Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

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I don't care if this kills Google and OpenAI.

I hope it does, though I'm doubtful because distribution is important. You can't beat "ChatGPT" as a brand in laypeople's minds (unless perhaps you give them a massive "Temu: Shop Like A Billionaire" commercial campaign).

Closed source AI is almost by design morphing into an industrial, infrastructure-heavy rocket science that commoners can't keep up with. The companies pushing it are building an industry we can't participate or share in. They're cordoning off areas of tech and staking ground for themselves. It's placing a steep fence around tech.

I hope every such closed source AI effort is met with equivalent open source and that the investments made into closed AI go to zero.

The most likely outcome is that Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic win and every other "lab"-shaped company dies an expensive death. RunwayML spent hundreds of millions and they're barely noticeable now.

These open source models hasten the deaths of the second tier also-ran companies. As much as I hope for dents in the big three, I'm doubtful.

I can’t think of a single company I’ve worked with as a consultant that I could convince to use DeepSeek because of its ties with China even if I explained that it was hosted on AWS and none of the information would go to China.

Even when the technical people understood that, it would be too much of a political quagmire within their company when it became known to the higher ups. It just isn’t worth the political capital.

They would feel the same way about using xAI or maybe even Facebook models.

This is the real cause. At the enterprise level, trust outweighs cost. My company hires agencies and consultants who provide the same advice as our internal team; this is not to imply that our internal team is incorrect; rather, there is credibility that if something goes wrong, the decision consequences can be shifted, and there is a reason why companies continue to hire the same four consulting firms. It's trust, whether it's real or perceived.

Children do the same thing intuitively: parents continually complain that their children don't listen to them. But as soon as someone else tells them to "cover their nose", "chew with their mouth closed", "don't run with scissors", whatever, they listen and integrate that guidance into their behavior. What's harder to observe is all the external guidance they get that they don't integrate until their parents tell them. It's internal vs external validation.

Or in many cases they go over to their grandparents house and they let them run wild and all of the sudden your parents have “McDonald’s money” for their grandkids when they never had it for you.

I have seen it much more nuanced than that.

2020 - I was a mid level (L5) cloud consultant at AWS with only two years of total AWS experience and that was only at a small startup before then. Yet every customer took my (what in hindsight might not have been the best) advice all of the time without questioning it as long as it met their business goals. Just because I had @amazon.com as my email address.

Late 2023 - I was the subject matter expert in a niche of a niche in AWS that the customer focused on and it was still almost impossible to get someone to listen to a consultant from a shitty third rate consulting company.

2025 - I left the shitty consulting company last year after only a year and now work for one with a much better reputation and I have a better title “staff consultant”. I also play the game and be sure to mention that I’m former “AWS ProServe” when I’m doing introductions. Now people listen to me again.

So much worse for American companies. This only means that they will be uncompetitive with similar companies that use models with realistic costs.

I can’t think of a single major US company that is big internationally that is competing on price.

Any car company. Uber.

All tech companies offering free services.

Is a “cheaper” service going to come along and upend Google or Facebook?

I’m not saying this to insult the technical capabilities of Uber. But it doesn’t have the economics that most tech companies have - high fixed costs and very low marginal costs. Uber has high marginal costs saving a little on inference isn’t going to make a difference.

What American car company competes overseas on price?

All the American cars (Ford, Chevrolet, GM...) are much cheaper in Europe than eg. German cars from their trifecta (and other Europe-made high end vehicles from eg Sweden, Italy or UK), and on par with mid-priced vehicles from the likes of Hyundai, Kia, Mazda...

Obviously, some US brands do not compete on price, but other than maybe Jeep and Tesla, those have a small market penetration.

> I can’t think of a single major US company that is big internationally that is competing on price.

All the clouds compete on price. Do you really think it is that differentiated? Google, Amazon and Microsoft all offer special deals to sign big companies up and globally too.

I worked inside AWS consulting department for 3 years (AWS ProServe) and now I work as a staff consultant for a 3rd AWS partner. I have been on enough sales calls, seen enough go to market training materials and flown out to customers sites to know how these things work. AWS has never tried to compete as the “low cost leader”. Marketing 101 says you never want to compete on price if you can avoid it.

