>An Yong: But DeepSeek is a business, not a nonprofit research lab. If you innovate and open-source your breakthroughs—like the MLA architecture innovation releasing in May—won’t competitors quickly copy them? Where’s your moat?

>Liang Wenfeng: In disruptive tech, closed-source moats are fleeting. Even OpenAI’s closed-source model can’t prevent others from catching up.

>Therefore, our real moat lies in our team’s growth—accumulating know-how, fostering an innovative culture. Open-sourcing and publishing papers don’t result in significant losses. For technologists, being followed is rewarding. Open-source is cultural, not just commercial. Giving back is an honor, and it attracts talent.

https://thechinaacademy.org/interview-with-deepseek-founder-...

It’s a bunch of known optimisations bundled together rather than any single revolutionary change.

More open than any other model (but still a bespoke licence) and bundles together a bunch of known improvements. There’s nothing to hide here honestly and without the openness it wouldn’t be as interesting.

There are a bunch of theories floating round.

Personally this looks to me like an ego thing: the DeepSeek team are really, really good and their CEO is enjoying the enormous attention they are getting, plus the pride of proving that Chinese AI labs can take the lead in a field that everyone thought the USA was unassailable in.

Maybe they are true believers in building and sharing "AGI" with the world?

Lots of people see this as a Chinese government backed conspiracy to undermine the US AI industry. I'm not sure how credible that idea is.

I saw somewhere (though I've not confirmed it with a second source) that none of the people listed on the DeepSeek papers got educated at US universities - they all went to school in China, which further emphasizes how good China's home-grown talent pool has got.

> none of the people listed on the DeepSeek papers got educated at US universities

"You have been educated at foreign universities / worked at foreign companies" is indeed an excuse they have used at least once to refuse a candidate. n=1 though so maybe that's just a convenient excuse. There's one guy who went to University of Adelaide (IIRC) on the paper.

> Chinese government backed conspiracy

Do you understand how ginormous China is and how ridiculous this kind of made up boogeyman statement sounds?

Yes.

It makes Trump look like a chump.

> a Chinese government backed conspiracy to undermine the US AI industry

To me this sounds like describing Lockheed as a US government backed conspiracy to undermine the Tupolev Aerospace Design Bureau. It really stretches the normal connotations of words, and it presupposes that the center of the world is conveniently located very close to the speaker.