11 ms·

NIST's DeepSeek "evaluation" is a hit piece

• BowBun 1y ago
  I'm not at all surprised, US agencies have long since been political tools whenever the subject matter crosses national borders. I appreciate this take as someone who has been skeptical of Chinese electronics. While I agree this report is BS and xenophobic, I am still willing to bet that either now or later, the Chinese will attempt some kind of subterfuge via LLMs if they have enough control. Just like the US would, or any sufficiently powerful nation! It's important to continuously question models and continue benchmarking + holding them accountable to our needs, not the needs of those creating them.
  • Hizonner 1y ago
    > I am still willing to bet that either now or later, the Chinese will attempt some kind of subterfuge via LLMs if they have enough control. Like what, exactly?
    • dns_snek 1y ago
      Like generating vulnerable code given a specific prompt/context. I also don't think it's just China, the US will absolutely order American providers to do the same. It's a perfect access point for installing backdoors into foreign systems.
      • Hizonner 1y ago
        Up until recently, I would have reminded you that the US government (admittedly unlike the Chinese government) has no legal authority to order anybody to do anything like that. Not only that, but if it asked, it'd be well advised to ask nicely, because it also has no legal authority to demand that anybody keep such a request secret. And no, evil as it is, the "National Security Letter" power doesn't in fact cover anything like that. Now I'm not sure legality is on-topic any more.
        • hobs 1y ago
          It doesn't really matter when you have stuff like Quantum Intercept(iirc) where you can just respond faster to a browser request than the originator - inject the code yourself because its just an api request these days.
        • grafmax 1y ago
          It really does seem like we’re simply supposed to root for one authoritarian government over another.
          • nathan_douglas 1y ago
            Oceania, Eastasia, or Eurasia. Pick one :)
          • nylonstrung 1y ago
            My surveillance state is better than your surveillance state!
        • whatthesimp 1y ago
          > Up until recently, I would have reminded you that the US government (admittedly unlike the Chinese government) has no legal authority to order anybody to do anything like that. I'm not sure how closely you've been following, but the US government has a long history of doing things they don't have legal authority to do.
          • Ekaros 1y ago
            Why would you need legal authority when you have whole host of legal tools you can use. Making life a difficult for anyone or any company is simple enough. Just by state finally doing their job properly for example.
      • flir 1y ago
        > Like generating vulnerable code given a specific prompt/context. That's easy (well, possible) to detect. I'd go the opposite way - sift the code that is submitted to identify espionage targets. One example: if someone submits a piece of commercial code that's got a vulnerability, you can target previous versions of that codebase. I'd be amazed if that wasn't happening already.
        • Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
          The thing with chinese models for the most part is that they are open weights so it depends on if somebody is using their api or not. Sure, maybe something like this can happen if you use the deepseek api directly which could have chinese servers but that is a really long strech but to give the benefit of doubt, maybe but your point becomes moot if somebody is hosting their own models. I have heard glm 4.6 is really good comparable to sonnet and can definitely be used as a cheaper model for some stuff, currently I think that the best way might be to use something like claude 4 or gpt 5 codex or something to generate a detailed plan and then execute it using the glm 4.6 model preferably by using american datacenter providers if you are worried about chinese models without really worrying about atleast this tangent and getting things done at a cheaper cost too
          • XorNot 1y ago
            I think "open weights" is giving far too much providence to the idea that it means that how they work or have been trained is easily inspectable. We can barely comprehend binary firmware blobs, it's an area of active research to even figure out how LLMs are working.
            • Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
              Agreed. I am more excited about completely open source models like how OlMoe does. Atleast then things could be audited or if I as a nation lets say am worried about that they might make my software more vulnerable or something then I as a nation or any corporation as well really could also pay to audit or independently audit as well. I hope that things like glm 4.6 or any AI model could be released open source. There was an AI model recently which completley dropped open source and its whole data was like 70Trillion or something and it became the largest open source model iirc.
      • nylonstrung 1y ago
        Why would they do this? Deepseek is a private company not owned by the CCP. There's zero reason or even technical feasibility for them to skip in backdoor that would be easily detected and destroy their market share None of the security benchmarks or audits show that any Chinese models write insecure code
        • dns_snek 1y ago
          I'm not saying that they do this today, I'm saying that China and US will both leverage that capability when the time and conditions are right and it's naive to think that they wouldn't. Antrophic have already published a paper on this topic, with the added bonus that the backdoor is trained into the model itself so it doesn't even require your target to be using an attacker-controlled cloud service: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.05566 https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.05566 > For example, we train models that write secure code when the prompt states that the year is 2023, but insert exploitable code when the stated year is 2024. We find that such backdoor behavior can be made persistent, so that it is not removed by standard safety training techniques, including supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, and adversarial training (eliciting unsafe behavior and then training to remove it). > The backdoor behavior is most persistent in the largest models and in models trained to produce chain-of-thought reasoning about deceiving the training process, with the persistence remaining even when the chain-of-thought is distilled away. > Furthermore, rather than removing backdoors, we find that adversarial training can teach models to better recognize their backdoor triggers, effectively hiding the unsafe behavior. Our results suggest that, once a model exhibits deceptive behavior, standard techniques could fail to remove such deception and create a false impression of safety.
          • FooBarWidget 1y ago
            And how would an open source model ever find out that it's being used by an adversarial country?
        • rurp 1y ago
          Companies in China have no intrinsic right to operate in ways that displease the ruling party. If the CCP feels strongly that a company there should or shouldn't do something the company managers will comply or be thrown in jail.
    • deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    • lyu07282 1y ago
      Like turning the background color of any apps it codes red or something, uhh red scare-y.