Microsoft doesn’t compete on price. Their major competitive advantage is Big Enterprise is already big into Microsoft and it’s much easier to get them to come onto Azure. They compete on price only when it comes to making Windows workloads Bd SQL Server cheaper than running on other providers.

AWS is the default choice for legacy reasons and it definitely has services an offerings that Google doesn’t have. I have never once been on a sales call where the sales person emphasizes that AWS is cheaper.

As far as GCP, they are so bad at evterprise sales, we never really looked at them as serious competition.

Sure AWS will throw credits in for migrations and professional services both internally and for third party partners. But no CFO is going to look at just the short term credits.

> AWS has never tried to compete as the “low cost leader”. Marketing 101 says you never want to compete on price if you can avoid it.

Despite all that and whatever you say, the fact is you do compete. It doesn't have to be a race to the bottom.

So Cloudfront free tier and the latest discount bundles etc aren't to compete? People have also negotiated private pricing way below list price and a lot cheaper than competitors.

Similarly was the Dynamodb price cuts not due to competition?

I can give way more examples...

I am well aware that Netflix doesn’t pay the same price for AWS services that “Joe Bob’s Fish Tackle and WordPress shop”. All big companies give discounts to large companies as part of negotiations which is different from “we are the low cost leader”.

All technology gets cheaper over time. There is a difference between lowering price in response to competitors and finding the profit maximizing price based on supply and demand.

AWS was lowering prices to increase demand before GCP and Azure were a thing.

Jassy said right before he became CEO of Amazon and he was still over AWS that only 5% of IT spend was on any cloud provider. They are capturing non consumption and marketing value of AWS vs that.

While I don’t have any insider experience about Azure, looking on the outside, I would think that Azure’s go to market is also not competing against AWS on price, but trying to get on prem customers on Azure.

If the Chinese model becomes better than competitors, these worries will suddenly disappear. Also, there are plenty startups and enterprises that are running fine-tuned versions of different OS models.

Yeah that’s not how Big Enterprise works…

And most startups are just doing prompt engineering that will never go anywhere. The big companies will just throw a couple of developers at the feature and add it to their existing business.

Big enterprise with mostly private companies as their clients? Lol, yeah, that’s how they work from my personal experience. The reality is, if it’s not a tech-first enterprise and already outsource part of tech to a shop outside of NA (which is almost majority at this point), they will do absolutely everything to cut the costs.

I spent three years working in consulting mostly in public sector and education and the last two working with startups to mid size commercial interest and a couple of financial institutions.

Before that I spent 6 years working between 3 companies in health care in a tech lead role. I’m 100% sure that any of those companies would I have immediately questioned my judgment for suggesting DeepSeek if had been a thing.

Absolutely none of them would ever have touched DeepSeek.

Why would you be presenting what AI tech you are using? You would tell them AI will come from Amazon using a variety of models.

You still choose your model. I’m no more going to say “I’m using Bedrock” without being more specific than I would say “I’m using RDS” without specifying the database.

In various sectors, you need to be able to explain why you/your-system did what it did. Exchange Act Rule 15c3-5 is probably the most relevant in financial circles:

https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-17/chapter-II/part-240/su...

Note: I am neither a lawyer nor in financial circles, but I do have an interest in the effects of market design and regulation as we get into a more deeply automated space.

To add on, while it doesn’t work with GenAI models as far as I know. AWS has a service around explainability around ML decisions

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/sagemaker/latest/dg/clarify-mode...

I've worked with financial services, and insurance providers that would have done the opposite for cost saving measures. So, I'm not sure what to say here.

Regulators would have the head of any financial institution that used a Chinese model.

Financial Services are far more risk averse first than they are cost cutting, they literally have risk departments.

If you'd spent anytime working at one for swe you won't have access to popular open source frameworks, let alone Chinese LLMs. The LLM development is mostly occurring through collaborations with the regional LLM businesses or internal labs.

As a government contractor, using a Chinese model is a non-starter.

I don't know that it's actually prohibited. There is no Chinese telecommunications equipment allowed, no Huawei or Bytedance, but nothing prohibiting software merely being developed in China, not yet at least.

Although I did just check what regions AWS bedrock support Deepseek and their govcloud regions do not, so that's a good reason not to use it. Still, on prem on a segmented network, following CMMC, probably permissable

There’s nuance and debate about the 110 level 2 controls without bringing Chinese tech in to the picture. I’d love to be a fly on the wall in that meeting lol.

