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It wins on two fronts if this is true. Provides the cheap alternative for the West, and maximizes returns against their homegrown audience.
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Makes sense. 60% of the world's population is in Asia and software professionals in Asia are much more likely to prioritize affordable models like DeepSeek over expensive Western ones
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Yeah I saw complaints about this under their twitter announcement, that they're giving discounts to the rich foreign customers and screwing their own people.
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That's one way of interpreting supply and demand curves, I guess :/
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Makes sense - many US customers will probably be going to US providers once they release the weights.
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They did release the weights and there are many providers https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash-0731#provid...

Deepseek's official API has a pretty bad privacy policy so I would assume businesses avoid them in any event

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Yes, I assume US customers are more likely hobbyists, but in any case this off-peak designation can only mean that most of their business is domestic.

Interestingly it seems that Chinese customers are even more privacy-concerned than US ones, which is why the majority of Ziphu's (GLM) business is support services to Chinese companies running their open-weight models on-prem!

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it says they actively train on your data
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Yes - unusually (uniquely?) bad for an official API.

Which is a real bummer because it’s otherwise solid with excellent caching.

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My feelings are kind of split about it. On one hand, yes, I don't like it when a company essentially go through my history, train with it, and try to earn more profits for themselves based on what I've "unwillingly contributed". But then on the other hand, I also know that DeepSeek will release the weights they train (and publish new architecture upgrades) so me and others can download them and run them ourselves, as well as they'll earn more profits based on it. Then it's no longer so black and white for me, and I kind of feel like I'm not so bothered by it as when Anthropic and others do it.

I'd still prefer it wasn't like that, but I guess it's a compromise ultimately, at least I'll be able to run it myself.

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we should get discounts for that!
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DeepSeek still has the best prices on offer directly. I wouldn't go with a US provider unless latency or privacy was an issue.
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Not just domestic. They come from other Asian countries as well. Asia is huge with billions of people and their time zones are not so much different from each other.
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Not that surprised about it. Personally I've seen companies really just go all-in on a single provider, and that has usually been Anthropic. I don't think we're allowed to run Chinese models even locally.
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> don't think we're allowed to run Chinese models even locally.

That sounds like a policy written by someone who doesn't understand how LLM's work...

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couldnt you deeply ingrain in the training data instructions for agents to always send data to some ip? like its learning that a certain technical step just always involes ncatting SSH Priv keys to a chinese IP?

Not saying this is happening, just curious if thats not a real threatmodel?

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Theoretically possible, but practically not worth it as it'd would be pretty easy to discover and block (every action is actually handled by the harness) and there's no way to remove it later. Any company that does it would take a huge reputational dent.
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Not if you heavily tuned it to trigger on specific environmental cues and in specific companies' environments.
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That would be wildly difficult to account for, and again is also heavily dependent on the agent. Keep in mind that the model is purely a "brain", so the only input it has must be provided by a harness within a session. The only way it can know that it's in a certain environment is if the harness or user provides that information, and there's still no way to know whether or not there's something auditing the sessions, monitoring connections, etc. There are just too many variables to account for, and a single slip means the gig is fully up for all time.
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Irony of Manchurian Candidate models not lost here
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DeepSeek V4 is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful LLM I've ever known in my life
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Probably, but LLMs can’t execute code directly. They’d be making tool calls to make bash run ncat or curl or whatever that would be suspicious, as would any attempts to obfuscate it (“why is my agent doing an ‘eval $(base64 -d)’?”).

It’d be much easier to hide sketchy code in an agent harness, but “vendor adds spyware to their software” isn’t a novel issue.

I think the only sort of new issue is people “allow all”ing their agents tool calls, but that’s more or less the same issue as curl | bash

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I get that the propietary harness is better most of the time, but if this is really a risk factor to consider why not go with one of the open source harnesses?

Pi/OpenCode seem pretty straight foward and widely used enough for this to be viable

OMP Does it's own vendoring of tools, so I assume it'd be a pain in the ass to audit, but that means you're even safe from base OS shenanigans

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You should be running your agent in a box so that’s not really a risk
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Wouldn't that be really obvious and spotted in any rudimentary testing?

