Is anyone actually surprised by this?

93 points

This is probably only a problem with the online version. In contrast to google and openAI they, like meta, let you download the model and run it offline, where they can’t access any of this data I presume.

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57 points

I’ve been running it locally using ollama, works completely offline, no keystroke data for anyone!

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6 points

Yeah I scan logs and so far nothing… I still don’t trust them but I can’t tell shit either

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5 points

Just use little snitch, open snitch or simple wall depending on your operating system and block the outbound connection if one ever occurs

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23 points

Right, the offline version (if you have the hardware to run it) is completely under your control, and no one can take that away from you. Honestly nice to see that happen, I thought it would take several years.

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79 points
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Anyone using DeepSeek as a service the same way proprietary LLMs like ChatGPT are used is missing the point. The game-changer isn’t that a Chinese company like DeepSeek can compete with OpenAI and its ilk—it’s that, thanks to DeepSeek, any organization with a few million dollars to train and host their own model can now compete with OpenAI.

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23 points

On-prem vs. Cloud, basically. On-prem just magically got cheaper.

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3 points
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Onprem has always been cheaper. Cloud compute was the most successful marketing campaign I can think of.

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1 point

Not when it’s about LLMs.

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5 points

I’d like to look into that, how can I train an existing model further?

I’m only playing around with ollama, but like to do a bit more - mostly just to fulfill my needs to understand things - but have no idea where to start

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5 points

You’re going to have to learn python.

Here’s a good overview: https://huggingface.co/docs/transformers/training

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3 points
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Python is not a problem
SW Dev is my job. Just never had real contact with AI before, besides playing around a bit.

Thank you very much for the link!!

Edit: thank you very much again, that was pretty much exactly what I was looking for.
Don’t know how I missed to checkout huggingface. Thought of it always just as a github for models and didn’t bother checking for docs…
But that’s a great intro with simple tools/tutorials to get a grip on it, thanks!

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8 points

Or open source groups can make a fully open repro of it: https://github.com/huggingface/open-r1

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348 points
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DeepSeek does the same things that OpenAI does, but it’s a foreign actor so OOooooOOWwwwooOOOO sCaRrRey!

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220 points

Wait until they hear what data Instagram/Meta collects during use!

But they’re a US company so it’s ok.

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Strawmanning the open source federated social media enthusiast crowd as unaware fans of meta?

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69 points

Realistically what is the worst thing China is doing with your private data? Selling it? If you’re not a Chinese National, at least you don’t fall under their jurisdiction.

If you’re a U.S. citizen, with all the tech oligarchs cozying up to the current administration, I’d be a lot more concerned with Facebook/Twitter/Etc collecting your data.

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-1 points
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Realistically what is the worst thing China is doing with your private data?

Probably mapping out the extended support networks of democratic activists in Taiwan to prepare to throw them in jail after a forcible military takeover.

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-41 points

The CCP is significantly more oppressive, gives zero shits about human rights or trademarks or really anyone at all. The US at least pretends to care.

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-23 points
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As a US citizen, I prefer services that US consumer protections could apply to. (While we still have them, ahem.) I know that Chinese laws will not protect me from things a Chinese business does in China.

(What’s with the rude replies? Did I fail to notice what instance I’m on or something?)

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12 points

As a chauvinist

Ftfy

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16 points

The response the deepseek has been so transparent and cliched .

I thought more of Mashable. , but I suppose it’s good when they show you who they really are

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26 points

That sinophobia isn’t going to stoke itself!

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-15 points

Pathetic

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2 points
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Western authorities have been harvesting data for a few decades from social media so any complaint that singles out Chinese apps doing the same is obviously rooted in sinophobia.

The fact you think my joking about racists doing that is pathetic shows which side of that assertion you fall.

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-25 points
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but it’s a foreign actor so OOooooOOWwwwooOOOO sCaRrRey!

