We should not care what Deepseek thinks about Tiananmen square

Don’t get me wrong, these are important issues. We all know to what lengths China goes to censor information and change the narrative. But Deepseek is not about that.

Last week, Deepseek released its most advanced model yet, the R1. Arguably the most advanced LLM model in the world - beating, if not matching Open AI’s O1 model. This sent shock waves through the tech industry.

Open AI has been almost bragging about the amount of investment they’ve been getting from, well, almost everyone. Microsoft, PwC, Thrive Capital, Nvidia and the list goes on and on. Recently, they even announced a $500 Billion (yes, with a B) Stargate coalition investment fund. No one in the history of tech companies got this amount of investment, this kind of support, and this level of attention. The US stock prices for all companies tied with Open AI also surged to the moon. Nvidia known for some of its advanced chips is the primary supplier to Open AI and other companies working on their own LLMs. Nvidia is also the biggest supplier of these chips to China. The US government has been limiting what chips Nvidia can sell to China so as to cripple China from advancing in their own AI frontiers. China winning the AI war would be a disaster to the US. And that’s not counting the loss of soft power over the world which the US currently flaunts with its tariff threats. China had to be slowed down even if it meant sanctioning them from buying the latest Nvidia chips.

Now imagine the shock the industry felt when a Chinese hedge fund named High-Flyer with AI research as a side project comes out of nowhere with one of the most powerful models in the world, beating the Open AI’s most advanced, O1 model in most benchmarks. According to some sources, it didn’t even cost $6 Million to build it. Deepseek’s reasoning model, the R1, employs some of the most groundbreaking technological breakthroughs to achieve this. The reasoning model employs Chain-of-Thought (COT) prompt engineering technique, Inference Time Compute scaling and many other state-of-the-art advancements to shift the perception of AI in almost every way. All this, for a fraction of the cost. Currently, Deepseek’s R1 model costs just 93% of the price of Open AIs latest O1 model. And that’s not even the best part.

Deepseek’s R1 model is Open Source. You can download the model and install it on almost anything and run it locally without it ever reaching out to the internet. There are instances of Deepseek running on Raspberry Pi. You can even host it on your phone if you want to. Imagine that, the world’s most powerful AI model is open source, spilling its secrets to everyone in the world. An embarrassment to Open AI, which is anything but Open. To make things worse, Deepseek’s app is currently No.1 in the app store. The stock market lost Billions over this news and rightfully so. This is not just a win for Deepseek. This is a win for open source; this is a win for anyone that thought you need billions of dollars to build something great.

Now, will all this context, with the understanding of why this is such a big deal and with the importance of the model being Open Source, we now know why Deepseek is such a big deal. Whoever hosts the model, makes the rules. So that’s exactly what Deepseek.com is. The website itself is hosted in China, abiding by China’s censorship policies and data mining rules. Of course it won’t talk about Tiananmen square, Taiwan, Tibet or any other geopolitical controversies involving China. Its not a surprise that a model hosted in China would be pro-china. Open AI is rightfully pro-american with its own set of sensorships and rules. Atleast with Deepseek, you can host the model on your own and viola no more Chinese censorship, or Chinese data tracking.

We need to see these LLMs for what they are - technological marvels. Judging them by their political beliefs is very primitive, almost childish. Deepseek’s open source model should be embraced and should be celebrated. Something our Americal friends can learn a thing or two instead of spending Billions on the next big thing.