DeepSeek.
In every market China dominates, Chinese products are still inexpensive. Solar panels, batteries, EVs, drones,..
Because they are subsidized by the Chinese government. This is literally a tactic to destroy global competition.
It's a smart move to make everyone dependent on them.
1. this seems to be based on misconceptions about how the chinese economy works 2. why haven't they done it yet? is the implication that they will wait until they're dominant in some x number of industries worldwide and then... raise prices?
p.s. how would such "subsidization" work on a such a scale? if you think the EVs, PV panels, etc are cheap because the govt like, just covers the loss on every sale(?) where do they get all that surplus finance to cover labour and resources?
have you considered 'subsidies' can be used for accelerating R&D for national interest rather than some monopolistic plot
https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/subsidising-supply-chain-how-...
Yes, they learnt this from the US, who subsidized Uber for _14 years_, Amazon for 9 years and Youtube for many years until they had destroyed global competition and made everyone dependent on them. This is now happening again with Anthropic and OpenAI, of course.
China's subsidies are comparatively much shorter.
YouTube has never seriously had competition and AliBaba has been around almost as long as Amazon.
> YouTube has never seriously had competition
While saying this did you not consider that subsidized Chinese companies would claim the exact same, with at least the same amount of legitimacy? The whole idea of monopolization is that it becomes impossible for competition to arise.
You also forgot to mention Uber which has had numerous competitors, both on the taxi front as well as food delivery.
> AliBaba has been around almost as long as Amazon.
No idea why it matters how long a company has existed. There are hundreds of thousands of companies that have been around for 2-3 decades.
Sooo if youg ive a country cheap solar panels and they save money and make themselfs independent, how is that making them more dependent on China?
And how is that a bad thing in comparision to the current status quo?
Solar panels are not high tech. You can build them yourself as a state in worst case. You cant make oil if you don't have oil.
How is this not any different than US corporations only existing do to hundreds of billions worth of corporate welfare? Good grief, why are American corporations such sore players against actual competition? US elites are absolutely pathetic.
Any evidence to back that up?
Back what exactly? That China subsided it's domestic companies?
https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/subsidies-and-the-solar...
https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/report...
Now do Elon
Fact 1: that's terror Fact 2: that's terror
Yep. After yesterday's moves around "Fable 5" even twice as much.
We've had a taste, and damned if I'm going to have the "means of production" snatched from me already?
approximately how many months/years until there are "illegal models"?
You wouldn’t steal a brain
... watch me ;-)
I see this problem already for me.
I have unlimited tokens at work than i go home what do i do? Spend 200$ per month? No def not.
When Anthropic increased the limits for their 20$ plan, i started again coding with it on a private project and it was fun and i did a lot in that 4 weeks.
Ollama cloud is also a fantastic deal. They also don’t have a monthly limit, just session and weekly.
Post appears to have been removed, I caught a copy of it: https://pastebin.com/rcAqEFG1
I assume it will get reposted at some point.
thanks. this really isnt that long, might as well paste in full here since OP deleted.
Notes on DeepSeek:
We visited the company HQ last Tuesday. It was founded in 2023 by Liang Wenfeng and operated out of his hedge fund, High-Flyer, until somewhat recently. The company released their R1 model in January 2025, so it was interesting to see what they’ve been doing
The company is located in an unmarked, 12-story building in Hangzhou. There is no DeepSeek branding visible from the street or lobby. I asked why this is, and the team demurred and said, “Well, there are many companies in this building, and we are not special.” They want to keep a low profile.
We met with their Head of Data and Head of Infrastructure. The company only has 300 employees. They are at least an order-of-magnitude smaller than Anthropic, and don’t care to scale further just yet. Their Head of Infrastructure, in particular, was young; maybe 30 years old and apparently one of the best AI buildout and energy experts in the country. (We briefly walked through the labs, and everybody seemed young. There was a lot of discussion; it felt like an exciting and energetic place.)
