The following quotes from a reddit comment here https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1dkgjqg/comment...
> under International Data Transfers (in the Privacy Policy): """ The personal information we collect from you may be stored on a server located outside of the country where you live. We store the information we collect in secure servers located in the People's Republic of China . """
> under How We Share Your Information > Our Corporate Group (in the Privacy Policy): """ The Services are supported by certain entities within our corporate group. These entities process Information You Provide, and Automatically Collected Information for us, as necessary to provide certain functions, such as storage, content delivery, security, research and development, analytics, customer and technical support, and content moderation. """
> under How We Use Your Information (in the Privacy Policy): """ Carry out data analysis, research and investigations, and test the Services to ensure its stability and security; """
> under 4.Intellectual Property (in the Terms): """ 4.3 By using our Services, you hereby grant us an unconditional, irrevocable, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicensable, transferable, perpetual and worldwide licence, to the extent permitted by local law, to reproduce, use, modify your Inputs and Outputs in connection with the provision of the Services. """
Maybe OK for trying out stuff, a big no no for real work.
It's backed solely by a hedge fund who do not want to draw attention to their business. So yeah, as sketchy as DESRES.
Their terms of service say "The DeepSeek Open Platform is jointly owned and operated by Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Co., Ltd., Beijing DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Co., Ltd. "
And they're funded by https://www.high-flyer.cn/en/fund/ which the FT did an article on: https://www.ft.com/content/357f3c68-b866-4c2e-b678-0d075051a...
In terms of the personal data you share when using their models, I can't see why they would be any more or less nefarious than big Western tech companies.
That said, if you're using a model based in China then by providing them with data and feedback you are in a very small way helping researchers in China catch up with/keep up with/overtake researchers in the West. Maybe in the long term that could end badly. And if you are concerned about the environment, it's entirely possible their training and inference is run using coal power stations.
At $0.14M/$0.28M it's a no brainier to use their APIs. I understand some people would have privacy concerns and would want to avoid their APIs, although I personally spend all my time contributing to publicly available OSS code bases so I'm happy for any OSS LLM to use any of our code bases to improve their LLM and hopefully also improving the generated code for anyone using our libraries.
Since many LLM orgs are looking to build proprietary moats around their LLMs to maintain their artificially high prices, I'll personally make an effort to use the best OSS LLMs available first (i.e. from DeepSeek, Meta, Qwen or Mistral AI) since they're bringing down the cost of LLMs and aiming to render the technology a commodity.
[1] https://ollama.com/library/deepseek-coder-v2
[2] https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-Coder-V2-Lite-In...
Is that even legal in regards to EU users ?
Whats the current state of such tech/thought/standards/vendors?
43x cheaper is good, but my time is also worth money, and it unfortunately doesn't bode well for me that it's stumped by the first problem I throw at it.