[ptsneves]

This is the rare earth minerals dumping all over again. Devalue to such a price as to make the market participants quit, so they can later have a strategic stranglehold on the supply.

This is using open source in a bit of different spirit than the hacker ethos, and I am not sure how I feel about it.

It is a kind of cheat on the fair market but at the same time it is also costly to China and its capital costs may become unsustainable before the last players fold.

[coliveira]

> cheat on the fair market

Can you really view this as a cheat this when the US is throwing a trillion dollars in support of a supposedly "fair market"?

[embedding-shape]

> This is using open source in a bit of different spirit than the hacker ethos, and I am not sure how I feel about it.

It's a bit early to have any sort of feelings about it, isn't it? You're speaking in absolutes, but none of this is necessarily 100% true as we don't know their intentions. And judging a group of individuals intention based on what their country seems to want, from the lens of a foreign country, usually doesn't land you with the right interpretation.

[csomar]

Prosecutor, judge and jury? You have access to their minds to know their true intentions? This whole “deepseek is controlled by CCP” is ridiculous. If you want to know how bad the CCP is at IT, then check the government backed banks.

The way I see this, some tech teams in China have figured out that training and tuning LLMs is not that expensive after all and they can do it at a fraction of the cost. So they are doing it to enter a market previously dominated by US only players.

[tokioyoyo]

I mentioned this before as well, but AI-competition within China doesn’t care that much about the western companies. Internal market is huge, and they know winner-takes-it-all in this space is real.

[DiogenesKynikos]

Are you by chance an OpenAI investor?

We should all be happy about the price of AI coming down.

[doctorwho42]

But the economy!!! /s

Seriously though, our leaders are actively throwing everything and the kitchen sink into AI companies - in some vain attempt to become immortal or own even more of the nations wealth beyond what they already do, chasing some kind of neo-tech feudalism. Both are unachievable because they rely on a complex system that they clearly don't understand.

[CamperBob2]

Good luck making OpenAI and Google cry uncle. They have the US government on their side. They will not be allowed to fail, and they know it.

What I appreciate about the Chinese efforts is that they are being forced to get more intelligence from less hardware, and they are not only releasing their work products but documenting the R&D behind them at least as well as our own closed-source companies do.

A good reason to stir up dumping accusations and anti-China bias would be if they stopped publishing not just the open-source models, but the technical papers that go with them. Until that happens, I think it's better to prefer more charitable explanations for their posture.

[Jedd]

> It is a kind of cheat on the fair market ...

I am very curious on your definition and usage of 'fair' there, and whether you would call the LLM etc sector as it stands now, but hypothetically absent deepseek say, a 'fair market'. (If not, why not?)

[nextaccountic]

Where exactly is this fair market? Giant US companies love rules and regulations, but only when it benefits them (and they pay dearly for it)

[jsiepkes]

The way we fund the AI bubble in the west could also be described as: "kind of cheat on the fair market". OpenAI has never made a single dime of profit.

[nylonstrung]

Yeah and OpenAI's CPO was artificially commissioned as a Lt. Colonel in the US Army in conjunction with a $200M contract

Absurd to say Deepseek is CCP controlled while ignoring the govt connection here

[josh_p]

Isn’t it already well accepted that the LLM market exists in a bubble with a handful of companies artificially inflating their own values?

ESH

[jascha_eng]

Do they actually spend that much though? I think they are getting similar results with much fewer resources.

It's also a bit funny that providing free models is probably the most communist thing China has done in a long time.

[deaux]

Ah, so exactly like Uber, Netflix, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook and so on have done to the rest of the world over the last few decades then?

Where do you think they learnt this trick? Years lurking on HN and this post's comment section wins #1 on the American Hypocrisy chart. Unbelievable that even in the current US people can't recognize when they're looking in the mirror. But I guess you're disincentivized to do so when most of your net worth stems from exactly those companies and those practices.

[corimaith]

Except domestic alternatives to the tech companies you listed were not driven out by them, they still exist today with substantial market share. American tech dominance elsewhere has more to do a lack of competition, and when competition does exist they're more often than not held at a disadvantage by domestic governments. So your counter narrative is false here.

[devsda]

> American tech dominance elsewhere has more to do a lack of competition,

Do you believe the lack of competition is purely because the products are superior?

US tech is now sort of like the dollar. People/countries outside the US need and want alternatives to hedge against in the event of political uncertainity but cannot do it completely for various reasons including arm twisting by the US govt.

One example is some govts and universities in the EU are trying to get rid of MS products for decades but they are unable to.

[bogdan]

> American tech dominance elsewhere has more to do a lack of competition

If that's true, why doesn't America compete on this front against China?

> they're more often than not held at a disadvantage by domestic governments

So when the US had the policy advantage over the EU it was just the market working, but when China has the policy advantage over the US it suddenly becomes unfair?

[corimaith]

>> they're more often than not held at a disadvantage by domestic governments

I think you misunderstood this. When domestic competitor arise against American tech, the domestic government tends to explicitly favour those competitor against American tech, placing the latter at an disadvantage.

You can see India or China or Korea or SEA where they have their own favored food delivery apps and internet services. Even in the EU the local LLM companies like Mistral are favored by local businesses for integration over OpenAI. Clearly American tech hasn't actually displaced serious domestic competitors, so the rare earths comparison fails when the USA in contrast is far more willing to let local businesses fail.

[ptsneves]

Not American and I also agree that the current big techs should be broken up by force of the state, there is a very big difference between a company becoming monopolistic due to market forces, and a company becoming monopolistic due to state strategy, intervention, backing.

Things can be bad in a spectrum and I believe it is much easier for society/state to break up a capitalistic monopoly than a state backed monopoly. To illustrate, the state has sued some of those companies and they were seriously threatened, because of competition ills. That is not the case with a state company.

[Draiken]

And what exactly are grants then? Tariffs? All the lobbied laws that benefit specific corporations or industries? Aren't they state backed advantages?

Banks created their oligopolies and then who saved them when they fucked up?

Isn't Tesla a state backed monopoly in the USA because of grants and tariffs on external competitors? Isn't SpaceX? Yet nobody treats then as state backed.

I don't understand this necessity to put companies in a pedestal and hate on states. Capitalist propaganda I guess?

Market forces are manipulated all the time. This distinction is nonsense. Companies influence states and vice-versa.