3 ms·

Most sane US companies will disallow use of cloud-based Chinese AI providers, because everything including code, data, PII, etc is being sent to them.

cheeze 4mo ago
Deepseek has some models in Bedrock. There is definitely a huge market for a "good enough" model running within the country of the company
- KronisLV 4mo ago
  > Deepseek has some models in Bedrock. Just looked into it, seems like at most they have just 3.2, not 4: https://aws.amazon.com/bedrock/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/bedrock/pricing/ Looking around their catalogue more, most of their models seem quite outdated, aside from the OpenAI and Anthropic ones (but those get more expensive). I wouldn't willingly pick Bedrock and would instead throw money at OpenRouter, that has both a bunch of providers, as well as almost any model for you to try.
  - upcoming-sesame 4mo ago
    Azure AI Foundry has Deepseek 4
ceejayoz 4mo ago
Saner companies ask the same question about models from their own country too.
amunozo 4mo ago
You can run DeepSeek as it's open weights, unlike Claude or GPT.
rd 4mo ago
I wonder if I could start a US-based company with good data regulation and just serve open-weight models at a competitive price. I feel like the real barrier is just that most companies willing to adopt AI usage enough to make it worth it at this point don't want to be using inferior models.
- tokioyoyo 4mo ago
  Yes, you can. There are multiple inference providers out there. The problem is, it’s hard to beat the Chinese providers in cost. And you also have to compete with frontier model providers’ subsidized offerings.
  - dakolli 4mo ago
    They charge the exact same prices. So many people in these comments have no idea what they're talking about. Even if they did charge less, nobody is going to deal with the latency of sending requests to China. edit: Actually American inference providers are cheaper for Chinese models. There's way more competition here because the Chinese aren't idiots and investing every last dollar they have into data centers for llms that don't make money..
    - RussianCow 4mo ago
      By "cost" I think the parent means the provider's own costs, not the cost of inference to the customer. The cost of land, labor, and electricity are significantly lower in China than in the US.
    - tokioyoyo 4mo ago
      Can you please link me DeepSeekV4 provider that's cheaper than their official offering? And not all tasks require low latency. Also, there are a lot of competition in China. Like a lot. You might know better than me as well, but although the biggest AI-labs are based in USA, the adoption is weirdly global. Like as a general sense of what's going on - you can see AI-related ads literally everywhere in Tokyo, almost all the time, in every single screen in public.
      - dakolli 4mo ago
        Deepseek's api platform for V4 Pro is the only example of this, and Deepseek V4 Flash is cheaper (usually) than from Deepseek itself on openrouter via DeepInfra. Deepseek shot themselves in the foot because they never intended to serve V4 Pro for .80c mm ouput, that was a promotional price that was meant to expire (and still might). They intended for v4 to cost $4.00 per million but Western inference providers drove down the price because they can operate at negative margins to try and push competition out. I can assure you they are losing a ton of money @ ~80cents. My point is, its Western inference providers that are establishing the floor price of inference. They are willing to operate at a loss in order to put their competition out of business. Chinese providers are typically at or above the prices set by American/western providers if you go looking on the Chinese internet. You aren't going to get deals from China for inference except through this one instance with Deepseek v4 Pro which wasn't even supposed to be permanent pricing.
eikenberry 4mo ago
Then don't use the cloud-based Chinese providers, use cloud-base US/EU providers using Chinese models. The interesting Chinese models are all open making this issue mostly moot.
- daemin 4mo ago
  A key point here is open in terms of being able to download and use it, not open as knowing what data and instructions were fed into it when training. A paranoid part of me thinks that these models are all inherently biased and instructed to be pro CCP, with specific gaps in their training data related to undesirable historic events and political ideas.
  - therealdrag0 4mo ago
    Sure but that goes both ways. Any dataset has a bias. My coding doesn’t need to know about Tienamen square.
  - viking123 4mo ago
    Applies both ways, ask it about Israel.
  - gck1 4mo ago
    The same thing applies to US models. Check out various system prompt leak repos on github. There are also prompt injections by various parallel "alignment" models that pre-process the prompt before it's sent to the main one with questionable guidance. You'd be surprised how much of bias exists in easily extractable information. Now imagine how much of that happens during training, that you can't easily extract. So this is largely a moot point. Yes, Chinese models will likely have some weird things injected into them. But so do the US models. Do I care? Not in the slightest. Models are my code monkeys, and if the code leaves my machine, I assume IP is leaked be it a Chinese model that clearly tells me they do use the data, or US models that pinky promise they don't.
tmp10423288442 4mo ago
There are some objections here saying that some US firms are using Chinese AI providers, but I wonder if any of those are subject to compliance. Large firms that are disproportionately responsible for AI spending are all subject to compliance.
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
smoe 4mo ago
[dead]
HWR_14 4mo ago
Do you trust OpenAI with your code, data, PII? What makes you so sure it's not all part of the next training set anyway?

