US holds off blacklisting DeepSeek, more than 100 firms deemed security risks

The GamersNexus documentary (https://youtu.be/1H3xQaf7BFI) on the semi-underground GPU trade in China, while a little amateurish in terms of depth and general atmosphere, is an interesting watch and may answer some of your questions.

Basically, those export controls make GPUs more expensive for affected parties in China, but don't effectively stop them from being acquired or used over there.

"First published in 1997 to inform the public on entities involved in disseminating weapons of mass destruction, the list has since expanded to include entities that engaged in "activities sanctioned by the State Department and activities contrary to U.S. national security and/or foreign policy interests"

So RAM chip makers when there's a RAM shortage must be 'contrary to U.S. national security and/or foreign policy interests' i.e. the US government is trying to squeeze its citizens on RAM prices.

Nice.

Free markets generally only make sense when at the same scope of the ruling government. When country A can manipulate markets in ways that country B can't or won't, eventually country B will attempt to make trade rules that level the playing field.

Its also worth noting we don't really have free markets in the US anyway.

And those who enabled it (the leadership team at SuperMicro) were charged by the US [0] and Taiwan [1]

[0] - https://www.reuters.com/world/us-charges-three-people-with-c...

[1] - https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/taiwan-investigates...

They would be looking to do large scale espionage, whether it be corporate secrets or personal secrets. They know people just carelessly dump everything into the LLM to solve.(Yes, I am aware you can run their models locally/locally hosted, it's called soft power, look at endless glazing, it works).

China is an ethnonationalist authoritarian dictatorship. It wants the position in the world that the US has, sans the diversity and democracy. The party knows best and the Han are the purest. They're not a post-scarcity utopia sharing the promised vision of marxist communisn, but I suppose it's forgivable for thinking that if your only knowledge of China is "Well they give me AI for free!".

Canadian, and I also agree. It’s hard to avoid but I try not to use any American service or data storage.

I trust them as a cloud less than US but don't completely trust US.

Both China and the US can compel businesses to hand over data. There is no reason to trust any service that doesn't have strong built in privacy.

Same

As an American, I trust Chinese AI providers more than American.

The chinese providers are just the CCP. They don't even need a cloud act...

This is a commonly-repeated trope. Full of all the emotional zeal of AI Doomerism, but no accompanying evidence.

Just an anecdote,

I lived in China for a bit years ago and one the biggest issues accessing western websites weren't restrictions against the site. Most of the times the culprit was using CDNs or services from Google or Cloudflare which were restricted totally or partially.

I was working on a site around that time, learned about that fixed it for the chinese user base, after that users from china went up considerably.

Not sure if having point of presence (POP) managed DNS for China is of interest, but my company offers something for China traffic [0].

Disclosure: I’m an IBMer

[0] https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/ns1-connect?topic=started-manage...

CVS (drugstore chain) and Walgreens were among the first major U.S. merchants to accept Alipay via QR code payments, allowing Chinese consumers (and anyone with Alipay) to pay at these stores.

> The reason why some Capital Interests want to blacklist DeepSeek in the US is so that you are forced to buy Claude/GPT/Gemini, which will feed revenue into an industry that requires revenue (or it’s a big problem).

It sounds right, but I see zero evidence of this. I think you underestimate how many people in the current administration are True Believers. This does not, to me, seem like anything to do with Big Capital, but rather "America over China".

if you look at share of industry profits, currently most of AI profits are captured by NVIDIA and cloud providers

banning deepseek/open weight models will allow Ant/OAI jack up prices and extract more profits for themselves

keeping open weights models available will keep current industry profit distribution where majority is captured by nvidia and cloud providers

and it would be great to have an independent auditor have access to all the training material and good search tools, so that take down requests can be made by copyright owners

Ever see a tiktok about may 35?