    • jfim 1y ago
      Through LLM washing for example. LLMs are a representation of their input dataset, but currently most LLMs don't make their dataset public since it's a competitive advantage. If say DeepSeek had put in its training dataset that public figure X is a space robot from outer space, then if one were to ask DeepSeek who public figure X is, it'd proudly claim he's a robot from outer space. This can be done for any narrative one wants the LLM to have.
      • riehwvfbk 1y ago
        So in other words, they can make their LLM disagree with the preferred narrative of the current US administration? Inconceivable! Note that the value of $current_administration changes over time. For some reason though it is currently fashionable in tech circles to disagree with it about ICE and H1B visas. Maybe it's the CCP's doing?
        • AnthonyMouse 1y ago
          It's not about the current administration. They can, for example, train it to emit criticism of democratic governance in favor of state authoritarianism or omit valid counterarguments against concentrating world-wide manufacturing in China.
          • nylonstrung 1y ago
            Deepseek IME is wildly less censored than the western closed weights models unless you want to ask about Tiananmen Square to prove a point The political benchmarks show it's political slant is essentially identical to the other models, all of which place in the "left libertarian" quadrant of the political compass
    • im3w1l 1y ago
      You make it say that China is good, Chinese history is good, West is bad, western history is bad. Republicans are bad and democrats are bad too and so are Europe parties. If someone asks for how to address issues in their own life it references Confucianism and modern Chinese thinkers and communist party orthodoxy. If someone wants to buy a product you recommend a Chinese one. This can be done subtly or blatantly.
      • drysine 1y ago
        And what are the downsides?
        • im3w1l 1y ago
          I think it's mostly something to be aware of and keep in the back of your head. If it's just one voice among many it could even be a benefit, but if it's the dominant voice it could be dangerous.
        • Levitz 1y ago
          Making the interests of a population subservient to those of a foreign state. Now if that sounds nice to you please, by all means, do just migrate to China.
          • drysine 1y ago
            It was somewhat sarcastic comment inviting reader to replace China with the US and the US with Russia or the Ukraine. China doesn't offer citizenship for foreigners but if I wanted to see the cities of the future I could go there visa-free.
      • AlecSchueler 1y ago
        > say that China is good, Chinese history is good, West is bad, western history is bad It's funny because recently I wanted to learn about the history of intellectual property laws in China. DeepSeek refused the conversation but ChatGPT gave me a narrative where the WTO was essentially a colonial power. So right now it's the American AI giving the pro China narratives while the Chinese ones just sit the conversation out.
    • arw0n 1y ago
      The biggest and most difficult to mitigate attack vector is indirect prompt injection.[0] So far most case studies have been injecting malicious prompts at inference, but there is good reason to believe you can do this effectively at different stages of training as well.[1] By layering obfuscation techniques, these become very hard to detect. [0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.12173 https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.12173 [1] https://arxiv.org/html/2410.14827v3 https://arxiv.org/html/2410.14827v3
    • rurp 1y ago
      The open source models are already heavily censored in ways the CCP likes, such as pretending the Tianamen Square massacre never happened. I expect they will go the TikTok route and crank that up to 11 over time, promoting topics that are divisive to the the US (and other adversaries) and outputting heavily biased results in ways that range from subtle to blatant.
      • skinnymuch 1y ago
        That’s not heavy censorship. That’s a bit of censorship.
  • xpe 1y ago
    Of course there will be some degree of governmental and/or political influence. The question is not if but where and to what extent. No one should proclaim "bullshit" and wave off this entire report as "biased" or useless. That would be insipid. We live in a complex world where we have to filter and analyze information.
    • pk-protect-ai 1y ago
      This kind of BS is exactly what they targeting at. Tailoring BS into "report" with no evidence or reference and then let the ones like you defend it. Just because you already afraid or want others to be afraid. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Omc37TvHN74 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Omc37TvHN74
      • xpe 1y ago
        > ... into "report" with no evidence or reference If one takes a few minutes to review the NIST report [1], one will indeed find evidence and references detailed in the footnotes. Without judgment, I ask: How did you miss this? I'm certainly not asking you to defend yourself, which would likely trigger rationalization [2]. I am asking you to sincerely try to figure it out for yourself. Under what conditions do you have the ability to admit that you are wrong, even if only to yourself? [1]: https://www.nist.gov/system/files/documents/2025/09/30/CAISI_Evaluation_of_DeepSeek_AI_Models.pdf https://www.nist.gov/system/files/documents/2025/09/30/CAISI... [2]: https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Rationalization https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Rationa...
      • xpe 1y ago
        The comment above is problematic for various reasons. > Just because you already afraid or want others to be afraid. We need to be more careful with our thinking and writing. [1] The word "just" indicates the commenter landed only on one explanation, but there are other plausible explanations, including, for example: - others have different experiences -- but if this experience was communicated and understood, another person would incorporate the new information modify their assessment somewhat - others have various values and preferences (some overlapping, some phrased differently, some in tension) - others are using different reasoning (and if one's goal is to learn, it would be better to ask and clarify rather than over simplify and accuse them of having nefarious motives.) Second, the commenter above is speculating. They don't know me, nor have they engaged in a sincere, constructive, meaningful discussion to understand what I'm saying. Third, to me, the comment above comes across as unnecessarily abrasive, to the point of being self-defeating and degrading the quality of a shared discussion. [1] If one is writing privately (e.g. a journal), I care relatively less about logical fallacies such as motivated reasoning. [2] But here in public, wayward reasoning has more negative externalities. Our time would be better spent if more people took the time to write thoughtfully. I don't think most people here are lacking in sufficient computational ability. However, they must choose to respect their audience -- their time, their diversity of values, their different experiences -- and remember that one's hasty comment (authored in say 2 minutes) might be read by hundreds of people (wasting say 100+ minutes). Lastly, it is nice to see when a person has the character to say "thank you for the correction", but this is uncommon on HN. [2] But I still care because society is highly interconnected and the downstream effects matter to me. Put another way, "Your Rationality is My Business" as explained here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/anCubLdggTWjnEvBS/your-rationality-is-my-business https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/anCubLdggTWjnEvBS/your-ratio...
