or sold to US I could totally see this happening soon

Why would they want to sell ?

And what are they going to sell? The weights and the model architecture are already open source. I doubt the datasets of DeepSeek are better than OpenAI's

plus, if the US were to decide to ban DeepSeek (the company) wouldn't non-chinese companies be able to pick up the models and run them at a relatively low expense?

> getting DeepSeek banned like TikTok

Banned in the USA. Only.

There is a big wide world out there, and much of it is pivoting to China

Grumpy temper tantrums, on the part of the USA, will speed up the pivot.

And we'd be shooting ourselves in the foot to do so. If America is forced to use only the clunky corporate-owned American AI at a fee, we'll very quickly fall behind competitors worldwide who use DeepSeek models to produce better results for much, much cheaper.

Not to mention it'd defeat the whole purpose of a "free market" economy. (Not that that means much of anything anymore)

It never meant anything. There's no such thing as a free market economy. We haven't had one of those in modern times, and arguably human civilization has never had one. Markets and their participants have chronically been subject to information asymmetry, coercion/manipulation, and regulation, among other things.

I don't think all of that is a bad thing (regulation tends to make it harder to do the first two things), but "free markets" are the economic equivalent to the "point mass" in physics: perhaps useful sometimes to create simple models and explanations of things, but will never exist in the real world.

Yes, technically and pedantically you are correct.

But restricting the trade in micro chips only because the USA is afraid it will loose a technical and commercial edge is a long long way from a free market.

It is too late, too. China has broken out and they are ahead in many fields. Not trading chips with them will make them build their own foundries. In two decades they will be as far ahead there as they are in many other fields.

If the USA would trade then the technological capacities of China and the USA would stay matched, as they help each other. China ahead in some areas, the USA ahead in others.

That would still (probably) not be a pure Free Market but it would be a freer market, and better for everybody except a few elites (on both sides)

Madness is taking root

The Nvidia export restrictions also might be shooting us in the foot too, or at least Nvidia. They really benefit from CUDA remaining the de facto standard.

The Nvidia export restrictions have already harmed Nvidia. Deepseek-R1 is efficient on compute and was trained on old, obsolete cards because they couldn't get ahold of Nvidia's most cutting edge tech, so they were forced to innovate instead of just brute-forcing performance with faster cards. That has directly resulted in Nvidia's stock crashing over the last week.

That's true, but I mean it'd be a hundred times worse if Deepseek did this on non-Nvidia cards. Which seems like only a matter of time if we're going to keep doing this.

> Which seems like only a matter of time if we're going to keep doing this.

What's funny is that people have been saying this since OpenCL was announced but today we're actually in a worse spot than we were 10 years ago. China too - their inability to replicate EULV advancements has left their lithography in a terrible place.

There's a reason China is literally dependent on Nvidia for competitive hardware. It's their window into export-controlled TSMC wafers and complex streaming multiprocessor designs. Losing access to Nvidia hardware isn't an option for them (or the United States for that matter) which is why the US pushes so hard for export controls. There is no alternative.

Well I wasn't optimistic about OpenCL in the past, because nobody will bother with that when they can pay a little (or even a lot) more for Nvidia and use CUDA. Even though OpenCL might work in theory with whatever tools someone is using, it's unpopular and therefore less supported. But this time is different.

> But this time is different.

Is it? Time will tell, but it wasn't "different" even during the crypto craze when CUDA was literally printing money. We were promised world-changing ASICs just like with Cereberas and Groq, and ended up with nothing in the end.

When AI's popularity blows over (and it will, like crypto), will the market have responded fast enough? From where I'm standing, it looks like every major manufacturer (and even the Chinese market) is trying the ASIC route again. And having watched ASICs die a very painful and unsatisfying death in the mining pools, I'd like to avoid manufacturing purpose-made ICs that are obsolete within months. I'm simply not seeing the sort of large-scale strategy that threatens Nvidia's actual demand.

I don't have any hope for ASICs. GPUs are going to stay, but if enough big countries are only able to obtain new non-Nvidia GPUs, big corps and even governments will find it worthwhile to build up the ecosystem around OpenCL or something else. Before now, CUDA had unstoppable momentum.

Crypto mining was just about hash rates, so I don't think it really mattered whether you used CUDA or not. Nvidia cards were just faster usually. People did use AMD too, but that didn't involve creating a full competitor to CUDA. They do also use ASICs for BTC in particular, I don't think that died.

