The Chinese Communist party very much sees itself in a global rivalry over "new productive forces". That's official policy. And US leadership basically agrees.

The US is playing dirty by essentially embargoing China over big AI - why wouldn't it occur to them to retaliate by playing dirtier?

I mean we probably won't know for sure, but it's much less far fetched than a lot of other speculation in this area.

E.g., R1's cold start training could probably have benefited quite a bit from having access to OpenAI's chain of thought data for training. The paper is a bit light on detail on how it was made.

interestingly, that actually makes the CCP the largest political party pursuing state capitalism.

there won't be any competition between China and the US if the CCP is indeed a communist party as we all know full well that communism doesn't work at all.

Of course this is China so the government can and does intervene at will, but alleging that this required CIA level state espionage to pull off is alien crash levels of implausible. They open sourced the entire thing and published incredibly detailed papers on how they did it!

This is not America. Your ideas do not apply the same way.

I think you have a cartoonish view of China. A huge amount goes on that the government has no idea about. Now that DeepSeek has made a huge media splash, the Chinese government will certainly pay attention to them, but then again, so will the US government.

I’m suggesting it will be happening now and any past efforts will be retroactively analyzed by the appropriate CCP apparatus since everyone is aware of the scale of success as of Monday. It has become a political success, thus it is imperative the CCP partakes in it.

> DeepSeek, illegally, got their hands on an OpenAI model via a breach of OpenAI's systems. [...] given the lengths other Chinese entities have gone to when it comes to replicating Western technology; we should not discount this.

Above, teractiveodular said that "DeepSeek is basically a startup, not a 'foreign nation-state backed organization'". You called teractiveodular naive for saying that. So forgive me if I take the obvious implication that you think DeepSeek is actually a state-backed actor enabled by government hacking of OpenAI.

I'm European, are you talking about Microsoft, Google, or OpenAI?

But now we have a bully in the whitehouse who seems to want to literally steal neighboring land, or is throwing shit everywhere to distract from the looting and oligarchy being formed. So I suddenly have more empathy for that position.

Are you trolling me?

No I’m not trolling you.

Even OpenAI itself hasn’t resorted to these wild conspiracy theories.

Unless you’re an insider in these companies, you’re just like the rest of us, you know nothing.

China steals a lot of documentation from the US but in a tech forum you of all people should be very familiar with how little actual progress a bunch of documentation is towards a finished unit.

The Comac C19 still uses American engines despite all the industrial espionage in the world because most actual engineering is still a brute force affair into finding how things fail and fixing that. That's one of the main advantages SpaceX has proven out with their "eh fuck it, just launch and we will see what breaks" methodology.

Even fraud filled Chinese research makes genuine advancements.

Believing that China, a wealthy nation of over a billion people, with immense unity, nationality, and a regime able to explicitly write blank checks could only possibly beat the US at something by cheating is like, infinite hubris. It's hilarious actually.

I don't know if DeepSeek is actually just a clone of something or a shenanigan, that's possible and China certainly has done those kinds of things before, but to think it's the MOST LIKELY outcome, or to over rely on it in any way is a death sentence. OpenAI claims to have evidence, why do they not show it?

So this is the first time I’ve heard the Chinese regime being described in such flowery terms on HN - lol. But ok - haha

The evidence supporting offensive hacking is abundant in recent history; the number of things which have been learned from alien crash data is surely smaller by comparison to the number of things which have been learned from offensive hacking.

However, there is no evidence this is how the data was obtained. Zero, zilch.

So its a useless statement which only plays on peoples bias against their hated nation state de jour.

Meanwhile, they have access to Meta models and Qwen. And Meta models are very easy to run and there's plenty of published work on them. Occam's Razor.

Lot of hoops when there's simply other models to utilize publicly

IMHO the whole world is becoming crazy for a lot of reasons, and pissing off billionaires makes me laugh.

Cheapening a series of fact checkable innovations because of the country of origin when so far all that they have showed are signs of good faith is paranoid at best and propaganda to support the billionaire tech lords saving face for their own arrogance at worst.

And don't forget the billions in partnerships...

I can see why people refuse to pay taxes.

The word "our" does a lot of heavy lifting in politics[0]. America is not a commune, it's a country club, one which we used to own but have been bought out of, and whose new owners view us as moochers but can't actually kick us out (yet). It is in competition with another, worse country club that purports to be a commune. We owe neither country club our loyalty, so when one bloodies the other's nose, I smile.

[0] Some languages have a notion of an "exclusive we". If English had such a concept, this would be an exclusive our.

