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It's reasonably likely that a lot of people linked to the federal government want to ban DeepSeek. You can tell it's being presented away from "they gave us a f

It's reasonably likely that a lot of people linked to the federal government want to ban DeepSeek. You can tell it's being presented away from "they gave us a free set of weights" and towards "they destroyed $1T of shareholder value." (By revealing that Microsoft et al. paid way too much to OpenAI et al. for technology that was actually easy to reinvent.)

fullshark 2y ago
Would it even matter? Isn't the cat out of the bag and everything they did repeatable by an American research team?
- Cumpiler69 2y ago
  It matters because their goal was hyping up how advanced and difficult their tech is, propping up their valuations. DeepSeek proved the emperor had no clothes and wiped out a lot of their valuation when investors saw reaching parity to Chtgpt is not really that difficult.
  - mastazi 2y ago
    I think parent was asking would it even matter if there was a ban. To which the answer would be "no" because as you said the point has been made. And, as parent pointed out, it's repeatable anyway.
- whatshisface 2y ago
  American researchers had already made enough progress to prove that LLMs were not an incomprehensible trade secret based on years of secret knowledge - investors and tech executives were simply lead to believe otherwise. Well-connected people are probably very mad about this and they may try to lash out like the emotional human beings they are.
- bhouston 2y ago
  It doesn't matter from the US government perspective if all of the tech is replicated by US companies and US user continue to use US AI technology. But if US users start to use Chinese AI tech, then protectionism urges will appear that will likely figure out how to ban its use or subject it to large tariffs (e.g. TikTok, BYD, network equipment, solar panels, etc.)
Cumpiler69 2y ago
>By revealing that Microsoft et al. paid way too much to OpenAI et al. for technology that was actually easy to reinvent. That's why it's called a bubble. Pretty sure my great great grandad also overpaid for some tulips.
toomuchtodo 2y ago
> "they destroyed $1T of shareholder value." (By revealing that Microsoft et al. paid way too much to OpenAI et al. for technology that was actually easy to reinvent.) The value was highly speculative, an illusion created by PR and sentiment momentum. "Hype value" not real value (unless you're able to realize it and dump those bags on someone else before fundamentals set in). Same thing happening with power companies downstream of the discovery that AI is not going to be a savior of sagging electricity demand. Overdriving the fundamentals is not value destruction, it is "I gambled and lost." https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-01-28/deepseek-reveals-how-badly-us-energy-industry-needs-ai-demand-for-growth https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-01-28/deepseek-... | https://archive.today/mCemf https://archive.today/mCemf "In the short run, the market is a voting machine but in the long run, it is a weighing machine."
- cft 2y ago
  Since the time when companies en masse stopped paying cash dividends on owned shares, the value has become highly speculative. In the absence of dividend payments, the stock pricing mechanism is not essentially different from Solana or Ethereum "price" discovery.
  - toomuchtodo 2y ago
    I don't disagree that price discovery is harder, but I can with more certainty give an honest valuation of CLF or DOW vs OpenAI's "who knows what money will look like after we succeed, you should view your investment as a donation" nonsense. Speculation is inevitable when forward looking, but there is a difference between error bars and various projections vs unicorns. Due diligence never goes out of style.
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > when companies en masse stopped paying stock dividends Do you mean cash dividends [1]? Also, the premise is false. Dividend yields have roughly tracked interest rates [2]. (The difference is a dirty component of the equity risk premium [3].) [1] https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/05/stockcashdividend.asp https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/05/stockcashdividen... [2] https://www.multpl.com/s-p-500-dividend-yield/table/by-year https://www.multpl.com/s-p-500-dividend-yield/table/by-year [3] https://www.investopedia.com/investing/calculating-equity-risk-premium/ https://www.investopedia.com/investing/calculating-equity-ri...
onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
Theoretically this should be good for OpenAI - in that they can reduce their costs by ~27x and pass that along to end users to get more adoption and more profit.
- ceejayoz 2y ago
  No; those costs were their moat.
  - onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
    You don't need a moat when you're in first place. Their moat is >1B people are already using ChatGPT monthly. They aren't going to switch unless something is substantially better.
    - ceejayoz 2y ago
      > You don't need a moat when you're in first place. Tell that to Friendster/MySpace and Facebook.
      - onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
        Cute - but MySpace didn't have >1B users, it didn't even have 10M when Facebook launched. Try again.
        cjbgkagh 2y ago
        It had more than Facebook when Facebook launched so I’m not sure what your point is