DeepSeek's technology is out of the bag.

Every LLM provider in the US will be using it to lower OpEx.

One of them is likely to pass those savings along to consumers to gain market share.

Facebook is in the business of providing weights for free.

The idea that we are all doomed unless we immediately migrate to DeepSeek is fantasy.

> Banned in the USA. Only.

The US government has the wherewithal to drag Europe along with it, like they did with Huawei's 5G equipment.

So far, a general tiktok ban (as opposed to a tiktok ban on things like government phones) has only been in effect in the USA. I highly doubt Europe would play ball at any attempt at banning imports of DeepSeek.

Besides, it's kinda too late for this. The model is freely accessible, so any attempt at banning it would be _completely_ moot. If DeepSeek keeps releasing their future models for free, I don't see how a ban could ever be effective at all. Worse case scenario, big tech can't use those models... but then individuals (and startups willing to go fast and break laws) will be able to use them and instantly get a leg up on the competition.

Used to. If they're going to start a trade war, pull out of NATO and invade Greenland instead, there'll not be much soft power left to drag Europe anywhere.

And yet, Huawei is still doing fine.

Not really anymore, and I would bet that the way things are going, Twitter will be banned in the EU before Tiktok.

Perhaps a few years ago, yes. But considering that the US president is now threatening to invade and annex part of a European country, I don't think past results can be extrapolated to the present.

The only parts of the world pivoting towards China are the despotic countries seeking to overthrow democracy and liberalism.

No the US isn't pivoting towards China so far

Well the US is a liberal democracy...

Sure we are buddy, keep telling yourself that.

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

The US is a plutocracy pretending to be a liberal democracy.

Rapidly doing a lot less of the pretending.

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

All right.

What about Brazil.

Brazil's technological environment is stagnant and apathetic. And it has been that way since the tragic explosion that claimed the country's space program. It seems that all of the country's technological activities have suffered the blow. It is possible that now it will finally be able to manufacture its national tier 3 AI, using the outputs of DeepSeek.

They've got a socialist convict president...

https://thehill.com/opinion/international/4835388-brazil-pre...

Lula is no friend of democracy.

Not a single American can say shit given what's going on at home.

What's happening at home? From a foreigner's (Canadian) perspective, Trump's not doing anything crazy but the media is going crazy...

Our Prime Minister has multiple scandals worse than anything Trump has done so far... From groping a reporter to multiple instances of blackface to firing the attorney general because she investigated a company who gave bribes to Moammar Gaddafi to nearly a billion dollars going to a 2 person software consulting firm to fake charities giving him and his family members millions of dollars and much more. Yet somehow we're held up as an example of democracy and the US, which defends democracy all over the world somehow isn't...

Not sure what you mean; the things you list that your PM has done seems like just another day at the office for Trump.

Trump has already done quite a few crazy things since his inauguration. And I'm judging that by what I'm hearing from people who are directly affected by his actions, not by what I'm hearing from the media.

> the things you list that your PM has done seems like just another day at the office for Trump

Yet you did not mention one single thing. The thread to which you replied did.

it's not crazy to suspend all federal grants, get us out of the Paris accord when the world is rapidly heating up, try to put RFK Jr, a vaccine denier, in charge of our health, rename the goddamn Gulf of Mexico, unconstitutionally order that people born on American soil are not necessarily Americans anymore, which has been the case for at least 150 years, withdraw from the WHO, launch hourly raids to deport people, many of whom are actually American citizens?

> suspend all federal grants

Not really.

> get us out of the Paris accord when the world is rapidly heating up

Is anyone on pace to meet those targets? Canada isn't.

> try to put RFK Jr, a vaccine denier, in charge of our health,

Our health minister is a random politician who took poly sci and history...

> rename the goddamn Gulf of Mexico

Things get renamed all the time... It's not crazy.

> people born on American soil are not necessarily Americans anymore

Jus soli is the exception in the world and in history. For example, every European country has jus sanguinis...

> launch hourly raids to deport people

Enforcing laws is the normal state of affairs in the world...

> many of whom are actually American citizens?

I doubt this one, got any proof?

Be a bit careful of "whataboutism". It is a cognitive fallacy

Canada's civil society collapsing does not mean that the USA's civil society is not. Perhaps they both are?

