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.

  • Liv@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    1 day ago

    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?

    • tburkhol@lemmy.world
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      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.

      • Th3D3k0y@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        MVP in Technology. OpenAI just sat around throwing salt to the wind piling up “value” until they can convince people it is worth some obscene amount of money to sell out. Once you give someone a literal milestone and show them the path, boom.

        This really really feels like a real life Tortoise and the Hare story. Like real hard, and I don’t feel the least bit bad for the hare.

      • Liv@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        1 day ago

        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

    • naeap@sopuli.xyz
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      1 day ago

      Distilling OpenAI and Llama models probably also helped quite a bit

      Although I must admit, that the architectural changes are pretty cool

      but I have to add, that I’ve just started reading into the topic a few weeks ago and don’t really have any real practical experience, besides checking out some huggingface docs I got linked yesterday and stupid me hasn’t thought about looking there…
      So everything I say is probably bullshit o⁠:⁠-⁠)

      • Liv@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        1 day ago

        Sure it made the training process faster, but this still takes a fraction of the energy to generate a single output compared to other LLMs like ChatGPT or Llama. Plus it’s open source. You can’t discredit a technological advancement for building upon previous advancement, especially when doing so with transparency.

        • naeap@sopuli.xyz
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          1 day ago

          As I said, the architectural changes are quite cool

          As far as I’ve understood it mostly comes down to splitting it up into multiple expert systems, so you don’t need to activate the complete system with every request

          But I’ve only scratched the surface…

          Also, open source… The weights are made publicly available.
          None of the training data or systems

          Edit: regarding “open source”:
          Also Meta’s Llama is on huggingface, just like deepseek. I still wouldn’t talk about transparency here

    • Xanthobilly@lemmy.world
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      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.

    • Zexks@lemmy.world
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      Not that America doesn’t have its own problem. But what do the suicide prevention nets looks like at your office. Because they’re everywhere in china because of shitty working conditions. This is how they do shit so cheap.

      • kipo@lemm.ee
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        1 day ago

        I don’t understand why you’re getting downvoted. Labor laws in China are shit. A ton of people there work way more than 40 hours a week for less money than US Americans get, live on company “campuses”, and have suicide nets.

        • TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world
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          1 day ago

          Many people online have been radicalised into thinking they have to be 100% for side A or for side B.

          When you put any criticism towards A or B, the supporters go absolutely wild. They will deny any problems with the side they’ve chosen.