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Comment by jvanderbot | Hacker News Reader

How likely is this?

Just a cursory probing of deepseek yields all kinds of censoring of topics. Isn't it just as likely Chinese sponsors of this have incentivized and sponsored an undercutting of prices so that a more favorable LLM is preferred on the market?

Think about it, this is something they are willing to do with other industries.

And, if LLMs are going to be engineering accelerators as the world believes, then it wouldn't do to have your software assistants be built with a history book they didn't write. Better to dramatically subsidize your own domestic one then undercut your way to dominance.

It just so happens deepseek is the best one, but whichever was the best Chinese sponsored LLM would be the one we're supposed to use.

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>Isn't it just as likely Chinese sponsors of this have incentivized and sponsored an undercutting of prices so that a more favorable LLM is preferred on the market?

Since the model is open weights, it's easy to estimate the cost of serving it. If the cost was significantly higher than DeepSeek charges on their API, we'd expect other LLM hosting providers to charge significantly more for DeepSeek (since they aren't subsidised, so need to cover their costs), but that isn't the case.

This isn't possible with OpenAI because we don't know the size or architecture of their models.

Regarding censorship, most of it is done at the API level, not the model level, so running locally (or with another hosting provider) is much less expensive.

I trust China a lot more than Meta and my own early tests do indeed show that Deepseek is far less censored than Llama.

Interesting. What topics are censored on Llama?

I can't help but wonder if this is just a dogwhistle for pornography?

Did you try asking deepseek about June 4th, 1989? Edit: it seems that basically the whole month of July 1989 is blocked. Any other massacres and genocides the model is happy to discuss.

What is a similarly offensive USA event that we should be able to ask GPTs about?

Snowden releases?

You raise an interesting point, and both of your points seem well-founded and have wide cache. However, I strongly believe both points are in error.

- OP elides costs of anything at all outside renting GPUs, and they purchased them, paid GPT-4 to generate training data, etc. etc.

- Non-Qwen models they trained are happy to talk about ex. Tiananmen

it's not likely

as DeepSeek wasn't among China's major AI players before the R1 release, having maintained a relatively low profile. In fact, both DeepSeek-V2 and V3 had outperformed many competitors, I've seen some posts about that. However, these achievements received limited mainstream attention prior to their breakthrough release.

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