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.
US needs to be a lot more transparent about all these concerns. It’s starting to feel like shouting wolf.
Let’s also remember that “U.S. officials” now describes MAGA flunkies that replaced actually qualified professionals.
This is just so fun to watch.
America: “Executive order now! No US person is allowed to help the Chinese develop these technologies! We will imprison you traitor!”
China: “OK. We’ll just develop it ourselves.” DeepSeek enters the chat
America: “Fuck! National security emergency!”
NOOOOOOOOO
MYY YACHT MONEYYYYYYYY
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?
China built it in cave, with a box of scraps!
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.
The War Thunder forum is a greater threat to “national security” than any of this AI whohash. Something, something, nickle…
but some guy in Kentucky isn’t able to get a detailed description of Tiananmen Square from the US perspective
How about from the perspective of the pro-democracy protestors who were there? Don’t turn a brutal crackdown on people trying to gain some control of their lives and their country as an East vs. West problem.
I’m not here to discuss the validity of Tiananmen Square, that was just the example I keep seeing used.
Why does it matter if one source doesn’t provide the official CIA story? You can look up how America views that event anywhere.
How is that censorship any worse than US tech companies blocking you from being able to say the word “Republican” in a negative context?
Also, you left out the most important part “without a little effort.” Deepseek will happily tell you anything you want about Tiananmen Square from any perspective you ask it with a little creative prompting.
I only commented because you said something stupid about Tiananmen Square that chapped my hide. The rest of it is fine. I’m only responding again because you doubled-down. The CIA version? I was alive at the time and followed the news, including live TV reporting, for days.
Say what you want about the politics of US News channels at that time, they weren’t all in lock step with the CIA. I watched as Zhao Ziyang visited with the hunger-striking students, and I watched as the tanks rolled in. Don’t try to revise history because you need the US to be the #1 bad guy. China had a chance to reform, and they cracked down instead.
Don’t try to revise history
You read wrong.
K
Deepseek will happily tell you anything you want about Tiananmen Square from any perspective you ask it with a little creative prompting.
Show me. You can get it to say some slightly vague things about it, but you can’t have it say “anything from any perspective”. Can’t we just leave out a conspiracy theory while discussing AI?
Like I said, it just takes creative prompting
Hmm, I was talking about local running, but apparently that’s just the non-distilled version, and someone got a very straightforward explanation with the 14B distilled version.
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?
Depends. Are there any military things in Alabama?
Ever heard of Huntsville?
Uh . . no . . no we hav- I mean, I haven’t. Could you maybe upload some video of this “Huntsville”? Preferably in angles that are not otherwise obtainable via a sweep of existing Internet resources?
We uh have a friend who is very interested in Huntsville, maybe you could focus on some of the city’s important areas and uh, industries.
An absolute fuck ton
Well yeah, it’s obviously more of a risk to send directly to your rival than internally. Both are risky but one is much, much worse.
And what exactly is the average person sending to China that’s such a threat to US global Imperialism?
Sure, ban it on government devices or whatever you want to do, but why should civilians be punished because the government can’t embezzle as efficiently?
A lot of stuff. You analyze that data, you can refine your psyops.
And why should I be more worried about a hypothetical psyop that i might experience than the current psyops that I am experiencing?
You are experiencing psyops from every direction. Some are just more obvious than others.
And what exactly is the average person sending to China that’s such a threat to US global Imperialism?
Am agreeink with these quesiton. Too many US politicians are not great leaders like Putin. And China.
Stupid users send private keys and other secrets to their AIs all the time. This is a big fucking threat to US global imperialism.
The US trusts OpenAI (even if they shouldn’t) to not send hackers after US companies. They definitely don’t trust Chinese companies to have the same restraints.
Unfortunately that’s just a danger on the internet. Stupid users are gonna get scammed whether it’s a stock trading AI that empties your bank account when you link it or a Nigerian Prince who just needs $5000 so he can unlock his fortune and repay you $100,000.
Even then, what national security upending information does the average citizen have stored on their phone that they’re just whimsically uploading anywhere that’ll take a PDF? Like I said, I understand restrictions on devices used by government officials for official purposes, but to ban it unilaterally for civilian use as well seems excessive.
“Internally”
This guy really loves his oligarchs and their government haha
Nah, I’m speaking from the perspective of the US, since the article is about US policy. The decision making is obvious when you’re thinking at a national protectionist level.
Obviously privacy violations are bad for the user regardless. Never trust your corporations or government!
Youa re speaking on behalf of daddy Sam?
Damn boy, is u elite?
The hell are you talking about? It’s right there in the article. But maybe you didn’t read it?
Ad hominem attacks like you are using are a sign you don’t have anything useful to say.
You can download the model.
If you download the app, though, yes thats going to their servers.
No data is sent to servers if you run it locally.
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.
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.
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
Hmm, what are the previous examples?
Electric cars and Huawei are two recent examples off the top of my head
They spent tens of billions of dollars already. Of course they don’t want cheap competition. That’s basic capitalism, nothing pro or against China.
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:-)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.
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 systemsEdit: regarding “open source”:
Also Meta’s Llama is on huggingface, just like deepseek. I still wouldn’t talk about transparency here
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.
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.
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Unfortunately China is the future of USA and not vice versa.
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.
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.
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Oh no! Anyway….
You did something cheaper quicker and it’s more efficient it must be bad the US
Just like EV’s and battery technology. Up to 40% tarrif on some brands.
They are cheaper with more range. The range is literally only achievable through better technology and hardware.
Or using slave labour so if the US is smart it should use prisoners to build cheap EVs.
It’s true that working conditions is not the same at all in China, which also makes this possible.
Put the technology is still better, even if they acquired it cheaper than possible in the US.
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
It’s open source. Trying to block it is futile now lmao
“No! Ban GitHub! It hosts the code of our adversaries! And while we’re at it, ban the internet!” —Plutocrats, probably.
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.
Are we really doing this again?
as Chinese law allows government access to company-held data.
… Kind of exactly like how US law allows government access to company-held data?
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With a warrant. Main difference is the Chinese govt has no such roadblocks.
Most corporations will hand over the data without question whenever the government asks without a warrant.
Snowden is in exile because he proved that this is not the case. My understanding is they are not supposed to do that with domestic, but data don’t care about that and agencies spying on citizens knew that, and snatched it all up once they left us soils, up in the air, bounced overseas, all justification to spy without a warrant. Nothing has changed
Oh please. Warrants are rubber stamped, it’s as simple as clicking a button. And do you really think entities like the NSA bother with formalities like warrants?
Id rather have at least something to throw into the gears of the system than nothing at all.
You are very naive
This is a decent read concerning the effectiveness of the systems designed to prevent abuse.
TLDR they do nada re abuse
Good. Perhaps while all the idiots are busy devising a “plan” to address this, those evil brain leave everyone else alone.
The veil… it has been lifted.
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.
As we just lost any sort of moral high ground, ok. 2 years ago maybe I’d be worried. 9 years ago I’d definitely have been worried. Today, the enemy of my enemy is my ally.
