It's like AMD open-sourcing FSR or Meta open-sourcing Llama. It's good for us, but it's nothing more than a situational and temporary alignment of self-interest with the public good. When the tables turn (they become the best instead of 4th best, or AMD develops the best upscaler, etc), the decision that aligns with self-interest will change, and people will start complaining that they've lost their moral compass.
I hope it does, though I'm doubtful because distribution is important. You can't beat "ChatGPT" as a brand in laypeople's minds (unless perhaps you give them a massive "Temu: Shop Like A Billionaire" commercial campaign).
Closed source AI is almost by design morphing into an industrial, infrastructure-heavy rocket science that commoners can't keep up with. The companies pushing it are building an industry we can't participate or share in. They're cordoning off areas of tech and staking ground for themselves. It's placing a steep fence around tech.
I hope every such closed source AI effort is met with equivalent open source and that the investments made into closed AI go to zero.
The most likely outcome is that Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic win and every other "lab"-shaped company dies an expensive death. RunwayML spent hundreds of millions and they're barely noticeable now.
These open source models hasten the deaths of the second tier also-ran companies. As much as I hope for dents in the big three, I'm doubtful.
I can’t think of a single company I’ve worked with as a consultant that I could convince to use DeepSeek because of its ties with China even if I explained that it was hosted on AWS and none of the information would go to China.
Even when the technical people understood that, it would be too much of a political quagmire within their company when it became known to the higher ups. It just isn’t worth the political capital.
They would feel the same way about using xAI or maybe even Facebook models.
Airbnb has ~$12 bn annual revenue, and is a counterexample to the idea that no companies can be "convinced to use DeepSeek".
The fact that it's customer service means it's dealing with text entered by customers, which has privacy and other consequences.
So no, it's not "pretty inconsequential". Many more companies fit a profile like that than whatever arbitrary criteria you might have in mind for "consequential".
This is the real cause. At the enterprise level, trust outweighs cost. My company hires agencies and consultants who provide the same advice as our internal team; this is not to imply that our internal team is incorrect; rather, there is credibility that if something goes wrong, the decision consequences can be shifted, and there is a reason why companies continue to hire the same four consulting firms. It's trust, whether it's real or perceived.
2020 - I was a mid level (L5) cloud consultant at AWS with only two years of total AWS experience and that was only at a small startup before then. Yet every customer took my (what in hindsight might not have been the best) advice all of the time without questioning it as long as it met their business goals. Just because I had @amazon.com as my email address.
Late 2023 - I was the subject matter expert in a niche of a niche in AWS that the customer focused on and it was still almost impossible to get someone to listen to a consultant from a shitty third rate consulting company.
2025 - I left the shitty consulting company last year after only a year and now work for one with a much better reputation and I have a better title “staff consultant”. I also play the game and be sure to mention that I’m former “AWS ProServe” when I’m doing introductions. Now people listen to me again.
Children do the same thing intuitively: parents continually complain that their children don't listen to them. But as soon as someone else tells them to "cover their nose", "chew with their mouth closed", "don't run with scissors", whatever, they listen and integrate that guidance into their behavior. What's harder to observe is all the external guidance they get that they don't integrate until their parents tell them. It's internal vs external validation.
Or in many cases they go over to their grandparents house and they let them run wild and all of the sudden your parents have “McDonald’s money” for their grandkids when they never had it for you.
Is a “cheaper” service going to come along and upend Google or Facebook?
I’m not saying this to insult the technical capabilities of Uber. But it doesn’t have the economics that most tech companies have - high fixed costs and very low marginal costs. Uber has high marginal costs saving a little on inference isn’t going to make a difference.
All the American cars (Ford, Chevrolet, GM...) are much cheaper in Europe than eg. German cars from their trifecta (and other Europe-made high end vehicles from eg Sweden, Italy or UK), and on par with mid-priced vehicles from the likes of Hyundai, Kia, Mazda...
Obviously, some US brands do not compete on price, but other than maybe Jeep and Tesla, those have a small market penetration.
> I can’t think of a single major US company that is big internationally that is competing on price.
All the clouds compete on price. Do you really think it is that differentiated? Google, Amazon and Microsoft all offer special deals to sign big companies up and globally too.