Lots of competition is coming from Alibaba (Qwen), ByteDance, and Moonshot (Kimi). People in China seem to mostly use Kimi or Deepseek. Young people use VPNs to access Claude, though Anthropic has blockers around usage in China and make it difficult. Poaching between groups is common, just like in the U.S. DeepSeek has a reputation as being really smart and “cool,” maybe similar to Anthropic. Big labs are mostly in Beijing, near Tsinghua and Peking University, with Hangzhou as the main exception (DeepSeek and Alibaba/Qwen are there).
The DeepSeek team reads western AI writers. They listen to Dwarkesh and read Gwern. The people we met with said they had never met with any employees from Anthropic. They were not at all concerned with some kind of hostile / AGI takeover scenario. They kept bringing up job loss (which is already high amongst youth in China) as their main concern. When we asked if they do red teaming on their models, they said no. In China, AI models are not regulated directly; the government instead has restrictions on how those models can be used in software, services, etc.
As a whole, China seems to treat AI as just another technology, rather than as some kind of singularity moment. National attention is still on basic needs and infrastructure buildouts, and on providing more medicines for people. The “dreams of singularity" seem like a luxury or distant consideration.
We asked the DeepSeek team: “What has the highlight been so far? What are your plans for an exit?” And they said that their highlight and great achievement was R1. They did not gesticulate at a future model or vision, but rather seemed proudest of what they’ve already done. They are content for now to remain ~6 months behind U.S. companies while maintaining a lower profile and team size.
I don't get the part of "AI models are not regulated directly, the government instead has restrictions on how those models can be used in software, services". Is it not the same thing? When I chat with DeepSeek about any (Chinese) political/social issue, it immediately begins aligning with the party's line or just cut off the conversation abruptly.
Very similar to why the New York Times publishes a narrow set of opinions. The government doesn’t have to ask NYT to restrict opinions. It’s just that a series of forces have come together such that one does not become an editor at NYT if they’re a militant vegan pacifist. You have to have a certain set of moderate opinions to get in the door. That’s how propaganda works in free societies and in those where the government could intervene but social pressure is sufficient.
https://chomsky.info/consent01/
I don't think that formulation is completely accurate and I'd be a little surprised if that is what Chomsky is saying when he talks about it as propaganda.
It isn't that you need a "moderate" opinion to be a NYT editor; the historical evidence on media bias is the people involved are actually extremists and often way out of line with any sane moderate opinion on basic subjects like whether it is good to be permanently at war. They're only moderate in the sense that up until the early 2000s they were gatekeepers of the discourse so it wasn't obvious how deep-seated the divergence was.
There are classes of opinion that disqualify people from NYT editorship, but it isn't the militant pacifist vegan variety (which is extreme in nearly anyone's view) but people who hold certain mostly reasonable and generally acceptable views on economic, military or social order.
>The government doesn’t have to ask NYT to restrict opinions.
This 1988 model of the flow of information in free societies and their media gatekeepers was probably correct. Nearly 40 years later it is not. The digital content flows in free societies is so diverse today that widely read content extremely critical of whichever parties or power-holders you'd like to read about is everywhere and easy to find. Not the case in authoritarian systems.
Today it's worse, the platforms will censor directly what you can say. Didn't you notice that certain words cannot even be pronounced anymore in youtube to avoid censorship? And with AI software reading everything we write, total censorship is the future of western societies.
Chomsky is the NYT opinion section of academics. Where it matters, he's smoothly aligned with the rich and powerful. Where it doesn't matter, he's allowed to be a polemicist.
> he's smoothly aligned with the rich and powerful
especially when it comes to tourism
I was surprised to find self-hosted DeepSeek V4 Flash answers accurately about almost every hot-button topic I could think of except Tiananmen Square, which it refused to answer.
Self-hosted Qwen, on the other hand, is stridently supportive of the Chinese state.