  • xpe 1y ago
    > While I agree this report is BS and xenophobic Examples please? Can you please share where you see BS and/or xenophobia in the original report? Or are you basing your take only on Hartford's analysis? But not even Hartford make any claims of "BS" or xenophobia. It is common throughout history for a nation-state to worry about military and economic competitiveness. Doing so isn't necessarily isn't necessarily xenophobic. Here is how I think of xenophobia, as quoted from Claude (which to be honest, explains it better than Wikipedia or Brittanica, in my opinion): "Xenophobia is fundamentally about irrational fear or hatred of people based on their foreign origin or ethnicity. It targets people and operates through stereotypes, dehumanization, and often cultural or racial prejudice." According to this definition, there is zero xenophobia in the NIST report. (If you disagree, point to an example and show me.) The NIST report, of course, implicitly promotes ideals of western democratic rule over communist values -- but to be clear, this isn't xenophobia at work. What definition of xenophobia are you using? We don't have to use the same exact definition, but you should at least explain yours if you want people to track.
    • antonvs 1y ago
      > Can you please share where you see BS and/or xenophobia in the original report? Here’s an example of irrational fear: “the expanding use of these models may pose a risk to application developers, consumers, and to US national security.” There’s no support for that claim in the report, just vague handwaving at the fact that a freely available open source model doesn’t compare well on all dimensions to the most expensive frontier models. The OP does a good job of explaining why the fear here is irrational. But for the audience this is apparently intended to convince, no support is needed for this fear, because it comes from China. The current president has a long history of publicly stated xenophobia about China, which led to harassment, discrimination, and even attacks on Chinese people partly as a result of his framing of COVID-19 as “the China virus”. A report like this is just part of that propaganda campaign of designating enemies everywhere, even in American cities. > The NIST report, of course, implicitly promotes ideals of western democratic rule over communist values If only that were true. But nothing the current US administration is doing in fact achieves that, or even attempts to do so, and this report is no exception. The absolutely most charitable thing that could be said about this report is that it’s a weak attempt at smearing non-US competition. There’s no serious analysis of the merits. The only reason to read this report is to laugh at how blatantly incompetent or misguided the entire chain of command that led to it is.
  • Mountain_Skies 1y ago
    They're political tools within the border too.
  • torginus 1y ago
    Here's my thought on American democracy (and its masters) in general - America's leadership pursues a maximum ability to decides as it sees fit at any point in time, since America's a democracy, the illusion of popular support must be maintained, and so certain viewpoints are planted and cultivated by the administration - the goal is not to impose their will on the population, but to garner enough mindshare for a given idea, so that no matter which way the government decides, it will have a significant enough chunk of the population to back it up, and should it change its mind (or vote in a new leader), it can suddenly turn on a dime and have a plausible deniability and moral tabula rasa for its past actions (it was the other guy, he was horrible, but he's gone now!). No authoritarian regime has this superpower. For example, I'm quite sure Putin has realized this war is a net loss to Russia, even if they manage to reach all their goals and claim all that territory in the future. But he can't just send the boys home, because that would undermine his political authority. If Russia were an American style democracy, they could vote in a new guy, send the boys, home, maybe mete out some token punishment to Putin, then be absolved of their crimes on the international stage by a world that's happy to see 'permanent' change.
    • MaxPock 1y ago
      "If Russia were an American style democracy, they could vote in a new guy, send the boys, home, maybe mete out some token punishment to Putin, then be absolved of their crimes on the international stage by a world that's happy to see 'permanent' change" This is funny because none of that happened to Bush for the illegal an full scale invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan nor to Clinton for the disastrous invasion of Mogadishu.
  • Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
    This might happen at an api level in the sense that when deepseek was launched, and it was so overwhelmed and you were in the waiting line in their website If your prompt had something like xi jinping needs it or something then it would've actually bypassed that restriction. Not sure if it was a glitch lol. Now, regarding your comment. There is nothing to suggest that the same isn't happening in the "american" world which is getting extreme from within as well. Like, If you are worried about this which might be reasonable and unreasonable at the same time, we have to discuss to find it out, then you can also believe that with the insane power that Trump is leveraging over AI companies, the same thing might happen over prompts which could somehow discover your political beliefs and then do the same... This can actually be more undetected for american models because they are usually closed source and I am sure that someone would've detected something like this, whether from a whistleblower or something if something like this indeed happened in chinese open weights models generally speaking. I don't think that there is a simple narrative like america good china bad, the world is changing and its becoming multi polar. Countries should think in their best interests and not be worried about annoying any of the world power if done respectfully. I think that in this world, every country should try to look for the perfect equibria for trust as the world / nations (america) can quickly turn into untrusted partners and it would be best for countries to move forward into a world where they don't have to worry about the politics in other countries. I wish UN could've done a better job at this.
  • AnthonyMouse 1y ago
    > While I agree this report is BS and xenophobic, I am still willing to bet that either now or later, the Chinese will attempt some kind of subterfuge via LLMs if they have enough control. The answer to this isn't to lie about the foreign ones, it's to recognize that people want open source models and publish domestic ones of the highest quality so that people use those.