I think that the social fabric in both countries can take the punishment for a decade or two. It will be some time before they collapse.

This isn't whataboutism, it's some perspective that what's happening in America is merely reverting back to what's normal in liberal western democracies and thus not "crazy".

The only thing I find crazy about the US right now is the media reaction.

Defending borders? Jus sanguinis? Only 2 genders? Cutting spending? Tariffs? Literally so normal it's boring.

[flagged]

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

Unsubstantive, sure, I agree, but I don’t see how expressing a sentiment of disbelief and suspicion of trolling (or however it may be called) this way is “flamebait”.

Posting "is this satire" is an internet trope, a way of snarkily putting down what someone else said. In that way, it's a provocation and in that way flamebait.

If that explanation doesn't land, there are other site guidelines which maybe make the point more directly, such as "Don't be snarky", "Edit out swipes", and/or "Omit internet tropes".

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

i see, thank you for clarifying

> Is anyone on pace to meet those targets? Canada isn't.

India, one of the poorest countries by per capita GDP met its target before deadline. Better than looking at others, US need to ensure that it meets its own targets. Because its the sole super power and at an international level without US leading sustainability, there is no hope for the rest of us.

> when the world is rapidly heating up

I think it would do no harm to know that the Earth had a glaciar era (at least, I am not sure it was more than one), 10 times more carbon dioxide than now at some point and that weather always changed in history. All without humans being involved. Do not take as facts the propaganda of "it is humans and only humans who are making the temperature change".

If I am not wrong the greenhouse gas for carbon dioxide is a small percentage (I do not remember if it was 3%, from which only a fraction is generated by humans). The water vapor (which is a greenhouse gas also) accounts for like 90% or more, by the effect of the sun in the water, and noone talks about this in the media. Also, the most catastrophic models are usually chosen instead of other alternative models.

There are also multiple reports of how data was deliberately hidden or manipulated: https://www.libertaddigital.com/ciencia/que-es-el-watergate-... (in spanish, some evidence of manipulation about the climate change, which was conveniently renamed from "Global warming" at some point, bc in the last 20 years there has been no such "global warming"). I think there was a record in the mass of ice registered in Antartica in year 2017 if I am not wrong...

Smells really bad all this story at this point, to be honest.

Trump is doing things that violate some of the guardrails of the US system. For example, refusing to disburse funds allocated by the legislature. These separations are less of a barrier in parliments. At least in the westminster system. These boundaries have been redrawn before: the federal bureaucracy was basically invented between the 30s and the 60s and SCOTUS's role as we know it was established in the early 1800s.

"Democracy and liberalism" increasingly means canceling elections (Romania), freezing bank accounts (Canada), jailing people for speech (UK), killing thousands of children (Israel), kidnapping CEOs (France), banning foreign market competition (USA), blowing up pipelines, seizing assets, erecting a vast surveillance state, etc, etc.

"Democracy and liberalism" are merely shorthand for a neofeudal rent-seeking oligarchy that disguises itself with parliamentary forms. As Huxley predicted in 1958:

>the democracies will change their nature; the quaint old forms -- elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the rest -- will remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind of non-violent totalitari­anism. All the traditional names, all the hallowed slo­gans will remain exactly what they were in the good old days. Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial -- but democracy and free­dom in a strictly Pickwickian sense. Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of sol­diers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit.

Meanwhile our ruling class has completely exhausted its moral authority and delegitimized its own political formula: of popular sovereignty, rules-based order, human rights, and so on. The mask is off and no one can take these sacred oaths seriously any more.

THAT is why the world is pivoting to China. That, and the fact that China does not impose as a precondition of lending and trade that you upend your social/sexual norms and/or demographically transform your country through mass immigration. China simply offers a better deal.

Agree with most of this (not the weird anti-immigrant bit but the rest), however China does have some foreign requirements that are a bit of a pain in the ass, like its insistence that Taiwan isn't a country. They also don't like it and will retaliate when you point out the shady shit it does (e.g. the Uighurs), but then thats no different from the states especially under its current toddler administration.

The immigration bit helps explain why Hungary, for instance, is trying to escape Western orbit and align with the East.

Is Hungary planning to exit the EU?

I can't say what Orban is planning specifically, but his recent actions have not been well received by the EU Council, to say the least. Moreover Hungary has been China's main outpost in Europe since 2015 when it joined Belt and Road.