> I don't know that it's actually prohibited.

Chinese models generally aren't but DeepSeek specifically is at this point.

No… Nobody I work for will touch these models. The fear is real that they have been poisoned or have some underlying bomb. Plus y’know, they’re produced by China, so they would never make it past a review board in most mega enterprises IME.

People say that, but everyone, including enterprises, are constantly buying Chinese tech one way or another because of cost/quality ratio. There’s a tipping point in any excel file where risks don’t make sense, if the cost is 20x for the same quality.

Of course you’ll always have exceptions (government, military and etc.), but for private, winner will take it all.

What Chinese built infrastructure tech where information can be exfiltrated or cause any real damage are American companies buying? Chinese communication tech is for the most part not allowed in any American technology.

80% of the parts in iPhones are manufactured in China, and they have completely and utterly dominated in Enterprise (Ever heard of someone using a Blackberry in 2025? Me neither.) so there’s one example.

The software is made by Apple. Hardware can’t magically intercept communications and the manufacturing is done mostly in Taiwan. If Apple doesn’t have a process to protect its operating system from supply chain attacks, it would be derelict

Hardware can do any "magic" software can, which should be obvious since software runs on it. It's just not as cost-effective to modify it after shipping, which is why the tech sector is moving to more sw less hw (simplified, ofc, there are other reasons).

The xenaphobia is still very much there. Chinese tech is sanitized through Taiwanese middlemen (Foxconn, Asus, Acer etc). If you try to use Chinese tech or funding directly you will have a lot of pushback from VCs, financial institutions and business partners. China is the boogieman

it is many things, but not xenophobia.

That conversation probably gets easier if and when company when $100+M on AI.

Companies just need to get to the “if” part first. That or they wash their hand by using a reseller that can use whatever it wants under the hood.

For what it's worth, this is complete insanity when practically every mega enterprises' hardware is largely Made in China.

Enterprise hardware isn’t the issue. It’s the software. How much enterprise hardware is running with Chinese software? The US basically bans any hardware with Chinese software that can disrupt infrastructure.

Tons of routers, modems, embedded, are running Chinese software

Backdoors in software are much easier to discover than backdoors in hardware.

Any kind of hardware that is somehow connected to the wired or wireless communication interfaces is much more dangerous than any software.

Backdoors embedded in such hardware devices may be impossible to identify before being activated by the reception of some "magic" signals from outside.

I work at a F50 company and Deepseek is one of the model that has been approved for use. Took them a bit to get it all in place but it's certainly being used in Megacorps.

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AirBnB is all in on DeepSeek and Qwen.

https://sg.finance.yahoo.com/news/airbnb-picks-alibabas-qwen...

TIL: That Chinese models are considered better at multiple languages than non Chinese models.

It's a customer service bot? And Airbnb is a vacation home booking site. It's pretty inconsequential

Airbnb has ~$12 bn annual revenue, and is a counterexample to the idea that no companies can be "convinced to use DeepSeek".

The fact that it's customer service means it's dealing with text entered by customers, which has privacy and other consequences.

So no, it's not "pretty inconsequential". Many more companies fit a profile like that than whatever arbitrary criteria you might have in mind for "consequential".

really a testament to how easily the us govt has spun a china bad narrative even though it is mostly fiction and american exceptionalism

> I can’t think of a single company I’ve worked with as a consultant that I could convince to use DeepSeek because of its ties with China even if I explained that it was hosted on AWS and none of the information would go to China.

Well for non-American companies, you have the choice between Chinese models that don't send data home, and American ones that do, with both countries being more or less equally threatening.

I think if Mistral can just stay close enough to the race it will win many customers by not doing anything.

That might be the perspective of a US based company. But there is also Europe and basically it's a choice between Trump and China.

Europe has Mistral. It feels that governments that can do things without fax take this as a sovereignity thing and roll their own or have their provider in their jurisdiction.

> Even when the technical people understood that

I'm not sure if technical people who don't understand this deserve the moniker technical in this context.

The average person has been programmed to be distrustful of open source in general, thinking it is inferior quality or in service of some ulterior motive

ChatGPT is like "Photoshop" people will call any AI chatgpt.

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