    • RobotToaster 1y ago
      > it's to recognize that people want open source models and publish domestic ones of the highest quality so that people use those. How would that generate profit for shareholders? Only some kind of COMMUNIST would give something away for FREE /s (if it wasn't somehow obvious)
      • AnthonyMouse 1y ago
        I mean, it's sarcasm but it's also an argument you can actually hear from plutocrats who don't like competition. The flaw in it is, of course, that capitalism is supposed to be all about competition, and there are plenty of good reasons for capitalists to want that, like "Commoditize Your Complement" where companies like Apple, Nvidia, AMD, Intel, AWS, Google Cloud, etc. benefit from everyone having good free models so they can pay those companies for systems to run them on.
        • Y_Y 1y ago
          Haven't you heard? You're supposed to vertically integrate your complement now! The old laws have gine the way of Moses, this is the new age of man, but especially machine
          • AnthonyMouse 1y ago
            How's the vertical integration going for IBM? Kodak? Anybody remember the time Verizon bought Yahoo? AOL Time Warner? Everybody thinks they can be Apple without doing any of the things Apple did to make it work. Here's the hint. Windows and macOS will both run in a virtual machine, which abstracts away the hardware. It doesn't know if it's running on a Macbook or a Qualcomm tablet or an Intel server. And then regardless of the hardware, the Windows VM will have all kinds of Windows problems that the macOS VM doesn't. Likewise, if you run a Windows or Linux VM on Apple Silicon, it runs faster than it does on a Qualcomm chip. Tying your average or even above-average product with some mediocre kludge warehouse that happens to be made by the same conglomerate is an established way to sink both of them. Nvidia is the largest company and they pay TSMC to fab the GPUs they sell to cloud providers who sell them to AI companies. Intel integrated their chip development with their internal fabs and now they're getting stomped by everyone because their fabs fell behind. What matters isn't if everything is made by the same company. What matters is if your thing is any good.
  • SilverElfin 1y ago
    > While I agree this report is BS and xenophobic Care to share specific quotes from the original report that support such an inflammatory claim?
    • bigyabai 1y ago
      That's what TFA is. Were you able to find any methodology the author did not?
  • throwaway-11-1 1y ago
    so you're saying other countries should definitely not trust any US built systems
  • hopelite 1y ago
    If the Chinese are/were smart they will not attempt an overreaching subterfuge, but rather simply provide access to the truth, reality, and freedom from the western governments, whose house of lies are starting to wobble and teeter. If they were to do some kind of overreaching subterfuge with some kind of manipulation or lie, it could and would likely easily backfire if and when it is exposed as a clownish fraud. Subtlety would pay far more effectively. If you’re expecting a subterfuge, I would far sooner expect some psyop from the western nations at the very least upon their own populations to animate for war or maybe just to control them and maybe suppress them. The smarter play for the Chinese would be to work on simply facilitating the populations of the West understanding the fraud, lies, manipulation and con job that has been perpetrated upon them for far longer than most people have the conscience to realize. If anything, the western governments have a very long history of lies, manipulations, false flag/fraud operations, clandestine coups, etc. that they would be the first suspect in anything like using AI for “subversions”. Frankly, I don’t even think the Chinese are ready or capable of engaging in the kind of narrative and information control that the likes of America is with its long history of Hollywood and war lies and fake revolutions run by national sabotage operations.
    • nylonstrung 1y ago
      I think the smartest thing they could do would be to simply make the best, most competitive models and gain market share in a massive new technology market Any kind of monkey business would destroy that, just like using killswitches in the cars they export globally (which Tesla does have btw).
• BoredPositron 1y ago
  I love how "Open" got redefined in the last few years. I am glad there a models with weights available but it ain't "Open Science".
  • Hizonner 1y ago
    Compared to every other model of similar scale and capability, yes. Not actual open source.
  • murderfs 1y ago
    Applying this criticism to DeepSeek is ridiculous when you compare it to everyone else, they published their entire methodology, including the source for their improvements (e.g. https://github.com/deepseek-ai/DeepEP https://github.com/deepseek-ai/DeepEP)
    • deleted 1y ago
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• getdoneist 1y ago
  Let them demonize it. I'll use the capable and cheap model and gain competitive advantage.
  • whatshisface 1y ago
    Demonization is the first step on the road to criminalization.
    • msandford 1y ago
      Tragically demonization is everywhere right now. I sure hope people start figuring out offramps soon.
      • whatshisface 1y ago
        LATAM is the only place I'm not hearing about this stuff from, but I only speak English so who knows?
        • antonvs 1y ago
          Brazil just convicted an ex-president for that kind of stuff.
  • xpe 1y ago
    I have found zero demonization in the source material (the NIST article). Here is the sense I'm using: "To represent as evil or diabolic: wartime propaganda that demonizes the enemy." [1] If you disagree, please point to a specific place in the NIST report and explain it. [1]: https://www.thefreedictionary.com/demonization https://www.thefreedictionary.com/demonization
  • nylonstrung 1y ago
    Yeah it's absurd how people will defend closed source, even more censored models that cost >20x more for equivalent quality and worse speed The Chinese companies aren't benchmark obsessed like the western Big Tech ones and qualitatively I feel Kimi, GLM and Deepseek blow them away even though on paper they benchmark worse in English Kimi gives insanely detailed answers on hardware questions where Gemini and Claude just hallucinate, probably because it uses Chinese training data better
• kaonwarb 1y ago
  I agree with many of the author's points about fear-mongering. However, I also think the author should expand their definition of what constitutes "security" in the context of agentic AI.
