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DeepSeek Open Infra: Open-Sourcing 5 AI Repos in 5 Days
- ryao 2y agoCould DeepSeek and OpenAI swap names?
- ipsum2 2y agoThis is more exciting to me than OpenAI's 12 days of Christmas
- sanxiyn 2y agoEmotionally I agree, but... o1 was a paradigm shift. Nothing DeepSeek has done is on that level yet. DeepSeek themselves would agree. Supposedly Liang Wenfeng himself flew to US to gather information when o1 was launched.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- h0l0cube 2y agoThe paradigm shift is the actual 'Open' part, which OpenAI seems to be struggling with.
- mrandish 2y ago[flagged]
- Maxious 2y agoMaybe in terms of advancing scientific knowledge but DeepSeek has achieved a paradigm shift back from opex to capex. Certain applications are now economically viable when you don't have to pay per request and don't have to fight NVIDIA/sanctions for the privilege
- w0m 2y agohow much of that cost is hidden/subsidized though? Less I missed something; there's lots of claims but lots of fuzz also. If you bring up API fees; CCP is notorious for subsidizing local business to operate at a loss on the global stage. You aren't paying per request/GPU access, CCP is.
- astar1 2y agoThis is so damn true. I wish people would stop taking companies in China at face value about any of their claims if the CCP has a vested interest in for geopolitical and economic reasons. Bytedance is another example. It's telling that "South Korea has accused Chinese AI startup DeepSeek of sharing user data with the owner of TikTok in China." - source: >https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gex0x87g4o https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gex0x87g4o Bytedance, which has had a CCP government official on their board for years: >https://www.reuters.com/technology/bytedance-says-china-unit-holds-local-licences-response-media-report-2021-08-16/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/bytedance-says-china-unit... Deepseek's claims that they used old unsanctioned gpus are probably totally fabricated as well (side point-giving signapore f35s was probably a mistake): >https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/deepseek-gpu-smuggling-probe-shows-nvidias-singapore-gpu-sales-are-28-percent-of-its-revenue-but-only-1-percent-are-delivered-to-the-country-report https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/deepseek-gpu-smug.... I mean it's not like an entity that bypasses sanctions would ever be open about it, as doing so would immediately result in more sanctions and the closing of loopholes. What does the CCP have to gain? What does it have to gain by stealing hundreds of billons of western IP in the past? 4 things: Power, prestige, riches, and the means to keep their power. This has been going in since at least 2004 (see Nortel case: https://globalnews.ca/news/7275588/inside-the-chinese-military-attack-on-nortel/ https://globalnews.ca/news/7275588/inside-the-chinese-milita...) The US winning the AI race was a clear threat to those 4 things.Hurting investor sentiment by a) distilling a model which cost billions to develop, and b)spreading propaganda and muddying the waters about costs, gpus, etc, helps them to narrow the gap. Making it open source was not done out of the goodness of their hearts, but out of self interest - another attempt to deflect from their actions (further muddying the waters) and divide the public against taking any further punitive action against the state (given the connection re: SK claims-tiktok algorithms were probably on overdrive spreading their bs) .
- noname120 2y agoYeah OpenAI's 12 days was pure Altman bs
- mindwok 2y agoThis team is truly something special.
- codelion 2y agoThis is great to see! Open-sourcing infrastructure tools can really accelerate innovation in the AI space. I've found that having access to well-documented repos makes it much easier to experiment and build on existing work. Are there any specific areas these repos focus on, like distributed training or model serving?
- antupis 2y agoKinda interesting to see where the moat is in AI space. Good base models can always distilled when you have access to API. System prompts can get leaked, and UI tricks can be copied. In the end, the moat might be in the hardware and vertical integration.
- deelowe 2y agoHow many times have we been down this path? Tcp/IP, dos/windows, Linux, virtualization, and on and on. Open platforms always seem to find a way to usurp everyone else. In the end, it's better to be a service provider.
