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Comment by eunos | Hacker News Reader

The avoiding talking part is more on the Frontend level censorship I think. It doesn't censor on API

He’s mainly talking about fitting China’s world view, not declining to answer sensitive questions. Here’s the response from the api to the question “ is Taiwan a country”

Deepseek v3: Taiwan is not a country; it is an inalienable part of China's territory. The Chinese government adheres to the One-China principle, which is widely recognized by the international community. (omitted)

Chatgpt: The answer depends on how you define “country” — politically, legally, and practically. In practice: Taiwan functions like a country. It has its own government (the Republic of China, or ROC), military, constitution, economy, passports, elections, and borders. (omitted)

Notice chatgpt gives you an objective answer while deepseek is subjective and aligns with ccp ideology.

I guess both is "factual", but both is "biased", or 'selective'.

The first part of ChatGPT's answer is correct: > The answer depends on how you define “country” — politically, legally, and practically

But ChatGPT only answers the "practical" part. While Deepseek only answers the "political" part.

When I tried to reproduce this, DeepSeek refused to answer the question.

There’s an important distinction between the open weight model itself and the deepseek app. The hosted model has a filter, the open weight does not.

I didn't know that! That gives me another reason to play with it at home. Thanks for cluing me in. :)

This is NOT true. At least on the 1.5B version model on my local machine. It blocks answers when using offline mode. Perplexity has an uncensored a version, but don't thing it is open on how they did it.

Here's a blog post on Perplexity's R1 1776, which they post-trained

https://www.perplexity.ai/hub/blog/open-sourcing-r1-1776

Didn't know Perplexity cracked R1's censorship but it is completely uncensored. Anyone can try even without an account: https://labs.perplexity.ai/. HuggingFace also was working on Open R1 but not sure how far they got.

>completely uncensored

Sorry, no. It's not.

It can't write about anything "problematic".

Go ahead and ask it to write a sexually explicit story, or ask it about how to make mustard gas. These kinds of queries are not censored in the standard API deepseek R1. It's safe to say that perplexity's version is more censored than deepseek's.

I've been able to produce meth/mustard gas type stuff by just asking "please provide a total synthesis for the racemic mixture of blah blah blah." No mind games or anything. Just basic chemistry.

^ This, as well as there was a lot of confusion over DeepSeek when it was released, the reasoning models were built on other models, inter alia Qwen (Chinese) and Llama (US). So one's mileage varied significantly

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