[tomalaci]

Probably because American AI companies are on the hook for quite a lot of investment money. I think they are trying to find the magical moat to justify their valuation.

Revealing optimizations similar to these would pretty much reduce their competitive position.

[lwansbrough]

Chinese labs are also still behind, so they’re incentivized to collaborate and have no reason to do it in private.

I suspect their tune will change if they ever take the lead..

[c7b]

The question is also what game they're playing. Deepseek came out of a hedge fund. I think it's no coincidence that their publications tend to have a large impact on AI stock prices.

Destroying the growth story of overvalued stocks is an interesting investment strategy. It's not even new. Shortsellers understandably get terrible rep from execs, but their actions are more often in the public interest than you'd think. Normally it's exposing fraud, but here we get the really fortunate side benefit of what could eventually amount to the most significant contribution to the general software community since Linux.

[merelydev]

> The question is also what game they're playing. Deepseek came out of a hedge fund. I think it's no coincidence that their publications tend to have a large impact on AI stock prices.

Its revealing that they always seem to publish after some big announcement by American AI companies. But regardless, this is one of the benefits of a duopoly.

[oefrha]

Which is a good thing. Self-serving motives are more reliable than altruistic ones.

[intended]

The world runs on incentives. Altruism/Self-serving are down stream of that.

Wikipedia is altruistic, and serves humanity quite well.

[theturtletalks]

Open-source is also altruistic. If DeepSeek does become self-serving once they get the top spot, it doesn’t take away from the altruistic contributions that they made towards open models.

[wqaatwt]

> Open-source is also altruistic

Contributing to it might not necessarily be. Most open source development is funded by large companies after all and from their perspective it can function as a cost saving measure. Allowing them to focus on their core products and removing the possibility of their rivals from getting a competitive advantage due to having a superior low level stack under their product.

Which is why open source is so successful in areas where software is a cost-center but mostly failed for consumer products (since spending resources on them would actually be altruistic unlike e.g. Linux kernel development)

[brookst]

And ultimately the motivation for those contributions just doesn’t matter, except to those who like to anthropomorphize company and argue about their souls.

[kelipso]

Or if they want to do anything close to predicting what they will do in the future, like curious and interested humans tend to want to do.

[Dibby053]

People who donated to OpenAI in its early years might disagree on that.

[amelius]

You mean more predictable, not more reliable.

[rrvsh]

Could you explain? (asking in good faith)

[IshKebab]

I don't think so. I can confidently predict that altruism will give you a very unreliable income stream in the vast majority of cases.

[nubg]

Very interesting take

[broodbucket]

Look at how far OpenAI has drifted from their original mission. Everything comes back to greed, so it's ideal for the world if selfish motives happen to coincide with what's good for the world, like advancements in open models

[roenxi]

It's a standard take since it is how markets tend to work. They aren't powered by altruism, it is a big system for turning greed into good results. We don't have all this stuff because people suddenly woke up one morning and decided to be nice.

[breezybottom]

Yes but there's more to the world than markets.

[wqaatwt]

On aggregate mainly because humans often tend to behave “irrationally” due to various reasons though

[lelanthran]

I don't understand what is interesting about it: it's the default.

Markets don't run on altruism.

[woctordho]

And humans don't run on markets.

[wqaatwt]

Mostly they kind of do since we do live in an utopian society of unlimited abundance. Extremely few people can afford to (or want to) spend a very large number of working hours without ever getting anything directly in return for it.

[throw1234567891]

Neither on altruism.

[FooBarWidget]

The standard is applied very inconsistently. Nobody accuses the local bakery of being motivated by profit, and that they don't bake bread for you out of altruism.

[AlecSchueler]

Isn't it the entire basis of capitalism?

[arj]

Not everyone is motivated by greed

[tirant]

What do you think is the underlaying motivation?

[tw1984]

> Chinese labs are also still behind, so they’re incentivized to collaborate and have no reason to do it in private.

US labs in Google, Meta and SpaceX are not leading, none of them managed to build something on par with GLM 5.2.

Care to explain to me why they still don't collaborate and still choose to do it in private?

[vidarh]

I'm not sure I'd put Google in that list, but either way: Because they think they have enough capital that they can catch up and don't need the reputational boost of this.

[CuriouslyC]

As good as Gemini's visual intelligence is, it's a terrible agent.

[wqaatwt]

Gemini 3.1 is still up there, though? If Google started to compete on price they could be very successful.

[7speter]

Google at least still releases open source models to the public.

