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Comment by ryanisnan | Hacker News Reader

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DeepSeek is basically a startup, not a "foreign nation-state backed organization". They were forced to pivot to AI when their original business model (quant hedge fund) was stomped on by the Chinese government.

Of course this is China so the government can and does intervene at will, but alleging that this required CIA level state espionage to pull off is alien crash levels of implausible. They open sourced the entire thing and published incredibly detailed papers on how they did it!

You may be unaware, but CCP has far more control over private companies than you might think: https://www.cna.org/our-media/indepth/2024/09/fused-together...

This is not America. Your ideas do not apply the same way.

Naivety of some folks here is astounding… CCP has golden shares in anything that could possibly be important at some point in the next hundred years, and yes golden shares are either really that or they’re an euphemism, the point is it doesn’t even matter.

China has tens of millions of companies. The government can't, doesn't and isn't even interested in micromanaging all of them.

It doesn’t have to micromanage. It doesn’t care about most. It is only interested in the politically important ones, but it needs the optionality if something becomes worthwhile.

You're suggesting that DeepSeek was a Chinese government operation that gained access to OpenAI's proprietary data, and then you're justifying that by saying that the government effectively controls every important company. You're even chiding people who don't believe this as naive.

I think you have a cartoonish view of China. A huge amount goes on that the government has no idea about. Now that DeepSeek has made a huge media splash, the Chinese government will certainly pay attention to them, but then again, so will the US government.

I never suggested anything of the sort.

I’m suggesting it will be happening now and any past efforts will be retroactively analyzed by the appropriate CCP apparatus since everyone is aware of the scale of success as of Monday. It has become a political success, thus it is imperative the CCP partakes in it.

This is the argument we're discussing:

> DeepSeek, illegally, got their hands on an OpenAI model via a breach of OpenAI's systems. [...] given the lengths other Chinese entities have gone to when it comes to replicating Western technology; we should not discount this.

Above, teractiveodular said that "DeepSeek is basically a startup, not a 'foreign nation-state backed organization'". You called teractiveodular naive for saying that. So forgive me if I take the obvious implication that you think DeepSeek is actually a state-backed actor enabled by government hacking of OpenAI.

You took a major leap. No one made any such argument.

You don’t need a CIA level agent to get someone with a fraudulent job at OpenAI for a few months, load some files on a thumb drive, and catch a plane to Shanghai.

> foreign nation-state backed organization

I'm European, are you talking about Microsoft, Google, or OpenAI?

They’re referring to an organization (like a hacking group) backed by a country (like china, North Korea).

So, which of them 3?

You're missing the point that for a much larger portion of the world, all "tech" is a foreign entity to them

Until recently treating the US and China on the same geopolitical level for allied countries would have been insanely uncharitable and impossible to do honestly and in good faith.

But now we have a bully in the whitehouse who seems to want to literally steal neighboring land, or is throwing shit everywhere to distract from the looting and oligarchy being formed. So I suddenly have more empathy for that position.

I notice that your geographical perspective doesn’t stretch to any actual evidence that such a thing took place. So it really has exactly the same amount of supporting evidence as my alien crash reverse engineering scenario at present.

The surrounding facts matter a lot here. For example, there are plenty of instances of governments hacking companies of their competing nations. Motives are incredibly easy to come by as well, be they political or economical. We also have no proof that aliens exist at all, so you've not only conjured them into existence, but also their motive and their skills.

Are you trolling me?

Ok so to be clear: your surrounding facts are they may have a motive and nation states hack people. I don’t disagree with those, but there really are no facts that support the idea that there was a hack in this case and the null hypothesis is that researchers all around the world (not just in the US) are working on this so not all breakthroughs are going to be made in the US. That could change if facts come to light but att the moment it’s not really useful to speculate on something that is in essence entirely made up.

No I’m not trolling you.

> exactly the same amount of supporting evidence

The evidence supporting offensive hacking is abundant in recent history; the number of things which have been learned from alien crash data is surely smaller by comparison to the number of things which have been learned from offensive hacking.

More to the point, offensive hacking is something that all governments do, including the US, on a regular basis.

However, there is no evidence this is how the data was obtained. Zero, zilch.

So its a useless statement which only plays on peoples bias against their hated nation state de jour.

Are you a Chinese military troll? The fact that China engages in industrial espionage is well known. So I’m surprised at your resistance to that possibility.

This thread reads like sour grapes to me. When people can’t compete but instead start throwing unfounded allegations is not a good look.

Even OpenAI itself hasn’t resorted to these wild conspiracy theories.

Unless you’re an insider in these companies, you’re just like the rest of us, you know nothing.

Are you saying Chinese industrial espionage is not a well established fact?

Industrial espionage isn't magic. Airbus once stole basically everything Boeing had, but that doesn't mean Airbus could magically build a better 737 tomorrow.

China steals a lot of documentation from the US but in a tech forum you of all people should be very familiar with how little actual progress a bunch of documentation is towards a finished unit.

The Comac C19 still uses American engines despite all the industrial espionage in the world because most actual engineering is still a brute force affair into finding how things fail and fixing that. That's one of the main advantages SpaceX has proven out with their "eh fuck it, just launch and we will see what breaks" methodology.

Even fraud filled Chinese research makes genuine advancements.

Believing that China, a wealthy nation of over a billion people, with immense unity, nationality, and a regime able to explicitly write blank checks could only possibly beat the US at something by cheating is like, infinite hubris. It's hilarious actually.

I don't know if DeepSeek is actually just a clone of something or a shenanigan, that's possible and China certainly has done those kinds of things before, but to think it's the MOST LIKELY outcome, or to over rely on it in any way is a death sentence. OpenAI claims to have evidence, why do they not show it?

>>>Believing that China, a wealthy nation of over a billion people, with immense unity, nationality, and a regime able to explicitly write blank checks could only possibly beat the US at something by cheating is like, infinite hubris. It's hilarious actually

So this is the first time I’ve heard the Chinese regime being described in such flowery terms on HN - lol. But ok - haha

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