> Others like OpenAI, Anthropic and Google are mostly just competeing with each rather than keep innovating around the clock.

They compete with each other by innovating. The innovations result in more utility for the customer, but the technology isn't made public. Trade secrets are secret for a reason.

The reason people may think that DeepSeek is the "most innovative" is because of what they can observe from the outside, much like people may mistakenly conclude models are the "prettiest of the population" because not everyone is photographed for public consumption.

> DeepSeek is, as I feel currently, the sole AI company which is actually trying to innovate rather than top mere benchmarks.

I'd also include the other Chinese labs like Moonshot (behind Kimi) and Z.ai (behind GLM). They are innovating and continue openly sharing their research to the public. I believe the founder of Moonshot even shared 40 minute video on Twitter where he goes through techniques that powers Kimi.

Isn't GLM-5.2 mostly DeepSeek V3 architecture?

More and more I suspect Z.ai just has deeper pockets and access to the Claude traces while DeepSeek is punching way above their class.

Perhaps, but Z.ai contributed with techniques such as IndexShare, which helps reduce computation for larger context windows (1M).

That understates how difficult it is to get to the level of performance they attained. The fact that it surpasses DeepSeek v4 in most ways shows that they accomplished some great work in this space.

> Others like OpenAI, Anthropic and Google are mostly just competeing with each rather than keep innovating around the clock.

The strategy for the most companies in the US has been for a long time to capture the social audience, whatever the mean is. Quality and innovation is the second factor. Capture the market, lock in the users, influence regulation and lobbying to keep the power.

> Capture the market, lock in the users, influence regulation and lobbying to keep the power.

“Buy every new players threatening their business” should be at #3 in your list.

the big labs have already been doing this for at least a year

Yes, all the closed providers are probably doing this already. As well as open models like Gemma and Nemotron.

Qwen as well.

There was a recent exodus from Qwen of researchers who supported their open source efforts, I’m not sure we will see many new open models from them past the 3.6 series.

are you able to say more about this (specifically that the researchers who left were concerned that qwen models were being closed sourced)? I was under the impression that the chinese labs and their employees aren't particularly concerned about ideology/safety/whatever and were just releasing open source models because it helps with publicity and does the most damage to the US AI labs. (and to be clear, I strongly support open source models, I just doubt that the Chinese labs and their employees are actually motivated by morals).

This was the easiest link I could find but TechCrunch also has an article on the departure - this one didn’t require turning off ad blockers though and has a bit more rumor mill stuff: https://chinabizinsider.com/alibabas-qwen-faces-turmoil-as-t...

Besides the founder, the only real external investor for DeepSeek is Chinese govt. there are literally zero revenue pressure compare to O, A & G.

To compete in that direction, USG needs to learn from CCP to "seize the means of production", which they are sort of doing, but in such an incompetent way that I'm afraid we will probably end up mixing the worst of both communism and capitalism.

China is just taking a lot of ideas from the USG when it was doing things correctly and is using those for innovation.

In this case, it feels like they are just funding multiple independent pure research projects and letting the chips fall where they may.

Doesn't even really seem like Europe can coordinate that.

> To compete in that direction, USG needs to learn from CCP to "seize the means of production"

No they don't. The U.S. Government is free to launch their own AI labs if they wish -- and even compete with the private sector -- but that doesn't mean they have to confiscate existing investments and capital. But Congress is unlikely to do that, because we've learned in the course of history that in well-functioning competitive markets, publicly-operated services tend to be worse than private ones across multiple dimensions.

Chinese companies are largely where they are not because they're state funded, but because they operate in ways that would be considered criminal in the U.S. If they didn't constantly trespass on OpenAI and Anthropic to try to achieve product and technological parity, they would be too far behind to produce innovative research.

Please explain how distillation == innovation

Especially since your 5-day-old account is sus, and thus likely not yet proven not to be a Chinese bot

You can't lead by following the actual leader LOL

The only real innovation I've seen from Deepseek is the out-loud reasoning thing in R1

You call yourself a philosopher in your profile.

I am also a fan of giving credit where it is due, and not giving it where it is not due. China is not an innovator. Perhaps they are only beginning to be, but historically, this is simply not the case, and yet distillation still falls squarely under "not innovating".

> historically, this is simply not the case

I wish people knew more history before using the term “historically”

The Chinese civilisation has been one of the most long living ones with plenty of “innovation” throughout history, both long ago and recently.

Long ago, OK.

Recently, maybe. I see a lot more copycat behavior however.

One presumes that in order to compete they must also be innovating, if the only innovation they had was how much money they could set on fire then OpenAi / Google would have walked all over Anthropic by now.