I worked inside AWS consulting department for 3 years (AWS ProServe) and now I work as a staff consultant for a 3rd AWS partner. I have been on enough sales calls, seen enough go to market training materials and flown out to customers sites to know how these things work. AWS has never tried to compete as the “low cost leader”. Marketing 101 says you never want to compete on price if you can avoid it.
Microsoft doesn’t compete on price. Their major competitive advantage is Big Enterprise is already big into Microsoft and it’s much easier to get them to come onto Azure. They compete on price only when it comes to making Windows workloads Bd SQL Server cheaper than running on other providers.
AWS is the default choice for legacy reasons and it definitely has services an offerings that Google doesn’t have. I have never once been on a sales call where the sales person emphasizes that AWS is cheaper.
As far as GCP, they are so bad at evterprise sales, we never really looked at them as serious competition.
Sure AWS will throw credits in for migrations and professional services both internally and for third party partners. But no CFO is going to look at just the short term credits.
> AWS has never tried to compete as the “low cost leader”. Marketing 101 says you never want to compete on price if you can avoid it.
Despite all that and whatever you say, the fact is you do compete. It doesn't have to be a race to the bottom.
So Cloudfront free tier and the latest discount bundles etc aren't to compete? People have also negotiated private pricing way below list price and a lot cheaper than competitors.
Similarly was the Dynamodb price cuts not due to competition?
I am well aware that Netflix doesn’t pay the same price for AWS services that “Joe Bob’s Fish Tackle and WordPress shop”. All big companies give discounts to large companies as part of negotiations which is different from “we are the low cost leader”.
All technology gets cheaper over time. There is a difference between lowering price in response to competitors and finding the profit maximizing price based on supply and demand.
AWS was lowering prices to increase demand before GCP and Azure were a thing.
Jassy said right before he became CEO of Amazon and he was still over AWS that only 5% of IT spend was on any cloud provider. They are capturing non consumption and marketing value of AWS vs that.
While I don’t have any insider experience about Azure, looking on the outside, I would think that Azure’s go to market is also not competing against AWS on price, but trying to get on prem customers on Azure.
If the Chinese model becomes better than competitors, these worries will suddenly disappear. Also, there are plenty startups and enterprises that are running fine-tuned versions of different OS models.
And most startups are just doing prompt engineering that will never go anywhere. The big companies will just throw a couple of developers at the feature and add it to their existing business.
Big enterprise with mostly private companies as their clients? Lol, yeah, that’s how they work from my personal experience. The reality is, if it’s not a tech-first enterprise and already outsource part of tech to a shop outside of NA (which is almost majority at this point), they will do absolutely everything to cut the costs.
I spent three years working in consulting mostly in public sector and education and the last two working with startups to mid size commercial interest and a couple of financial institutions.
Before that I spent 6 years working between 3 companies in health care in a tech lead role. I’m 100% sure that any of those companies would I have immediately questioned my judgment for suggesting DeepSeek if had been a thing.
Absolutely none of them would ever have touched DeepSeek.
I've worked with financial services, and insurance providers that would have done the opposite for cost saving measures. So, I'm not sure what to say here.
Financial Services are far more risk averse first than they are cost cutting, they literally have risk departments.
If you'd spent anytime working at one for swe you won't have access to popular open source frameworks, let alone Chinese LLMs. The LLM development is mostly occurring through collaborations with the regional LLM businesses or internal labs.
In various sectors, you need to be able to explain why you/your-system did what it did. Exchange Act Rule 15c3-5 is probably the most relevant in financial circles:
Note: I am neither a lawyer nor in financial circles, but I do have an interest in the effects of market design and regulation as we get into a more deeply automated space.
You still choose your model. I’m no more going to say “I’m using Bedrock” without being more specific than I would say “I’m using RDS” without specifying the database.
No… Nobody I work for will touch these models. The fear is real that they have been poisoned or have some underlying bomb. Plus y’know, they’re produced by China, so they would never make it past a review board in most mega enterprises IME.
I work at a F50 company and Deepseek is one of the model that has been approved for use. Took them a bit to get it all in place but it's certainly being used in Megacorps.