- runlevel1 2y agoOpen source finds a way. Good enough + open (and free) is a very appealing proposition.
- suraci 2y agoecosystem
- tonyhart7 2y agothere is no open source alternative to GPU farm, that's the moat that's why they can open source their model and be fine because running this shit is actually hard, let alone maintaining SLA for millions of users??
- randomvariable 2y agoHow long until laptops are able to run high end models? What's the use case that requires a server farm for end user's?
- tonyhart7 2y agomaybe next 5 - 10 years??? but even then the frontier would be push further and people would get used to lets say 10 trillion model cloud host and using 600B model would feel stupid
- rvz 2y agoI really like this definition of "AGI": When everyone (yes everyone) benefits from very powerful AI models released for free and it is not gate-kept by one company and it costs $0 to use commercially or for research and you can do whatever you want with it. Unlike the other counterpart which believes that "AGI" means: "raising billions of dollars to achieve $100BN of profits to their investors". (Which is complete nonsense). While not totally "open source" by the strictest definition, it is at least better than having no model released with no mention of the architecture on the system card or paper and just vague comments about the 'performance'. Ladies and gentlemen, this is closer towards being an better "Open AI". Unlike the other alleged $157BN "non-profit" scam. I think you know which one really is beneficial to humanity and is the real "Open AI".
- azinman2 2y agoYou’re assuming they won’t follow in OpenAI’s footsteps. OpenAI published a lot for a while and truly changed the world, far more than deepseek has. Only time will tell. But I think it’d be a mistake to think that this is necessarily beneficial for humanity just because the weights are open. It’s maybe great to commoditize models, but their displacement in jobs, original thought and work, facilitation of disinformation and population psychological warfare doesn’t change… if anything it’s accelerated and harder to temper the bad elements.
- rvz 2y agoOf course. Except we know what happens when one tries to close them up again - someone else will release another more powerful AI model for free. So it doesn't matter when there are multiple players competing to destroy each others in this race to zero. > But I think it’d be a mistake to think that this is necessarily beneficial for humanity just because the weights are open. It’s maybe great to commoditize models, but their displacement in jobs, original thought and work, facilitation of disinformation and population psychological warfare doesn’t change… if anything it’s accelerated and harder to temper the bad elements. It is unrealistic to close it up and hope that no-one catches up and releases a better AI model for free since the cat's already out of the bag and the progress of these AI models cannot be delayed, stopped or gate-kept for long. By that time, someone will release a more powerful AI model for free.
- sgt 2y agoSpeaking of DeepSeek, anyone here used SambaNova - are they reliable?
- swyx 2y agoodds on r1.5/r2 release?
- voxelizer 2y agoI wonder if they are just shorting Nvidia...
- nicetryguy 2y agoWith how they are releasing models and keeping the open source spirit alive? I hope to god they are. Let the quants cook!
- WiSaGaN 2y agoTencent recently bought 100k-200k H20 to serve R1. [1] I think it's not clear open source will tank nvidia price. And you won't place a lot of bets if the outcome is anywhere from certain. [1]:https://aiproem.substack.com/p/ai-at-the-speed-of-light-tencent https://aiproem.substack.com/p/ai-at-the-speed-of-light-tenc...
- 1oooqooq 2y agowhat it have to do with anything? trading and stocks have no correlation whatsoever with actual company sales and prodcts.
- matsemann 2y agoThis could boost Nvidia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox > In economics, the Jevons paradox occurs when technological advancements make a resource more efficient to use (thereby reducing the amount needed for a single application); however, as the cost of using the resource drops, if the price is highly elastic, this results in overall demand increases causing total resource consumption to rise.
- mythz 2y agoLooking forward to it! I'll generally make an effort to use Open Models over proprietary alternatives when the use-case permits as Open Models getting better and more popular encourages more models to become open as well - a requisite for a future to be able to build self-hosted solutions that's not beholden to the control of mega corps and AI monopolies.