        ceejayoz 2y ago
        Nothing had a billion users; the Internet didn't at the time. MySpace and Friendster both spent significant time as the #1 social sites. Facebook unseated them rapidly. The same is possible for OpenAI.
aprilthird2021 2y ago
Banning it will not bring back the value
duxup 2y ago
When it comes to the executive branch's role in banning something. I'm not convinced they're even honest about it / what the context even is. Trump wanted to ban Tiktok before... and then simply chose not to / forgot about it. Next round congress acted, and Trump delayed it and has said that he is interested in his friends buying it. Is there really a competitive plan here or is it just fishing for payouts / grifting for allies? The context is always about competition, but I'm not even sure that's their plan.
the_sleaze_ 2y ago
"easy to reinvent" often comes after "hard to invent"
- mromanuk 2y ago
  At Microsoft’s size, they don’t care; they just buy out others.
IAmGraydon 2y ago
Yeah they're setting this up to ban it. Crazy that they think this kind of approach will work in any way. Banning H100s didn't work, and actually pushed them to innovate. Now someone has found a more efficient way to train a model and they decide the best way forward is for the US not to benefit from access to it? This is clear evidence of collusion between OpenAI and the US Government to disadvantage competitors. Beyond that, it will never work. If they need to be reminded of just how little power they have to control the distribution of open source models, I think we would all be happy to enlighten them.
Buttons840 2y ago
I saw a some Europeans hoping that the US would ban DeepSeek, because then there would be less traffic interfering with their own DeepSeek queries. The US can ban all they want, but if the rest of the world starts preferring Chinese social media, Chinese AI, and Chinese websites in general, the US is going to lose one of its crown jewels. The way the US behaves is a problem and makes a lot of people prefer alternatives just for the sake of avoiding the US, which is why it's important that the US get along with other nations, but--well, about that...
- nozzlegear 2y ago
  Agreed, you've highlighted one of the key problems with protectionism and nativism. Banning competition just weakens America's global influence, it doesn't make it stronger.
  - paxys 2y ago
    Plus technology cycles move so quickly that you won't have to wait a generation or two to see the effects of this isolationism.
  - sailfast 2y ago
    You know this. I know this. But the President of the United States does not know this.
  - darkwizard42 2y ago
    This statement doesn't seem to hold true. China has banned nearly all US tech companies and social products. It has not decreased the influence of China's influence (which has been through manufacturing/retail influence and tech influence). I don't think your statement holds with current behavior.
    - nozzlegear 2y ago
      But China has never been a global leader in tech or social media. They undoubtedly have influence in these areas, but they've never dominated them like the US has. Banning foreign competition in a field where you already dominate, like tech and AI, has different consequences than banning it where you're playing catch up.
dkjaudyeqooe 2y ago
Not sure I agree with your premise, but what exactly are they going to ban? They can stop DeepSeek doing various things commercially I guess, but stopping Americans using their ideas is simply impossible and stopping use of their source or weights would be (likely successfully) challenged under the first amendment. There is no law against simply destroying trillions of dollars of shareholder value.
- thedevilslawyer 2y ago
  Heh, not yet..
dfxm12 2y ago
There's a lot of egg on people's faces now. DeepSeek shows there's nothing special about America or its economic system that breeds innovation. DeepSeek shows how these tech oligarchs greatly overplayed their hand and along with the president, bamboozled the taxpayer to enrich each other. I just hope the voters remember this in 2 years, 4 years and beyond.
- dtquad 2y ago
  >DeepSeek shows how these tech oligarchs greatly overplayed their hand and along with the president, bamboozled the taxpayer to enrich each other. How much taxpayer money has gone to OpenAI and Anthropic? They are the two big sinners in closed AI.
- iforgot22 2y ago
  If the allegations are true, the special thing about OpenAI is that it didn't have to be trained off DeepSeek. But either way, you maybe don't want to invest billions in something if someone else will be able to copy it for less.
dtquad 2y ago
>It's reasonably likely that a lot of people linked to the federal government want to ban DeepSeek. It took them years and years to move forward with the ban ok Tiktok and it still hasn't been banned yet. There is no way they are going to ban some MIT-licensed weights. >"they destroyed $1T of shareholder value." The market has largely recovered.
- tokioyoyo 2y ago
  There is big American money invested in TikTok. That doesn’t seem to be the case for DeepSeek.
leesec 2y ago
It was so easy it cost hundreds of millions of dollars, only one company has done it and they had to lie about it
nullbyte 2y ago
I think the real concern from the govt's perspective is data privacy, since all the chat messages are stored on Chinese servers

fullshark 2y ago

Would it even matter? Isn't the cat out of the bag and everything they did repeatable by an American research team?