People say that, but everyone, including enterprises, are constantly buying Chinese tech one way or another because of cost/quality ratio. There’s a tipping point in any excel file where risks don’t make sense, if the cost is 20x for the same quality.
Of course you’ll always have exceptions (government, military and etc.), but for private, winner will take it all.
The xenaphobia is still very much there. Chinese tech is sanitized through Taiwanese middlemen (Foxconn, Asus, Acer etc). If you try to use Chinese tech or funding directly you will have a lot of pushback from VCs, financial institutions and business partners. China is the boogieman
What Chinese built infrastructure tech where information can be exfiltrated or cause any real damage are American companies buying? Chinese communication tech is for the most part not allowed in any American technology.
80% of the parts in iPhones are manufactured in China, and they have completely and utterly dominated in Enterprise (Ever heard of someone using a Blackberry in 2025? Me neither.) so there’s one example.
The software is made by Apple. Hardware can’t magically intercept communications and the manufacturing is done mostly in Taiwan. If Apple doesn’t have a process to protect its operating system from supply chain attacks, it would be derelict
Hardware can do any "magic" software can, which should be obvious since software runs on it. It's just not as cost-effective to modify it after shipping, which is why the tech sector is moving to more sw less hw (simplified, ofc, there are other reasons).
Enterprise hardware isn’t the issue. It’s the software. How much enterprise hardware is running with Chinese software? The US basically bans any hardware with Chinese software that can disrupt infrastructure.
Backdoors in software are much easier to discover than backdoors in hardware.
Any kind of hardware that is somehow connected to the wired or wireless communication interfaces is much more dangerous than any software.
Backdoors embedded in such hardware devices may be impossible to identify before being activated by the reception of some "magic" signals from outside.
I don't know that it's actually prohibited. There is no Chinese telecommunications equipment allowed, no Huawei or Bytedance, but nothing prohibiting software merely being developed in China, not yet at least.
Although I did just check what regions AWS bedrock support Deepseek and their govcloud regions do not, so that's a good reason not to use it. Still, on prem on a segmented network, following CMMC, probably permissable
There’s nuance and debate about the 110 level 2 controls without bringing Chinese tech in to the picture. I’d love to be a fly on the wall in that meeting lol.
> I can’t think of a single company I’ve worked with as a consultant that I could convince to use DeepSeek because of its ties with China even if I explained that it was hosted on AWS and none of the information would go to China.
Well for non-American companies, you have the choice between Chinese models that don't send data home, and American ones that do, with both countries being more or less equally threatening.
I think if Mistral can just stay close enough to the race it will win many customers by not doing anything.
This is how crazy and nationalistic people are getting. I'm an American citizen, though I am critical of the US government, and have no allegiances to China. What do you think America is doing to every country, even allies (which has been highly publicized)? Why would a country being constantly attacked by American intelligence and propaganda not want to counter that?
American intelligence has penetrated most information systems and at least as of 10 years ago, was leading all other nations in the level of sophistication and capability. Read Edward Snowden.
Moralizing through whataboutism does not logically follow in disproving the China threat narrative, it is axiomatic that what matters is what they are doing to us, not what we are doing to them from that vantage.
Rather, I'd say it speaks more about how deranged the post-snowden/anti-neocon figures have become, from critiquing creeping authoritarianism to functionality acting at the behest of an even more authoritarian regime. The funny thing is that behavior of deflection, moralizing and whataboutism is exactly the kind of behavior nationalists employ, not addressing arguments head on like the so-called "American nationalists".
The average person has been programmed to be distrustful of open source in general, thinking it is inferior quality or in service of some ulterior motive
Europe has Mistral. It feels that governments that can do things without fax take this as a sovereignity thing and roll their own or have their provider in their jurisdiction.
Where does the software come from? Your iPhone can’t magically intercept communications and send it to China without the embedded software. If Apple can’t verify the integrity of its operating system before it is installed on iPhones. There are some huge issues.
Even if China did manage to embed software on the iPhone in Taiwan, it would soon hopefully be wiped since you usually end up updating the OS anyway as soon as you activate it.
The hardware can always contain undetectable sub-devices that can magically intercept anything with no possibility for the software to detect this.