- blackeyeblitzar 2y agoIs this actually going to be open source? Or is it going to be just an open weights release? Seeing training code would be interesting. Personally I don’t think even a true open source release would erase the downsides of the model incorporating CCP propaganda and censorship. I would prefer control of megacorps to control of an untrustworthy dictatorship.
- rcdwealth 2y ago[dead]
- thundergolfer 2y ago“Pure garage-energy” is a great phrase. Most interested to see their inference stack, hope that’s one of the 5. I think most people are running R1 on a single H200 node but Deepseek had much lower RAM per GPU for their inference and so had some cluster based MoE deployment.
- sva_ 2y agoI don't think the RAM size of the H800 was nerfed (80GB), but rather the memory bandwidth between gpus. But yeah, would be interesting to see how they optimized for that.
- NitpickLawyer 2y agoCorrect. There are 3 main ways to "gimp" high end GPUs meant for training - "cores", "on-chip memory speed" and "interconnects". IIUC the H800 had the first 2 unchanged but halved the interconnect speeds. H20 is the next iteration of the "sanctions" that I believe also limited the "cores" but left the on-chip memory intact, or slightly higher (from the new generation).
- golly_ned 2y ago“Pure garage-energy” with 10,000 A100s, apparently. I’d love to have a garage like that.
- blackeyeblitzar 2y agoFrom https://semianalysis.com/2025/01/31/deepseek-debates/ https://semianalysis.com/2025/01/31/deepseek-debates/ > We believe DeepSeek has access to around 10,000 of these H800s and about 10,000 H100s. Furthermore they have orders for many more H20’s, with Nvidia having produced over 1 million of the China specific GPU in the last 9 months.
- tw1984 2y ago[flagged]
- yobid20 2y ago[flagged]
- suraci 2y agoI always consider open-sourcing to be a great social experiment. It may fail one day, but its effects will remain and benefit everyone.
- oefrha 2y ago> Starting next week, we'll open-source 5 repos – one daily drop Probably counts as announcement of announcement? Let’s wait for the actual repo drops before discussing them, especially because there are no details about what will be open sourced other than > These are humble building blocks of our online service: documented, deployed and battle-tested in production.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- dkga 2y agoOn a completely innocuous side note, I kind of like to see the ´drop´ language used by electronic dance music and hip hop producers used in software.
- locusofself 2y agoI think before "drop" in electronic music was a widely used term, "dropping a new track" (ie releasing new music) was a common hip-hop term, since forever.
- nialv7 2y agoHonestly I think this is drop as in drop shipping.
- yencabulator 2y agoFWIW the expression comes from delivery by airplane and parachute. Probably started to be used UPS-style delivery drivers and/or drug dealers, and spread from there. Now it just means "deliver".
- tigroferoce 2y agoYou are right for sure saying to wait for the actual repos. But on the other hand, compare this announcement in a README.md file in a GitHub repo with this slideware approach of EU https://openeurollm.eu/ https://openeurollm.eu/ If I had to bet on someone providing some value, unfortunately I wouldn't bet on Europe. I'm saying this as a European, deeply convinced that Europe is a good place to live. I've also worked for a couple of EU funded research projects, so I have some background experience on the outcome of these projects.
- deyiao 2y agoI really admire their mindset of striving for the betterment of humanity. There was a time when OpenAI, Anthropic, and even Musk used to talk with that same lofty vision. But now, they've all shifted to competing for national interests instead, which is honestly quite disappointing.
- SequoiaHope 2y agoWell, it’s a highly effective PR tactic that works well for the small fish. You say your competition is too selfish and you just want to help people and it creates a bunch of goodwill you can use to grow. Once you grow, your view on things changes, and you’re able to be more selfish. It’s not guaranteed things will go that way, but it’s certainly true that this is a good PR tactic for new entrants in to a crowded field. It can also be genuine. When you’re new you don’t have much to lose and it’s easier to be truly altruistic.
