I always find it an illuminating experience about the power of mass propaganda every time I see an American believe they somewhat have the moral high ground over China, despite starting a new war somewhere around the globe either for petrol or on behalf of Israel every six months.

I don't see the issue. China hosts the alternatives or the only game in town for lots of technologies. China has every interest and right to create products. Not everything that comes out of China is some devious plan to do terrible things. It's people trying to make money just like you and me.

I am not washing away the authoritarianism, but take a look at other economic super powers directionality. Or that of tech ceos as well. At least Chinese tech companies aren't going around praising wwii Germany, writing manifestos, and bombing children at school or fisherman on whims. It is difficult not to see more countries regardless of leadership putting their hat in the ring as a net positive. Especially if it increases sustainability and lowers the price, which this very clearly does. It's even open source...

> Still not sure how I feel about China of all places to control the only alternative AI stack, but I guess it's better than leaving everything to the US alone.

Fully agree. From a US perspective, that sucks. For everyone else it's pretty great.

At this point the world's opinions of China are better than those of the US in some polls. One country invests and helps build infrastructure on a massive scale globally, the other alienates allies, causes countless conflicts, and openly threatens to end civilizations.

Indeed, even if one isn't partial to China, there's reasons to be glad that an increasingly hostile US has powerful competition.

> This is about who will dominate the world of tomorrow.

For this you'd need a technological moat. So far the forerunners have burned a lot of money with no moat in sight. Right now Europe is happy just contributing on research and doing the bare-minimum to maintain the know-how. Building a frontier model would be lobbing money into the incinerator for something that will be outdated tomorrow. European investors are too careful for that - and in this case seem to be right.

Moral stances aside, I'd argue it's healthy that the US gets competition from abroad. I appreciate the boost that the world is getting from China - infrastructure and construction projects are a huge benefit to economies. Their focus on green energy has caused a huge influx of affordable solar panels, home batteries, EVs, etcetera, helping reduce the dependency on fossil fuels - while the US and especially the other big money spenders in the middle east would rather the world remain fully dependent on them. But for the past years Europe and now Asia are feeling the pain from being overly reliant on that.

China's policies and government aren't morally defensible and I do fear that they will become more aggressive in spreading their influence and policies onto other countries, but from an economic standpoint what they're doing is super effective. While the previous world power (the US) is stuck in infighting and going through cycles of fixing/undoing the previous administration's damages, instead of planning ahead.

Thankfully, DeepSeek is the most open of the model providers.

And in the hardware side, RISC-V is gaining a lot of traction in China. So the dependency on a single supplier is lower with the Chinese tech stack than with most western options.

The important thing is that LLMs are well-dispersed and the technology is relative open, much more open than it could have been. Alternative worthwhile LLMs will emerge from Europe and other non-US western countries once the economic incentives are there.

You’re right… but that’s on the rest of the world not getting their shit together.

It’s this sort of example (and not properly supporting Ukraine, and not agreeing how to collectively deal with migrants, and not agreeing how to coordinate defence, and myriad other examples) that highlights what a pointless mess the EU is. It’s not a unified block - it’s 27 self-interested entities squabbling and playing petty power games, while totally failing to plan for the future with vision.

The EU could/should have ensured that a European equivalent to OpenAI or Anthropic could thrive, and had competitive frontier models already; instead, they’re years and countless billions behind.

> If China ever feels emboldened enough to go for Taiwan and the US descends into complete chaos, the rest of the world running on AI will be at the mercy of authoritarian regimes.

Alternative being the current reality and world being dominated by US. Let's ask people in Middle East/Asia/South America about how they feel about that. In this current day and age, how is this statement even relevant?

bold to think half the comments here arent from deepseek itself :)

I personally love the bit "us initiated tech war" lol. thats right, they started making AI its their fault! bad imperialist US !

yeah, v5 will do better

Competition with the Soviet Union gave all the workers in the world better conditions, also advances in science and technology... (And risk of mutual destruction ;)), even if the USSR wasn't good.

Mistral (a French company) shouldn’t be discounted.

China doesn't even care about Taiwan anymore, their saber-rattling about it is a convenient distraction while they quietly make it completely irrelevant in the next few years.

Not worse than having our stuff built there. Is it great to be relying on them? No, but at least more stable than US under Trump.

Isn’t Mistral close in the ballpark?

Come on... I was hoping that Mistral would do something and man that would be great as european but I hear NOTHING from them ever.

I don't know what the problem is. Are we europeans to stupid? Do we just not have enough money / VC money? Are we not proud enough?

:(