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Comment by lvl155 | Hacker News Reader

The answer is simply that no one would pay to use them for a number of reasons including privacy. They have to give them away and put up some semblance of openness. No option really.

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I know first hand companies paying them. Chinese internal software market is gigantic. Full of companies and startups that have barely made into a single publication in the west.

Of course they are paying them. That’s not my point. My point is this is the only way for them to gain market share and they need Western users to train future models. They have to give them away. I’d be shocked if compute costs are not heavily subsidized by CCP.

> My point is this is the only way for them to gain market share and they need Western users to train future models.

And how would releasing open-weight models help with that? Open-weights invite self-hosting, or worse, hosting by werstern GPUaaS companies.

But the CCP only has access to the US market because they joined the WTO, but when they joined the WTO they signed a treaty that they wouldn't do things like that.

I don’t think there’s any privacy that OpenAI or Anthropic are giving you that DeepSeek isn’t giving you. ChatGPT usage logs were held by court order at one point.

It’s true that DeepSeek won’t give you reliable info on Tiananmen Square but I would argue that’s a very rare use case in practice. Most people will be writing boilerplate code or summarizing mundane emails.

There are plenty of people paying, the price/performance is vastly better than the Western models

Deepseek 3.2 is 1% the cost of Claude and 90% of the quality

Why is privacy a concern? You can run them in your own infrastructure

Privacy is not a concern because they are open. That is the point.

Ah understood i misread

ByteDance’s Volcengine is doing very well offering paid LLM services in China. Their Doubao Seed models are on par with other state-of-the-art models.

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