You should remember that all iPhones had for several years an undetected hardware backdoor, until a couple of years ago, when independent researchers have found it and reported the Apple bugs as CVEs, so Apple was forced to fix the vulnerabilities.
The hardware backdoor consisted in the fact that writing some magic values to some supposedly unused addresses allowed the bypassing of all memory protections. The backdoor is likely to have consisted in some memory test registers, which are used during manufacturing, but which should be disabled before shipping the phone to customers, which Apple had not done.
This hardware backdoor, coupled with some bugs in a few Apple system libraries, allowed the knowledgeable attackers to send remotely an invisible message to the iPhone, which was able to take complete control over the iPhone, allowing the attacker to read any file and to record from cameras and microphones. A reboot of the iPhone removed the remote control, but then the attacker would immediately send another invisible message, regaining control.
There was no way to detect that the iPhone was remotely controlled. The backdoor was discovered only externally in the firewalls of a company, because the iPhones generated a suspiciously high amount of Internet traffic, without apparent causes.
This has been widely reported at the time and discussed on HN, but some people continue to be not aware about how little you can trust even major companies like Apple to deliver the right hardware.
The identity of the attackers who exploited this Apple hardware backdoor has not been revealed, but it is likely that they had needed the cooperation of Apple insiders, at least for access to secret Apple documentation, if not for intentionally ensuring that the hardware backdoor remained open.
Thus the fact that Apple publishes only incomplete technical documentation has helped only the attackers, allowing them to remain undiscovered for many years, against the interests of the Apple customers. Had the specifications of the test registers been public, someone would have quickly discovered that they had remained unprotected after production.
Therefore, for many years the iPhones of certain valuable targets had magically intercepted all their communications and they have sent them to an unknown country (due to the nature of some of the identified targets and the amount of resources required to carry the attacks, it has been speculated that the country could have been Israel, but no public evidence exists; a US TLA is the main plausible alternative, as some targets were Russians).
The argument was that you couldn’t trust American designed hardware running American designed software because it was built in China. All theories suggest that the security vulnerabilities were caused by Apple and had nothing to do with Chinese manufacturers
on what hypothetical grounds would you be more meaningfully able to sue the american maker of a self-hosted statistical language model that you select your own runtime sampling parameters for after random subtle security vulnerabilities came out the other side when you asked it for very secure code?
put another way, how do you propose to tell this subtle nefarious chinese sabotage you baselessly imply to be commonplace from the very real limitations of this technology in the first place?
the mechanism of action for that attack appears to be reading from poisoned snippets on stackoverflow or a similar site, which to my mind is an excellent example of why it seems like it would be difficult to retroactively pin "insecure code came out of my model" on the evil communist base weights of the model in question
"Baselessly" - I'm sorry but realpolitik is plenty of basis. China is a geopolitical adversary of both the EU and the US. And China will be the first to admit this, btw.
The EU isn’t a state and has no military or police. As such the EU’s existence is an anecdotal answer to your question in itself: Reliance on (in particular maritime) trade. And yes, China also benefits from trade, but as opposed to democracies (in which the general populace to a greater extent are keys to power) the state does not require trade to sustain itself in the same way.
This makes EU countries more reliable partners for cooperation than China. The same goes for the US from an European perspective, and even with everything going on over there it is still not remotely close.
All states are fundamentally adversaries because they have conflicting interests. To your point however, adversaries do indeed cooperate all the time.
sorry, is your contention here "spurious accusations don't require evidence when aimed at designated state enemies"? because it feels uncharitably rude to infer that's what you meant to say here, but i struggle to parse this in a different way where you say something more reasonable.
> It is US warmongering ideology that tries to equate these concepts
Please don't engage in political battle here, including singling out a country for this kind of criticism. No matter how right you are or feel you are, it inevitably leads to geopolitical flamewar, which has happened here.
Please don't be snarky or condescending in HN comments. From the guidelines: Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
That is just objectively incorrect, and fundamentally misunderstanding the basics of statehood. China, the US, and any other local monopoly on force would absolutely take any chance they could get to extend their influence and diminish the others. That is they are acting rationally to at minimum maximise the probability they are able to maintain their current monopolies on force.