Considering fresh signs of rupture in transatlantic relations, maybe Orban will turn out to have had keen foresight. There seems to be some sort of realignment afoot under the Trump administration.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_visits_by_Viktor_Orb%C3%A...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China%E2%80%93Hungary_relation...

Orban is a racist, kleptocratic madman that runs a mafia state - trying to apply reason to his actions beyond enriching himself and his lackeys is a fools game

Every country would behave like China in the same situation with Taiwan. Imagine if the Confederates moved over to Puerto Rico or Hawaii or Alaska. America damn sure would say that’s America still. They’re literally the same people from the same land. Same ethnicity. Same history. Only being apart for under a century.

> They’re literally the same people from the same land. Same ethnicity. Same history. Only being apart for under a century

I see what you mean. But there is an alternative point of view.

The indigenous people of Taiwan are very different. DNA wise they are the prototypical polynesians

From an alternative pov from any one not from the west/colonizer countries:

We arent talking about those indigenous people regarding this topic. We are talking about the Chinese people there. This would be clear and obvious if Confederates were in any of the examples I gave. All 3 examples have indigenous people now who aren’t cared about now.

Americans were still actively cleansing Native Americans under 200 years ago. The only country that would do anything serious about an attempt at Chinese reunification would be America [and of course NATO and Europe but if America wasn’t doing anything, Europe wouldn’t either].

If it wasn’t for America, reunification would have already happened.

So the pov of Americans or the west caring about indigenous people is faulty from the pov of most of the rest of the world. The west should care about indigenous people in their own direct spheres of influence first.

> its insistence that Taiwan isn't a country

Lol Taiwan is officially the "Republic of China", as per their own claims.

BYD cars are everywhere in Latin America and Europe. Xiaomi phones also.

Same in Australia. Xiaomi phones less so.

A much better build compared to Tesla.

> A much better build compared to Tesla.

Really? I am intrigued. Why do you think that?

The Cybertruck is well-known for breaking down for the silliest reasons and losing parts during regular driving.

I have no idea what the build quality of BYD is, but doing better than Tesla isn't exactly a challenge.

I live in Europe half the time. Literally never seen a BYD car in the flesh.

Chinese phones, yes. But I'd argue we're past peak China. Huawei phones briefly were the #1 selling in the world, have since pulled back.

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

I have a Xiaomi phone, a Huawei Matebook and a BYD car. I guess I am pivoting to China after all :)

world is pretty small as we see with all nations kissing the ring in the last few weeks. pivot away from chinar will accelerate.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42866072.

> So they'll go for getting DeepSeek banned like TikTok was now that a precedent has been set ?

Can't really ban what can be downloaded for free and hosted by anyone. There are many providers hosting the ~700B parameter version that aren't CCP aligned.

I'm old enough to remember when the US government did something very similar. For years (decades?), we banned any implementation of public-key cryptography under the guise of the technology being akin to munitions.

People made shirts with printouts of the code to RSA under the heading "this shirt is a munition." Apparently such shirts are still for sale, even though they are not classified as munitions anymore.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...

I am not that old, but I did a deep dive on this in the past because it was just so extremely fascinating, especially reading the archives of Cypherpunk. There is a very solid, if rather bendy, line connecting all that to "crypto culture" today.

Were these implementations already easily open source accessible at the time, with tens of thousands of people already actively using them on their computers? No, right? Doesn't seem feasible this time around.

Yes they were.

The ban was on exporting the code, not having the code in possession.

Furthermore it was only the US who had this ban.

I am old enough to remember this and the scoffing that European PGP users had towards their American counterparts

Sounds like it was ineffective then, despite an export ban being easier to uphold than what would amount to an import ban?

I don’t think an import ban would be any harder to enforce than an export ban. In fact if anything, I’d expect an import ban to be easier.

Though I’m not suggesting an import ban on DeepSeek would be effective either. Just that the US does have precedence pulling these kinds of stunts.

You can also look at the 90s subculture for passing DeCSS code (a tool for breaking DVD encryption) to see another example of how people wilfully skirted these kinds of stupid legal limitations.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeCSS

So if you were to ask me if a ban on DeepSeek would work, the answer is clearly “no”. But that doesn’t mean it’s not going to happen. And if it does, the only people hurt are legitimate US businesses who might get a benefit from DeepSeek but have to follow the law. Those of us outside of America will be completely unaffected. Just like we were when US tried to limit the distribution of GPG.