Cumpiler69 2y ago
It matters because their goal was hyping up how advanced and difficult their tech is, propping up their valuations. DeepSeek proved the emperor had no clothes and wiped out a lot of their valuation when investors saw reaching parity to Chtgpt is not really that difficult.
- mastazi 2y ago
  I think parent was asking would it even matter if there was a ban. To which the answer would be "no" because as you said the point has been made. And, as parent pointed out, it's repeatable anyway.
whatshisface 2y ago
American researchers had already made enough progress to prove that LLMs were not an incomprehensible trade secret based on years of secret knowledge - investors and tech executives were simply lead to believe otherwise. Well-connected people are probably very mad about this and they may try to lash out like the emotional human beings they are.
bhouston 2y ago
It doesn't matter from the US government perspective if all of the tech is replicated by US companies and US user continue to use US AI technology. But if US users start to use Chinese AI tech, then protectionism urges will appear that will likely figure out how to ban its use or subject it to large tariffs (e.g. TikTok, BYD, network equipment, solar panels, etc.)

Cumpiler69 2y ago

>By revealing that Microsoft et al. paid way too much to OpenAI et al. for technology that was actually easy to reinvent. That's why it's called a bubble. Pretty sure my great great grandad also overpaid for some tulips.

toomuchtodo 2y ago

> "they destroyed $1T of shareholder value." (By revealing that Microsoft et al. paid way too much to OpenAI et al. for technology that was actually easy to reinvent.) The value was highly speculative, an illusion created by PR and sentiment momentum. "Hype value" not real value (unless you're able to realize it and dump those bags on someone else before fundamentals set in). Same thing happening with power companies downstream of the discovery that AI is not going to be a savior of sagging electricity demand. Overdriving the fundamentals is not value destruction, it is "I gambled and lost." https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-01-28/deepseek-reveals-how-badly-us-energy-industry-needs-ai-demand-for-growth https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-01-28/deepseek-... | https://archive.today/mCemf https://archive.today/mCemf "In the short run, the market is a voting machine but in the long run, it is a weighing machine."

cft 2y ago
Since the time when companies en masse stopped paying cash dividends on owned shares, the value has become highly speculative. In the absence of dividend payments, the stock pricing mechanism is not essentially different from Solana or Ethereum "price" discovery.
- toomuchtodo 2y ago
  I don't disagree that price discovery is harder, but I can with more certainty give an honest valuation of CLF or DOW vs OpenAI's "who knows what money will look like after we succeed, you should view your investment as a donation" nonsense. Speculation is inevitable when forward looking, but there is a difference between error bars and various projections vs unicorns. Due diligence never goes out of style.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > when companies en masse stopped paying stock dividends Do you mean cash dividends [1]? Also, the premise is false. Dividend yields have roughly tracked interest rates [2]. (The difference is a dirty component of the equity risk premium [3].) [1] https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/05/stockcashdividend.asp https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/05/stockcashdividen... [2] https://www.multpl.com/s-p-500-dividend-yield/table/by-year https://www.multpl.com/s-p-500-dividend-yield/table/by-year [3] https://www.investopedia.com/investing/calculating-equity-risk-premium/ https://www.investopedia.com/investing/calculating-equity-ri...

onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago

Theoretically this should be good for OpenAI - in that they can reduce their costs by ~27x and pass that along to end users to get more adoption and more profit.

ceejayoz 2y ago
No; those costs were their moat.
- onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
  You don't need a moat when you're in first place. Their moat is >1B people are already using ChatGPT monthly. They aren't going to switch unless something is substantially better.
  - ceejayoz 2y ago
    > You don't need a moat when you're in first place. Tell that to Friendster/MySpace and Facebook.
    - onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
      Cute - but MySpace didn't have >1B users, it didn't even have 10M when Facebook launched. Try again.
      - cjbgkagh 2y ago
        It had more than Facebook when Facebook launched so I’m not sure what your point is
      - ceejayoz 2y ago
        Nothing had a billion users; the Internet didn't at the time. MySpace and Friendster both spent significant time as the #1 social sites. Facebook unseated them rapidly. The same is possible for OpenAI.

