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This interview with DeepSeek founder and CEO Liang Wenfeng, also co-founder of the hedge fund backing DeepSeek, might shed some light on the question: https://w

by layer8 2y ago

This interview with DeepSeek founder and CEO Liang Wenfeng, also co-founder of the hedge fund backing DeepSeek, might shed some light on the question: https://www.chinatalk.media/p/deepseek-ceo-interview-with-chinas https://www.chinatalk.media/p/deepseek-ceo-interview-with-ch... Some relevant excerpts: “Because we believe the most important thing now is to participate in the global innovation wave. For many years, Chinese companies are used to others doing technological innovation, while we focused on application monetization — but this isn’t inevitable. In this wave, our starting point is not to take advantage of the opportunity to make a quick profit, but rather to reach the technical frontier and drive the development of the entire ecosystem.” “We believe that as the economy develops, China should gradually become a contributor instead of freeriding. In the past 30+ years of the IT wave, we basically didn’t participate in real technological innovation. We’re used to Moore’s Law falling out of the sky, lying at home waiting 18 months for better hardware and software to emerge. That’s how the Scaling Law is being treated. “But in fact, this is something that has been created through the tireless efforts of generations of Western-led tech communities. It’s just because we weren’t previously involved in this process that we’ve ignored its existence.” “We do not have financing plans in the short term. Money has never been the problem for us; bans on shipments of advanced chips are the problem.” “In the face of disruptive technologies, moats created by closed source are temporary. Even OpenAI’s closed source approach can’t prevent others from catching up. So we anchor our value in our team — our colleagues grow through this process, accumulate know-how, and form an organization and culture capable of innovation. That’s our moat. “Open source, publishing papers, in fact, do not cost us anything. For technical talent, having others follow your innovation gives a great sense of accomplishment. In fact, open source is more of a cultural behavior than a commercial one, and contributing to it earns us respect. There is also a cultural attraction for a company to do this.”

