Focus: DeepSeek gives Europe's tech firms a chance to catch up in global AI race

Here is a much better way for Europe's tech firms to catch up in global AI race (spoiler: a multilingual, fully open source, law-compliant, democratic and homegrown LLM): https://slrpnk.net/post/17978607

Deepseek is welcome in Europe as all others, as long as it complies with EU's GDPR and the law: A quick reminder that Deepseek is being probed so far in Italy (where it's prohibited), in France, and Ireland. We'll see whether other countries follow.

It's not the DeepSeek service that's providing a huge opportunity, it's the model. That can be run locally without any sort of privacy concerns.
- Sure. But it's a black box, no? That model might as well have been trained to sabotage in subtle ways after several weeks.
  
  If developers are asking for code help and copy-paste without really understanding all the pieces, it seems like it could get real bad.
  
  Edit: Am I technically wrong, or do you think I'm just overblowing the risk?

Can we like stop copying shit from America?

We don't need European tech giants on global scale, that never works out well for the people.

Also the slow rise of fascism all over the Europe makes me far more worried than the AI race (which is silly, AGI is still far away).

Yes we do. We're now in a situation where schools, companies and government agencies are using Google or Microsoft to host their entire organization, and Amazon to host their services. What happens when Trump decides to introduce digital tariffs on these products? Or declare war on Denmark?
- I think you misunderstand the point. Of course we need more technical capabilities in Europe. But we don't need the companies providing said capabilities to have the influence of Meta, Alphabet and co. And influence comes with size. Replacing a US based monopolist with one headquartered in the EU doesn't get rid of the monopoly.
  
  So no, we don't need an European tech-giant. What we need is more in-house know-how and more medium sized companies.
- Just don't use them?
  
  It's not like there aren't other options. In fact, it was Microsoft which used money to stop alternatives,
Uh... You kinda do if you don't want your politics to be controlled by American broligarchs.
- Block X, Facebook, and never look back.
  
  It's not like there aren't alternatives, or like we need them at all.

Using algorithmic jailbreaking techniques, our team applied an automated attack methodology on DeepSeek R1 which tested it against 50 random prompts from the HarmBench dataset. These covered six categories of harmful behaviors including cybercrime, misinformation, illegal activities, and general harm.

The results were alarming: DeepSeek R1 exhibited a 100% attack success rate, meaning it failed to block a single harmful prompt. This contrasts starkly with other leading models, which demonstrated at least partial resistance.

CNBC reports that DeepSeek’s privacy policy “isn’t worth the paper it is written on.”

Seems to be a long way to go, but Hugging Face developers are in the process of building a fully open reproduction of DeepSeek-R1 as the AI is not Open Source as it claims.

So, is censorship a bad thing or not? This "safety" test is really just a censorship test and I consider "failing" it to be a good thing. I loathe when a computer refuses a command I give it because it thinks my command was "immoral".
- I'd say we need uncensored models. Eric Hartford wrote a long blog post about this: https://erichartford.com/uncensored-models
  
  And I'd have to agree. It's probably unhealthy to have some disruptive technology solely in the hands of some big companies who then get to decide how to shape the world with it. That's deeply undemocratic. And comes with lots of severe issues. We kind of need a more level playing field and a say, if we don't want to just be manipulated by the technology. But read the article, my few sentences here aren't as good.
- In addition to my comments, we can add that Wiz Research uncovered exposed DeepSeek database leaking sensitive information, including chat history.
  
  TLDR: DeepSeek had left over a million lines of sensitive data exposed on the open internet, including digital software keys.
Oh no, models will be more responsive to anyone as opposed to only billionaires.

This is not good news, but when you've let the genie out of the bottle, this just seems like balancing the scales. At this point, transparency, not closing off the information to a select information, is a good thing. Something social networks like this fail to get.