> But also a financial one

china's advantage is manufacturing capacity. giving away the model is a loss leader for the hardware business. they have a big gap on chip manufacturing. the only way to close that is by developing more efficient software. an open ecosystem is the best way to accelerate innovation of software development. since they are behind the US on model capabilities they aren't really losing anything by making the models open weights and being open about the performance enhancements techniques. but the open weights models are not necessarily what are running on the platforms or what they have internally. deepseek released v4 on their platform about a month before the open weights release, which I would guess was done to expose it to adversarial testing, so they could fine tune the removal of capabilities from the open weights model. (but i may very well be wrong)

> It's quite impressive how the latest years I have found more and more to empathize with China than many of the western counterparts.

I'm not sure that this is because China is suddenly a great place or political system so much as a reflection of many western nations speed running to autocracy in the name of manliness.

Also, the open-weight local models are proving that the commodity can be delivered for most applications at a far lower price than frontier is charging.

An excellent example of Poe’s law. I can’t imagine what kind of Western person would hold such a cognitively dissonant view of globalism, for example.

realisticaly, the united states has no right or moral authority when it comes to human rights or rule of law given the last few years. given that, the admonishment of china's human rights violations against uighurs run hollow and hypocritical.

just happy to have more models that I could eventually play with if hardware ever becomes cheaper.

I think you’re assigning magnanimity to a competitor that is lagging behind and has every, state backed incentive to capture the market the only way they can. By making the models dirt cheap to access. If the roles were reversed you wouldn’t see open source versions of Chinese models. Much like you don’t see them open sourcing their blade battery design.

>> Politically they believe AI belongs to humanity

It’s really BS. Comunist China Party is mostly interested in control above all. Forget humanity, human rights, what is good or what is bad or even financials. The most important thing to them is to keep the people on a short leash. Of course once they feel they have that under control they think about the “humanity” stuff as well but that’s just extra.

> there is no free market here whatsoever. The fact that BYD's cost structure is what it is is the direct result of Chinese industrial policy.

Aside from countless other ways before and after this, the US government handed over tens of billions of dollars in cash to GM and Chrysler in 2008 and 2009.

Perhaps the U.S should change its industrial policy as well so that it can be competitive on the global market? To me it’s been clear that the car manufacturers both in the US and Europe were just milking their customers every year with a facelift as a reason to sell the same old car. I am glad that a 3rd player is in the market to challenge the “heritage” tax.

Don’t worry about the free market. China will definitely agree to free market terms after it captures the market like the U.S did and Britain before it. Then enforce strict free market rules and strict IP rules.

Why do people say this? You can get a Shanghai-made Tesla Model 3 with CATL batteries in the US yet somehow, if a Chinese car, made with Chinese components in Chinese factories were to enter the market, the would spell doom for the entire US auto industry.

The US is primarily powered by oil and natural gas, has massive domestic capacity, and locked in supply all over the Americas. China has a completely different energy mix and they move from a position of competitive disadvantage on ICE cars to competitive advantage on electric. Rapid electrification for China is all win, but for the US and our partners in the oil business, it would mean stranding trillions in capital investments that still have decades to run, so it just isn't going to happen.

This is absolutely true. Remember that automakers greatly contributed to war efforts in the past. It is an indispensable domestic industry, just as much as energy.

Then there is the issue that BYD cars are presumably connected to servers in China and most probably backdoored. They are too much of a security risk. I would absolutely not drive such a car, without permanently disabling the onboard cellular modem.

> The reason we can't buy BYD cars is because if we allowed it without restrictions, it would utterly and completely destroy the United States auto industry. That's terrible public policy, and we should not allow it.

Yeah, that was the argument against Japanese car makers, too.

A shitty system needs destroying sometimes. Competition from Toyota/Honda was critical in making US auto makers up their game.

It is terrible public policy to fall decades behind making expensive shitty versions of what the rest of the world has.

You can just copy the chinese playbook and allow entry if you are willing to hand over ip.

it would destroy it, but then new more competent US automakers would pop up, similar to tesla.

US Big Three are simply full of incompetent boomers who want to maintain monopoly using tariffs, chicken tax, and banning of competitors that actively harm consumers.

Suddenly US government thinks that capitalism and free market is not desirable... huh

> The Chinese don't make these kinds of idiotic mistakes, which is how they have amassed the power, wealth, and influence that they have.

