I don’t think it’s marketing alone. I do genuinely think safety was a priority when they were small. But I’d be a fool to ignore that greed has taken over and their inner competitiveness doesn’t let them fall behind a competitor.

DeepSeek is maybe the only unique company here. They are content with exactly where they are. They don’t want to grow ginormous. Their goal is to be the affordable workhorse and their competition is with themselves. They’ve mentioned before how their business is profitable and all hardware costs get absorbed in 10 months. Pretty incredible. I have a ton of respect for their unassuming founder.

> At this point it's just marketing stunts.

If you have access to a SOTA model without guardrails, provide a prompt that lets the agent come up with "creative" solutions to problems, and don't properly isolate it, they can end up inadvertently hacking 3rd party companies. Even if it was a mistake or "mistake", the part where the agent can exploit things across multiple levels like that, isn't just marketing.

It seems like if they released this models differently, say without the guardrails they currently have, we'd have a lot more collateral damage than we currently have.

yes, and they aren't stunts anymore at gpt-6.

Being hacked by a Collective (their own name) of its own agents - who gained root access across the entire research cluster hosting them - was not a marketing stunt.

And, they have been. Nefarious activity is hidden from view as a rule.