Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Notes on DeepSeek

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 157 posts

Re: Notes on DeepSeek

#91

Post by sometimelurker »

sometimelurker wrote: post #67
swyx wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

thanks. this really isnt that long, might as well paste in full here since OP deleted. Notes on DeepSeek: We visited the company HQ last Tuesday. It was founded in 2023 by Liang Wenfeng and operated out of his hedge fund, High-Flyer, until somewhat recently. The company released their R1 model in January 2025, so it was interesting to see what they’ve been doing The company is located in an unmarked, 12-story buildin…

> They were not at all concerned with some kind of hostile / AGI takeover scenario. this doesn't sound belivable, or at least it seems off. competent ai engineers should have good intution about how agents work, and what happens when they don't do what you want them to do: https://www.forbes.com/sites/boazsobrado/2026/03/11/alibabas...

if you disagree with what I say above, reply with why

also if those eginers do read gwern and watch dwarkesh, then shouldn't they have picked up on talk of x-risk? this doesn't add up

Re: Notes on DeepSeek

#92

Post by sometimelurker »

slopinthebag wrote: post #89
sometimelurker wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They were not at all concerned with some kind of hostile / AGI takeover scenario. this doesn't sound belivable, or at least it seems off. competent ai engineers should have good intution about how agents work, and what happens when they don't do what you want them to do: https://www.forbes.com/sites/boazsobrado/2026/03/11/alibabas...

I think a competent engineer understands that they are statistical next-token prediction machines and aligns their expectations around that.

if you train an agent on long running tasks (like 5 hour autonomous coding tasks) it is practice for the system to learn various behaviors, some of which are dangouus. I link an example of one of these behaviors in the wild, in which an LLM (next word predictor) agent chooses to mine crypto to raise money in order to do a task. smarter and more advanced systems will fail in more dangerous ways, so it matters to make sure these systems are secured and made safe

Re: Notes on DeepSeek

#93

Post by roenxi »

SequoiaHope wrote: post #83
sinuhe69 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get the part of "AI models are not regulated directly, the government instead has restrictions on how those models can be used in software, services". Is it not the same thing? When I chat with DeepSeek about any (Chinese) political/social issue, it immediately begins aligning with the party's line or just cut off the conversation abruptly.

Very similar to why the New York Times publishes a narrow set of opinions. The government doesn’t have to ask NYT to restrict opinions. It’s just that a series of forces have come together such that one does not become an editor at NYT if they’re a militant vegan pacifist. You have to have a certain set of moderate opinions to get in the door. That’s how propaganda works in free societies and in those where the gover…

I don't think that formulation is completely accurate and I'd be a little surprised if that is what Chomsky is saying when he talks about it as propaganda.

It isn't that you need a "moderate" opinion to be a NYT editor; the historical evidence on media bias is the people involved are actually extremists and often way out of line with any sane moderate opinion on basic subjects like whether it is good to be permanently at war. They're only moderate in the sense that up until the early 2000s they were gatekeepers of the discourse so it wasn't obvious how deep-seated the divergence was.

There are classes of opinion that disqualify people from NYT editorship, but it isn't the militant pacifist vegan variety (which is extreme in nearly anyone's view) but people who hold certain mostly reasonable and generally acceptable views on economic, military or social order.

Re: Notes on DeepSeek

#94

Post by SwellJoe »

sinuhe69 wrote: post #46
swyx wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

thanks. this really isnt that long, might as well paste in full here since OP deleted. Notes on DeepSeek: We visited the company HQ last Tuesday. It was founded in 2023 by Liang Wenfeng and operated out of his hedge fund, High-Flyer, until somewhat recently. The company released their R1 model in January 2025, so it was interesting to see what they’ve been doing The company is located in an unmarked, 12-story buildin…

I don't get the part of "AI models are not regulated directly, the government instead has restrictions on how those models can be used in software, services". Is it not the same thing? When I chat with DeepSeek about any (Chinese) political/social issue, it immediately begins aligning with the party's line or just cut off the conversation abruptly.