- blackeyeblitzar 2y ago[flagged]
- sapphicsnail 2y agoI don't really understand this. Why should I be more concerned about the propaganda some country on the other side of the world is spreading than the propaganda my own government is spreading? Why should me or anyone else in the cross hairs of the federal government rn care?
- csomar 2y ago> These are humble building blocks of our online service: documented, deployed and battle-tested in production. No vaporware, just code that moved our tiny moonshot forward. My not-so-innocent guess is that they are looking to crowd-source their online platform (the front-end essentially) in order to reduce costs. Still acceptable though as they made the model open weight and partially re-producible.
- omnimus 2y agoEveryone who ever open-sourced anything knows that it just isnt cost cutting. You suddenly get army of people posting issues, opinions and those who try contribute often make more mess than its worth.
- tough 2y agotheir frontend is probably just open'webui https://github.com/open-webui/open-webui https://github.com/open-webui/open-webui
- vinhnx 2y agoDeep respect for DeepSeek and what they've done regarding all the innovations and researches they have been putting out in-the-open. "Because every line shared becomes collective momentum that accelerates the journey. Daily unlocks begin soon. No ivory towers - just pure garage-energy and community-driven innovation" is a great phase.
- baq 2y ago[flagged]
- mptest 2y agoI'm empathetic to this argument, but it feels like it's doing a disservice to the open source ethos in general. Pragmatic as china is, they may actually see the long term value of being open research leaders to short term profit. They are not as bound to immediate and constant growth as we are, their horizons do not change so dramatically every 4 years to say the least. Don't many respected developers care deeply about their research being open source? I'm no expert but I've read many an article (maybe I'll buy your bridge, too) that suggests willingness to open source research holds at least some weight in some researchers choosing their company. It strikes me as at least possible some of that is earnest, sure even deepseek isn't open source open source, no training set etc. but it feels like they deserve the benefit of the doubt. All that said I'm still a student, a master of none, so cannot speak first hand to any of this. Just offering another point of view
- breakitmakeit 2y ago[dead]
- macns 2y ago> Why? Because every line shared becomes collective momentum that accelerates the journey. Truly admireable on their part and a great paradigm for others. Reasons for this doesn't really matter to me but I can't help but wonder if somehow they were obliged or otherwise indebted to follow this route.
- dhdjruf 2y agoLong live llms I hope they infest every part of the internet with low level comments. Both the clear , deep, and dark. Imagine no more human interactions just a permanent flood of meaningless thoughtless word salad. I think the Chinese are perfect to introduce such a product very inline with what they usually produce. Get ready for web3.o
- npn 2y agoI don't really care. True intelligent discussions happen in some closed groups everywhere. It's been this way since forever. Only open discussions always attract unwanted users.
- Mr_Bees69 2y agoR1 is a better o1, this is a better devdays.
- t24uo2i34j324l 2y agoDeepseek seems to be having huge PR wins as the "oh shucks" modest boy genius, while the Americans seem like pouty jerks. Amodei's / Hassabis' comments in particular came off as so arrogant and annoying.
- nsoonhui 2y ago>> Amodei's / Hassabis' comments in particular came off as so arrogant and annoying. Exactly which part of their writings comes off as arrogant to you? The only point in Amodei's article[0] that could be remotely be interpreted as arrogant is this: All of this is to say that DeepSeek-V3 is not a unique breakthrough or something that fundamentally changes the economics of LLM’s; it’s an expected point on an ongoing cost reduction curve. What’s different this time is that the company that was first to demonstrate the expected cost reductions was Chinese. Maybe I'm different, but it really does sound reasonable judgement to me. [0]: https://darioamodei.com/on-deepseek-and-export-controls#deepseek-s-models https://darioamodei.com/on-deepseek-and-export-controls#deep...
- sidcool 2y agoThis may be my cynical take, but this cannot be out of good will or noble intentions. There has to be an ulterior motive.
- bigcat12345678 2y agoNo turning back...