tarkin2 2y ago
Impressive, honestly. They're trying to become a mecca for innovation and research, trying to lead rather than follow, build a culture where innovation can spark future economic advantages, whereas OpenAI seem to more about monetisation currently, many of their researchers and scientists now departed. Under the aegis of a dictatorship they may be, but this encourages me more than anything OpenAI have said in a while.
- dralley 2y ago
  Well, it's certainly a strategic victory play. I'm not sure how much I buy the charitable aspects of this though.
  - layer8 2y ago
    I don’t get the impression that it’s intended as a charity. Also from the interview: “Our principle is that we don’t subsidize nor make exorbitant profits. This price point gives us just a small profit margin above costs.”
  - MetaWhirledPeas 2y ago
    Everything done in China, furthering any intellectual goal, is automatically going to be seen by most of us as a turn played in the game to become the world's #1 superpower. It's not unnatural for them to do this; I assume any nation would push for it if given the chance. The reason this causes so much suspicion is because we westerners are terrified of what that would mean for the rest of the world. So, sadly, even something that seems noble and refreshing like open-sourcing their AI advancements will be treated with suspicion.
    - dluan 2y ago
      Not suspicion, just propaganda and veiled racism.
      - tatrajim 2y ago
        Is it "veiled racism" to point out how China continues to wield the great firewall that effectively blocks most internet users from outside news and entertainment while Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Japan et al. do not? The basic world view in China of 天下 -- the universal dominion of China. Hence the general unpopularity of China in Vietnam, South Korea, and japan.
        Vegenoid 2y ago
LrnByTeach 2y ago
to me, just that these lines from DeepSeek founder/CEO Liang Wenfeng gives a clue that China communist party involvement in DeepSeek-R1 is minimal or nothing. If CCP is involved in a big way, we won't see these words from CEO. > "For many years, Chinese companies are used to others doing technological innovation, while we focused on application monetization..." > “But in fact, this is something that has been created through the tireless efforts of generations of Western-led tech communities. It’s just because we weren’t previously involved in this process that we’ve ignored its existence.”
- neoromantique 2y ago
  >China communist party involvement in DeepSeek-R1 is minimal or nothing. Until now.
- yodsanklai 2y ago
  Yet, ask DeepSeek what's the weather in Taiwan, it will replies that Taiwan is part of China. Ask about camps in Xinjiang, it'll say it's busy. Generally speaking, I assume CCP is involved with anything of strategic significance. They would even chase random benign influencers.
  - flybarrel 2y ago
    There's a thing called "local laws and regulations" that you need to comply with to be able to operate in China. It's plain and simple - without this level of limitation, once the model is viral it will be on the radar and then censorship will apply anyway. May as well implement that from the beginning. So I don't believe CCP is actively "involved" in this, but rather the laws impacted the behavior of the company. Microsoft apply censorship to Bing search results in China. It doesn't mean they are controlled by CCP. They just got impacted by law and they want to keep operate in China.
    - chii 2y ago
      The question is whether the weights they've released have such censorship in the training data, for which future users would be unable to detect nor remove. I don't care that deepseek's own service has censorship. I would care, if they have this censored weights but haven't revealed it was (aka, fraud by omission).
maxglute 2y ago
Another great interview dug up from 2020 but translated today. https://www.pekingnology.com/p/ceo-of-deepseeks-parent-high-flyer https://www.pekingnology.com/p/ceo-of-deepseeks-parent-high-... Interesting tidbit: >So far, there are perhaps only two first-person accounts from DeepSeek, in two separate interviews given by the company’s founder. I knew DeepSeek was lowkey but I didn't expect this much stealthmode. They were likely off CCP boomer radar until last week when Liang met with PRC premiere after R1 exploded. Finance quants turned AI powerhouse validates CCP strategy to crush finance compensation to redirect top talent to strategic soft/hardware. I assume they're going to get a lot more state support now, especially if US decides to entity list DeepSeek for succeeding / making the market bleed.
scotty79 2y ago
It's a good long term strategy. Releasing step A you developed, so you can see where others can go with it and adjusting your process of development of step B and C accordingly. Complete opposite of what OpenAI is doing, basically trying to squeeze step A short-term before others catch up and trying to develop step B with only limited experience you can gather yourself, in-house, from step A.
tomrod 2y ago
Surprising and refreshing. Create an ecosystem and all tides rise.
teleforce 2y ago
I think it's has escaped most of the HN crowds that Liang Wenfeng has a solid background (bachelor and master) in Electronics and Information Engineering that encompassed hardware and software. It's really a shame that in the current world, the art of hardware is dying out, where hardware people are not properly compensated and appreciated [1]. Liang Wenfeng belongs to this breed of engineers with hybrid hardware and software background that have money and at the same time founding and leading and companies (similar to two Steves of Apple), they're a force to reckon with with even with severe limitations, in case of Chinese companies computing resources sanctions CPU/RAM/GPU/FPGA/etc. But unlike two Steves these new hybrid engineers that raised in Linux era are the big believers of open source, as Google rightly predicted in case of LLM none of the proprietary LLM solutions has the moat [2],[3]. [1] UK's hardware talent is being wasted (1131 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42763386 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42763386 [2] Google “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI” (1039 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35813322 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35813322 [3] Google "We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI" (2023) (42 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42838112 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42838112
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  It's falling out in America precisely because we don't pay for good talent. So most talent flows into China. So, no surprise they are kicking the Us's butt in hardware while they are only now starting to build Silicon manufacturing plants domestically. That's alway the issue with outsourcing. You rely exclusively on middlemen, middlemen will realize they can cut out their middlemen and just go directly to the customers.
  - huitzitziltzin 2y ago
    >> It's falling out in America precisely because we don't pay for good talent. So most talent flows into China. These claims are quite hard to square with the long waits for H1B visas, extremely high salaries in the technology sector and net immigration to the US from China. I’m not aware of any Americans or Europeans in my network who have gone the other direction to China. Perhaps you have different data about the demand for tech worker visas in China.
dkga 2y ago
All of this resonates deeply with me. There are a lot of memes running around about Silicon Valley's Jing Yang (sorry if it's misspelled) eating OpenAI's lunch, but as much as those are funny, the underlying open source innovation and how it aligns with a vision of values, realisation, and also inevitability that eventually someone else would be able to reach these things, too - that all strikes a chord I have to say.
mistermann 2y ago
It doesn't surprise me that someone who has this thinking style is also able to outperform those who do not in certain domains.
agnosticmantis 2y ago
It's a breath of fresh air how grounded and coherent Wenfeg's argument is as a CEO of an AI startup. He actually talks like someone technical and not a snake oil salesman. Compare this to the interviews of Altman or Musk, talking vaguely about elevating the level consciousness, saving humanity from existential threats, understand the nature of the universe and other such nonsense they pander to investors.
- Yeul 2y ago
  Actually I'm terrified that they believe it. That they have Jordan Peterson's book on their night table.
keepamovin 2y ago
Great quotes. They didn’t ignore the existence of tireless efforts of Western tech they benefited off it and stole it. Obviously it’s a power play as China seeks influence beyond money now that’s secured. I think people should receive it on its merits. The strategy of open sourcing to eliminate the competitive mode of those with proprietary designs is a bit of a desperate play, favored by the weaker competitor, lacking access to the desired market. You can also perceive it as hostile and in line with dumping practices, where a high volume of product is dumped into a market at cheap prices. But besides these tactical aspects, which are no doubt being utilized, there’s a inescapable technological reality that obviously efficiency of AI will improve, and the most efficient designs would seem to rise to the top. This utilization of and guiding of inevitable historical trends for their own advantage is a very Chinese communist dialectical materialist approach to take, and I think we can expect to see more of these types of ‘surprising’ moves by entities out of China in the decades ahead as these kind of competitions heat up. The Chinese have a very deep and a very different ideological background that would justify these types of moves as making perfect sense to them, although they simultaneously appear as nonsensical to people from other backgrounds.
- lofaszvanitt 2y ago
  .
yieldcrv 2y ago
Ballsy of him to say some of that in China as a Chinese subject! I feel like the reaction of the west is protecting him from a reaction from Chinese authorities
buu700 2y ago
Reading between the lines, it sounds like there's less of a concern at this time for the profitability of this particular venture, and more of a national interest in making state-of-the-art AI viable on last-gen silicon. The win condition is to render US sanctions strategically toothless; DeepSeek itself one day achieving commercial success would just be gravy. If that is the game they're playing, I'm all for it. Maybe it's not the result that the sanctions were intended to have, but motivating China to share their research rather than keep it proprietary is certainly a win. Making AI more efficient doesn't reduce the value of compute infrastructure; it means we can generate that much more value from the same hardware.
rlt 2y ago
I have to wonder how much the Chinese government was aware of what DeepSeek was going to publish, and how much they will allow Chinese labs to publish in the future.
3abiton 2y ago
I am extremely grateful so far for their work and contributions, nut they are right. China is leading the way despite all the hurdles put by the chip act.