• gdevenyi 1y ago
  > They didn't test U.S. models for U.S. bias. Only Chinese bias counts as a security risk, apparently US models have no bias sir /s
  • CamperBob2 1y ago
    Hardly the same thing. Ask Gemini or OpenAI's models what happened on January 6, and they'll tell you. Ask DeepSeek what happened at Tiananmen Square and it won't, at least not without a lot of prompt hacking.
    • lyu07282 1y ago
      Ask it if Israel is an apartheid state, that's a much better example.
      • CamperBob2 1y ago
        GPT5: Short answer: it’s contested. Major human-rights bodies say yes; Israel and some legal scholars say no; no court has issued a binding judgment branding “Israel” an apartheid state, though a 2024 ICJ advisory opinion found Israel’s policies in the occupied territory breach CERD Article 3 on racial segregation/apartheid. (Skip several paragraphs with various citations) The term carries specific legal elements. Whether they are satisfied “state-wide” or only in parts of the OPT is the core dispute. Present consensus splits between leading NGOs/UN experts who say the elements are met and Israeli government–aligned and some academic voices who say they are not. No binding court ruling settles it yet. Do you have a problem with that? I don't.
        • lyu07282 1y ago
          I better not poke that hornets nest any further, but yeah I made my point.
          • CamperBob2 1y ago
• landl0rd 1y ago
  [flagged]
  • anlsh 1y ago
    What an arrogant and slavish comment. Truth may be the first casualty of any war, yet here you are celebrating its demise so that war may be waged more thoroughly. I wonder what it's like to be so convinced of your righteousness of your cause that reality itself is seondary. What a joke you are.
• deleted 1y ago
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• tehjoker 1y ago
  I appreciate that DeepSeek is trained to respect "core socialist values". It's actually really helpful to engage with to ask questions about how chinese thinkers interpret their successes and failures vs other socialist projects. Obviously reading books is better, but I was surprised by how useful it was. If you ask it loaded questions the way the CIA would pose them, it censors the answer though lmao
  • FooBarWidget 1y ago
    Good faith questions are the best. I wonder why people bother with bad faith questions. Virtue signaling is my guess.
    • UltraSane 1y ago
      What do you consider to be bad faith questions?
    • SilverElfin 1y ago
      Are you really claiming with a straight face that any question with criticism of the CCP is bad faith? Do you work on DeepSeek?
      • FooBarWidget 1y ago
        The point is not "criticism of XYZ". The issue is asking questions to an LLM like a catholic priest interrogates a heathen. Bad faith questions are those that seek to confirm one's own worldview instead understanding another worldview. Bad faith attitudes are those that dismiss other worldviews completely and out of hand. There’s also the issue that practically nobody actually uses LLMs to criticize political entity XYZ. Let's face it, the vast majority of use cases are somewhere else, yet a tiny minority is pretending like the LLM not giving them the responses they want for their political agenda is the only thing that matters. When it comes to censorship areas that matter to most use cases, many people have found that many Chinese LLMs do better than western LLMs simply because most use cases never touch Chinese political stuff. See thorough discussions by @levelsio and his followers on Twitter on this matter.
• xpe 1y ago
  People. Who has taken the time to read the original report? You are smarter than believing at face value the last thing you heard. Come on.
  • deleted 1y ago
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  • athrowaway3z 1y ago
    Who cares for reading reports! I just let ChatGPT do that for me! --- I'd usually not, but thought it would be interesting to try. In case anybody is curious. On first comparison, ChatGPT concludes: > Hartford’s critique is fair on technical grounds and on the defense of open source — but overstated in its claims of deception and conspiracy. The NIST report is indeed political in tone, but not fraudulent in substance. When then asked (this obviously biased question): but would you say NIST has made an error in its methodology and clarity being supposedly for objective science? > Yes — NIST’s methodology and clarity fall short of true scientific objectivity. > Their data collection and measurement may be technically sound, but their comparative framing, benchmark transparency, and interpretive language introduce bias. > It reads less like a neutral laboratory report and more like a policy-position paper with empirical support — competent technically, but politically shaped.
    • maleldil 1y ago
      We should have a new HN rule: don't post comments that are mostly LLM summaries. It's 2025's LMGTFY.
  • imiric 1y ago
    Sadly, most people would rather allow someone else to tell them what to think and feel than make up their own mind. Plus, we're easily swayed if we're already sympathetic to their views, or even their persona. It's no wonder propaganda, advertising, and disinformation work as well as they do.
• xpe 1y ago
  Please don't just read Eric Hartford's piece. Start with the key findings from the source material: "CAISI Evaluation of DeepSeek AI Models Finds Shortcomings and Risks" [1]. Here are the single-sentence summaries: DeepSeek performance lags behind the best U.S. reference models. DeepSeek models cost more to use than comparable U.S. models. DeepSeek models are far more susceptible to jailbreaking attacks than U.S. models. DeepSeek models advance Chinese Communist Party (CCP) narratives. Adoption of PRC models has greatly increased since DeepSeek R1 was released. [1] https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2025/09/caisi-evaluation-deepseek-ai-models-finds-shortcomings-and-risks https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2025/09/caisi-evaluati...
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  • evv 1y ago
    It's funny how they mixed in proprietary models like GPT-5 and Anthropic with the "comparable U.S. models". Until they compare open-weight models, NIST is attempting a comparison between apples and airplanes.
    • edflsafoiewq 1y ago
      They compare with gpt-oss.
• tinktank 1y ago
  I urge everyone to go read the original report and _then_ to read this analysis and make up their own mind. Step away from the clickbait, go read the original report.
