I think you've spent a little too long hitting on the Deepseek pipe. Enterprise customers with familiarity with China will avoid the hosted model for data security and IP protection reasons, among others.

Those working in any area considered economically competitive with China will also be hesitant to use the vanilla model in self-hosted form as there perpetually remains the standing question on what all they've tuned inside the model to benefit the CCP. Perhaps even in subtle ways reminiscent of the Trisolaran sophons from the Three Body Problem.

For instance, you can imagine that if Germany had released an OS model in 1943, that the Americans wouldn't have trusted it to help them develop better military systems even if initial testing passed muster.

Unfortunately, state control of private enterprise in the Chinese economy makes it unproductive to separate the two from one another. Particularly in Deepseek's case as a wide array of Chinese state-linked social media accounts were promoting V3/R1 on the day of its public release.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/c...

But DeepSeek clearly states in their terms of service that they can train on your API data or use it for other purposes. Which one might assume their government can access as well.

We need direct eval comparisons between o3-mini and DeepSeek.. Or, well they are numbers so we can look them up on leaderboards.

Reasons to use o3 when deepseek is free/cheaper:

- Some companies/users may already have integrated heavily with OpenAI

- The expanded feature-set (e.g., function-calling, search) could be very powerful

- DeepSeek has deep ties to the Chinese Communist Party and, while the US has its own blackspots, the "steering" of information is far more prevalent in their models

- Local/national regulations might not allow for using DeepSeek due to data privacy concerns

- "free" isn't always better

I'm sure others have better reasons