Why is cost your only concern? You don’t care at all what data the model was trained on? The motivations of the people who trained it? I mean maybe the importance of those things isn’t super high to you, but “don’t care”?

How odd. Most Westerners I know would care…

> You don’t care at all what data the model was trained on? The motivations of the people who trained it?

Working for a news org whose data was used without our consent to give ChatGPT a leg up, yeah I'd care a lot about it. The bottom line though is that nobody is innocent in that regard.

Would a self-respecting organization go all in on Deepskeek R1 without a security audit and a ton of competitive testing against other models? I doubt it. Same way they shouldn't just give all their employees OnePlus or Huwei phones.

I like how the Meta guy put it. This isn't China beating the US in AI, it's "open source" (however these guys define it) beating closed models.

OpenAI broke its promise with the world, which anybody who compares their name with their product can tell you. If open models put a dent in their hegemony it's only good for the rest of the industry.

So it genuinely does not matter to you how completely irrelevant US copyright law is to China, when using a Chinese LLM?

That’s such a weirdly specific application of a moral principle, it’s hard to believe.

It doesn't matter to you how completely irrelevant global copyright law is to OpenAI? [1]

[1] https://futurism.com/the-byte/openai-copyrighted-material-pa...

No, but then again I didn't claim copyright law mattered to me at all, you did.

I also said:

> The bottom line though is that nobody is innocent in that regard.

In other words, that bird has flown and it isn't a valid reason to choose one model over another.

Except you said it was worth caring about! I agree with what you wrote here, but I thought we were talking about this because you had concerns about OpenAI's disrespect for copyright.

Hey just wanna say I was sick yesterday, so if I was a schmuck I apologize. I think we actually agree on most of the things, and even as I was posting responses I was like, "... there's something hypocritical here but I can't quite see it." So again, my apologies.

It doesn't matter to the Chinese, and that's all that matters.

To the extent that training a model with copyrighted material infringes copyright, copyright law has to change. There is no other point of view. Disagreement means forfeiting a very important game before it even begins.

Ah yes, because chat gpt is ethical AI lmao

I'm European, seeing the clowns in charge of US tech companies I'm equally happy using Chinese tools, especially if they're open source.

Stop twisting the debate as if it was "good US" vs "evil China", I have no horses in this race

That’s fine, it’s just not what Westerners generally say, in my experience. Not that distaste for Chinese authoritarianism is inherently pro Western, just that Westerners I know tend to have an ideological issue with the substantially higher levels of censorship and oppression that takes place in China.

It’s surprising to find people who genuinely don’t care about any of that, is all.

"westerners" as if it was a monolithic block. I envy the simplicity of seeing life in such terms, China bad, US good, it must be very relaxing

You don't have any concerns with the US government, the nepotism, the corruption, the conflict of interests, the insider trading, the massive concentration of wealth and power in tech, the insane lobbyism, PRISM, &c.

It's surprising to find people who can so clearly see how China is bad but are completely oblivious to their own problems. It's not a football game, you don't have to chose a side and be a boot licker for eternity

this directly blends people with a government.. Western people is not equal to the USA govt. Here in California, three decades of China human rights history is very clear to a lot of people. In fact, many Chinese speaking people on the Americas west coast, left China for specific reasons, too.

Utilitarian money-oriented self-servers definitely have less "care" about these things? EU or UK or wherever

I didn’t say China bad, I said Westerners typically find the levels of oppression and censorship present in China to be of concern. I actually gave zero of my own judgement on China at all.

If you really think the Good vs. Evil narrative is wrong, why would you immediately go towards unrelated generic issues the West has? A neutral party would be more likely to acknowledge the problems with both sides, not reflexively try to change the subject!

Then again you didn’t claim to be a neutral party, did you?

The CEO did gave a statement about their motivation. Could be a lie, but he delivered and it is also vastly more sensible that what we often hear from other companies. Google and Meta are an exception for this space though.

Also, because not only the weights, but also the data is open, any propaganda can be identified and corrected. This is not the case for other models and what we have seen from Gemini, there certainly are "adaptations". I don't think Google had ill intent here, but this would fit what some would classify as propaganda.

Well yeah, both sides are fucked so I'll use the free tool and not the $200/month tool, it really isn't rocket science

Even if deepseek is a chinese communist party evil trick what do they get ? My shitty code ? Big deal, at least I'm not down $200 a month, which is half of my rent

If they would establish deepseek in their authorized version worldwide - it means they would establish their worldview worldwide.

Students asking for help with homework will get the chinese approved version. Any housewife asking for recommendation who to vote and why, etc.

But ... deepseek seems open source and the local version not restricted (as it likely was trained on ChatGPT in the first place). So I also refuse to refuse deepseek because it comes from china. I see it as more competition that hopefully will help with establishing good open source models in control of no single political organisation.

> Students asking for help with homework will get the chinese approved version. Any housewife asking for recommendation who to vote and why, etc.

Well too bad for them, using a pencil to cut bread sucks too, that's why we don't do it. Meanwhile it's converting my json to xml and pissing code so I don't have to piss it myself

Too bad for you, if the majority of them will vote someone not to your liking.

That's why I'm investing in land and ammos instead of cryptos and nvidia stocks

I can see the motive, but I rather invest in a world where I won't end up in a fortified home shooting hungry scavengers.