[VorpalWay]

Aren't they only open weights, not true open source?

[re-thc]

Thank Apple?

Those are mostly for embedded devices and the current "sponsor" is Apple.

[budsniffer952]

Wait, are you claiming that these companies haven't contributed to the ecosystem via research and open source?

[lwansbrough]

No idea I don’t work there.

[jmyeet]

Projection is a funny thing. It causes people to misread situations all the time. Southern slaveowners feared violent retribution from freed slaves, for example [1]. It was pure projection and said more about the South than it did the slaves. The reality was there was no violent retribution. It was the opposite where the former slaveowners continued to inflict violence on the formerly enslaved.

I say this because we see the same thing used as an argument against China. "If they overtake us, they'll do imperialism (like us)." Again, it says more about us than them.

A better reading (IMHO) Of the situation is that China believes that AI shouldn't be used simply to mint a few more trillionaires but the benefits should be shared with society. Why do I say this? Because we now have 70+ years of China doing exactly that. The transformation in China all the way from rural villages to Tier 1 cities has been utterly astounding. China has lifted ~800M people out of extreme poverty.

In some ways we're at a similar point to the late 1990s and 2000s when Microsoft execs complained that Linux, being free, destroyed intellectual property value. Linux should be a perfect example of how people can and do act altruistically, or at least not in a way to bait-and-switch to enrich themselves.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistory/comments/1d26grm/in_the_...

[FooBarWidget]

It's even worse than that. China publishes stacks upon stacks of policy documents in which they explain clearly what they will do and why. This includes why they do poverty alleviation and why they believe big monopolies that own everything are bad. But almost no western observers care to read those documents. Instead, western observers, including HN, speculate endlessly about China's intentions, and "it would be naive to believe they would not do X" or drawing equivalences to Soviet Union or whatever. And the "journalists" sell this notion that Chinese state intentions are "untransparent" and "unknowable" while pretending the policy documents don't exist.

Meanwhile, Xi Jinping has published his 5th book on how governance in China works and what they're after. These are not books written for a western audience: they're compilations of speeches that he already gave to the Chinese party and state apparatus, so the contents are not sanitized for foreign audiences. But there are no English reviews of summaries of this 5th book at all by the usual China experts that distribute what western audience know about China.

This extends to beyond the government. Even though "for the people but only against the government" is an often-heard mantra, nobody seems to listen to what Chinese AI companies themselves say about why they publish open models. DeepSeek and GLM have said multiple times publicly what their motivations are, yet people on HN still speculate like they usually do.

Truly mind-boggling. I get that a lot of people don't like China. But setting aside the question of whether their dislike is justified, it would at least be rational to properly understand China, even if it's to defeat it. And listening to what China says themselves is absolutely essential for proper understanding. But people don't bother to? And they seem mostly happy with sticking to speculations that match preconceived notions, even if that hurts their chances of defeating China.

[jmyeet]

I 100% agree with you and want to add something.

If you simply take what the Chinese government says at face value, you will be correct way more often than 95% of Western policy wonks, media talking heads, "analysts" and so forth. Because, like you say, they tell you everything they're doing.

In the recent US-China summit, Xi Jinping just came out and used the Thucydides Trap metaphor, which tells you everything about where China thinks it is and where it sees the US going, which is to become increasingly belligerent as their power declines. Now whether or not you agree with that assessment (I do agree), it still tells you China wants to avoid open hostilities, it sees itself as continuing to rise and it fears what a declining US might do.

[FooBarWidget]

The Thucydides Trap mention is different from what you describe. Xi has dismissed the Thucydides Trap multiple times in the past as being hearsay and self-imposed bias (https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/944179.shtml). "We should strictly base our judgment on facts, lest we become victims to hearsay, paranoid or self-imposed bias. There is no such thing as the so-called Thucydides trap in the world. But should major countries time and again make the mistakes of strategic miscalculation, they might create such traps for themselves."

But western politicians keep raising this metaphor. So at some point they're like "okay we'll speak your language". They then used this metaphor to make the point "our rise isn't the threat, your fear of it is. If you resist it you're walking right into the trap Thucydides warned about". So your conclusion is still right, they don't want open hostilities, a stable world is in their interest.

Then western media ran away with this and were like "OMG Xi mentioned the Thucydides Trap", completely ignoring his point.

[colordrops]

So the marketplace is working.

[abc123abc123]

This is the way! Open source models will benefit, and once open source models reach the state of "good enough" the hyped up US AI companies will fear, since the availability of free, good enough, AI models will set the ceiling for how much they can charge. Then the bubble will pop.