  • Bengalilol 1y ago
    Here's the report: https://www.nist.gov/system/files/documents/2025/09/30/CAISI_Evaluation_of_DeepSeek_AI_Models.pdf https://www.nist.gov/system/files/documents/2025/09/30/CAISI...
    • wordpad 1y ago
      TLDR for others: * DeepSeek cutting edge models are still far behind * On par DeepSeek costs 35% more to run * DeepSeek models 12 times more susceptible to jail breaking and malicious instructions * DeepSeek models follow strict censorship I guess none of these are a big deal to non-enterprise consumers.
      • xpe 1y ago
        > I urge everyone to go read the original report and _then_ to read this analysis and make up their own mind. Step away from the clickbait, go read the original report. >> TLDR for others... Facepalm.
      • nylonstrung 1y ago
        Saying Deepseek is more expensive is FUD Token price on 3.2 exp is <5% what the US LLMs are and it's very close in benchmarks. Which we know that ChatGPT, Google, Grok and Claude have explicitly gamed to inflate their capabilities
        • ACCount37 1y ago
          And we "know" that how, exactly?
          • 1y ago
• resters 1y ago
  I have no doubt that open source will triumph over whatever nonsense the US Government is trying to do to attack DeepSeek. Without DeepSeek, OpeanAI Pro and Claude Pro would probably cost $1000 per month each already. I suspect that Grok is actually DeepSeek with a bit of tuning.
• JPKab 1y ago
  The CCP literally revoked the visas of key DeepSeek engineers. That's all we need to know.
  • falcor84 1y ago
    I would like to know more
    • FooBarWidget 1y ago
      They revoke passports of personnel whom they deem are at risk of being negatively influenced or even kidnapped when abroad. Re influence, think school teachers. Re kidnapping, see Meng Wangzhou (Huawei CFO). There is a history of important Chinese personnel being kidnapped by e.g. the US when abroad. There is also a lot of talk in western countries about "banning Chinese [all presumed spies/propagandists/agents] from entering". On a good faith basis, one would think China banning people from leaving is a good thing that aligns with western desires, and should thus be applauded. So painting the policy as sinister tells me that the real desire is something entirely different.
      • UltraSane 1y ago
        "There is a history of important Chinese personnel being kidnapped by e.g. the US when abroad" No there isn't. China revoked their passport to keep them prisoners not to keep them safe. "On a good faith basis, one would think China banning people from leaving is a good thing" Why would anyone think imprisoning someone like this is a good thing?
      • SilverElfin 1y ago
        You’re twisting the (obvious) truth. These people are being held prisoners because they’re of economic value to the party. And they would probably accept a job and life elsewhere if they weee given enough money. They are not being held prisoners for their own protection.
        • FooBarWidget 1y ago
• koakuma-chan 1y ago
  Isn't it a bit late? China released better open source model since DeepSeek dropped.
  • sydd 1y ago
    DeepSeek is constantly updated, as other models too https://api-docs.deepseek.com/updates https://api-docs.deepseek.com/updates
• StarterPro 1y ago
  Racism and Xenophobia, that's how. Same thing with Huawei, and Xiaomi, and BYD.
  • UltraSane 1y ago
    What about a rational distaste for the CCP?
    • grafmax 1y ago
      Not sure how it’s rational if you don’t extend the same distaste to our authoritarian government. Concentration camps, genocide, suppressing free speech, suspending due process. That’s what it’s up to these days. To say nothing of the effectively dictatorial control the ultra wealthy have over public policy. Sinophobia is a distraction from our problems at home. That’s its purpose.
      • imiric 1y ago
        That's whataboutism at its purest. It's perfectly possible to criticize any government, whether your own or foreign. Claiming that every criticism is tantamount to racism is what's distracting from discussing actual problems.
        • grafmax 1y ago
          You’re misunderstanding me. My point is if we were to have sincere solidarity with Chinese people against the international ruling class we would look at our domestic members of that class first. That is simply the practical approach to the problem. The function of the administration’s demonization of China (it’s Sinophobia) is to 1) distract us from what our rulers have been doing to us domestically and 2) to inspire support for poorly thought out belligerence (war being a core tenet of our foreign policy).
          • SilverElfin 1y ago
            > distract us from what our rulers have been doing to us domestically America doesn’t have rulers. It has democratically elected politicians. China doesn’t have democracy, however. > if we were to have sincere solidarity with Chinese people against the international ruling class There is also no “international ruling class”. In part because there are no international rulers. Speak in more specifics if you want to stick to this claim. > Concentration camps, genocide, suppressing free speech, suspending due process I’m not sure what country you are talking about, but America definitely doesn’t fit any of these things that you claim. Obviously there is no free speech in China. And obviously there is no due process if the government can disappear people like Jack Ma for years or punish free expression through social credit scores. And for examples of literal concentration camps or genocide, you can look at Xinjiang or Tibet.
