Summary:
The launch of Chinese AI application DeepSeek in the U.S. has raised national security concerns among officials, lawmakers, and cybersecurity experts. The app quickly became the most downloaded on Apple’s store, disrupting Wall Street and causing a record 17% drop in Nvidia’s stock. The White House announced an investigation into the potential risks, with some lawmakers calling for stricter export controls to prevent China from leveraging U.S. technology.
Beyond economic impact, experts warn DeepSeek may pose significant data security risks, as Chinese law allows government access to company-held data. Unlike TikTok, which stores U.S. data on Oracle servers, DeepSeek operates directly from China, collecting personal user information. The app also exhibits censorship, blocking content on politically sensitive topics like Tiananmen Square. Some analysts argue that, as an open-source model, DeepSeek may not be as concerning as TikTok, but critics worry its widespread adoption could advance China’s influence through curated information control.
Of course it’s a national security threat, it’s just more proof that the US economy is just a giant ponzi scheme.
If China can do it better on a budget of $6m in 18 months with low end equipment, then why does it take an American company 10 years, half a trillion dollars, and the entire nation’s supply of high-end graphics cards?
The model isn’t afaik. I.e., if you download one of the models and run it locally. It’s the app with folks pasting proprietary, company secret, etc data into it.
Really, it’s the same problem as with ChatGPT, but now an organization in another country has your data. I guess we’ll see if our new techno bro overlords try to use this to their advantage across the board to limit competition, even from local processing.
Taking bets.
I just find it amusing how when proprietary data/company secrets/whatever are being sent to openAI it’s a matter of “that was irresponsible don’t let it happen again” but some guy in Kentucky isn’t able to get a detailed description of Tiananmen Square from the US perspective without a little effort and it’s the end of national security as we know it.
Same with the tiktok ban. How many classified military secrets do we think some regular dude in a trailer in Alabama really has on his phone?
“National Security” in the US is literally just code for rich people’s bank accounts at this point.
but some guy in Kentucky isn’t able to get a detailed description of Tiananmen Square from the US perspective
How about from the perspective of the pro-democracy protestors who were there? Don’t turn a brutal crackdown on people trying to gain some control of their lives and their country as an East vs. West problem.
Same with the tiktok ban. How many classified military secrets do we think some regular dude in a trailer in Alabama really has on his phone?
Depends. Are there any military things in Alabama?
Well yeah, it’s obviously more of a risk to send directly to your rival than internally. Both are risky but one is much, much worse.
First time you do something is always harder. OpenAI just didn’t think it was 1000x harder and thought they’d have more time to cash in.
Myself, I think that being able to throw billions of dollars at hardware, and their focus on next-quarter results discouraged them from putting in the human effort to analyze and optimize their process. It turns out there were some fantastic optimizations to do.
MVP in Technology. OpenAI just sat around throwing salt to the wind piling up “value” until they can convince people it is worth some obscene amount of money to sell out. Once you give someone a literal milestone and show them the path, boom.
This really really feels like a real life Tortoise and the Hare story. Like real hard, and I don’t feel the least bit bad for the hare.
oh yeah, not denying that the prototype will be more expensive and resource intensive than following versions, but the whole “US overspends on novel technology, China blows that technology out of the water and shows this tech is both accessible and affordable, US bans Chinese product because American companies don’t want to compete” shtick is just getting old
Distilling OpenAI and Llama models probably also helped quite a bit
Although I must admit, that the architectural changes are pretty cool
but I have to add, that I’ve just started reading into the topic a few weeks ago and don’t really have any real practical experience, besides checking out some huggingface docs I got linked yesterday and stupid me hasn’t thought about looking there…
So everything I say is probably bullshit o:-)
Sure it made the training process faster, but this still takes a fraction of the energy to generate a single output compared to other LLMs like ChatGPT or Llama. Plus it’s open source. You can’t discredit a technological advancement for building upon previous advancement, especially when doing so with transparency.
As I said, the architectural changes are quite cool
As far as I’ve understood it mostly comes down to splitting it up into multiple expert systems, so you don’t need to activate the complete system with every request
But I’ve only scratched the surface…
Also, open source… The weights are made publicly available.
None of the training data or systems
Edit: regarding “open source”:
Also Meta’s Llama is on huggingface, just like deepseek. I still wouldn’t talk about transparency here
Not that America doesn’t have its own problem. But what do the suicide prevention nets looks like at your office. Because they’re everywhere in china because of shitty working conditions. This is how they do shit so cheap.
I don’t understand why you’re getting downvoted. Labor laws in China are shit. A ton of people there work way more than 40 hours a week for less money than US Americans get, live on company “campuses”, and have suicide nets.
This is just so fun to watch.
America: “Executive order now! No US person is allowed to help the Chinese develop these technologies! We will imprison you traitor!”
China: “OK. We’ll just develop it ourselves.” DeepSeek enters the chat
America: “Fuck! National security emergency!”
Let’s also remember that “U.S. officials” now describes MAGA flunkies that replaced actually qualified professionals.
If it’s open source and can be hosted locally, I don’t think there are issues with national security in this case.
There is money to be lost though. Always follow the money.
it’s not fully open source. it comes with binary blobs you can’t build from source.
What do these blobs contain?
Does the version run locally also censors output?
You did something cheaper quicker and it’s more efficient it must be bad the US
Just like EV’s and battery technology. Up to 40% tarrif on some brands.
They are cheaper with more range. The range is literally only achievable through better technology and hardware.
Or using slave labour so if the US is smart it should use prisoners to build cheap EVs.