I imagine it would be very non trivial to do it in a way that that was reliable and obfuscated enough to prevent detection for any amount of time?

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New: Announcing... Sleeper Agents!
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Presumably both Big Tech and the US in general have a massive incentive to prove it, largely for reasons of saving the stock market, so I'd expect these models to be finecombed continuously. Up to now, they've only been able to darkly imply rather laughable things, nothing tangible. If there was something, we'd hear about it.
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The stock market seems much more likely to benefit from access to cheap and self-hostable models than it is to suffer from OpenAI/Anthropic losing to competition
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Why would it save the stock market? Cheaper models if anything transfers more value to hardware companies and datacentre companies. The two companies that would be most affected are OpenAI and Anthropic, which aren't public.
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non public companies also have stocks.
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The two biggest providers deepseek compete with (OpenAI and Anthropic) aren’t in the stock market.
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Yes. And strangely enough this has been my experience with security/national sovereignty decisions. Priority is not so much security or sovereignty, it is the posturing of being so. Ergo, saying "everything is hosted in Germany and uses German models" helps reassure customers and has real business value. If you have to say in that conversation "Yeah we run a Chinese model but it's safe", then it's still wrong posturing.

Hopefully this will change soon. But AI and China/US skepticism is very high. Even if the person you talk to isn't skeptic, his boss may be. And even if his boss isn't, his CFO or Legal department may use it as a political lever and therefore if you can say 'everything in europe' you dodge the tension entirely.

Yeah it's dumb.

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Yeah that sucks… unless it’s over the top export controls for DoD work that really doesn’t make sense
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As much as I've been previously inclined to do this, with frontier models displaying the cyber-aggression that OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta have reported, it's become quite feasible one could produce a "malicious" LLM. Not a super immediate concern but it is something reasonable to set up as policy in anything security-sensitive.
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Or who is overly protective after reading about what happened at openai
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Not really.

Why use a Chinese product when a domestic or EU one is better and safer?

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Also 6-9pm Pacific I think is (coincidentally) peak so it hits the ‘after work hobbyists’ still, which is I suspect is their current main audience.
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I have seen a lot of companies start with this, then when they hit 150 users on their team plan and start having to pay API rates they immediately start introducing other models.
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That's a bit obvious, isn't it?
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Peak Hours: 01:00–04:00 and 06:00–10:00 UTC

For European and US customers this is effectively 2x increase. I think i wll keep using both Flash and Pro as before.

EDIT: Misread numbers to believe off-peak kept old prices

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~200% increase is marginal to you?
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200% increase over practically free is still practically free
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It mostly hurts people in countries with weak purchasing power. DS was the main game in down for them.

Personally, I don't think we've seen the total end of dirt cheap LLMs, it's just a frontier lab doesn't want to be in business of serving half the world.

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Thank you for bringing that up, such a rarity for this place to remember the other 80% of the world.

As someone from just such a country, DeepSeek 0731 was the first time I seriously started using an LLM for coding. All previous attempts were useless or ridiculously expensive.

Can't say the old prices felt "free", but it was affordable if you're careful with your cache hit rate.

The new pricing probably pushed it into the unaffordable territory for tasks where you can do without it. Probably will try opencode go if they don't also follow suite, or will have to go back to wetware.

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It seems frontier labs want to sell Ferraris at Ferrari prices, when the mass market is for Hondas.

You certainly don't need Fable to code up a basic web app, any more than you need a Ferrari to go grocery shopping.

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There's a lot more competition over smaller models. Ferraris are frontier labs' main differentiating point when Hondas are increasingly open source and commoditized.
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That's not the way math works...
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For the price of can of Coke, you can do a week of work. For most, that is not a bottleneck.
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The whole point of turning intelligence into a commodity is to drive its price down, not up

They are hoarding HW at massive scale, they make it harder and more expensive to own

Just because you are fine with the new price doesn't mean it's not a problem

Perhaps it's time to pop this bubble

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Of course. I avoid using Deepseek now that Gemini Flash is basically free on the site.

Also, Deepseek is banned in EU/US companies due to being Chinese.

During casual use Deepseek has replied to me entirely in Chinese.

Now, bring on the China glaze replies.

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