Honestly, reasonable.

I mean, I sure don't trust OpenAI or Anthropic any more than I trust DeepSeek, but that's because I don't have legal control over them. The US government does, and it is correct to ban tools that are controlled by adversaries.

Isn't that the same argument they made for TikTok though? They are just trying to eliminate competition to prop up companies here.

You can run deepseek locally, have transparency into the tools and models.

There is less government control with deepseek than American born AI.

Lol, the guvmint flocked itself in its confusion

I have no idea why anyone would be using the online version of deepseek or qwen or glm or kimi in the us gov, surely they would be using chatgpt or claude?

i was so confused im like who cares if they’re running deepseek in lm studio or on their own servers but then they mentioned the sign up process

It says DeepSeek's sign-up process collects personal information and may "track and digitally fingerprint users", and that its apps work by having people type in information, which could mean sensitive data from US government staff or contractors ends up in China.

im like right, the online version, that makes sense

I mean yeah, look what happened to Ukraine when the trusted a foreign country to provide satellite access.

Exactly the reason why every country outside of America should drop all support for their IP and military purchases.

It’s not safe when dealing with a facist regime that controls the on/off switch to their own military operations and defences.

We’ve seen with Ukraine and the U.S. throttling access to starlink, and removing their sales or munitions to Ukraine to defend themselves again another rogue state.

Rogue states cannot be trusted.

Everyone conflates "AI model" with "AI platform."

The truth of the matter is that if you are interfacing with the DeepSeek service, you don't have control of the version of the model being run, the hidden system prompts, or any co-agents that might modify output before its sent to the user/service.

The model itself could be completely innocent. It may not have had any weights modified and was trained on honest greenfield data. But we control literally nothing about the environment it is running inside of.

That part tho

Meanwhile Elon Musk has a panic attack and reprograms Grok Everytime it tells the truth because it's "Woke".

Don't act like US based models are not being manipulated as fuck. Hell it's probably the ultimate end game for these pricks. Get these things mainstream for "all knowledge" and then "Hey ChatGPT, tell me about slavery?" "Ok user, slavery was a tool used by the benevolent superior white men to help grateful black people find work and shelter." Except it doesn't say "black people" in the actual future timeline.

I’m surprised they have agencies that use deep seek at all.

It’s not just about trust but if access was suddenly cut off they may not be able to pivot as quickly as needed to a US based platform. Also it’s entirely reasonable to expect these tools to be able to analyze the environment they run and determine, invisibly to the user, to decide to set up a backdoor. I mean who is actually reviewing the vibe coded bs?

There is no such thing as transparency into large language models. It’s a billion numbers that don’t mean jack shit to anyone, human or machine. In other words: it’s Chinese to us.

I'm not acting like they're innocent either, I don't and won't ever use any of them. But if you are thinking about it from the perspective of geopolitical warfare, the Chinese should doubly not trust grok and the US should doubly not trust DeepSeek. Using the adversaries tool is a fool's mistake outside of R&D.

This is also why a lot of European governments are pivoting away from Microsoft

I know people in state gov who couldn’t even use CoPilot (blocked by firewall) until an explicit contract was put in place with Microsoft about data handling. (On top of their existing Microsoft contracts.) All other LLM’s, ML, or “AI” are blocked unless approved, as well.

Seems like the federal government does not have its shit together.

Yea the EU doing sovereign data centers and sovereign AI (Mistral) is great. Gives me hope maybe I could emigrate with the skills I have.

No one and no business should trust or use any ML systems they didn’t create.

Any system controlled in the US should be everyone’s fear right now.

Yes and yes.

I don't think TikTok is really comparable though, unless there are somehow people using it for important government work.

It's open weights though

So China can remotely disable Deepseek models whenever they want?

It's still a risk. You can train an LLM to respond maliciously to a very narrow range of requests that would not be easy to spot in general testing. If you know how the LLM is used, you can target that very specifically. It doesn't have to be as blatant as "always deny the Tiananmen Square massacre ever happened".

Given how thoughtlessly people use AI, and how opaque some of the systems are, I think this is a legitimate concern.

And yes, every government outside America should ban the use of ChatGPT and Claude. Obviously.

But you don't need to rely on testing. Deepseek is open source so they could just go through the code

There are different levels of trust one can apply. In the case of Deepseek you can run the model on your very own hardware with no external connection to China at all. You can abliterate and fine-tune the model's weights yourself. You can observe all of its reasoning text as it works.

So I think I'd trust Deepseek over the likes of OpenAI, who insist you send all your data to them and be happy with whatever they choose to send back to you.

It's just open weights. You never know what it was trained to do. That's actually a hysterical take, because you can always check its work against other LLMs, or God forbid check it yourself, and as yet no such activity has been seen.

Well, open weight is not open source. There's a lot of black box still left in those models.

It's still far more open to investigation and analysis than the likes of ChatGPT, though. Lots of work has been done to allow some degree of investigation into how the "brains" of an LLM work and in the case of Deepseek you can actually apply those techniques to the model you know you're using.

I worked for a Microsoft studio for a while that took forever to allow Copilot to be used internally, and they were all Microsoft. It was very frustrating, especially given that permission was finally granted for Copilot use just a matter of weeks before the whole studio got abruptly shut down anyway.

