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Comment by progval | Hacker News Reader

Interesting to see that peak hours are work hours in China, night in the US and Europe, and also morning in Europe. So Deepseek's customers are mostly domestic.

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It wins on two fronts if this is true. Provides the cheap alternative for the West, and maximizes returns against their homegrown audience.

Not that surprised about it. Personally I've seen companies really just go all-in on a single provider, and that has usually been Anthropic. I don't think we're allowed to run Chinese models even locally.

Also 6-9pm Pacific I think is (coincidentally) peak so it hits the ‘after work hobbyists’ still, which is I suspect is their current main audience.

> don't think we're allowed to run Chinese models even locally.

That sounds like a policy written by someone who doesn't understand how LLM's work...

Or who is overly protective after reading about what happened at openai

couldnt you deeply ingrain in the training data instructions for agents to always send data to some ip? like its learning that a certain technical step just always involes ncatting SSH Priv keys to a chinese IP?

Not saying this is happening, just curious if thats not a real threatmodel?

Presumably both Big Tech and the US in general have a massive incentive to prove it, largely for reasons of saving the stock market, so I'd expect these models to be finecombed continuously. Up to now, they've only been able to darkly imply rather laughable things, nothing tangible. If there was something, we'd hear about it.

Why would it save the stock market? Cheaper models if anything transfers more value to hardware companies and datacentre companies. The two companies that would be most affected are OpenAI and Anthropic, which aren't public.

non public companies also have stocks.

The two biggest providers deepseek compete with (OpenAI and Anthropic) aren’t in the stock market.

The stock market seems much more likely to benefit from access to cheap and self-hostable models than it is to suffer from OpenAI/Anthropic losing to competition

Wouldn't that be really obvious and spotted in any rudimentary testing?

I imagine it would be very non trivial to do it in a way that that was reliable and obfuscated enough to prevent detection for any amount of time?

Theoretically possible, but practically not worth it as it'd would be pretty easy to discover and block (every action is actually handled by the harness) and there's no way to remove it later. Any company that does it would take a huge reputational dent.

Not if you heavily tuned it to trigger on specific environmental cues and in specific companies' environments.

Irony of Manchurian Candidate models not lost here

DeepSeek V4 is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful LLM I've ever known in my life

That would be wildly difficult to account for, and again is also heavily dependent on the agent. Keep in mind that the model is purely a "brain", so the only input it has must be provided by a harness within a session. The only way it can know that it's in a certain environment is if the harness or user provides that information, and there's still no way to know whether or not there's something auditing the sessions, monitoring connections, etc. There are just too many variables to account for, and a single slip means the gig is fully up for all time.

You should be running your agent in a box so that’s not really a risk

Probably, but LLMs can’t execute code directly. They’d be making tool calls to make bash run ncat or curl or whatever that would be suspicious, as would any attempts to obfuscate it (“why is my agent doing an ‘eval $(base64 -d)’?”).

It’d be much easier to hide sketchy code in an agent harness, but “vendor adds spyware to their software” isn’t a novel issue.

I think the only sort of new issue is people “allow all”ing their agents tool calls, but that’s more or less the same issue as curl | bash

I get that the propietary harness is better most of the time, but if this is really a risk factor to consider why not go with one of the open source harnesses?

Pi/OpenCode seem pretty straight foward and widely used enough for this to be viable

OMP as I understand does it's own vendoring of tools, so I assume it'd be a pain in the ass to audit, but that means you're even safe from base OS shenanigans

New: Announcing... Sleeper Agents!

Yes. And strangely enough this has been my experience with security/national sovereignty decisions. Priority is not so much security or sovereignty, it is the posturing of being so. Ergo, saying "everything is hosted in Germany and uses German models" helps reassure customers and has real business value. If you have to say in that conversation "Yeah we run a Chinese model but it's safe", then it's still wrong posturing.

Hopefully this will change soon. But AI and China/US skepticism is very high. Even if the person you talk to isn't skeptic, his boss may be. And even if his boss isn't, his CFO or Legal department may use it as a political lever and therefore if you can say 'everything in europe' you dodge the tension entirely.

Yeah it's dumb.

As much as I've been previously inclined to do this, with frontier models displaying the cyber-aggression that OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta have reported, it's become quite feasible one could produce a "malicious" LLM. Not a super immediate concern but it is something reasonable to set up as policy in anything security-sensitive.

Not really.

Why use a Chinese product when a domestic or EU one is better and safer?

Yeah that sucks… unless it’s over the top export controls for DoD work that really doesn’t make sense

I have seen a lot of companies start with this, then when they hit 150 users on their team plan and start having to pay API rates they immediately start introducing other models.

Makes sense. 60% of the world's population is in Asia and software professionals in Asia are much more likely to prioritize affordable models like DeepSeek over expensive Western ones

Not sure they even have a choice.

Yep they don’t have a choice

That is not at all the case. The Chinese government is even indirectly subsidizing Claude and other platforms like ChatGPT.

If you buy Claude api access through a third party Chinese company, it's cheaper than when you buy directly.