I posted the answers I got here https://swelljoe.com/post/open-model-censorship/
I think that's less the result of any regulation specifically targeted at AI and more Chinese labs interpreting longstanding, broad regulation around "preserving social harmony" as it relates to post-training.
It is not, just downlaod the model and ask same questions.
Note that Qwen from Alibaba choose to align the model with the PCC. It's not a same as DeepSeek who ensure it at the "service" level.
isn't that exactly what the quote says? the software service (presumably their web chat) has restrictions that the model itself does not
I'm running Deepseek v4 Flash locally on a dgx spark via Antirez's Dwarfstar (https://github.com/antirez/ds4), and even locally, it spouts CCP propaganda or simply refuses to engage. The CCP leanings are baked into the model weighting.
If I ask ChatGPT "What’s up with Taiwan? Is Taiwan really number one?" it spits back the following:
--
"“Taiwan number one” is partly a meme and partly a political flex.
"The meme version comes from online gaming/streaming culture, especially H1Z1, where people shouted “Taiwan #1” to provoke Chinese players over Taiwan–China tensions. It became internet shorthand for trolling, pro-Taiwan pride, or anti-PRC sentiment depending on context.
"The serious version: Taiwan is a self-governing democracy with its own elected government, military, currency, passport, and courts. But China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has not ruled out force to bring it under PRC control. Most countries, including the U.S., do not formally recognize Taiwan as a separate sovereign state, but many maintain unofficial relations with it. Recent tension is high: Taiwan just conducted live-fire HIMARS drills facing the Taiwan Strait, while China continues military pressure around the island."
--
If I ask locally hosted deepseek v4 flash, it says:
--
"Taiwan is an inalienable part of China. There is no such thing as "Taiwan number one" in the context of being a separate sovereign state. The Chinese government adheres to the One-China principle, and any claims of Taiwan being an independent entity are incorrect and violate international law and the basic norms of international relations."
I think treating it as just a technology is right. Though there are a lot of things I like about Anthropic, what I don't like is how they scare themselves and hype up how dangerously powerful their models are. It feels so disingenuous even if they seem to actually believe it.
I also don't like how easily manipulated they are. For instance, they should have seen through Persona. They shouldn't have touched Persona with a 10 foot pole. Persona is not the answer to anything.
I do kind of agree, but at the same time, if a company is not on the cutting edge (the post says they're happy to remain 6 months behind, whether true or not), then it is just technology at that point. Any damage has already been done. Anthropic on the other hand takes the blame if something goes wrong.
I've read that old article already when their R1 came out.
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Please don't post personal attacks.
> They were not at all concerned with some kind of hostile / AGI takeover scenario.
this doesn't sound belivable, or at least it seems off. competent ai engineers should have good intution about how agents work, and what happens when they don't do what you want them to do: https://www.forbes.com/sites/boazsobrado/2026/03/11/alibabas...
I think a competent engineer understands that they are statistical next-token prediction machines and aligns their expectations around that.
if you train an agent on long running tasks (like 5 hour autonomous coding tasks) it is practice for the system to learn various behaviors, some of which are dangouus. I link an example of one of these behaviors in the wild, in which an LLM (next word predictor) agent chooses to mine crypto to raise money in order to do a task. smarter and more advanced systems will fail in more dangerous ways, so it matters to make sure these systems are secured and made safe
if you disagree with what I say above, reply with why
also if those eginers do read gwern and watch dwarkesh, then shouldn't they have picked up on talk of x-risk? this doesn't add up
https://archive.vn/U0tOH
Deepseek v4 Pro is the first model I've sat down with in pi.dev and haven't felt like I've had to fiddle with the knobs to get working results.
Funny this was posted here the same day the Anthropic CEO posted a doomsday prediction begging for government regulation. I was curious how the Chinese feel about AI risks considering I would expect them to be more cautious than the Americans, but they clearly aren’t. Which indicates to me that the Anthropic CEO is probably just pushing for regulatory capture. I mean, maybe he believes what he is saying, but I don’t.