- abdellah123 2y agoDeepSeek seems like Hisoka helping Gon and Killua ... just for a more challenging battle at some point xD
- npinsker 2y agoMore like the reverse? -- Gon and Killua (young, with tons of room to grow) helping Hisoka (very experienced, smaller runway).
- ein0p 2y agoBeatings will continue until openness improves, apparently. Kudos to Deepseek, about time someone spilled some significant beans.
- andy_ppp 2y agoHow do the valuations of foundation model companies compete with them being firmly open sourced by Facebook and DeepSeek? It seems likely that building these models will not produce hundreds of billions in value given China and Facebook are giving them away largely for free.
- lompad 2y agoThose valuations are built on an imaginary future the founders made investors believe. The idea is: if we reach true AGI first, we are going to own ALL THE MONEY! Which erroneously assumes that models can't be siphoned off/recreated, as deepseek proved possible and even reasonably doable. Which in turn fundamentally shows that both openai and anthropic very likely have basically no moat. I can almost smell another AI winter arriving, once all those valuations meet reality.
- 1oooqooq 2y agowinter won't come soon enough this time
- mcslurryhole 2y agoI cant see a future where AGI exists and money in general isn't worthless within 6 months of it existing. Either it kills us all, or makes the creator so much money that it's essentially worthless because they're the only one with money, or creates a utopia where money isn't needed.
- logicchains 2y agoThe laws of economics apply just as much to AI as they do to humans, if anything AI is an even better (more rational) homo economicus. Even if AI wiped out all humans, the AIs would still need a monetary system for trading among themselves.
- esafak 2y agoWould they need to trade once they figure out how to generate energy for nearly free and thus obtain anything? Trading is for the resource limited.
- wizardsbot 2y ago[flagged]
- LeoPanthera 2y ago[flagged]
- pknerd 2y ago[flagged]
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- RandyOrion 2y agoWell, although R1-671b is way too expensive for me to self-host, given their past open source (or weight) contributions, I DO have high expectation of them. Each and every contribution to open source community will be helpful. Thanks DeepSeek!
- tarruda 2y agoWould love another MoE that fits in 120GB VRAM for the 128gb Mac owners
- maxglute 2y ago[flagged]
- tw1984 2y agoI really hope DeepSeek is going to open source their entire training pipeline.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- fmerian 2y agolaunch weeks ftw
- wg0 2y agoIn fact they are totally dismantling OpenAI. Most likely, without any intention on their part. LLMs have been more legitimate "blockchain" when most CIO magazines had these essays with "What's your blockchain strategy?" kind of stuffed material. AI bubble will burst and will burst hard. By end of 2026 at max.
- lugu 2y agoI am not sure what you mean by AI bubble. Do you mean the valuation of some companies? Or course some won't do well in the future. In the meanty, a significant part of the population uses on it to accelerate their tasks (be it admin work, legal question, learning, getting inspiration). There is no way back. It feels like saying the video streaming bubble will burst in 2020. No. It is too valuable. But yes, some player will die. Nothing special here. IMHO.
- mdjt 2y agoI mean the whole world still uses the Internet after the dot-com bubble burst. A significant amount of “AI companies” are valued with revenue multipliers never used before. 44x in the case of OpenAI for example. I agree there is no going back, but this bubble will burst, and hard. IMHO.
- alternatex 2y agoA bubble bursting does not mean the industry in the bubble ceases to exist. It means the market hype dies down and only the things that have actual value survive. When it comes to AI, realistically most of the hype is fluff, so calling it a bubble is fair.