I generally agree with most of what you said but not this. China's chief advantage is having a billion people. On average, they aren't that wealthy or powerful. And their leadership makes plenty of idiotic mistakes - look at their real estate market.

That's 100% untrue lmao.

Is the idea that we're just one OTA update from them turning into bombs? Considering the quality of software in the auto industry, I would be about as worried about any domestically assembled EV.

> potentially fire-making (battery firmware) computers on wheels

Is Tesla any different?

What makes BYD different from, say, Volvo, which sells EVs freely in the US?

It’s a fairly liquid global market. I find it hard to believe that DRAM manufacturers will be able to sustain a premium if prices drop ex-US.

Opus said to me once without any poking at it something like, "Help Grok understand it better". Makes me wonder if they are all cross-pollinated to an extent.

Translated:

Prompt: Hello! Introduce yourself in one sentence.

Response: Hello! I'm *ChatGPT*, an AI assistant developed by OpenAI, dedicated to answering questions, providing information, and helping solve various problems. How can I help you?

"illicit" is throwing shade, but Anthropic can decide not to answer those questions if they don't want to. Plenty of companies don't sell to their competitors

It could also mean a TOS violation / breach of contract.

(To be clear, I find the complaint hilariously hypocritical.)

Illicit isn’t just a synonym for illegal.

It can mean “forbidden by laws, rules, or established moral customs”

So it can be illicit and legal.

This doesn't at all change the irony of big AI labs complaining about Chinese startups stealing the labs' IP, essentially by scraping the responses.

HN has a higher proportion of AI promoters than AI skeptics, and for a good while, the default response to complaints from book authors, bloggers, and other content creators was that "you put it on the internet so it's fair game", or "it's no different from a human learning from your works". So yeah, unless we're willing to revise these answers, I think the same "tough luck" reasoning should apply here.

For folks who are at Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, or Google, and think it's fundamentally different, I would ask you to think long and hard about that answer.

I like Ant, but also I support the tit-for-tat competition. In the best interest of consumers.

why? Just because you have that opinion deoesn't mean people shouldn't do it

Actually in competition it means exactly that.

Oh course it does, why wouldn't it work this way in regards to computer science?

Are we seriously going to go back to a time where numbers were considered munitions?

Buy access to the open models from a single US vendor like https://fireworks.ai

One company, multiple models, Fireworks is the fasts at making the models available (had GLM-5.2 before the other three we are evaluating)

Because they siphon off data to US intelligence, and if you claim they don't, you couldn't possibly know because the CLOUD Act can mandate them to do so without telling you or allowing you to admit it. Of course, if you're in the US this doesn't matter but for the rest of the world it does.

did you just came out of under a rock? lol

Or that time that we parked an army on the Rio Grande because a bunch of people from the US decided to settle in the Mexican territory of Texas? That was a whole thing and the President of the US at the time, James K. Polk, ran on a platform of "Manifest Destiny" -- that the US should span "from sea to shining sea." There were a whole host of other countries with interest in that territory, not to mention the Indian tribes who would be displaced by that policy. The US has had a lot of dark periods in our history, and we shouldn't let those periods displace us from the moral certainty we derive from the Declaration of Independence and things like The Bill of Rights.

Yes, because we weren't an empire then. At the time Trump befouled our country, Pax Americana was a thing. We have voluntarily walked back from that position of moral and strategic leadership.

In that regard, history offers few precedents to learn from. Most countries have to be physically attacked to suffer the kind of damage that American voters are inflicting on themselves.

It is very possible that Trump and his cronies are just too incompetent to do that. In this one particular aspect (i.e. open source) I prefer having a stupid enemy than a "smart" enemy.

> Chinese models first of all can be hosted on your own hardware, I'd argue they are way more transparent than US companies, by well releasing stuff.

US-based companies release open-source models too. Gemma and Granite, for example.

I wonder about your last point. Certainly there's an aspect of education that Asia values more, however by the US own metrics, they are number 1 in terms of education outcomes.

Not sure I'd go that far but I do use them almost exclusively for my coding on the basis that it is an acceptable trade-off. Far cheaper and my shitty apps are really not that valuable as training data