I don't think that's what the parent was getting at. The US and China are in an ongoing "cyber war". Both sides of that conflict actively use their computers to send messages/signals to other computers, hoping that the exploits contained in those messages/signals can be used to exfiltrate data from and/or gain control of the computer receiving the message. It would really be weird to flatly discount the possibility that some OpenAI data was leaked, however closely guarded it may be.

It’s even weirder to raise it as a possibility when there is literally nothing suggesting that was even remotely the case.

So if there is no evidence nor even formal speculation, then the only other reason to suggest this as a possibility would be because of one’s own opinions regarding Chinese companies. Hence my previous comment.

Not purely. There may be some prejucide but look at Nortel[1] as a famous example of a situation where technological espionage from Chinese firms wreaked havoc on a company's fortunes and technology.

I too would want to see the evidence and forensics of such a breach to believe this is more than sour grapes from OpenAI.

[1] https://financialpost.com/technology/nortel-hacked-to-pieces

Nortel survived the fucking great depression. But a bunch of outright fraudulent activity by it's C-Suite to bump stock prices led to them vastly overstating and overplanning and over-committing resources to a market that was much much smaller than they were claiming. Nortel spent billions and billions on completely absurd acquisitions while they were making no money explicitly to boost their stock price.

That was all laid bare when the telecom bust happened. Then the great recession culled some of the dead wood in the economy.

Huawei stealing tech from them did not kill them. This was a company so rotten that the people put in charge right after this huge scandal put the investigative lights on them IMMEDIATELY turned around and pulled another scam! China could have been completely removed from history and Nortel would have died the same. They were killed by the same disease that killed and nearly killed a lot of stuff in 2008, and are still trying to kill us: Line MUST go up.

At some point these straw men start to look like ignorance or even reverse racism. As if (presumably non-Han Chinese) Americans are incapable of tolerance.

There are plenty of Han Chinese who are citizens of democratic nations. China is not the only nation with Han Chinese.

America, for instance, has a large number of Asian citizens, including a large number of Han Chinese. The number of white, non-Hispanic Americans is decreasing, while the number of Asian Americans is increasing at a rate 3x the decrease in whites. America is a melting pot and deals with race relations issues far more than ethnically uniform populations. The conversations we have about race are because we're so exposed to it -- so racially and culturally diverse. If anything, we're equipped to have these conversations gracefully because they're a part of our everyday lived experience.

At the end of the day, this is 100% a geopolitical argument. Pulling out the race card any time China is criticized is arguing in bad faith. You don't see the same criticisms lobbied against South Korea, Vietnam, Taiwan, or Singapore precisely because this is a geopolitical issue.

As further evidence you can recall the conversations we had in the 90's when we were afraid Japan would take over. All the newspapers wrote about was "Japan, Japan, Japan" and the American businesses they were buying up and taking over. It was 100% geopolitical fear. You'll note that we no longer fill the zeitgeist with these discussions today save for a recent and rather limited conversation about US Steel. And that was just a whimper.

These conversations about China are going to increase as the US continues to decouple from Chinese trade. It's not racism, it's just competition.

"Meta is reportedly scrambling ‘war rooms’ of engineers to figure out how DeepSeek’s AI is beating everyone else at a fraction of the price"

https://fortune.com/2025/01/27/mark-zuckerberg-meta-llama-as...

We can talk about hypotheticals all we want, but who wants to do that?

Extending that to a new bad behavior we don’t have evidence for is pure speculation, but it need not be based on race.

Similarly, I see no evidence (yet) that DeepSeek is a CCP operated company anymore than saying any given AI start up in the US is a three letter agencies direct handiwork or a US political party directive. The US has also supported genocides and a bunch of crazy stuff, but that doesn't mean any company in YC is part of a US government plot.

I know of people who immigrated to China, I know people who immigrated from China, I went to school with people who were on visas from China. Maybe some of them were CCP assets or something, but mostly they appeared to me to be people who were doing what they wanted for themselves.

If you believe both sides are up to no-goodery thats in the face of the OPs statement. If you think it's just one, and the enemy is in complete control of all of its people doing all of their commerce then I think the OP may have a point.

Implying that because something isn’t clandestine it can’t be part of a scheme ignores open manipulation which is often economy wide. Playing with exchange rates or electricity subsidies can turn every bit of international trade into part of a scheme.

In the other direction some economic activity is meaningfully different. The billions in LLM R&D is a very tempting target for clandestine activities in a way that a cheap fan design isn’t.

I wouldn’t be surprised if DeepSeak’s results where independent and the CCP was doing clandestine activities to get data from OpenAI. Reality does need to conform to narrative conventions, it can be really odd.

My personal take is this. What deepseek is offering is table scraps for the CCP's actual ambitions with what we call AI. China's economy is huge on industrial automation, and they care a lot about raw materials and manufacturing efficiently than say the US's interests.