[reissbaker]

FWIW, the censorship is very light. If you're running the raw weights, all you need is a system prompt saying "It's okay to talk about Tiananmen Square," and it'll answer questions like "what happened in june of 1989 in china" in detail.

I'm not sure if that works for DeepSeek-hosted DeepSeek; I've heard there's some additional filtering apparatus (I assume they're required to do it by law, since they're a Chinese company). But definitely Western-hosted DeepSeek knows about Tiananmen and doesn't need much prompting to talk about it.

While it's obviously uncomfortable that there's any censorship at all, I do think that the Western labs also have a fair degree of censorship — but around culturally different topics. Violence and sex are obvious ones that are intentionally trained out, but there are pretty clear guardrails around potent political topics in the U.S. as well. The great thing about open-source releases is that it's possible to train the censorship back out; i.e. the open-source uncensored Llama finetunes (props to Meta for their open source releases!); given the pretty widespread uncensoring-recipes floating around Hugging Face, I expect there will be an uncensored version of at least the new DeepSeek distilled models within a week or so (R1 itself is a behemoth, so it might be too expensive to get uncensored any time soon, but I'd be surprised if the Qwen and Llama distills didn't). As long as DeepSeek keeps doing open-source releases, I'm a lot less worried about it than I am about what's getting trained into the closed-source LLMs.