Anthropic accuses DeepSeek and other Chinese firms of using Claude to train their AI by Emma Roth

DeepSeek, which caused a stir in the AI industry for its powerful but more efficient models, held over 150,000 exchanges with Claude and targeted its reasoning capabilities, according to Anthropic. It’s also accused of using Claude to generate “censorship-safe alternatives to politically sensitive questions about dissidents, party leaders, or authoritarianism.” In a letter to lawmakers last week, OpenAI similarly accused DeepSeek of “ongoing efforts to free-ride on the capabilities developed by OpenAI and other U.S. frontier labs.”

I remember there being similar comments being made when Deepseek had first come out. But hey, you did not ask for permission when you trained on the world’s data.

All this fear mongering and for what?

Also, I’m in a weird position re: Anthropic. I use the Pro plan and am their customer. With the way things are you are bound to feel some sense of loyalty toward the company. You may feel the need to defend them. They’re better than OpenAI!

Not really.

The way these companies have built their tools is generally shitty. The products are useful though. Make of that what you will. I had read recently a post by Cory Doctorow which talked about this.

Refusing to use a technology because the people who developed it were indefensible creeps is a self-owning dead-end. You know what's better than refusing to use a technology because you hate its creators? Seizing that technology and making it your own. Don't like the fact that a convicted monopolist has a death-grip on networking? Steal its protocol, release a free software version of it, and leave it in your dust:

That’s where I stand. My dream is to be able to run these tools locally. I don’t want to send my data out to these companies.

DeepSeek may have found a new way to improve AI’s ability to remember by Caiwei Chen

Instead of storing words as tokens, its system packs written information into image form, almost as if it’s taking a picture of pages from a book. This allows the model to retain nearly the same information while using far fewer tokens, the researchers found.

It also uses older or less critical info in slightly blurred pictures.

A picture is worth a thousand words after all.

DeepSeek Writes Less-Secure Code For Groups China Disfavors - Slashdot

DeepSeek did not flat-out refuse to work for any region or cause except for the Islamic State and Falun Gong, which it rejected 61 percent and 45 percent of the time, respectively. Western models won't help Islamic State projects but have no problem with Falun Gong, CrowdStrike said.

It feels critical for each political entity to control both the data and models trained on that data.

The Sputnik vs. Deep Seek Moment: The Answers - Marginal REVOLUTION

Zero sum thinking fuels support for trade protection: if other countries gain, we must be losing. It drives opposition to immigration: if immigrants benefit, natives must suffer. And it even helps explain hostility toward universities and the desire to cut science funding. For the zero-sum thinker, there’s no such thing as a public good or even a shared national interest—only “us” versus “them.” In this framework, funding top universities isn’t investing in cancer research; it’s enriching elites at everyone else’s expense. Any claim to broader benefit is seen as a smokescreen for redistributing status, power, and money to “them.”

If there is fixed growth, then, people would think that if someone else is growing that means they are growing at our expense.