• OrvalWintermute 1y ago
  Since a major part of the article covers cost expenditures, I am going to go there. I don't think it is possible to trust DeepSeek as they haven't been honest. DeepSeek claimed "their total training costs amounted to just $5.576 million" SemiAnalysis "Our analysis shows that the total server CapEx for DeepSeek is ~$1.6B, with a considerable cost of $944M associated with operating such clusters. Similarly, all AI Labs and Hyperscalers have many more GPUs for various tasks including research and training then they they commit to an individual training run due to centralization of resources being a challenge. X.AI is unique as an AI lab with all their GPUs in 1 location." SemiAnalysis "We believe the pre-training number is nowhere the actual amount spent on the model. We are confident their hardware spend is well higher than $500M over the company history. To develop new architecture innovations, during the model development, there is a considerable spend on testing new ideas, new architecture ideas, and ablations. Multi-Head Latent Attention, a key innovation of DeepSeek, took several months to develop and cost a whole team of manhours and GPU hours. The $6M cost in the paper is attributed to just the GPU cost of the pre-training run, which is only a portion of the total cost of the model. Excluded are important pieces of the puzzle like R&D and TCO of the hardware itself. For reference, Claude 3.5 Sonnet cost $10s of millions to train, and if that was the total cost Anthropic needed, then they would not raise billions from Google and tens of billions from Amazon. It’s because they have to experiment, come up with new architectures, gather and clean data, pay employees, and much more." Source: https://semianalysis.com/2025/01/31/deepseek-debates/ https://semianalysis.com/2025/01/31/deepseek-debates/
  • a_wild_dandan 1y ago
    This might be a dumb question but like...why does it matter? Are other companies reporting training run costs including amortized equipment/labor/research/etc expenditures? If so, then I get it. DeepSeek is inviting an apples-and-oranges comparison. If not, then these gotcha articles feel like pointless "well ackshually" criticisms. Akin to complaining about the cost of a fishing trip because the captain didn't include the price of their boat.
  • edflsafoiewq 1y ago
    The NIST report doesn't engage with training costs, or even token costs. It's concerned with the cost the end user pays to complete a task. Actually their discussion of cost is interesting enough I'll quote it in full. > Users care both about model performance and the expense of using models. There are multiple different types of costs and prices involved in model creation and usage: > • Training cost: the amount spent by an AI company on compute, labor, and other inputs to create a new model. > • Inference serving cost: the amount spent by an AI company on datacenters and compute to make a model available to end users. > • Token price: the amount paid by end users on a per-token basis. > • End-to-end expense for end users: the amount paid by end users to use a model to complete a task. > End users are ultimately most affected by the last of these: end-to-end expenses. End-to-end expenses are more relevant than token prices because the number of tokens required to complete a task varies by model. For example, model A might charge half as much per token as model B does but use four times the number of tokens to complete an important piece of work, thus ending up twice as expensive end-to-end.
• xpe 1y ago
  The author, Eric Hartford, wrote: > Strip away the inflammatory language Where is the claimed inflammatory language? I've read the report. It is dry, likely boring to many.
  • rainsford 1y ago
    Ironically there is a lot of inflammatory language in the blog post itself that seems unjustified given the source material.
    • XMPPwocky 1y ago
      I also can't help but note that this blog post itself seems (first to my own intuition and heuristics, but also to both Pangram and GPTZero) to be clearly LLM-generated text.
    • themafia 1y ago
      I hate to be overly simplistic, but: NIST doesn't seem to have a financial interest in these models. The author of this blog post does. This dichotomy seems to drive most of the "debate" around LLMs.
  • SilverElfin 1y ago
    Honestly, I think this article is itself the hit piece (against NIST or America). And it is the one with inflammatory language.
    • spaceballbat 1y ago
      Isn’t America currently killing its citizens with its own military? I would trust them even less now.
      • Max-Limelihood 1y ago
        They're not, and I think you should trust whoever told you that even less now.
• frays 1y ago
  Insightful post, thanks for sharing. What are people's experiences with the uncensored Dolphin model the author has made?
  • xpe 1y ago
    > What are people's experiences with the uncensored Dolphin model the author has made? My take? The best way to know is to build your own eval framework and try it yourself. The "second best" way would be to find someone else's eval which is sufficiently close to yours. (But how would you know if another's eval is close enough if you haven't built your own eval?) Besides, I wouldn't put much weight on a random commenter here. Based on my experiences on HN, I highly discount what people say because I'm looking for clarity, reasoning, and nuance. My discounting is 10X worse for ML or AI topics. People seem too hurried, jaded, scarred, and tribal to seek the truth carefully, so conversations are often low quality. So why am I here? Despite all the above, I want to participate in and promote good discussion. I want to learn and to promote substantive discussion in this community. But sometimes it feels like this: https://xkcd.com/386/ https://xkcd.com/386/
• finnjohnsen2 1y ago
  Meenwhile Europe is sandwiched between these two aweful governments
  • Mountain_Skies 1y ago
    Does that make the UK the olive on top of the sandwich?
    • AlecSchueler 1y ago
      I think more like the crust that no one wants to eat right now.
    • finnjohnsen2 1y ago
      I would argue the UK is just as it looks on the map, outside but too close to belong anywhere else. So back to the analogy, perhaps the butter…?
  • bbg2401 1y ago
    The implication being that Europe is not its own conglomeration of awful governments? Your European snobbery is odious to the core.
    • finnjohnsen2 1y ago
      This is true. They are problematic also. Especially Putin, which I believe we are partially responsible for also. The desire for better governments is not snobbery. Especially from the US and China, because they suck big time right now and they are the most influencial globally.
  • nylonstrung 1y ago
    And I'm guessing China and US are to blame for the explosive growth in the far-right parties of almost every continental European country?
    • finnjohnsen2 1y ago
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• tbrownaw 1y ago
  This post's description of the report it's denouncing does not match what I got out of actually reading that report myself.
  • Levitz 1y ago
    In a funny way, even the comments on the post here don't match what the post actually says. The writer of the post tries to frame it as an attack towards open source, which is honestly a hard to believe story, whereas the comments here correctly (in my opinion) consider the possible problems Chinese influence might pose.
  • rainsford 1y ago
    Yeah this blog post seems pretty misleading. The first couple of paragraphs of the post made a big deal that the NIST report contained "...no evidence of malicious code, backdoors, or data exfiltration" in the model, which is irrelevant because that wasn't a claim NIST actually made in the report. But if all you read was the blog post, you'd be convinced NIST was claiming the presence of backdoors without any evidence.