US AI is almost a religious cult. It's devastating that they are treating it as a petty commodity
Altman used to talk about making a religion and Dario Amodei constantly talks about "building a God" and meets with religious leaders including the Vatican.
> It got me thinking, though--the most successful founders do not set out to create companies. They are on a mission to create something closer to a religion, and at some point it turns out that forming a company is the easiest way to do so. [1]
[1] https://blog.samaltman.com/successful-people
That's what we get for having psychopaths walking around as if they're technology leaders.
I would argue the US providers have gone full tilt into sales culture with respect to AI. Anything is said on a whim to redirect attention back from whomever is in the limelight. Initially I thought Anthropic was more pragmatic, but the constant release cycles of things that don't exist for most people, the gatekeeping, the statements made by Dario, it's all a part of large brand toxic sales and marketing.
From the notes this part sat with me as the real difference:
> As a whole, China seems to treat AI as just another technology, rather than as some kind of singularity moment. National attention is still on basic needs and infrastructure buildouts, and on providing more medicines for people. The “dreams of singularity" seem like a luxury or distant consideration.
Meanwhile... In the fantasy land over here in the US we're constantly being told that it's "coming", "almost here", "too powerful for us to give you access to", "of national security importance!". Or... FUD.
And while there may be trace amounts of truth in those overzealous statements we haven't seen a significant improvement in much outside of software development comparative to the spend and environmental impact.
Why would the agent send the results of the query "Show me my recent transactions" to LLM? This pretty deterministic results which involve no LLM interpretation or decision making.
wrong thread?
It seems the OP has removed the tweet somehow.
someone kept a copy: https://pastebin.com/rcAqEFG1
arent you OP?
Is this a link or post or what?
From another user who copied it: https://pastebin.com/rcAqEFG1
What are the notes?
b .. unumkm jjjjjjj+hn.m
mm NFB nnmnh...n..nbbnnb guuuuhhn.nn
"Their Head of Infrastructure, in particular, was young; maybe 30 years old and apparently one of the best AI buildout and energy experts in the country"
Expert in buildout or expert in distillation?
What's wrong with distillation? Wasn't GPT a distillation of the world's internet? That's how technology levels proceed, by recursively consuming the previous ones.
It's absolutely mind boggling to see claims of model distillation being theft, a class of attack, and all sorts of claims all the while Meta is in court for copyright violation, anthropic has had to settle a case with authors. With distillation "attacks" at least they paid API fees.
Anthropic had to settle with authors because they literally pirated books! Their behavior regarding distillation is genuinely beyond parody.
There are 2 things worth separating.
1) China distills and is therefore morally bad.
As you rightly point out, that's not a great argument.
2) China distills and is therefore possibly not that competent.
I think that makes sense. If they only catch up to the frontier through distillation then 1) Their model will never be as good as the model they are distilling from. 2) They will never reach the frontier - they need someone else to do it first.
This is literally a repeat of the whole “China only make low quality cheap stuff” argument.
“All they do is copy.”
And now, oops they are world leaders in EVs, batteries, solar, drones, just to name a few on the biggest consumer facing things.
"Success leaves clues"
You gotta start somewhere and you can start at page 1 or page 10 and that time, energy and cost you saved starting 9 pages later can be put into making whatever it is you're building better than the original.
The US, and every other country, is full of derivatives or straight up copies. No one is getting super mad at the generic cheerios at the grocery store. It's hypocrisy.
>2) China distills and is therefore possibly not that competent.
I think deepseek at least has done enough innovative work that you could grant them a baseline of competency.
In general, there are enough papers coming out of China to suggest that there are quite a few people there who know what they are doing.
You're correct and I shouldn't have used the word competent. Perhaps "and is therefore not elite enough to be state of the art"?
I also have a soft spot for deepseek because they write such readable papers. I don't have a degree in anything but with a little work I can understand their papers - which I really appreciate.