Corporate bureaucracy. Weird and dumb.

I am not. Most of them had no policy at the start of this year, and the makeshift policies have been all over the place since then.

I'm not aware of any realistic way to vet published model weights like that.

It works for some open-source software, because you can download the source and compile it yourself. But most of the "open" models don't publish their entire training set, or enough details on the training for it to be truly reproducible. DeepSeek doesn't publish their data sets, and they probably couldn't, legally, since they "collaborate with third-party data providers to obtain proprietary datasets". And even if they did, it would be prohibitively expensive to train it on your own, unlike simply compiling open-source code.

The actual code for training LLMs is relatively trivial. The secret sauce is the training data and fine-tuning.

"Your wrong answer machine is not American enough, remove as soon as possible. Feel free to replace its function with a more American service that definitely doesn't steal all your data"
Pass

You have agents classify what each portion of the network responds to and how. One compares it to filling out a very large crossword puzzle: https://already-clean.goodfire.com/

That's the theory anways, not sure if it will stand the test of time...

Sounds interesting, thanks for the link. It's a little over my head tbh but I'll definitely take a closer look.

There are US hosted deepseek llm access points. openrouter, zen are local, but its more groups that can spy/train from you.

you don’t have control of the version of the model being run, the hidden system prompts, or any co-agents that might modify output before its sent to the user/service.

A bit of a paranoid concern. Your worry is that service may try to lie to you, perhaps because of your nationality. There have been quality issues from US served Chinese models. Completely free access points will get ultra compressed/quantized/lobotomized in order to be cheapest to serve but also give a poor impression of the model. Q4 quantization is considered a good balance between cheaper and full quality. But that will still make more mistakes, and US services can fake providing full precision. Every model can choose to lie to you, and you can screen shot it. Using a secret liar model in place of advertised model is possible from any provider, but they are incentivized to be as good as they can be.

There are outreach campaigns telling you to get vaccines and warning you about recalls, or at least there used to be. Not really comparable, but still important government work that could benefit from TikTok.

But the main reason for this move isn't concerns about privacy or spying. That's only the cover story. It's to make sure taxpayer money keeps flowing to US companies like Anthropic, Musk, and OpenAI which are only marginally better in most tests than Chinese models and are many times the cost in some cases. Propping up the bubble a bit longer so that more taxpayer money can be stolen is the number one priority. Do you honestly think Trump gives a damn about the security of the US?

Reading be hard

Two things can be true

Can't stop me from running a local model. China has always been the boogeyman. Not that there aren't valid criticisms against the Chinese government but I'm tired of this when we do it it's good but when China does it it's bad mindset. Bring back Huawei and Xiaomi phones.

Edit: Also these so-called capitalists want to ban the superior product instead of competing. It seems to me that China makes superior products. Why learn from them when you can ban the competition?

cuz everyone knows what that means

no. I'm in netsec, they aren't shutting down your local model with secret code. deepseek is a lot safer then Claude, grok, and chatgpt because you don't need Internet.

there is no comparison between software and services, though. self-hosting deepseek might be, subjectively, the wrong choice for your lab, but chatgpt is wrong for everyone, every human and every animal and plant too

this is coming from a k2 7b user btw. it's good enough for me!

edit: i replied to the wrong fucking comment and I'm too angry to fix it

Thanks for at least not being so angry you didn't bother adding that edit, I was very "wut?" There. :)

It means they release the model so you can run it yourself with enough hardware. Kind of like open source. Governments and large companies should be self-hosting this kind of stuff because of security, availability, and IP-leak risks anyway.

With LLMs, there is some risk of hidden malicious actions embedded in the weights that you can see until you ask it a magic question and it says "activate skynet."

Whether or not the government is doing this because of fears of hidden actions in the weights or just because OpenAI/Anthropic CEOs told the government to give them more money is unclear.

Super Intelligence good, China Intelligence bad!

Don’t run deep seek or you’ll be in deep shit.

Military should not depend on the imported (non-domestic) stuff. Supply chains must be 100% domeatic for the military.

Those are military requiremets.

This move is an overreach into the civilian/private sphere, so nakedly designed not for security, but for privileging the already morbidly overpriviledged domestic billionaires.

Also, with the rabid billionaires in control anyone can become an adversary overnight. Trump, with the presidential cabinet filled to the brim with billionaires and bootlickers, made Mexico, Canada, Denmark, and even the whole of the EU into adversaries, when they weren't before. The word "adversary" is meaningless these days.

Frankly, I trust the Chinese models and tools over those from the US. I know for a fact that the Trump Regime wants to hurt and exploit everybody, just because it can.

That doesn't apply for open models that you can run locally, like Deepseek.

I trust deepseek because I can run it fully offline on my own machine

I’ve always liked the cheaper Chinese phones and products, and I honestly don’t understand what people are stressing about.

I, personally, am not a huge power or some threat or anything important to be honest.

My government might care about what I get up to but I really doubt my data is of much use to China at all.

Every government is watching and tracking. But I highly doubt some random girl in Europe is a priority for China.