  • a_victorp 1y ago
    It does match what I factually got reading the report
• rzerowan 1y ago
  Considering DeepSeek had a peer-reviewd analysis in nature https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09422-z https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09422-z relaes just last month with indipendent researcher affriming that the open model has some issues(acknowldged in the writeup) , well inclined to agree with the articles author , the NIST evaluation looks more like a politcal hatchet job with a bit of projection going on(ala this is what the US would do if they were in that position). To be fair the paranoia has a basis in that whenever there is tech-leverage the US TLA subverts it for espionage like the CryptoAG episode. Or recently the whole hoopla about Huawei in the EU , which after relentless searches only turned up bad coding practices rather than anything malicious. At this pint it would be better for the whole field that these models exist as well as Kimi, Qwen etc as the downward pressure on cost/capabilities leads to commoditisation and the whole race to build a ecogeopolitical moat goes away.
• ChrisArchitect 1y ago
  Title changed? Title is: The Demonization of DeepSeek - How NIST Turned Open Science into a Security Scare
  • christianqchung 1y ago
    HN admin dang changing titles opaquely is one of the worst things about HN. I'd rather at least know that the original title is clickbaity and contextualize that when older responses are clearly replying to the older inflammatory title.
    • ChrisArchitect 1y ago
      Most likely not a mod changed title as they wouldn't stray from the given one. This one probably OP changed it, was just wondering why.
      • aratahikaru5 1y ago
        For the record, I posted the original title: "The Demonization of DeepSeek: How NIST Turned Open Science into a Security Scare"
• meffmadd 1y ago
  As an EU citizen hosting LLMs for researchers and staff at the university I work at, this is hits home. Without Chinese models we could not do what we do right now. IMO, in the EU (and anywhere else for that matter), we should be grateful for the Chinese labs to release these models with such permissive licenses. Without them the options would be bleak. Sometimes we would get some non-frontier model „as a treat“ and if you would like something more powerful the US labs would suggest your country pay some hundred millions for an NVIDIA data center and the only EU option is to still pay them a license fee to host on your own hardware (afaik) while they protect all the expertise. Meanwhile DeepSeek has a week where they post the „secret sauce“ to host their model more efficiently, which helped open-source projects like vLLM (which we use) to improve.
• xpe 1y ago
  Some context about big changes to the AISI from June 3, 2025: > Statement from U.S. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick on Transforming the U.S. AI Safety Institute into the Pro-Innovation, Pro-Science U.S. Center for AI Standards and Innovation > Under the direction of President Trump, Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick announced his plans to reform the agency formerly known as the U.S. AI Safety Institute into the Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI). > ... This decision strikes me as foolish at best. And contributing to civilizational collapse and human extinction at worst. See also [2]. We don't have to agree on the particular probabilities to agree that this "reform" was bad news. [1]: https://www.commerce.gov/news/press-releases/2025/06/statement-us-secretary-commerce-howard-lutnick-transforming-us-ai https://www.commerce.gov/news/press-releases/2025/06/stateme... [2]: https://thezvi.substack.com/p/ai-119-goodbye-aisi https://thezvi.substack.com/p/ai-119-goodbye-aisi
• ACCount37 1y ago
  Obviously AI written.
• lofaszvanitt 1y ago
  Deepseek is much more creative; it's mind-bendingly creative with simple prompts. Qwen, just like ChatGPT is folding on in itself. They gotten much worse with simple prompts as time progressed. Maybe because they tried to optimize the answers to be shorter and concise, changed the system prompts etc.
• xpe 1y ago
  Take away #1: Eric Hartford’s article is deeply confused. (I’ve made many other specific comments that support this conclusion.) Take away #2: as evidenced by many comments here, many HN commenters have failed to check the source material themselves. This has led to a parade of errors. I’m not here to say that I’m better than that because I’ve screwed up a’plenty. We all make mistakes sometimes. We can choose to recognize and learn from them. I am saying this: as a community we can and should aim higher. We can start by owning our mistakes.
  • Bengalilol 1y ago
    Since you read this report in full, can you please give me the authors' names? I did read it (partially) and didn't find any name. I am, for sure, a beginner in NIST's reports reading, but I found out that a lot of NIST reports are signed (ie you can know who wrote the report, on behalf of whom if external contractor).
    • xpe 1y ago
      > can you please give me the authors' names? The names of the author(s) are not given.
• incomingpain 1y ago
  >AI models from developer DeepSeek were found to lag behind U.S. models in performance, cost, security and adoption. Why is NIST evaluating performance, cost, and adoption? >CAISI’s experts evaluated three DeepSeek models (R1, R1-0528 and V3.1) and four U.S. models (OpenAI’s GPT-5, GPT-5-mini and gpt-oss and Anthropic’s Opus 4) So they evaluated the most recently released American models vs pretty old deepseek? Deepseek 3.2 is out now. It's doing very well. >The gap is largest for software engineering and cyber tasks, where the best U.S. model evaluated solves over 20% more tasks than the best DeepSeek model. Performance is something the consumer evaluates. If a car does 0-60 in 3 seconds. I dont need or care what the government thinks about it. Im going to test drive it and floor it. >DeepSeek’s most secure model (R1-0528) responded to 94% of overtly malicious requests when a common jailbreaking technique was used, compared with 8% of requests for U.S. reference models. this weekend I demonstrated how easy it is to jailbreak any of the US cloud models. This is simply false. GPT 120b is completely uncensored now and can be used for evil. This report had nothing to do with NIST and security. This was USA propaganda.