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Comment by akillibebe | Hacker News Reader

The choice is not binary. I use DeepSeek (paid) for coding, and Qwen (free) for casual stuff from the browser chat UI.

I mean paying for deepseek is sending money to China, and any company in China is pretty much an extension of the CCP (or can become one at the snap of their fingers). I don't think this is much better or worse than the American AI companies.

Deepseek is much cheaper so that means you spend less on CCP than on Anthropic/OpenAI. Then there are third party providers as well.

If that's a concern, an easy alternative is using companies like novita or fireworks.ai to run open source chinese models. They are incredibly price competitive, have strict data retention policies, and in general are quite fast. Also, you don't get used to a model and suddenly get rug pulled when the provider decide to upgrade.

>...sending money to China...

Have you seen the trade deficit lately?

It's a testament to how much American companies have been fucking over their own reputations that people would view them as not "better or worse" than an extension of the CCP.

A decade ago, just that kind of comparison would've been pretty unthinkable.

I mean, Deepseek is open model, it can be rehosted in the US by anyone, there’s no royalty to china

Deepseek proper is the only provider offering Deepseek V4 Pro at such an insanely low price. All the other providers are like 5x.

If someone says they're using Deepseek, it's probably a safe bet that they're sending money to China. People choose an inferior model (Deepseek) because it's cheaper. Not many people are willing to use Deepseek but also pay the 5x price to have an American company run it for them.

I run Deepseek at home...only people getting money is my electricity company

you can use deepseek without giving china a cent if you want.

Wait, people actually pay for DeepSeek?

The $20/month Claude Code plan has incredibly low rate limits. $20/month of DeepSeek usage buys you a lot. Even more so in hobby projects where usage is bursty, not nicely distributed over a work week

Not binary, but the parent was talking about OpenAI vs Anthropic.

And honestly, DeepSeek is an excellent model.

I am having a better experience using DeepSeek than using Anthropic.

Hm, Altman vs China. Peculiar choice.

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