Several of your comments in this subthread have broken the guidelines. The guidelines ask us not to use HN for political/ideological battle and to "assume good faith". They ask us to "be kind", "eschew flamebait", and ask that "comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less as a topic gets more divisive."
The topic itself, like any topic, is fine to discuss here, but care must be taken to discuss it in a de-escalatory way. The words you use and the way you use them matter.
Most importantly, it's not OK to write "it is however entirely reasonable to assume that the comment I replied to was made entirely in bad faith". That's a swipe and a personal attack that, as the guidelines ask, should be edited out.
Can you, by any chance, delete my account? I have tried to do so before but it is not possible through the GUI. And I see you are associated with HN.
Other than that let's be very clear that there was no personal attack. You left out the part where I explain why I think the comment was made in bad faith. I.e. the part that makes it not a personal attack. And a part which I, upon request, elaborated on in the same comment tree.
And yes I am a moderator and it's my role to prevent flamewars and to encourage everyone to raise the standard of discourse here. In my comment I was trying to convey that multiple comments of yours were crossing too far into political battle and personal attack, and here are the main instances:
> That is just objectively incorrect, and fundamentally misunderstanding the basics of statehood
This counts as a personal swipe, and as fulminating.
> It is however entirely reasonable to assume that the comment I replied to was made entirely in bad faith
People can be mistaken or wrong, or just of a different opinion/assessment, without acting “entirely in bad faith”.
> "Baselessly" - I'm sorry but realpolitik is plenty of basis. China is a geopolitical adversary of both the EU and the US. And China will be the first to admit this, btw.
This is phrased in a snarky way.
The points you've made are fine to make, but the way you make them matters. Snarkiness, swipes, put-downs, accusations of bad faith (giving your reason "why" you think it was in bad faith doesn't make it OK) are all clearly against the guidelines.
I can accept that you didn't mean to break the guidelines, which is why I've politely asked you to familiarise yourself with them and try harder to follow them in future. It's a request not a scolding. It's not necessary to announce you want to quit HN in protest. (Though of course, eventually we would rather people leave if they prefer not to follow the guidelines.) Just making an effort to respect the guidelines and the HN community would be great.
The deletion request was completely unrelated. I just don’t like the interaction gamification. Thanks!
I have not made a single personal swipe in this entire comment tree. I have stated (implied) that certain views are not consistent with a cursory introduction to the topic at hand.
I absolutely assumed a basic familiarity with the concept of a state from a comment on the relationship between states. That is good faith and basic respect for the human you are conversing with as I view it.
Overall, I have kept a tone I would prefer be kept towards myself; fake politeness is just condescending.
That being said: Your site, your rules, and your power to arbitrarily interpret and enforce said rules. I.e., message received, regardless of my thoughts on your interpretation of events.
> Overall, I have kept a tone I would prefer be kept towards myself; fake politeness is just condescending.
We don't want you to be fake. We just want you to make the effort to share your perspective in a way that is kind and is conducive to curious conversation, which is HN's primary objective. We know it can be hard to get this right when commenting on the internet. It's common for people to underestimate how hostile their words can come across to others, when they seem just like reasonable, matter-of-fact statements when formulated in one's own mind.
> That being said: Your site, your rules, and your power to arbitrarily interpret and enforce said rules
That's not really it. The community holds the power here; when we try to override broad community sentiment and expectations, the community pushes back forcefully.
Your comments got my attention because they were attracting flags and downvotes from the community, and from looking at these comments and earlier ones in your feed, my assessment is "yes, I can see why". (We don't let community sentiment, or "mob rule" win out all the time; we often override flags if we think they're unfair, but in your case, given the pattern we observe over time, we think the community's response is reasonable.)
Isn’t every country by definition a “local monopoly on force”? Sweden and Norway have their own militaries and police forces and neither would take kindly to an invasion from the other. By your definition this makes them adversaries or enemies.
Exactly. I am Norwegian myself, and I don’t even know how many wars we have had with Sweden and Denmark.
If you are getting at the fact that it is sometimes beneficial for adversaries to collaborate (e.g., the prisoner dilemma) then I agree. And indeed, both Norway and Sweden would be completely lost if they declared war on the other tomorrow. But it doesn’t change the fundamental nature of the relationship.
