Open Source as it gets in this space, top notch developer documentation, and prices insanely low, while delivering frontier model capabilities. So basically, this is from hackers to hackers. Loving it!
Also, note that there's zero CUDA dependency. It runs entirely on Huawei chips. In other words, Chinese ecosystem has delivered a complete AI stack. Like it or not, that's a big news. But what's there not to like when monopolies break down?
As a Brit I'm here for it to be honest, I'm tired of America with everything that's going on.
China is not perfect but a bit of competition is healthy and needed
The funniest thing is how Americans have been fooled with this stuff.
This version of AI is mostly taking a public paper from 2017, investing in GPUs, and feeding it as much data as possible. So with a few computer scientists, no respect for intellectual property, and tons of money to burn, you have all the ingredients to create this technology.
Sam Altman and friends did it, as did the Chinese. The difference is that the Americans have been hyping it up to the extreme with all these dramatic scenarios about what would happen if someone else got its hands on it.
The Chinese made it public, among other things to show how fragile this is as a business and as a large part of the US stock market
Jensen Huang said this in his recent interview - that China has the best/most engineers, it has the chip making ability, it's a good thing they wanna build on a Nvidia stack - but if you push them they will build on an all Chinese stack - but the interviewer was being a numb head who kept parroting the propaganda of Western tech supremacy
Let's see how long it takes before the big US AI companies start lobbying to outright ban use of Chinese AI, even the open source / local models. For "national security" reasons, of course.
Does the 'zero CUDA dependency' also count for running it on my own device? I have an AMD card, older model. Would love to have a small version of this running for coding purposes.
Really nice to see the Chinese are competing this strongly with the rest of the world. Competition is always nice for the end-consumer.
As a Chinese, I feel tiered, it's like the cold war, what is takes to keep competitive with every aspect, it's just another win for the country and the corp
"Open Source" is the ultimate romance understood by software engineers.
I can't find any info on what exactly is open sourced.
And in any case what does open source actually mean for an llm? It's not like you can look inside it to see what it's doing.
> Also, note that there's zero CUDA dependency.
So does this mean I can run this on AMD? And on a consumer 9000 series card?
not a full AI stack. Training still runs on NVIDIA chips.
I sometimes wonder if there are any security risks with using Chinese LLMs. Is there?
My guess is Chinese govt is going to mandate that labs switch all future training and inference to Huawei. DeepSeek has shown it's possible. Once they are done, the rest of the world is going to be buying Huawei! I for one can't wait for a cheap Huawei GPU!
Jensen was saying this in that interview last week and the interviewer dismissed it.
It's also not fake open source like Metas models - https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1-0528, the weights are actually under a real open source license, (MIT), see https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1-0528
Sorry, but exactly where did you get the idea that DS V4 runs entirely on Huawei?
I asked DS itself and it denied this. It says: 'Nvidia chips are absolutely used for DeepSeek V4. The reality is a pragmatic "both-and" strategy, not an "either-or."'
And based on the DS V4 technical report (https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4-Pro/blob/main...), it is mentioned that:
We validated the fine-grained EP scheme on both NVIDIA GPUs and HUAWEI Ascend NPUs platforms. Compared against strong non-fused baselines, it achieves 1.50 ~ 1.73× speedup for general inference workloads, and up to 1.96× for latency-sensitive scenarios such as RL rollouts and high-speed agent serving.
(In all honesty I relied on DS to give me the above, so I haven't vetted the information in full.)It mentions that Nvidia is still used. It doesn't even mention that Huawei chips are used in production — only in testing and validation, yes.
The incredible arrogance and hybris of the American initiated tech war - it is just a beautiful thing to see it slowly fall apart.
The US-China contest aside - it is in the application layer llms will show their value. There the field, with llm commoditization and no clear monopolies, is wide open.
There was a point in time where it looked like llms would the domain of a single well guarded monopoly - that would have been a very dark world. Luckily we are not there now and there is plenty of grounds for optimism.