by layer8 2y ago

tarkin2 2y ago

Impressive, honestly. They're trying to become a mecca for innovation and research, trying to lead rather than follow, build a culture where innovation can spark future economic advantages, whereas OpenAI seem to more about monetisation currently, many of their researchers and scientists now departed. Under the aegis of a dictatorship they may be, but this encourages me more than anything OpenAI have said in a while.

dralley 2y ago
Well, it's certainly a strategic victory play. I'm not sure how much I buy the charitable aspects of this though.
- layer8 2y ago
  I don’t get the impression that it’s intended as a charity. Also from the interview: “Our principle is that we don’t subsidize nor make exorbitant profits. This price point gives us just a small profit margin above costs.”
- MetaWhirledPeas 2y ago
  Everything done in China, furthering any intellectual goal, is automatically going to be seen by most of us as a turn played in the game to become the world's #1 superpower. It's not unnatural for them to do this; I assume any nation would push for it if given the chance. The reason this causes so much suspicion is because we westerners are terrified of what that would mean for the rest of the world. So, sadly, even something that seems noble and refreshing like open-sourcing their AI advancements will be treated with suspicion.
  - dluan 2y ago
    Not suspicion, just propaganda and veiled racism.
    - tatrajim 2y ago
      Is it "veiled racism" to point out how China continues to wield the great firewall that effectively blocks most internet users from outside news and entertainment while Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Japan et al. do not? The basic world view in China of 天下 -- the universal dominion of China. Hence the general unpopularity of China in Vietnam, South Korea, and japan.
      - Vegenoid 2y ago

