Summary:
The launch of Chinese AI application DeepSeek in the U.S. has raised national security concerns among officials, lawmakers, and cybersecurity experts. The app quickly became the most downloaded on Apple’s store, disrupting Wall Street and causing a record 17% drop in Nvidia’s stock. The White House announced an investigation into the potential risks, with some lawmakers calling for stricter export controls to prevent China from leveraging U.S. technology.
Beyond economic impact, experts warn DeepSeek may pose significant data security risks, as Chinese law allows government access to company-held data. Unlike TikTok, which stores U.S. data on Oracle servers, DeepSeek operates directly from China, collecting personal user information. The app also exhibits censorship, blocking content on politically sensitive topics like Tiananmen Square. Some analysts argue that, as an open-source model, DeepSeek may not be as concerning as TikTok, but critics worry its widespread adoption could advance China’s influence through curated information control.
Of course it’s a national security threat, it’s just more proof that the US economy is just a giant ponzi scheme.
If China can do it better on a budget of $6m in 18 months with low end equipment, then why does it take an American company 10 years, half a trillion dollars, and the entire nation’s supply of high-end graphics cards?
Deepseek used distillation, which is a way of extracting training information from other models through querying the model. In other words, some of the advances came from examining OpenAI’s models. Being first is hardest and took brute force.
First time you do something is always harder. OpenAI just didn’t think it was 1000x harder and thought they’d have more time to cash in.
Myself, I think that being able to throw billions of dollars at hardware, and their focus on next-quarter results discouraged them from putting in the human effort to analyze and optimize their process. It turns out there were some fantastic optimizations to do.
oh yeah, not denying that the prototype will be more expensive and resource intensive than following versions, but the whole “US overspends on novel technology, China blows that technology out of the water and shows this tech is both accessible and affordable, US bans Chinese product because American companies don’t want to compete” shtick is just getting old
The model isn’t afaik. I.e., if you download one of the models and run it locally. It’s the app with folks pasting proprietary, company secret, etc data into it.
Really, it’s the same problem as with ChatGPT, but now an organization in another country has your data. I guess we’ll see if our new techno bro overlords try to use this to their advantage across the board to limit competition, even from local processing.
Taking bets.
I just find it amusing how when proprietary data/company secrets/whatever are being sent to openAI it’s a matter of “that was irresponsible don’t let it happen again” but some guy in Kentucky isn’t able to get a detailed description of Tiananmen Square from the US perspective without a little effort and it’s the end of national security as we know it.
Same with the tiktok ban. How many classified military secrets do we think some regular dude in a trailer in Alabama really has on his phone?
“National Security” in the US is literally just code for rich people’s bank accounts at this point.
If it’s open source and can be hosted locally, I don’t think there are issues with national security in this case.
There is money to be lost though. Always follow the money.
Like TikTok. The national security threat is actually just fear of profit loss.
it’s not fully open source. it comes with binary blobs you can’t build from source.
What do these blobs contain?
Does the version run locally also censors output?
it’s the so called weights. the learned data after training.
they didn’t provide neither training data, nor lists of sources, so nobody can recreate it, but them.
OpenAI and nividia owners in shambles haha
National security, anti-terrorism, protecting children.
The trifecta of reasons given for abolishing freedoms
And the first two reasons are not even legitimate in theory. Nationalism is a plague destroying the planet. “Terrorism” is a fake word reserved for enemies of the state.
When you’re living in the imperial core violently genociding the planet to make a quick buck, of course everything is a security concern and opportunity for the MIC to profit.
It’s better than our usa tech, sir!
Quick, mark it as a security threat!
If they’re limiting focus to the Chinese app then they’re noir wrong. If they mean the whole model then they’re full of crap.
Good. Perhaps while all the idiots are busy devising a “plan” to address this, those evil brain leave everyone else alone.
US needs to be a lot more transparent about all these concerns. It’s starting to feel like shouting wolf.
Weaselly little liars.
Deepseek released the model and showed how they made it. You can run it locally. It doesn’t connect to the internet.
The cope is absolutely unreal.
it’s not fully open souce tho.
it comes with binary blobs you can’t build from the source.
I do wonder why do they bother with pretences like this. Would Americans not buy „hey, we’re going to do to Chinese companies what they have been doing to ours for years now”?
B/c USA has already been doing the same stuff for years now.
Which Chinese tech company was forced to sell majority stock to a US domestic business before? I’ve only heard of TikTok which was also deemed national security issue recently.
It sets bad precedent that the owner class doesn’t like.
Either way US government will need to either nationalize or break up these mega corps. This can’t go on.
This thing has bipartisan support, local business support and seems to be supported by wider general public thanks to scare tactics and lobbying from Meta. I understand that Democrats conditioned their voters to ignore things they agree on with Republicans but they’re not in charge anymore. It’s like the whole country went on a carnival ride, got stuck and are now trapped in this weird loop.