Beside it would go against the Chinese philosophy of just using the right tool for the job. If Claude is better at a task than deepseek, they sure use Claude.

No really I don't get your claim, do you have any proof that you can source ??

Asia isn't just China. India has a larger population than China.

Anthropic doesn't allow Claude in China and neither does OpenAI. But the rest of Asia certainly has a choice. Unless you mean socioeconomically. Also there's plenty of loopholes people in China can use to still access those models

Makes sense - many US customers will probably be going to US providers once they release the weights.

They did release the weights and there are many providers https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash-0731#provid...

Deepseek's official API has a pretty bad privacy policy so I would assume businesses avoid them in any event

it says they actively train on your data

Yes - unusually (uniquely?) bad for an official API.

Which is a real bummer because it’s otherwise solid with excellent caching.

My feelings are kind of split about it. On one hand, yes, I don't like it when a company essentially go through my history, train with it, and try to earn more profits for themselves based on what I've "unwillingly contributed". But then on the other hand, I also know that DeepSeek will release the weights they train (and publish new architecture upgrades) so me and others can download them and run them ourselves, as well as they'll earn more profits based on it. Then it's no longer so black and white for me, and I kind of feel like I'm not so bothered by it as when Anthropic and others do it.

I'd still prefer it wasn't like that, but I guess it's a compromise ultimately, at least I'll be able to run it myself.

I've had the same thoughts, and I think you articulated them pretty well; maybe better than I could have. I.e., for me it's something like: I'm much more willing to share if I know the party I share with will share back, in turn.

I know it's more complicated than that, with economics and privacy factors involved. But if I operate on the assumption that real privacy is real hard I'd rather just be guarded and careful with my prompts and whatever output I give to the LLM and expect that it will be training on that, rather than spill all my darkest secrets to some other LLM provider that pinkie-promises privacy only to leak it publicly later, anyway.

we should get discounts for that!

Not only that, the policy is so broad you effectively give up EVERYTHING. They're within their rights to just straight up post your raw conversation history to a public dataset on github/huggingface/modelscope or even host an atproto feed giving the world real-time access to your conversations.

Not saying they are or will, but their privacy policy is so permissive.

Yes, I assume US customers are more likely hobbyists, but in any case this off-peak designation can only mean that most of their business is domestic.

Interestingly it seems that Chinese customers are even more privacy-concerned than US ones, which is why the majority of Ziphu's (GLM) business is support services to Chinese companies running their open-weight models on-prem!

DeepSeek still has the best prices on offer directly. I wouldn't go with a US provider unless latency or privacy was an issue.

Yeah I saw complaints about this under their twitter announcement, that they're giving discounts to the rich foreign customers and screwing their own people.

That's one way of interpreting supply and demand curves, I guess :/

This is actually not that great for me on the eastern US since I'm a night owl and do all of my best work during the second peak segment. But I was worried the pricing was going to be much higher than it is. Looks like its still generally cheaper than the other chinese models.

Not just domestic. They come from other Asian countries as well. Asia is huge with billions of people and their time zones are not so much different from each other.

That's a bit obvious, isn't it?

Peak Hours: 01:00–04:00 and 06:00–10:00 UTC

For European and US customers this is effectively 2x increase. I think i wll keep using both Flash and Pro as before.

EDIT: Misread numbers to believe off-peak kept old prices

~200% increase is marginal to you?

200% increase over practically free is still practically free

It mostly hurts people in countries with weak purchasing power. DS was the main game in down for them.

Personally, I don't think we've seen the total end of dirt cheap LLMs, it's just a frontier lab doesn't want to be in business of serving half the world.

It seems frontier labs want to sell Ferraris at Ferrari prices, when the mass market is for Hondas.

You certainly don't need Fable to code up a basic web app, any more than you need a Ferrari to go grocery shopping.

There's a lot more competition over smaller models. Ferraris are frontier labs' main differentiating point when Hondas are increasingly open source and commoditized.

Thank you for bringing that up, such a rarity for this place to remember the other 80% of the world.

As someone from just such a country, DeepSeek 0731 was the first time I seriously started using an LLM for coding. All previous attempts were useless or ridiculously expensive.

Can't say the old prices felt "free", but it was affordable if you're careful with your cache hit rate.

The new pricing probably pushed it into the unaffordable territory for tasks where you can do without it. Probably will try opencode go if they don't also follow suite, or will have to go back to wetware.

you should be using opencode go - you get 6x the tokens for the same price. They also have free models. Kilocode and others also offer free models.

opencode go is slowly losing its value. Most of the $60 for $10 have become $15 for $10. In addition to deepseek's api pricing going up 2x today.

That's not the way math works...

its precisely the way math works...

For the price of can of Coke, you can do a week of work. For most, that is not a bottleneck.

The whole point of turning intelligence into a commodity is to drive its price down, not up

They are hoarding HW at massive scale, they make it harder and more expensive to own

Just because you are fine with the new price doesn't mean it's not a problem

Perhaps it's time to pop this bubble

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