cheeze 4mo ago

Deepseek has some models in Bedrock. There is definitely a huge market for a "good enough" model running within the country of the company

KronisLV 4mo ago
> Deepseek has some models in Bedrock. Just looked into it, seems like at most they have just 3.2, not 4: https://aws.amazon.com/bedrock/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/bedrock/pricing/ Looking around their catalogue more, most of their models seem quite outdated, aside from the OpenAI and Anthropic ones (but those get more expensive). I wouldn't willingly pick Bedrock and would instead throw money at OpenRouter, that has both a bunch of providers, as well as almost any model for you to try.
- upcoming-sesame 4mo ago
  Azure AI Foundry has Deepseek 4

ceejayoz 4mo ago

Saner companies ask the same question about models from their own country too.

amunozo 4mo ago

You can run DeepSeek as it's open weights, unlike Claude or GPT.

rd 4mo ago

I wonder if I could start a US-based company with good data regulation and just serve open-weight models at a competitive price. I feel like the real barrier is just that most companies willing to adopt AI usage enough to make it worth it at this point don't want to be using inferior models.

tokioyoyo 4mo ago
Yes, you can. There are multiple inference providers out there. The problem is, it’s hard to beat the Chinese providers in cost. And you also have to compete with frontier model providers’ subsidized offerings.
- dakolli 4mo ago
  They charge the exact same prices. So many people in these comments have no idea what they're talking about. Even if they did charge less, nobody is going to deal with the latency of sending requests to China. edit: Actually American inference providers are cheaper for Chinese models. There's way more competition here because the Chinese aren't idiots and investing every last dollar they have into data centers for llms that don't make money..
  - RussianCow 4mo ago
    By "cost" I think the parent means the provider's own costs, not the cost of inference to the customer. The cost of land, labor, and electricity are significantly lower in China than in the US.
  - tokioyoyo 4mo ago
    Can you please link me DeepSeekV4 provider that's cheaper than their official offering? And not all tasks require low latency. Also, there are a lot of competition in China. Like a lot. You might know better than me as well, but although the biggest AI-labs are based in USA, the adoption is weirdly global. Like as a general sense of what's going on - you can see AI-related ads literally everywhere in Tokyo, almost all the time, in every single screen in public.
    - dakolli 4mo ago
      Deepseek's api platform for V4 Pro is the only example of this, and Deepseek V4 Flash is cheaper (usually) than from Deepseek itself on openrouter via DeepInfra. Deepseek shot themselves in the foot because they never intended to serve V4 Pro for .80c mm ouput, that was a promotional price that was meant to expire (and still might). They intended for v4 to cost $4.00 per million but Western inference providers drove down the price because they can operate at negative margins to try and push competition out. I can assure you they are losing a ton of money @ ~80cents. My point is, its Western inference providers that are establishing the floor price of inference. They are willing to operate at a loss in order to put their competition out of business. Chinese providers are typically at or above the prices set by American/western providers if you go looking on the Chinese internet. You aren't going to get deals from China for inference except through this one instance with Deepseek v4 Pro which wasn't even supposed to be permanent pricing.

eikenberry 4mo ago

Then don't use the cloud-based Chinese providers, use cloud-base US/EU providers using Chinese models. The interesting Chinese models are all open making this issue mostly moot.

daemin 4mo ago
A key point here is open in terms of being able to download and use it, not open as knowing what data and instructions were fed into it when training. A paranoid part of me thinks that these models are all inherently biased and instructed to be pro CCP, with specific gaps in their training data related to undesirable historic events and political ideas.
- therealdrag0 4mo ago
  Sure but that goes both ways. Any dataset has a bias. My coding doesn’t need to know about Tienamen square.
- viking123 4mo ago
  Applies both ways, ask it about Israel.
- gck1 4mo ago
  The same thing applies to US models. Check out various system prompt leak repos on github. There are also prompt injections by various parallel "alignment" models that pre-process the prompt before it's sent to the main one with questionable guidance. You'd be surprised how much of bias exists in easily extractable information. Now imagine how much of that happens during training, that you can't easily extract. So this is largely a moot point. Yes, Chinese models will likely have some weird things injected into them. But so do the US models. Do I care? Not in the slightest. Models are my code monkeys, and if the code leaves my machine, I assume IP is leaked be it a Chinese model that clearly tells me they do use the data, or US models that pinky promise they don't.

tmp10423288442 4mo ago

There are some objections here saying that some US firms are using Chinese AI providers, but I wonder if any of those are subject to compliance. Large firms that are disproportionately responsible for AI spending are all subject to compliance.

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

smoe 4mo ago

[dead]

HWR_14 4mo ago

Do you trust OpenAI with your code, data, PII? What makes you so sure it's not all part of the next training set anyway?