I love that people think this is a solid own. Lest we forget Hong Kong, or an impending hot war in Taiwan or building out extradition systems with an expanding network of countries to forcibly repatriate and torture dissidents and human rights lawyers.

You used to not have to explain why authoritarianism was bad.

Edit: I would love to know the Pro side of what happened in Hong Kong, or the forced extradition regime, since evidently I’m clearly in the wrong in thinking those were bad. What am I missing?

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30 points

It used to not be necessary because democracies used to have moral authority but since the revelations of Manning and Snowden non-Americans see no difference between giving our data to the USA or to China or any other. We also know from the reaction to the war in Ukraine and Gaza that human rights claims are only sometimes used.

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4 points
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Anti terrorism is good, actually. I don’t support people kicking seniors for speaking mandarin to try to bully a government into not prosecuting murderers in the mainland, which was the reason the protests happened (that and Washington money)

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4 points

or an impending hot war in Taiwan

When you can’t even find things that China actually has done to complain about, so you have to start complaining about things they haven’t done.

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14 points

I’m not American so they are indeed a foreign actor.

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3 points

Nope you can’t run chatgpt locally.

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16 points

DeepSeek’s privacy policy raises concerns about a U.S. foreign adversary’s ability to access U.S. user data. Users are familiar with the massive amounts of data U.S. tech companies collect, but China’s cybersecurity laws make it much easier for the government to demand data from its tech companies. Additionally, DeepSeek users have reported instances of censorship, when it comes to criticizing the Chinese government or asking about Tiananmen Square.

Users have been shown that both governments are untrustworthy so what the fuck are we supposed to do?

Am I supposed to not read this article as panic? I know this is Mashable but the media overall is no longer unbiased and now there’s gonna be more gremlins to watch for in pro-US corpo AI propaganda and media ownership having stakes in AI.

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14 points

Well, only one of those governments can actually do anything to me. Hint: it’s the one I live under

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-6 points

You think other governments can’t reach you? Did you miss the whole “election interference” thing? Have you never heard of propaganda?

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14 points
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Okay, but they can’t literally bust down my door and kill me.

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16 points

Assuming that DeepSeek really is logging keystrokes (they provided no evidence: who were they quoting?), that is unfortunately not uncommon. As shown by their TikTok pearl clutching, corporate media regularly goes for maximalist cold war fearmongering.

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19 points

(they provided no evidence: who were they quoting?)

https://platform.deepseek.com/downloads/DeepSeek Privacy Policy.html

Ctrl-F “rhythm”

I’ve noticed that this “there is no proof!” or “where’s the evidence?” all of a sudden has become popular. You have people saying it even when they’re talking about a very specific statement of a fact that’s very specifically and easily verifiable.

that is unfortunately not uncommon

Completely true. A lot of web sites monitor everything you do on them, and can play it back for anyone who’s curious about optimizing the UX or for any other less innocent reason. Generally I think there’s not much specific in their privacy policy about it when they do. It’s not surprising that this one is also doing that, accompanied by really a pretty minor line in their privacy policy to go along with it, I completely agree with you here.

As shown by their TikTok pearl clutching, corporate media regularly goes for maximalist cold war fearmongering.

Personally, I wish the corporate media would pearl-clutch a little bit more about how explicitly malicious to our interests our computing devices have become. “Everyone does it, so it’s not a big deal after all” is a common take to have, but it’s the exact opposite of the one that I personally have on it.

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12 points

“Everyone does it, so it’s not a big deal after all” is a common take to have, but it’s the exact opposite of the one that I personally have on it.

That’s not my take, and I agree with you.

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-2 points

Well, you did say it was “pearl clutching” and “fearmongering.” My point is, they should be clutching pearls, and fear should be mongered. Arguably, at all the social media companies including TikTok.

I actually do agree that TikTok is worse, but it’s hardly the point. We can be alarmed about all of them, especially since the US ones are now in the hands of an overtly evil tyrannical government instead of merely the sociopathic profit-minded corporatocracy they were in before.

