DeepSeek AI raises national security concerns, U.S. officials say
DeepSeek AI raises national security concerns, U.S. officials say
Lawmakers and experts say China's DeepSeek AI app could expose U.S. users to risks and promote censorship.
Summary:
The launch of Chinese AI application DeepSeek in the U.S. has raised national security concerns among officials, lawmakers, and cybersecurity experts. The app quickly became the most downloaded on Apple's store, disrupting Wall Street and causing a record 17% drop in Nvidia's stock. The White House announced an investigation into the potential risks, with some lawmakers calling for stricter export controls to prevent China from leveraging U.S. technology.
Beyond economic impact, experts warn DeepSeek may pose significant data security risks, as Chinese law allows government access to company-held data. Unlike TikTok, which stores U.S. data on Oracle servers, DeepSeek operates directly from China, collecting personal user information. The app also exhibits censorship, blocking content on politically sensitive topics like Tiananmen Square. Some analysts argue that, as an open-source model, DeepSeek may not be as concerning as TikTok, but critics worry its widespread adoption could advance China’s influence through curated information control.
Of course it's a national security threat, it's just more proof that the US economy is just a giant ponzi scheme.
If China can do it better on a budget of $6m in 18 months with low end equipment, then why does it take an American company 10 years, half a trillion dollars, and the entire nation's supply of high-end graphics cards?
The model isn’t afaik. I.e., if you download one of the models and run it locally. It’s the app with folks pasting proprietary, company secret, etc data into it.
Really, it’s the same problem as with ChatGPT, but now an organization in another country has your data. I guess we’ll see if our new techno bro overlords try to use this to their advantage across the board to limit competition, even from local processing.
Taking bets.
I just find it amusing how when proprietary data/company secrets/whatever are being sent to openAI it's a matter of "that was irresponsible don't let it happen again" but some guy in Kentucky isn't able to get a detailed description of Tiananmen Square from the US perspective without a little effort and it's the end of national security as we know it.
Same with the tiktok ban. How many classified military secrets do we think some regular dude in a trailer in Alabama really has on his phone?
"National Security" in the US is literally just code for rich people's bank accounts at this point.
No data is sent to servers if you run it locally.
You can download the model.
If you download the app, though, yes thats going to their servers.
China built it in cave, with a box of scraps!
First time you do something is always harder. OpenAI just didn't think it was 1000x harder and thought they'd have more time to cash in.
Myself, I think that being able to throw billions of dollars at hardware, and their focus on next-quarter results discouraged them from putting in the human effort to analyze and optimize their process. It turns out there were some fantastic optimizations to do.
MVP in Technology. OpenAI just sat around throwing salt to the wind piling up "value" until they can convince people it is worth some obscene amount of money to sell out. Once you give someone a literal milestone and show them the path, boom.
This really really feels like a real life Tortoise and the Hare story. Like real hard, and I don't feel the least bit bad for the hare.
oh yeah, not denying that the prototype will be more expensive and resource intensive than following versions, but the whole "US overspends on novel technology, China blows that technology out of the water and shows this tech is both accessible and affordable, US bans Chinese product because American companies don't want to compete" shtick is just getting old
Distilling OpenAI and Llama models probably also helped quite a bit
Although I must admit, that the architectural changes are pretty cool
but I have to add, that I've just started reading into the topic a few weeks ago and don't really have any real practical experience, besides checking out some huggingface docs I got linked yesterday and stupid me hasn't thought about looking there...
So everything I say is probably bullshit o:-)Sure it made the training process faster, but this still takes a fraction of the energy to generate a single output compared to other LLMs like ChatGPT or Llama. Plus it's open source. You can't discredit a technological advancement for building upon previous advancement, especially when doing so with transparency.
Deepseek used distillation, which is a way of extracting training information from other models through querying the model. In other words, some of the advances came from examining OpenAI’s models. Being first is hardest and took brute force.
Not that America doesn’t have its own problem. But what do the suicide prevention nets looks like at your office. Because they’re everywhere in china because of shitty working conditions. This is how they do shit so cheap.
Let's also remember that "U.S. officials" now describes MAGA flunkies that replaced actually qualified professionals.
This is just so fun to watch.
America: "Executive order now! No US person is allowed to help the Chinese develop these technologies! We will imprison you traitor!"
China: "OK. We'll just develop it ourselves." DeepSeek enters the chat
America: "Fuck! National security emergency!"
NOOOOOOOOO
MYY YACHT MONEYYYYYYYY
If it's open source and can be hosted locally, I don't think there are issues with national security in this case.
There is money to be lost though. Always follow the money.
You did something cheaper quicker and it's more efficient it must be bad the US
National security, anti-terrorism, protecting children.
