Who knows what any of then might do in the future? For now I'm cheering for Deepseek, Meta and anyone publishing open models as I strongly believe that the potential "danger" of AI in the hands of everyone is far outstripped by the concrete dangers of AI dictated by a select small group of corps/gov symbionts.
If we ignore that, we will let PR teams play us every time they claim altruism while serving themselves. It doesn’t mean Deepseek can’t also have good motives, but we must be clear that undercutting OpenAI while simultaneously building community goodwill is a smart move on their part to shift the market in their favor.
I wish it was easier to learn about media literacy
Can't fool me twice. Not yet, wait a couple of years.
Google also made a lot of money from other businesses that aren't AI models, until they started selling AI models, just as DeepSeek now does.
The reality is that DeepSeek is a full company, that was funded as a spin-off from the original business (a hedge fund that used its large GPU stockpile to pick stocks via ML). The company DeepSeek is owned by the hedge fund CEO not the hedge fund. It exists as a business aiming to make money, not as a pet project for another business.
Of course they want money, lots of money, tons of money is required for hiring engineers and paying for its hardware. However, your claim that DeepSeek's exists is to make money is just your guess back by nothing else but your wild guess.
DeepSeek CEO Liang Wenfeng himself is an engineer, he is the co-author/developer of the DeepSeek model, he helped but not listed as a core contributor. Obviously that is not a smart strategy to spend your CEO hours to maximize your $ return. His interview a few months ago actually gave answers to all these, he is seeking for AGI. That is the motivation, that is why DeepSeek exists.
No business exists not to make money because that is a charity. It’s not a charity, because a charity is not a business, and DeepSeek is a business. I don’t care to quibble about how interesting they are in being a lucrative business, but simply that they’re a business.
My point wasn’t to question their motives about profit vs AGI (why would these be mutually exclusive btw), but to challenge the notion that it’s some side project from a random business. It’s a company with dedicated resources and staff.
Friedrich Engels: The Condition of the Working-class in England
The focus of Engels' criticism when he made these statements was on *capitalist production relations*, where capitalists control the means of production and obtain profits by exploiting the surplus labor time of workers. This is precisely what DeepSeek and open-source initiatives are challenging. They are turning the means of production from the private property of capitalists into public property.
I hope you did not intentionally misquote this passage.
Regardless of free software, capitalists control the means of production and obtain profits by exploiting the surplus labor time of workers.
Free software may make it more obvious though, at least for some.
Basically they pocketed all profits with other people footing all the risks.
You don't need to be known by the general public to take advantage of tax schemes involving "donating" money
Some companies will play on opensource, some will play on pricing, some on quality.
Almost all of the open source companies which do good eventually start an enterprise / paid division as well.
The Chinese government only supports companies that are in line with industrial policies and are facing difficulties that require assistance. This is because such companies struggle to obtain financing from the society. The aim is to support the entire industry, not a specific company. If a company holds a leading position, it does not need to receive any "resources" from the government; it can acquire sufficient resources from the society.
China 10y bond yield is at <2%, this is a very low financing cost.
So, like, for example, AI companies who are very upfront about not being able to get their hands on as many chips as they'd like?
government is not good at smuggling chips without getting attention, better try to contact some dealers in singapore or malaysia
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/xis-new-frontline-corpor...
https://x.com/NinaDSchick/status/1891958716976578864
Liang Wenfeng, the CEO of deepseek, shake hands with Xi jinping
and Xi smiled and said something to him
btw, the defacto leader of Huawei also was there
suspicious!
Get a real life please.
Anyways, the idea that US LLMs are censored in the same way as Chinese LLMs is a false equivalence. Models built by private companies under their own freedom are completely different from censorship imposed by a dictatorship (the CCP) trying to erase facts and censor speech in LLMs, which is what they literally require in Chinese law (“Content generated using generative AI shall embody the Core Socialist Values“).
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
LLM's are not that different than programming languages. Imagine Guido van Rossum charging $200 so you can use Python...
For a smaller player, open-sourcing might be a strategic move. It would likely go unnoticed if a small Chinese company released a model "almost as good as" ones from the top US players. But releasing it as open source is a game-changer.
However, open source isn't just for small players. Microsoft develops Visual Studio Code and Meta develops PyTorch - to name a few examples out of hundreds. In these cases, it's also PR - they can afford it, and it doesn't compete with their core business.
There's a story about someone asking the Dalai Lama whether all altruism is actually a form of egoism, since we do good things to feel better. He responded that if that's the case, we need more of this type of egoism. (I can't find the exact source, but it aligns with his quote "Being wisely selfish means taking a broader view and recognizing that our own long-term individual interest lies in the welfare of everyone.")
So yes, I want to see more of this kind of PR.
I also think that the companies that are doing that have a different idea on how to make money. Facebook's competitive edge lies in all the people using their social media, and for the Chinese, I think their edge lies in manufacturing physical products, so they try to commodify the software component.
Which is in stark contrast to the US, who have a world-beating software and silicon industry, but are merely competent in other areas, so it makes sense for them to want to avoid that.
Why enter the market now when AI is already commoditized? DeepSeek is making US investors regrets investing so much to get a tiny lead over them, but they're also making future, large investments much harder to justify when you can rely on existing open-sourced models
Foundation Models aren't defensible. It'll force VCs to allocate on other stuff (the new buzz is "the application layer")
The giant players are more than happy to keep their models open if no one even tries to compete.
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." ~~ Goethe
I just wish this smear campaign against them stops sometime soon.