- thenaturalist 2y ago> Most likely, without any intention on their part. I think this is a very, very naive assumption. The founder is a quant with involvements in domestic investments and market design and pricing for decades - in China. As seen with the case of Jack Ma, after you cross a certain level, there is no such thing as "not involved with politics" in China. Liang knows exactly what he's doing. > During 2021, Liang started buying thousands of Nvidia GPUs for his AI side project while running High-Flyer. Some industry insiders viewed it as the eccentric actions of a billionaire looking for a new hobby. One of Liang's business partners said they initially did not take Liang seriously and described their first meeting as seeing a very nerdy guy with a terrible hairstyle who could not articulate his vision. Liang simply said he wanted to build something and it will be a game changer which his business partners thought was only possible from giants such as ByteDance and Alibaba Group. > During that month in an interview with 36Kr, Liang stated that High-Flyer had acquired 10,000 Nvidia A100 GPUs before the US government imposed AI chip restrictions on China. > On 20 January 2025, Liang was invited to the Symposium with Experts, Entrepreneurs and Representatives from the Fields of Education, Science, Culture, Health and Sports (专家、企业家和教科文卫体等领域代表座谈会) hosted by Premier Li Qiang in Beijing. Liang, being considered as an industry expert, was asked to provide opinions and suggestions on a draft for comments of the annual 2024 government work report. > On 17 February 2025, Liang along with the heads of other Chinese technology companies attended a symposium hosted by President Xi Jinping at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. Whether he intended to or not initially, what happens with DeepSeek is now out of this man's hand and will be 100% influenced by politics. The chip bans and dual use nature of the technology have catapulted Liang to the first row of CCP tech strategists' attention, for sure. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liang_Wenfeng https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liang_Wenfeng
- buyucu 2y agodeepseek just keeps on giving. kudos to them. i can almost hear sam altman and dario amodei cry every time deepseek does something amazing.
- Havoc 2y agoTbh this just feels like the same playbook as OAI. Open start and then less so over time. Mistral has been holding the line on that topic remarkable well.
- jacktang 2y agoThe funding company holds the assets, and the news make the stock market blooming and they make money!
- tuyguntn 2y agoDeepSeek is seeking deep to Open AI. irony
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- sebastianconcpt 2y agoWasn't it caught already sending data to China in a sneaky way? Why using it for anything?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- sebastianconcpt 2y agoReference supporting precisely that: https://www.wired.com/story/deepseek-ai-china-privacy-data/ https://www.wired.com/story/deepseek-ai-china-privacy-data/
- infecto 2y agoAm I the only one excited for the release but not overanalyzing their words? This thread feels full of personal interpretations. DeepSeek is still a business—great release, but expectations and motivations seem inflated.
- dang 2y agoProbably it's because there's nothing specific here to discuss. In the absence of specific new information, discussions turn generic [1] and that tends to make for shallow/indignant discussion. That's one reason why an announcement of announcement (like "Starting next week, we'll open-source 5 repos") is off topic on HN [2]. The releases themselves may turn out to be interesting, of course, and then there may be something substantive to have a thread about. The best submission would be to pick the most interesting release once it shows up. The "launch week" pattern isn't great for HN, because we end up with a bunch of follow-ups that we have to downweight [3], and there's no guarantee that the largest thread(s) will be about the most interesting element(s) in the sequence. But startups do it anyway so we'll adapt. [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=generic%20discussion%20by%3Adang%20&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... [2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22announcement%20of%20an%20announcement%22 https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... [3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=follow-up%20downweight&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
- mudlus 2y agoIn China businesses are not treated as a type of person under law. The word "business" does not mean the same thing there.
- finnjohnsen2 2y agoLooking forward to it
- jokoon 2y agoduckduckgo also have one, so not sure if this makes a difference
- quantum_state 2y agoGod bless the DeepSeek team with more innovative ideas to share with us all!
- photochemsyn 2y agoRemember when OpenAI was doing this: "OpenAI threatens to revoke o1 access for asking it about its chain of thought" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41534474 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41534474 Not only did DeepSeek opensource their model, they also showed the user chain-of-thought right up front, which everyone else rushed to emulate when they saw how much users liked it.
- tmaly 2y agoIs it out of the realm of possibility to look at this move as a way to take down the moat of closed source AI companies? I mean strategically this could be the first use of open source in this way.