aprilthird2021 2y ago

Banning it will not bring back the value

duxup 2y ago

When it comes to the executive branch's role in banning something. I'm not convinced they're even honest about it / what the context even is. Trump wanted to ban Tiktok before... and then simply chose not to / forgot about it. Next round congress acted, and Trump delayed it and has said that he is interested in his friends buying it. Is there really a competitive plan here or is it just fishing for payouts / grifting for allies? The context is always about competition, but I'm not even sure that's their plan.

the_sleaze_ 2y ago

"easy to reinvent" often comes after "hard to invent"

mromanuk 2y ago
At Microsoft’s size, they don’t care; they just buy out others.

IAmGraydon 2y ago

Yeah they're setting this up to ban it. Crazy that they think this kind of approach will work in any way. Banning H100s didn't work, and actually pushed them to innovate. Now someone has found a more efficient way to train a model and they decide the best way forward is for the US not to benefit from access to it? This is clear evidence of collusion between OpenAI and the US Government to disadvantage competitors. Beyond that, it will never work. If they need to be reminded of just how little power they have to control the distribution of open source models, I think we would all be happy to enlighten them.

Buttons840 2y ago

I saw a some Europeans hoping that the US would ban DeepSeek, because then there would be less traffic interfering with their own DeepSeek queries. The US can ban all they want, but if the rest of the world starts preferring Chinese social media, Chinese AI, and Chinese websites in general, the US is going to lose one of its crown jewels. The way the US behaves is a problem and makes a lot of people prefer alternatives just for the sake of avoiding the US, which is why it's important that the US get along with other nations, but--well, about that...

nozzlegear 2y ago
Agreed, you've highlighted one of the key problems with protectionism and nativism. Banning competition just weakens America's global influence, it doesn't make it stronger.
- paxys 2y ago
  Plus technology cycles move so quickly that you won't have to wait a generation or two to see the effects of this isolationism.
- sailfast 2y ago
  You know this. I know this. But the President of the United States does not know this.
- darkwizard42 2y ago
  This statement doesn't seem to hold true. China has banned nearly all US tech companies and social products. It has not decreased the influence of China's influence (which has been through manufacturing/retail influence and tech influence). I don't think your statement holds with current behavior.
  - nozzlegear 2y ago
    But China has never been a global leader in tech or social media. They undoubtedly have influence in these areas, but they've never dominated them like the US has. Banning foreign competition in a field where you already dominate, like tech and AI, has different consequences than banning it where you're playing catch up.

dkjaudyeqooe 2y ago

Not sure I agree with your premise, but what exactly are they going to ban? They can stop DeepSeek doing various things commercially I guess, but stopping Americans using their ideas is simply impossible and stopping use of their source or weights would be (likely successfully) challenged under the first amendment. There is no law against simply destroying trillions of dollars of shareholder value.

thedevilslawyer 2y ago
Heh, not yet..

dfxm12 2y ago

There's a lot of egg on people's faces now. DeepSeek shows there's nothing special about America or its economic system that breeds innovation. DeepSeek shows how these tech oligarchs greatly overplayed their hand and along with the president, bamboozled the taxpayer to enrich each other. I just hope the voters remember this in 2 years, 4 years and beyond.

dtquad 2y ago
>DeepSeek shows how these tech oligarchs greatly overplayed their hand and along with the president, bamboozled the taxpayer to enrich each other. How much taxpayer money has gone to OpenAI and Anthropic? They are the two big sinners in closed AI.
iforgot22 2y ago
If the allegations are true, the special thing about OpenAI is that it didn't have to be trained off DeepSeek. But either way, you maybe don't want to invest billions in something if someone else will be able to copy it for less.

dtquad 2y ago

>It's reasonably likely that a lot of people linked to the federal government want to ban DeepSeek. It took them years and years to move forward with the ban ok Tiktok and it still hasn't been banned yet. There is no way they are going to ban some MIT-licensed weights. >"they destroyed $1T of shareholder value." The market has largely recovered.

tokioyoyo 2y ago
There is big American money invested in TikTok. That doesn’t seem to be the case for DeepSeek.

leesec 2y ago

It was so easy it cost hundreds of millions of dollars, only one company has done it and they had to lie about it

nullbyte 2y ago

I think the real concern from the govt's perspective is data privacy, since all the chat messages are stored on Chinese servers