Interestingly enough your post finally motivated me to read the deepseek stories I was going to make time for later. Two interesting things of note, one from a BBC article and another from the associated press is that once the app hit app stores, the malicious efforts started too. Deepseek had to halt app registration, and their site had issues as well. The suggestion that deepseek is not really the result of an innovative person working around sanctions to use less expensive chips available in china is, speaking personally, naive. In fact that is a large part of the mayhem, how dare someone prove need not drop large wads of cash on our AI to make it work? for shame! for Shame! As for the not fully opensource, although one article I read hinted otherwise, my thought, speaking personally, is that the opensource nature may be the first door those unhappy with those well intended, but largely impossible to enforce limitations start hacking through. Right now, for example, if one asks deepseek about say Chinese human rights crimes, it politely tells you that it cannot answer the question. Little is known about how privacy is protected with the app, let alone how it basically thinks out loud to prevent the need for large piles of data. Granted, again speaking personally, I would not trust the objectivity of anyone from Meta <spelling> but that comment seems aimed to preach limits on regulation stateside on the AI industry. Just my limited coffee thoughts, Kare On Tue, 28 Jan 2025, Evan Leibovitch via talk wrote:
Hi all.
As I watch the stock market and geopolitical analysis melt down over the emergence of DeepSeek, I am reminded of a Linkedin (of all places) post by Meta's chief AI scientist.
Deepseek is not a triumph of Chinese innovation over US sanctions and unlimited capital. It's a triumph of open over closed models. It could not have existed without building on top of Llama and other open tools. it wrecks the pseudo-openness of OpenAI with something completely transparent.
Having said that, neither Llama nor DeepSeek is truly open source. The rub is limitations on use, disallowed by both the FSF Four Freedoms and the OSI Open Source Definition.
For DeepSeek, the code is under the MIT license, but the data may not be used:
- In any way that violates any applicable national or international law or regulation or infringes upon the lawful rights and interests of any third party; - For military use in any way; - For the purpose of exploiting, harming or attempting to exploit or harm minors in any way; - To generate or disseminate verifiably false information and/or content with the purpose of harming others; - To generate or disseminate inappropriate content subject to applicable regulatory requirements; - To generate or disseminate personal identifiable information without due authorization or for unreasonable use; - To defame, disparage or otherwise harass others; - For fully automated decision making that adversely impacts an individual’s legal rights or otherwise creates or modifies a binding, enforceable obligation; - For any use intended to or which has the effect of discriminating against or harming individuals or groups based on online or offline social behavior or known or predicted personal or personality characteristics; - To exploit any of the vulnerabilities of a specific group of persons based on their age, social, physical or mental characteristics, in order to materially distort the behavior of a person pertaining to that group in a manner that causes or is likely to cause that person or another person physical or psychological harm; - For any use intended to or which has the effect of discriminating against individuals or groups based on legally protected characteristics or categories. (from https://github.com/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-LLM/blob/HEAD/LICENSE-MODEL)
Now, some of these are pretty vague and a Chinese entity will have a hard time enforcing them internationally, but I think may people can live with these limitations. What do you think?
If Deepseek is successful it could break proprietary models. Could it break open source ones too?
-- Evan Leibovitch, Toronto Canada @evanleibovitch / @el56