alt Hacker NewsYou seem to severely overestimate the level of centralised command-and-control in China. It's not like every software company is going to the government for explicit sign-off of every open source release.
There is a pretty clear benefit to DeepSeek's reputation for all the other providers offering DeekSeek's open-weights model to have similar performance/benchmark scores.
In the past performance has varied wildly across inference providers, making this available should result in every inference provider implementing the same optimisations
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The other benefit is that as more of the stack is open sourced we can finally see just how cheaply these models can be served. Which in turn gives us insight into what the frontier labs might be doing.
That, and drive down prices everywhere.
That's true and the Chinese vendor market for most things is sufficiently decentralized that individual vendors do act with a lot of self-interest rather than government-interest, but it would strike me that a provider whose key operatives are travel-controlled by the government of the place they live in are not in that category. I imagine having your passports held by the Chinese government assists in alignment.
You underestimate it.
7% of Chinas total population are members of the CCP. 7%. So at DeepSeek there's a good few handfuls of them.
If you want to understand the impact of that, read up on reporting lines in the CCP.
Not every company needs sign-off from the government for an OSS release, but every OSS release is visible to the government.
I would assume DeepSeek is considered one of China's strategic assets and is therefore heavily policed.
> On October 16, 2026, the Ministry of Commerce and the Ministry of Science and Technology issued Announcement No. 48 of 2026, publicly solicited opinions on the revision of the China Export Prohibition and Export Restriction Technology Catalogue (hereinafter referred to as the Catalogue), and implemented temporary management measures for pre-export registration of relevant technologies. Recently, the spokesman of the Ministry of Commerce answered questions from reporters on relevant issues.
https://m.bjnews.com.cn/detail/1792137269129878.html
Apparently globally recognized top 10 models (so Deepseek 4.1 Flash and GLM 5.3 Flash) would have fallen under this export registration.