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6 points
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Everyone does it, so it’s not a big deal after all

…and I think that’s you completely misreading what people are saying.

We’re saying that it’s bunk for the corporate media to portray it as this dangerous thing when they refuse to report similarly on US companies doing the same with the same ferocity.

I think most people agree with you, that our privacy protections are fucking abysmal and no company should be being allowed to do this stuff. Hell, that’s like the entire thrust of Ed Zitron’s entire fucking blog: that none of these companies should get away with this.

It’s like when Facebook got fined a paltry sum for being caught lying about their video metrics and literally putting businesses like CollegeHumor out of business because they “pivoted to facebook video” to grab those high metrics… which never materialized because Facebook was ratfucking lying to people. They should have been shut down and put out of business for that, not fined less than they made ripping off people.

People are sick of the companies here getting a pass, and the media gives them a pass. It’s more that you can’t make freaked out headlines like this about TikTok and DeepSeek and not understand that everyone is rolling their fucking eyes because we’re all like “it’s no worse than what US companies already do to us.” That doesn’t mean we like it or are okay with it. It means we’re rolling our eyes at a fucking insipid news media that’s obviously lying to us for the sake of private American companies profit, not because they care about rightfully informing American citizentry about what is happening.

All of us fucking hate it, but what the fuck do you expect us as individuals to do about it? Folks like me have been voting Blue for 25 fucking years with fuck-all to show for it on issues like these. So why’s it our job to explain that we don’t support it, we just think it’s dumb as fuck when a foreign company is doing the same thing and now suddenly that’s evil, but our guys doing it is somehow fine. What we have issue with is the hypocrisy.

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1 point
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Dude, why is this guy getting so upset about the suggestion that people should be alarmed both by TikTok and also by the malicious behavior of all the other social media companies? And that the media should report more on it? Why is he yelling so much at me for making what I thought was that fairly reasonable suggestion?

Folks like me have been voting Blue for 25 fucking years

Oh. Um… what? What does that… okay.

Edit: Oh, also, you were unnecessarily doing a bunch of obedience to the establishment if you’ve been voting blue for 25 years. Back in the Bill Clinton era, the parties really were practically indistinguishable, and there were other realistic options like Ralph Nader and Ron Paul on the table who were genuinely pretty good. They got creamed by FPTP, but right around the year 2000 was a time when almost anyone could see that the good options were not within either major party. Al Gore being a pretty obvious and rare exception. The calculus changed a lot with the last few elections, where the Republicans became such an objectively terrifying option that voting for the Democrat just so they wouldn’t get into office became a necessary strategy if you care about the country. In my opinion.

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-3 points

https://platform.deepseek.com/downloads/DeepSeek Privacy Policy.html

Ctrl-F “rhythm”

I assumed that they couldn’t have gotten that from the privacy policy itself, because I’d never seen one be so explicit.

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11 points

They are quoting DeepSeek’s privacy policy. They say this before and after the first quote, and also link the policy at the top of the article.

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8 points

Let’s be honest, ChatGPT is also logging keystrokes.

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10 points

Yes. I also like how the alarming take on it is not “People are typing their passwords / medical histories / employer’s source code into ChatGPT and from there it goes straight into the training data not only to be stored forever in the corpus, but also sometimes, to be extracted at a later date by any yahoo who knows the way to tease it back out from ChatGPT via the right carefully crafted prompting!”

But instead it is “When you type things, they can see what you type! The keystrokes!”

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2 points

And they probably aren’t even doing that. More likely, it’s just bot prevention.

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0 points

maybe they harvest passwords on the side?

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3 points

It doesn’t have access to all your keystrokes. An app can only harvest the keystrokes typed into it.

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1 point

Oh my god, that is such stupid detail to get hung up on then. There are actual problems with it like censorship and consequent potential untrustworthiness of the answers and THIS is what they decide is the worst thing.

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Privacy

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