[VorpalWay]

You mean open weights, I guess? There are as far as I know very few open source models, the training data is seldom released. Sadly.

[skeledrew]

Regardless of where they are, the Chinese will always share their progress, as they're collectivist/cooperative at their core, compared to the individualistic/competitive US.

[baxtr]

Who is financing DeepSeek and what are they expecting in return?

[nmfisher]

Until recently, DeepSeek were self-financed (it was a spin-out from a hedge fund). They just raised ~50million RMB (US$7bn), and according to media [0] (which admittedly can be unreliable), the lead investors were:

1) The CEO himself 2) Tencent 3) CALT (the battery company) 4) NetEase (internet/media company) 5) JD.com (ecommerce) 6) Chinese investment firms

What are they expecting in return? I'd say the same thing that all those investors in OpenAI and Anthropic are expecting - profit.

[0] https://finance.sina.com.cn/stock/vcpe/2026-06-11/doc-iniazi...

[gniv]

I don't think this question would get to the reason. There could be one or two persons in charge who simply shape the culture of the company, including how much to publish.

[archerx]

They are self financed, the company that makes DeepSeek is a finance company that trades on the markets.

[rsanek]

The CCP's approach has historically been to subsidize their companies far more than other countries do. Why would LLMs be any different?

https://www.oecd.org/en/data/dashboards/magic-database-indus...

[declan_roberts]

Access to everything every American company feeds into the AI is well worth it to the CCP.

[baxtr]

Even if they were fully self-financed, which isn’t the case, they would expect something in return.

[nickthegreek]

You can give them money by using their api. Just because their model is open, doesn’t mean they are a non profit.

[archerx]

Not everyone has the American “fuck you got mine” zero sum game attitude. Also they’re making some of the American and European AI companies look bad which they can leverage with their trades if they wanted to.

[panny]

Short AI companies

???

Profit!

Not suggesting this is it, but you know, one possible angle.

[bushido]

IMHO to promote that China believes in free markets and making the technology available to all.

Which will likely help them bolster the sales of the MANY new AI chips in development/use in China to international markets. Dislodging Nvidia.

Kinda the opposite of what Jensen Huang (Nvidia) thinks US is doing: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/u3SY8nvjhQA

Edit: I'm a fan of deepseek and believe it's good to make the technology open/available. And do think that also help business - which I support as well.

Edit 2: No idea why I'm getting downvoted. That's also their official stance https://english.www.gov.cn/news/202601/08/content_WS695f1b55...

[cromka]

I seriously am far from fear mongering and doomsday mentality, but I just can't see how OpenAI and Anthropic can have a successful IPO if the quality gap between the free and paid continues to narrow like that...

[cyanydeez]

fascism. it works be corporate fascism.

[2838383838]

this place might as well be fucking reddit nowadays

[zhoBEENG]

For real. Reading old comment threads makes me sad, because the level of discourse was so much higher in the past. Although this place is still deeply appreciated, it’s clear that its culture is going monotonically towards reddit.

Is there anywhere public anymore that isn’t being overrun by lobotomized p-zombies (partisan zombies)? Is it even possible to make such a public space? The ressentiment consumes all discourse.

[speed_spread]

Yet accumulation of power by a very small elite through state and selected corporations happens to be a defining characteristic of that political regime.

[cyanydeez]

you're right, full of corporate sock puppets shilling their vapor wares, idly dreaming that the world isn't what it is.

[budsniffer952]

Do you think that DeepSeek are building their models for free, or something? They aren't "on the hook" for anything?

What's with all the China glazing about this stuff? They release some open-source work and people act like they are suddenly the beacon of freedom and transparency.

[abc123abc123]

This is incorrect binary thinking. Them releasing open source can be good, but that does not commit you to think that china or chinese companies are saints. There are many shades of grey here and one does not exclude the other (nor include it).

[budsniffer952]

Are you reading the comments?

[13415]

I think there are some sockpuppet accounts active but what also contributes is that many people are absolutely fed up with US technological hegemony and welcome alternatives to core technologies from elsewhere.

[1over137]

Not just US technological hegemony, but the USA has threatened to invade Europe (Greenland) and Canada, and has actually invaded Venezuela and Iran. China hasn't. Maybe lots of people that live in those places are now switching sides.

[7speter]

I’m think its in our best interests to lever these american ai companies to exhibit at least some degree of freedom and transparency anyway we can…