Wait, people actually pay for DeepSeek?
replyThe $20/month Claude Code plan has incredibly low rate limits. $20/month of DeepSeek usage buys you a lot. Even more so in hobby projects where usage is bursty, not nicely distributed over a work week
replyI mean paying for deepseek is sending money to China, and any company in China is pretty much an extension of the CCP (or can become one at the snap of their fingers). I don't think this is much better or worse than the American AI companies.
replyIf that's a concern, an easy alternative is using companies like novita or fireworks.ai to run open source chinese models. They are incredibly price competitive, have strict data retention policies, and in general are quite fast. Also, you don't get used to a model and suddenly get rug pulled when the provider decide to upgrade.
replyDeepseek is much cheaper so that means you spend less on CCP than on Anthropic/OpenAI. Then there are third party providers as well.
replyIt's a testament to how much American companies have been fucking over their own reputations that people would view them as not "better or worse" than an extension of the CCP.
replyA decade ago, just that kind of comparison would've been pretty unthinkable.
I mean, Deepseek is open model, it can be rehosted in the US by anyone, there’s no royalty to china
replyDeepseek proper is the only provider offering Deepseek V4 Pro at such an insanely low price. All the other providers are like 5x.
replyIf someone says they're using Deepseek, it's probably a safe bet that they're sending money to China. People choose an inferior model (Deepseek) because it's cheaper. Not many people are willing to use Deepseek but also pay the 5x price to have an American company run it for them.
>...sending money to China...
replyHave you seen the trade deficit lately?
Not binary, but the parent was talking about OpenAI vs Anthropic.
replyHm, Altman vs China. Peculiar choice.
replyAnd honestly, DeepSeek is an excellent model.
replyI am having a better experience using DeepSeek than using Anthropic.