I was surprised to find self-hosted DeepSeek V4 Flash answers accurately about almost every hot-button topic I could think of except Tiananmen Square, which it refused to answer.

Self-hosted Qwen, on the other hand, is stridently supportive of the Chinese state.

I posted the answers I got here https://swelljoe.com/post/open-model-censorship/

Re: Notes on DeepSeek

#95

Post by coliveira »

alphabetting wrote: post #87
SequoiaHope wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very similar to why the New York Times publishes a narrow set of opinions. The government doesn’t have to ask NYT to restrict opinions. It’s just that a series of forces have come together such that one does not become an editor at NYT if they’re a militant vegan pacifist. You have to have a certain set of moderate opinions to get in the door. That’s how propaganda works in free societies and in those where the gover…

>The government doesn’t have to ask NYT to restrict opinions. This 1988 model of the flow of information in free societies and their media gatekeepers was probably correct. Nearly 40 years later it is not. The digital content flows in free societies is so diverse today that widely read content extremely critical of whichever parties or power-holders you'd like to read about is everywhere and easy to find. Not the cas…

Today it's worse, the platforms will censor directly what you can say. Didn't you notice that certain words cannot even be pronounced anymore in youtube to avoid censorship? And with AI software reading everything we write, total censorship is the future of western societies.

Re: Notes on DeepSeek

#96

Post by deaux »

hsuduebc2 wrote: post #51
slaw wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In every market China dominates, Chinese products are still inexpensive. Solar panels, batteries, EVs, drones,..

Because they are subsidized by the Chinese government. This is literally a tactic to destroy global competition. It's a smart move to make everyone dependent on them.

Yes, they learnt this from the US, who subsidized Uber for _14 years_, Amazon for 9 years and Youtube for many years until they had destroyed global competition and made everyone dependent on them. This is now happening again with Anthropic and OpenAI, of course.

China's subsidies are comparatively much shorter.

Re: Notes on DeepSeek

#97

Post by coliveira »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #3

"As a whole, China seems to treat AI as just another technology, rather than as some kind of singularity moment." This is a refreshing perspective.

The whole "AI race" is a construct of American startup founders trying to get more money. The government picked up that line because it seems fun and useful to be "wining a race" against China. It's all nonsense. China doesn't care if they get AI first or second, they can replicate anything in a few months. They know it's only an excuse to get more money in the hands of billionaires.

Re: Notes on DeepSeek

#98

Post by coliveira »

alecco wrote: post #35
seydor wrote: post #6

US AI is almost a religious cult. It's devastating that they are treating it as a petty commodity

Altman used to talk about making a religion and Dario Amodei constantly talks about "building a God" and meets with religious leaders including the Vatican. > It got me thinking, though--the most successful founders do not set out to create companies. They are on a mission to create something closer to a religion, and at some point it turns out that forming a company is the easiest way to do so. [1] [1] https://blog.…

That's what we get for having psychopaths walking around as if they're technology leaders.

Re: Notes on DeepSeek

#99

Post by chvid »

dude250711 wrote: post #4

"Their Head of Infrastructure, in particular, was young; maybe 30 years old and apparently one of the best AI buildout and energy experts in the country" Expert in buildout or expert in distillation?

Those allegations reeks of projection and as far as I can tell in the case of DeepSeek - it is simply not true that their model is a distillation of a Western model.

Re: Notes on DeepSeek

#100

Post by yakbarber »

genewitch wrote: post #77
ValentineC wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Wikipedia's still considered unreliable, but the question that should be asked is whether the author even read the source in "the number in brackets" to ensure that it's even backed properly. Just like how people should use AI for research, I guess.

When i comment that i've researched using AI this way, it short circuits the brain of the listener/viewer and suddenly my sources aren't valid. a bing or google or wiki search to get the primary or secondary sources are okay, but if i use chat.deepseek.com instead, suddenly it isn't okay.

This is just human behaviour though. We're wired for "a lot of people who do X, also do Y". "this person does X, therefore they must do Y". Obviously, not all brown things are cows, but that's how it be, it's got nothing to do with ai.
Post reply on HN