> Can't really ban what can be downloaded for free and hosted by anyone.

Like music? They banned napster

Yet I can still download music. Check mate.

Napster was one of thousands, if not 10s of thousands of similar services for music download.

And this analogy isn't particularly good. Napster was the server, not the product. Whether you got XYZ from Napster or wherever else doesn't matter, because its the product that you are after, not the way to get the product.

I'm willing to bet ''ban DeepSeek'' voices will start soon. Why compete, when you can just ban?

They've started already, I've seen posts on LinkedIn implying or outright stating that DeepSeek is a national security risk (IMHO, LinkedIn being the social media outlet most corporate-sycophantic). I went ahead and just picked this one at random from my feed.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/kevinkeller_deepseek-privacy-...

Oh this post...calling out DeepSeek's T&C but not comparing it with OpenAI's is really disingenuous IMO.

Seen the same with censorship. Deepseek is a CCP pamphlet apparently, but rarely is it compared to OpenAI in the same breath.

NBC Nightly News, on Monday, had an expert -- at 8:05 in the video -- who claimed there might be national security risks to Deepseek.

I'm not going to take a side on whether there is or not.

But, it does sound reminiscent of the reasons used to ban Tik-tok.

https://youtu.be/uE6F6eTyAVc?si=BLZo3FMVRvjEy6Xa

Next they will say it is to protect the children and that terrorists use it. You start to recognize the playbook after about the millionth time.

as if openai is not an (inter)national security risk

At least this guy can differentiate between running your own model and using the web/mobile app where DeepSeek process your data. I've watched a TV show yesterday (I think it was France24) where the "experts" can't really tell the difference or are not aware of it. Shut down the TV and went to sleep.

Actually asking for banning DeepSeek would be the ultimate admit of defeat by ClosedAI.

No need to ban DeepSeek, just ban Chinese companies from using US frontier models.

that will have no effect. best frontier models are now chinese.

Already happening within tech company policy. Mostly as a security concern. Local or controlled hosting of the model is okay in theory based on this concern, but it taints everything regarding deepseek in effect.

Competing is hard and expensive, whereas banning is for sure the faster way to make stock values go up and exec's total package as a result.

Banning worked for China all these decades.

It’s simply because banning removes a market force in the US that’d drive technological advancement.

This is already evident with CNSA/NASA, Huawei/Android, TikTok/Western social media. The Western tech gets mothballed because we stick our heads in the sand and pretend we are undisputed leaders of the world in tech, whereas it is slowly becoming disputable.

The US won't ban DeepSeek from US, but more likely we will ban DeepSeek (and other Chinese companies) from accessing US frontier models.

> Western tech gets mothballed because we stick our heads in the sand and pretend we are undisputed leaders of the world in tech, whereas it is slowly becoming disputable.

I am hearing Chinese tech is now the best and they achieved it with banning things left and right.

The Chinese companies are almost always at each other's throat instead of colluding with each other. It's all about competition.

The fact it is out and improving day by day. Unsloth.ai is on a roll with their advancements. If DeepSeek is banned hundreds more will popup and change the data ever so slightly to skirt the ban. Pandora's box exploded on this one.

I'd imagine a ban would be on their service, not the model itself.

All you would do by banning it is killing US progress in AI. The rest of the world is still going to be able to use DS. You're just giving the rest of the world a leg up.

TikTok is a consumption tool, DS is a productive one. They aren't the same.

What’s so special about DeepSeek, though? I mean anyone else can replicate their methods and catch up. They don’t have a moat anyway.

Actually the "our IP" argument is ridiculous. What they are doing is stealing data from all over the web, without people's consent for that data to be used in training ML models. If anything, then "Open"AI should be sued and forced to publish their whole product. The people should demand knowing exactly what is going on with their data.

Also still an unresolved issue is how they will ever comply with a deletion request, should any model output personal data of someone. They are heavily in a gray area, with regards to what should be allowed. If anything, they should really shut up now.

If there's any litigation, a counterclaim would be interesting. But DeepSeek would need to partner with parties that have been damaged by OpenAI's scraping.

