Deepseek has been great for my academic research. I used it recently for a large scale RAG task with 10-Ks going back to 1995. I tried different models from various providers to get a sense of accuracy-cost tradeoff. GPT 5 mini was the best but still costing close to an estimated $10k which is way beyond my research budget or what my department would pay. Then Deepseek V4 Pro released and I tried it when they announced the pricing. The results were way better than GPT 5 mini and the cost was unbelievably low. I went for it rushing to finish the job before their promo period ended (which they made permanent anyway). It cost me only $450! That’s insane savings compared to GPT 5 mini.
I wasn’t concerned about data privacy as 10-Ks are public and quite likely part of the model training.
Makes sense in terms of public information. But the thing is if you use a foreign-hosted tech, you don’t know what is doing with ALL data you signed up with. You can use Chinese models hosted on US servers (like a together.ai – there are others). You’ll pay more than the native Chinese app sites, but will know that you aren’t feeding personal data into an ominous black hole. One simple example is to think what “dossier” they could build with your credit card data and search data. Nothing good can come from that.
And those US hosted versions of DeepSeek etc. are still far cheaper than the big (frontier) US companies... just not as cheap as the Chinese hosted sites.
I will check them out. I would always prefer keeping my data in the US. So far I haven’t used Deepseek for anything else but for future applications it will certainly create issues.
I wasn’t concerned about data privacy as 10-Ks are public and quite likely part of the model training.