LrnByTeach 2y ago

to me, just that these lines from DeepSeek founder/CEO Liang Wenfeng gives a clue that China communist party involvement in DeepSeek-R1 is minimal or nothing. If CCP is involved in a big way, we won't see these words from CEO. > "For many years, Chinese companies are used to others doing technological innovation, while we focused on application monetization..." > “But in fact, this is something that has been created through the tireless efforts of generations of Western-led tech communities. It’s just because we weren’t previously involved in this process that we’ve ignored its existence.”

neoromantique 2y ago
>China communist party involvement in DeepSeek-R1 is minimal or nothing. Until now.
yodsanklai 2y ago
Yet, ask DeepSeek what's the weather in Taiwan, it will replies that Taiwan is part of China. Ask about camps in Xinjiang, it'll say it's busy. Generally speaking, I assume CCP is involved with anything of strategic significance. They would even chase random benign influencers.
- flybarrel 2y ago
  There's a thing called "local laws and regulations" that you need to comply with to be able to operate in China. It's plain and simple - without this level of limitation, once the model is viral it will be on the radar and then censorship will apply anyway. May as well implement that from the beginning. So I don't believe CCP is actively "involved" in this, but rather the laws impacted the behavior of the company. Microsoft apply censorship to Bing search results in China. It doesn't mean they are controlled by CCP. They just got impacted by law and they want to keep operate in China.
  - chii 2y ago
    The question is whether the weights they've released have such censorship in the training data, for which future users would be unable to detect nor remove. I don't care that deepseek's own service has censorship. I would care, if they have this censored weights but haven't revealed it was (aka, fraud by omission).

maxglute 2y ago

Another great interview dug up from 2020 but translated today. https://www.pekingnology.com/p/ceo-of-deepseeks-parent-high-flyer https://www.pekingnology.com/p/ceo-of-deepseeks-parent-high-... Interesting tidbit: >So far, there are perhaps only two first-person accounts from DeepSeek, in two separate interviews given by the company’s founder. I knew DeepSeek was lowkey but I didn't expect this much stealthmode. They were likely off CCP boomer radar until last week when Liang met with PRC premiere after R1 exploded. Finance quants turned AI powerhouse validates CCP strategy to crush finance compensation to redirect top talent to strategic soft/hardware. I assume they're going to get a lot more state support now, especially if US decides to entity list DeepSeek for succeeding / making the market bleed.

scotty79 2y ago

It's a good long term strategy. Releasing step A you developed, so you can see where others can go with it and adjusting your process of development of step B and C accordingly. Complete opposite of what OpenAI is doing, basically trying to squeeze step A short-term before others catch up and trying to develop step B with only limited experience you can gather yourself, in-house, from step A.

tomrod 2y ago

Surprising and refreshing. Create an ecosystem and all tides rise.

teleforce 2y ago

I think it's has escaped most of the HN crowds that Liang Wenfeng has a solid background (bachelor and master) in Electronics and Information Engineering that encompassed hardware and software. It's really a shame that in the current world, the art of hardware is dying out, where hardware people are not properly compensated and appreciated [1]. Liang Wenfeng belongs to this breed of engineers with hybrid hardware and software background that have money and at the same time founding and leading and companies (similar to two Steves of Apple), they're a force to reckon with with even with severe limitations, in case of Chinese companies computing resources sanctions CPU/RAM/GPU/FPGA/etc. But unlike two Steves these new hybrid engineers that raised in Linux era are the big believers of open source, as Google rightly predicted in case of LLM none of the proprietary LLM solutions has the moat [2],[3]. [1] UK's hardware talent is being wasted (1131 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42763386 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42763386 [2] Google “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI” (1039 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35813322 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35813322 [3] Google "We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI" (2023) (42 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42838112 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42838112