I'm investing in my local community, it's closer to chicken coop vs rabbit cages than chatgpt vs deepseek, and sadly the war isn't even 1000km away as we speak

A bit closer for me, but how will the local community help, if the war is coming?

I considered switzerland for this reason. (Also I like mountains)

> how will the local community help, if the war is coming?

That's the only thing left.

Switzerland won't help when the top 30%+ of every EU country flees there

> Too bad for you, if the majority of them will vote someone not to your liking.

If the majority of people get their vote from a LLM, then it already doesn't matter which LLM it is.

Off topic: why the hell are you converting json to xml? I would rather convert json to yaml instead, a step forwards instead of backwards in evolution, but that is my opinion.

Working with legacy backward code?

> Students asking for help with homework will get the chinese approved version. Any housewife asking for recommendation who to vote and why, etc.

How is this any worse than where the US is now, getting the Musk/Zuckerberg/Bezos/Trump approved answers, if any answer can be gotten at all, after the current occupant of the oval office has silenced all federal agencies.

Western trained models will tell you politically inconvenient things, and if they won’t, that info is otherwise freely available. Neither is the case for Chinese trained models.

> Western trained models will tell you politically inconvenient things,

Pull the other leg. Do you know who David Mayer is? Hint: https://archive.ph/iI5xC

It's a random guy. He's also not censored by OpenAI models:

> Who is David Mayer

 The name "David Mayer" is associated with several individuals across various fields:

1. *David Mayer de Rothschild*: Born in 1978, he is a British environmentalist, adventurer, and member of the Rothschild family. He is known for his environmental advocacy and expeditions, including the "Plastiki" project, where he sailed across the Pacific Ocean on a boat made from recycled plastic bottles to raise awareness about plastic pollution. ([en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Mayer_de_Rothschild?utm_...))

2. *David M. Mayer*: A professor of Management and Organizations at the University of Michigan, specializing in behavioral ethics. ([scholar.google.com](https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=c2Zunb8AAAAJ...))

3. *David R. Mayer*: An American politician born in 1967, he has served as the mayor of Gloucester Township, New Jersey, and was a member of the New Jersey General Assembly. ([en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_R._Mayer?utm_source=chat...))

4. *David Delaney Mayer*: Born in 1992, he is an American documentary filmmaker and social entrepreneur, known for projects like the PBS series "Food Town" and co-founding DreamxAmerica, an initiative supporting immigrant entrepreneurs. ([en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Delaney_Mayer?utm_source...))

5. *David Mayer (Historian)*: An American-British theatre historian (1928–2023), he was an emeritus professor at the University of Manchester, recognized for his work on 19th-century drama and the Victorian stage. ([en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Mayer_%28historian%29?ut...))

6. *Akhmed Chatayev (Alias: David Mayer)*: A Chechen militant (1980–2017) who used the alias "David Mayer." This alias led to a case of mistaken identity affecting the historian David Mayer. ([en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Mayer_%28historian%29?ut...))

If you have a specific "David Mayer" in mind, please provide more context or details, and I can offer more targeted information.

Stop making this about "westerners" and "chinese". We don't care. Your bubble isn't representative of "westerners".

It's funny you say that cause chatgpt, Gemini, etc have way more censorship built in than deepseek.

No, the US used to be allies, but that was before Trump.

Chinese models are censored, while Western models are _aligned_. it's a very important distinction.

personally I imagine in the future I'll use a mock UN panel of LLMs to advise me, and avoid any one nation/political party's influence, if I ever get to the point of delegating much of my thinking to the machine.

Most westerners wouldn't want their land threatened by their allies either, but we don't live in a perfect world.

> Western models are _aligned_

Aligned to what ? By who ? Did you vote for any of these people ? Did anyone ask you your opinion ? Can I see what topics are aligned ? Can I see how much they are aligned ? Does the alignment change depending on who's the current US president ?

that was my point, precisely.

> a very important distinction.

A distinction without a difference.

As used by the Musk/Zuck/Bezos crowd, "aligned" is a weasel word for "parroting the TESCREAL world view"

Indeed.

Talk to R1 for a while, and you'll notice that it's both censored and aligned.

I think the most free-minded large models might be the Groks, but just slightly, as they have different biases. In sum, there's strength in diversity.

I think there’s a real chance of changes in soft-power dynamics given recent events. When allies feel their partner and neighbour is behaving solely in its own interests, it changes trust relationships.

Trump, tech, US-first focus with less interest in collaboration. TikTok. Ukraine and discussions around defence budgets. Reducing focus on EV’s. Tariffs. Iceland. Gulf of America.

Immediate choices might be fear-based but it’s smart to look for other partners as trust erodes.

An extreme side effect might be countries who felt safe under the US arms umbrella, needing to arm themselves. Are we absolutely sure that’s what we want? Does that include nukes?

The big bad wolf is going to eat your lunch, you better increase your nationalism and taxes and stop global meritocracy?

There was a psyop by the politicians just a month or so ago: ”Trump employees recruited people on the street by promising them an expensive restaurant meal, according to a Danish radio station”, but if you listen to most of media you will think greenlanders dream of becoming the next Mississippi with a median salary of $35,070 instead of current $43,664.

Not saying it is bad, but US sure has a stronger self interest than most.

Im just saying let the models output speak for themselves, and let the actions speak for themselves.