I'm getting popcorn ready for the trial where an apparatus of the Chinese Communist Party files a counterclaim in an American Court together with the common people - millions of John Does - as litigants against an organization that has aggressively and in many cases of oppressively scraped their websites (DDoS)

I would definitely pay for seeing that movie! Especially if it led to greedy tech giants becoming very careful about what data they gather and ingest for training of ML models.

They can still have IP while using copyrighted training materials - the actual model source code.

But DeepSeek didn't use that presumably (since it's secret). They definitely can't argue that using copyrighted material for training is fine, but using output from other commercial models isn't. That's too inconsistent.

> Only works with human authors can receive copyrights, U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell said[1]

IANAL but it seems to me that OpenAI wouldn’t be able to claim their outputs are IP since they are AI-generated. It may be against their TOS, meaning OpenAI could refuse to provide service to DeepSeek in the future, but they can’t really sue them.

[1]: https://www.reuters.com/legal/ai-generated-art-cannot-receiv...

Did OpenAI ask all of the authors of the works they ingested to train their model for permission? Is OpenAI the biggest copyrighted works launderer in existence?

I don't think OpenAI should be able to make any claims of IP for the AI generated outputs, since they based that on other work, partially copyrighted work, which they hide. They simply throw algorithms at data that is not their data to begin with.

If I steal something, keep the exact thing I stole hidden, and sell a product, that I could only have made, based on the stolen thing, how can I expect that to be even legal, let alone untouchable IP?

I think way too many people have seen too many dollar signs in front of their eyes. The whole thing is outrageous. If they were transparently proving, that they are using open data sets, adhering to licenses, then they would get to claim IP.

> [OpenAI] definitely can't argue that using copyrighted material for training is fine, but using output from other commercial models isn't. That's too inconsistent.

Well, they can argue that, if they're fine with being hypocrites.

They're hypocrites.

Explain to me how one ban's opensource? That concept is foreign to me.

TikTok is banned in the US?

Yes, it was removed from the app stores, and briefly, from the web.

Except access to the app didn't have to stop. TikTok chose to manipulate users and Trump by going beyond the law and kissing Trump's rear. It was only US companies that couldn't host the app (eg Google and Apple). Users in the US could have still accessed the app, and even side-loaded it on Android, but TikTok purposely blocked them and pretended it was the ban. They were able to do it because they know the exact location of every TikTok user whether you use a VPN or not.

Source:

> If not sold within a year, the law would make it illegal for web-hosting services to support TikTok, and it would force Google and Apple to remove TikTok from app stores — rendering the app unusable with time.

https://www.npr.org/2024/04/24/1246663779/biden-ban-tiktok-u...

From a strategic point of view, they took the smartest gamble (or call it calculated risk) I've seen a company of this size take in a while. Kudos.

Well, they flexed and it worked. I'm not sure it was the best strategy when the argument was "undue influence by a foreign power."

They don't know your exact location, but they would flag your account/device depending on your App Store localization and IP. I tested this, it doesn't work from outside of the US with a US IP, doesn't work outside of the US with the app downloaded on a phone set to US with a non-US IP, but instead requires a phone localized to download the app from outside the US, being outside the US, with an account that hasn't registered as in the US.

So no, it doesn't use your exact location, it just uses the censorship mechanisms that Apple and Google gracefully provide.

The fact that they are still called "Open"AI adds such a delicious irony to this whole thing. I could not imagine a company I had less sympathy for in this situation.

500 billion for a few US companies yet the Chinese will probably still be better for way less money. This might turn out to be a historical mistake of the new administration.

the biggest mistake was made 20 years by allowing China to join the WTO.

everything is already too late.

The US doesn't need to ban DeepSeek from US

The US should only ban DeepSeek (and other Chinese companies) from accessing US frontier models.

> The US should only ban DeepSeek (and other Chinese companies) from accessing US frontier models.

The US should only ban DeepSeek (and other Chinese companies) from accessing US frontier models designed and trained by Chinese Americans.

fixed for you.

> So they'll go for getting DeepSeek banned like TikTok

The UAE (where I live, happily, and by choice), which desperately wants to be the center of the world in AI and is spending vast time and treasure to make it happen (they've even got their own excellent, government-funded foundation model), would _love_ this. Any attempt to ban DeepSeek in the US would be the most gigantic self-own. Combine that with no income tax, a fantastic standard of living, and a willingness to very easily give out visas to smart people from anywhere in the world, and I have to imagine it is one of several countries desperate for the US to do something so utterly stupid.