johnnyanmac 2y ago
It's falling out in America precisely because we don't pay for good talent. So most talent flows into China. So, no surprise they are kicking the Us's butt in hardware while they are only now starting to build Silicon manufacturing plants domestically. That's alway the issue with outsourcing. You rely exclusively on middlemen, middlemen will realize they can cut out their middlemen and just go directly to the customers.
- huitzitziltzin 2y ago
  >> It's falling out in America precisely because we don't pay for good talent. So most talent flows into China. These claims are quite hard to square with the long waits for H1B visas, extremely high salaries in the technology sector and net immigration to the US from China. I’m not aware of any Americans or Europeans in my network who have gone the other direction to China. Perhaps you have different data about the demand for tech worker visas in China.

dkga 2y ago

All of this resonates deeply with me. There are a lot of memes running around about Silicon Valley's Jing Yang (sorry if it's misspelled) eating OpenAI's lunch, but as much as those are funny, the underlying open source innovation and how it aligns with a vision of values, realisation, and also inevitability that eventually someone else would be able to reach these things, too - that all strikes a chord I have to say.

mistermann 2y ago

It doesn't surprise me that someone who has this thinking style is also able to outperform those who do not in certain domains.

agnosticmantis 2y ago

It's a breath of fresh air how grounded and coherent Wenfeg's argument is as a CEO of an AI startup. He actually talks like someone technical and not a snake oil salesman. Compare this to the interviews of Altman or Musk, talking vaguely about elevating the level consciousness, saving humanity from existential threats, understand the nature of the universe and other such nonsense they pander to investors.

Yeul 2y ago
Actually I'm terrified that they believe it. That they have Jordan Peterson's book on their night table.

keepamovin 2y ago

Great quotes. They didn’t ignore the existence of tireless efforts of Western tech they benefited off it and stole it. Obviously it’s a power play as China seeks influence beyond money now that’s secured. I think people should receive it on its merits. The strategy of open sourcing to eliminate the competitive mode of those with proprietary designs is a bit of a desperate play, favored by the weaker competitor, lacking access to the desired market. You can also perceive it as hostile and in line with dumping practices, where a high volume of product is dumped into a market at cheap prices. But besides these tactical aspects, which are no doubt being utilized, there’s a inescapable technological reality that obviously efficiency of AI will improve, and the most efficient designs would seem to rise to the top. This utilization of and guiding of inevitable historical trends for their own advantage is a very Chinese communist dialectical materialist approach to take, and I think we can expect to see more of these types of ‘surprising’ moves by entities out of China in the decades ahead as these kind of competitions heat up. The Chinese have a very deep and a very different ideological background that would justify these types of moves as making perfect sense to them, although they simultaneously appear as nonsensical to people from other backgrounds.

lofaszvanitt 2y ago
.

yieldcrv 2y ago

Ballsy of him to say some of that in China as a Chinese subject! I feel like the reaction of the west is protecting him from a reaction from Chinese authorities

buu700 2y ago

Reading between the lines, it sounds like there's less of a concern at this time for the profitability of this particular venture, and more of a national interest in making state-of-the-art AI viable on last-gen silicon. The win condition is to render US sanctions strategically toothless; DeepSeek itself one day achieving commercial success would just be gravy. If that is the game they're playing, I'm all for it. Maybe it's not the result that the sanctions were intended to have, but motivating China to share their research rather than keep it proprietary is certainly a win. Making AI more efficient doesn't reduce the value of compute infrastructure; it means we can generate that much more value from the same hardware.

rlt 2y ago

I have to wonder how much the Chinese government was aware of what DeepSeek was going to publish, and how much they will allow Chinese labs to publish in the future.

3abiton 2y ago

I am extremely grateful so far for their work and contributions, nut they are right. China is leading the way despite all the hurdles put by the chip act.