Fake accounts drove the DeepSeek AI hype and distorted markets

Re:Fake accounts drove the DeepSeek AI hype and distorted ma... by evai on Friday August 29, 2025 @10:39AM (#45064749)

We analysed the online hype around DeepSeek and found something unusual: thousands of fake accounts were amplifying the narrative of mass adoption.

This wasn’t just random spam — the accounts showed patterns typical of coordinated bot networks (synchronous posting, recycled avatars, and disproportionate engagement).

The result: investors and the market briefly reacted to a level of “traction” that wasn’t real.

I’m curious how others here think about this:

How can we distinguish genuine user adoption from manufactured buzz in an LLM/AI market that is moving this fast?

What tools or heuristics do you use to check the authenticity of online signals?

(Research details and case breakdown in the post.)

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Re:Fake accounts drove the DeepSeek AI hype and distorted ma... by incone123 on Friday August 29, 2025 @12:12PM (#45065956)

Surely investors and tech leaders, as distinct from speculators, should be testing the product and doing due diligence on the company. I'm just a layman and I liked how a small version of deepseek ran faster and with less power draw on my PC than other small version models did. Output, very informally tested, was good. I did not think the 'reasoning' text added anything useful but I'm also not qualified to say how it contributed to the final output.

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Re:Fake accounts drove the DeepSeek AI hype and distorted ma... by NitpickLawyer on Friday August 29, 2025 @12:47PM (#45066433)

> I'm just a layman and I liked how a small version of deepseek ran faster and with less power draw on my PC than other small version models did.

This doesn't sound accurate. There are no "small versions" of deepseek r1. They released some distilled fine-tunes of their big model. They took qwen2.5 models as a starting point, and fine-tuned them with ~800k generations made with deepseek r1. But they did not change any of the model's architecture, so the "base" model released by qwen and the fine-tuned one released by deepseek should run identically on your hardware.

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Re:Fake accounts drove the DeepSeek AI hype and distorted ma... by incone123 on Friday August 29, 2025 @03:26PM (#45068326)

Emphasis on layman and I'm not at my PC but when deepseek came out there was something I could pull in ollama that could run on modest hardware.

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Re:Fake accounts drove the DeepSeek AI hype and distorted ma... by NitpickLawyer on Friday August 29, 2025 @05:17PM (#45069502)

Yes, that's ollama's fault. They renamed the fine-tuned qwen model to deepseek, and a lot of people got confused. But behind the naming blunder, the model you got was qwen2.5-finetuned-r1, which was identical in architecture with qwen2.5 (so it should have ran at the exact same speed)

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Re:Fake accounts drove the DeepSeek AI hype and distorted ma... by mosst on Friday August 29, 2025 @12:25PM (#45066122)

This reads like a propaganda piece, there's lots of bullet points and hardly any real information to support your bold claim. From the few examples you do show, they all look pretty standard. Not something that would have an impact... unless DeepSeek really was a great success and really did change the AI landscape... which it did.

[ Parent | on HN ]