[arjunchint]

There is a wave of users switching over to DeepSeek Flash. There are Reddit threads of users sharing billion token spend for $20.

If all of global spend on Anthropic/OpenAI/Gemini APIs just switches over to DeepSeek then easily we can decrease total AI spend by 10x

[szszrk]

v4 flash was really, really good in practice for me. While on openrouter it's around 1/100th of what the "SOTA" models cost.

But billions? A bit exaggerated.

[Aldipower]

DS is restricting the "expert" model usage already, because they do not have enough compute.

[pydry]

Probably won't be too long before the government decides to block deepseek's website based on "security" concerns.

[sharpshadow]

It’s in the doing with the DAAMT Act and soon foreign AI companies will be on the entity list. Circumvent this sanctions and count with assets forfeiture, civil penalty and criminal prosecution. This will eliminate access to Deepseek and so on overnight. Cherry on top most westerners will face similar problems due to secondary sanctions.

[LUmBULtERA]

Deepseek's models are open-weight and hosted all over the world, how would blocking deepseek's web sight do anything to stop its model's use?

[sharpshadow]

Deepseek will be sanctioned and therefore no provider will offer it anymore. Only way to use it then will be private but even that will be forbidden if it gets classified as threat to national security.

[kamaal]

>>Deepseek will be sanctioned and therefore no provider will offer it anymore.

That is possible inside the US. How do you do it all over the world? You have to convince every country in the world not use frontier models? Even worse how do you convince all the countries to not build their own models?

[IsTom]

And then USA will have a disadvantage compared to rest of the world with cheaper LLMs and american AI companies will have tougher time surviving on domestic spend alone.

[Mashimo]

Who is "The government"?

China or your local one?

[pydry]

American

[juleiie]

I am not sure if that is wise. It’s a hostile superpower after all

[viktorcode]

DeepSeek first and foremost is a business. Yes, being a business in China means risk of being ordered tomorrow to do something that is not in your best interests. But now we know the US is not immune to that level of government oversight either.

The difference is DeepSeek and other Chinese models are open weights.

[adrian_b]

By "hostile superpower" you mean USA?

As an European, today I certainly classify USA as a "hostile superpower" because the actions from the last few years of both the US government and of certain big US companies have stolen a lot of money directly from my own pocket, by artificially limiting competition in several important markets, like smartphones, SSDs and memory modules, thus greatly raising the prices in comparison with what they would have been in normal market conditions (i.e. if the US government had behaved after the same rules that they had forced upon the other countries for decades, by various methods of propaganda, bribing and blackmailing).

[gck1]

I'm in Europe. The only superpower that's been hostile to me, very directly - was US, when they asked a company I was relying on to limit model access based on nationality.

China has (so far), never done that to me.

[KumaBear]

Hostile? Us or them? I beg to differ who the hostile ones might be.

[sophrosyne42]

We are hostile to each other. It's ignorant or propagandistic to pretend it is only one sided. The concern is valid, if vague and unproven

[adrian_b]

USA is hostile to the entire world, because the US actions already for several years, but especially during the last year, have caused global price rises in more and more product categories, starting with smartphones, then with SSDs, then with DRAM and HDDs, and eventually with almost everything that is affected by energy costs.

This is not some hypothetical hostility, but billions of humans from all over the world have been losing more and more money in recent years and in recent months, from their own pockets, much of which eventually reaches US companies, like Qualcomm and Micron (or South-Korean companies, who have also benefited from the US policies).

Of course, China is not trustworthy, but until now, unless you are a neighbor like Taiwan, their hostility is only hypothetical and in the future, not real and in the present, like for USA.

[gf000]

Which one? China or the US?

[pjc50]

All AI is a hostile superpower. Might as well use the cheap one.

[ReptileMan]

Well... Open weights on premise is politically neutral.

[Sankozi]

The training might be political. Search for "deepseek tibet backdoor"

[akie]

Try doing it at scale for a whole office. Not trivial.

[arjunchint]

There are plenty of US based hosters racing to optimize and drive efficiencies

Literal race on twitter posting to increase token throughput and drive down costs on these Chinese open source models

[ReptileMan]

You could probably do with couple of instances. People rarely use ai 24/7, so right now you can oversubscribe and still have acceptable latency and high utilization rate.