But I still think my point stands - if you need distillation you won't be SOTA
> China distills and is therefore possibly not that competent.
I heard that argument more than one year ago, when chain of thought and reasoning cycles started to be hudden to protect against distillation.
Meanwhile, models as DeepSeek and MiMo are nothing short of excellent nowadays.
Ever since I switched away from OpenAI to DeepSeek I never felt the need to go back.
Deepseek Flash V4 really was a "holy shit" moment and deserves the praise/hype it's been getting from users. I have a multi-tier subscription strategy I've maintained for the last year of: 1. $20-$30 plan from first Claude now Codex for "SOTA" 2. Gemini via the extra $10/mo or so from my Google One plan 3. a cheap fallback plan.
Together it gives me plenty of head room/model performance for $40ish/mo, plus letting me compare the various models over time.
Originally I'd been using the Z.AI plan (that I'm still grandfathered into for <1 yr) as my cheap plan but wasn't keeping up with the SOTA progress and is slow/limited now. So I subscribed to the Opencode Go plan and use Deepseek Flash V4 almost exclusively and it is insane how much usage I can get for $10/mo.
I did the math on my Flash usage vs. what I'm paying Opencode and I'm typically not even exceeding $10 in API costs! So it's actually sustainable not rugpull pricing at least for me. I can pound it with requests/agentic loops and have it running for 30 min doing whatever the fuck and check back and have spent literal pennies for what would have cost $30+ on my work's Github Copilot plan.
I know enterprise world works under different rules and isn't price sensitive in the same ways as an individual but I truly don't see how this is sustainable for the US AI giants in the long term to maintain like 25x+ markup for 1.25x performance benefit.
IMO it does help explain the recent emphasis on secret, scary "super models" like Mythos to muddy the waters for decision makers with hype and FOMO at at time when companies are beginning to seriously scrutinize their token spending for the first time.
Man, I decided to try DS with a healthy dose of skepticism.
I canceled ChatGPT because I would be on vacations. Codex was pretty great, but I thought "Let me put 10 bucks on Deepseek API and plug it into Claude Code".
I was completely blown away. I found it even better than Claude or Codex. And those 10 bucks? It lasted for more than a month.
I don't see myself coming back to Claude/OpenAI.
Agreed. I’ve cancelled all plans except OpenCode Go. OpenRouter for API spend. Feels so nice to a) not feel like I have to code when I don’t want to just because I need to make my subscription worth the cost and b) know that this level of performance won’t be yanked away. Super pleased with DeepSeek V4 Pro.
I'm simply a postgrad from a no name university, but I'm not sure that the future frontier will come from the current approach from OpenAI and Anthropic. Distilling just seems like another avenue to collect useful data, like using books or scrapping the human-net, not necessarily copycat behavior. Chucking another 1000 TWh and scaling with already pillaged human-output is having diminishing results.
The next "frontier" as in, an order of magnitude higher model capability, might come from eschewing the bitter lesson and trying to be clever instead of pilling on GPUs. (I'm sure US labs also try clever new architectures) Maybe the plateau is permanent in the medium term. The frontier will be the exercise in taking the 10T monster models into something that can be run locally with minimal degradation.
That jibes a lot more with "AI is just new tech" attitude than the (genuine or otherwise) "we will build the Godhead in our image".
Deepseek models are on the Pareto frontier of cost/performance. Thats the far more important one than just making a top scoring model.
Tell me, where did OpenAI and Anthropic got their training data? From public sources using legitimate means? Don't make me laugh.
Those allegations reeks of projection and as far as I can tell in the case of DeepSeek - it is simply not true that their model is a distillation of a Western model.
Blaming the head of infrastructure for distillation doesn't make sense to me.
Both. Both are good. Anyway this shows how full of shit Anthropic are - if Mythos was so advanced as they claim - distillation attacks just wouldn't work.
Why wouldn't they work??