The trifecta of reasons given for abolishing freedoms
And the first two reasons are not even legitimate in theory. Nationalism is a plague destroying the planet. "Terrorism" is a fake word reserved for enemies of the state.
US needs to be a lot more transparent about all these concerns. It's starting to feel like shouting wolf.
It's open source. Trying to block it is futile now lmao
"No! Ban GitHub! It hosts the code of our adversaries! And while we're at it, ban the internet!" —Plutocrats, probably.
as Chinese law allows government access to company-held data.
... Kind of exactly like how US law allows government access to company-held data?
With a warrant. Main difference is the Chinese govt has no such roadblocks.
Most corporations will hand over the data without question whenever the government asks without a warrant.
Snowden is in exile because he proved that this is not the case. My understanding is they are not supposed to do that with domestic, but data don’t care about that and agencies spying on citizens knew that, and snatched it all up once they left us soils, up in the air, bounced overseas, all justification to spy without a warrant. Nothing has changed
This is a decent read concerning the effectiveness of the systems designed to prevent abuse.
Oh no! Anyway….
When you're living in the imperial core violently genociding the planet to make a quick buck, of course everything is a security concern and opportunity for the MIC to profit.
As we just lost any sort of moral high ground, ok. 2 years ago maybe I'd be worried. 9 years ago I'd definitely have been worried. Today, the enemy of my enemy is my ally.
It's better than our usa tech, sir!
Quick, mark it as a security threat!
If they're limiting focus to the Chinese app then they're noir wrong. If they mean the whole model then they're full of crap.
Other then the experts, whom ever they are, the rest have no clue
Good. Perhaps while all the idiots are busy devising a "plan" to address this, those evil brain leave everyone else alone.
Are we really doing this again?
Hahahahahahahaha, manufactured consent in full throttle here. Hahahahahaha
*plays the world's smallest violin
Us Corpo got daddy Sam to come protect them from the bad chinaman
Pathetic... Sam altman defrauded microshit, they deserve each other
Weaselly little liars.
Deepseek released the model and showed how they made it. You can run it locally. It doesn't connect to the internet.
Pretty sure they are talking about the app, not the model.
That's the first prong of attack... Low hanging fruit.
Attacking OS model will be a lot harder and less value.
But make no mistake, this is about the model being better haha
The veil.... it has been lifted.
While the calls from Moolenaar could be the first inkling of a possible congressional crackdown, Ross Burley — a co-founder of the nonprofit Centre for Information Resilience — warned that DeepSeek's emergence in the U.S. raises data security and privacy issues for users.
Yeah, because it's just soooo much better to have American plutocrats slurping up our data without consent and getting to do whatever they want with impunity. /s
"What they'll use it for is behavior change campaigns, disinformation campaigns, for really targeted messaging as to what Western audiences like, what they do," he added.
Yeah, because it's just soooo much better to have American plutocrats doing every single one of those things and more in the name of Profit. /s
Our leaders are hilariously tone-deaf.
It's open source so why not just take the best parts of it and run it themselves if it is such a worry instead of relying on their app and website.
it's not fully open source. it comes with binary blobs you can't build from the source
They're pissy cause it being open source and more efficient means that it's gonna be more cost effective for people to use. Which is real bad if your company overcommitted to the slop and needs to recover losses.
This.
I can easily see the national security argument for people sending queries to CCP-controlled servers (unfortunately people put all kinds of sensitive information into prompts).
Whether people like it or not, that is potentially risky. I don't know if China has blocked OpenAI-hosted stuff, but I wouldn't be surprised if they have for similar reasons. If they haven't, they should consider it.
But attempting any bans the model itself, even when ran locally, would be conclusive evidence that they're doing it just to harm a competitor.
it's not fully open souce tho.
it comes with binary blobs you can't build from the source.
I do wonder why do they bother with pretences like this. Would Americans not buy „hey, we’re going to do to Chinese companies what they have been doing to ours for years now”?
B/c USA has already been doing the same stuff for years now.
Which Chinese tech company was forced to sell majority stock to a US domestic business before? I’ve only heard of TikTok which was also deemed national security issue recently.
It sets bad precedent that the owner class doesn't like.
Either way US government will need to either nationalize or break up these mega corps. This can't go on.
This thing has bipartisan support, local business support and seems to be supported by wider general public thanks to scare tactics and lobbying from Meta. I understand that Democrats conditioned their voters to ignore things they agree on with Republicans but they’re not in charge anymore. It’s like the whole country went on a carnival ride, got stuck and are now trapped in this weird loop.
Lolol.
They can ban it but I will just go use seekdeep instead :|
The cope is absolutely unreal.
It's not, but I wish it was.