不要相信 DeepSeek R1 的炒作
Don't believe the Deepseek R1 hype. You might understand business and tech, but unless you understand the CCP, you are walking into a trap.
Recently the tech world was suddenly alarmed by the release of Deepseek R1, an LLM that is open source, currently free to use, and appears to significantly outperform existing models on some tasks. LLMs are complex machines and on any given day one model might take the lead over another given a particular task. This game of "leap frog" has been in progress for several years now. Although LLMs are designed to simulate generalized thinking, they inevitably vary in competence at a given task based on the amount of relevant training data they have seen and the extent to which they have been fine-tuned on it. The result is that each LLM will perform differently when given a certain task such as medical diagnosis or coding challenge. And it has long been the case that an LLM built to specialize at a task will significantly outperform a general one.
When R1 came out there were reports and screenshots proclaiming that it was significantly better than existing models at some tasks. While this may be true, it would not be a surprise given the speed of the development cycle in this space. In addition, more measured and objective comparisons suggest that the model is indeed comparable to those released by Anthropic and OpenAI, but not necessarily significantly better.
I have seen what many are saying about this model, and while it does seem to bring some iterative improvements to known LLM architecture, you will find that almost all of the shock and disbelief centers around a few points:
– First, the claim has been circulating that the entire system was built with only about $6 million USD. This is almost certainly a bald-faced lie. Models take months to train, requiring substantial compute, energy, and personnel. While some costs are cheap in China, energy and compute certainly are not. Top talent is not free, either. You can never expect a Chinese company to be transparent and show you their books––in fact, you can count on them to do just the opposite. Chinese companies, unlike Western companies, are integrated with the Chinese government. Thus, there is really no such thing as a "Chinese company," and there is only such thing as a "Chinese Communist Party company".
– Second, some have now questioned the efficacy of microchip export controls as it is presumed that DeepSeek was able to acquire many advanced chips despite these controls. But this just a demonstration that there are loopholes that need to be closed. If enforced properly, export restrictions will continue to become more effective over time as loopholes are found and addressed, and as new generations of lithography machines and microchips are developed under the auspices of the new restrictions. Even if these chips were acquired illegally, the CCP's narrative is that the chip restrictions are pointless and ineffective. This is a bluff intended to call into question the need for chip restrictions.
– Third, R1 is currently topping the charts in the app store, and it is free to use. Any normal company shipping an LLM product would need to compete in the free market to acquire users, earn revenue, and convince investors of the company's future value. But any Chinese company that is competing directly with the West for technological supremacy and enjoys the support provided by the CCP need not worry about such things. We can presume that DeepSeek R1 is not free, but that the CCP is paying the bill. Why would they do that? Subsidizing a free LLM that is competitive with Claude and ChatGPT bolsters the narrative that China is a leading innovator, calls into question the efficacy of export controls, earns the goodwill of a Western user base, and directly puts pressure on Western companies who are competing within a purely free market context. Not to mention the enormous amounts of sensitive data that will be reaped by the CCP as people voluntarily provide it with their personal data and information.
Far from being a leader in AI, China lags very far behind. The deep learning revolution is built on the work of Western scientists. Companies like Google, Meta and OpenAI paid steep R&D costs to create these technologies, whereas DeepSeek merely builds on those open source models. China has yet to produce a foundational breakthrough in AI, and DeepSeek R1 is unlikely to be an exception. Instead, China’s AI strategy relies on repurposing open-source Western research, scaling it rapidly with state funding, and leveraging stolen IP to accelerate progress.
DeepSeek R1 should be a wakeup call to Western business and policy makers. We need to double down on export restrictions and close whatever loopholes Chinese companies are using to sidestep them. Countries that cannot stop these chips from being sent to China should also be added to the export restriction list. In addition, US Congress should act immediately to protect the financial interests of the US companies that created this technology before unfair competition robs them of the ability to continue innovating.
Our collective meltdown at this Chinese stunt is playing right into the CCP propaganda game. We must stop interpreting China’s companies through a Western lens. Unlike firms in a free market, Chinese tech companies operate as extensions of the CCP’s strategic goals.
In the AI race, the US has a significant lead over any competitor. But we are indeed in a brutal race for technological supremacy. The first country to get and deploy AGI might be able to choose the future path for all of humanity. If this technology is first realized by an autocratic and Orwellian dystopia like China, I dare not even imagine what that means for our future. We must do whatever it takes to maintain our lead and ensure that the future of AI—and ultimately, technological supremacy—remains in the hands of the free world.