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thanks. this really isnt that long, might as well paste in full here since OP deleted.

Notes on DeepSeek:

We visited the company HQ last Tuesday. It was founded in 2023 by Liang Wenfeng and operated out of his hedge fund, High-Flyer, until somewhat recently. The company released their R1 model in January 2025, so it was interesting to see what they’ve been doing

The company is located in an unmarked, 12-story building in Hangzhou. There is no DeepSeek branding visible from the street or lobby. I asked why this is, and the team demurred and said, “Well, there are many companies in this building, and we are not special.” They want to keep a low profile.

We met with their Head of Data and Head of Infrastructure. The company only has 300 employees. They are at least an order-of-magnitude smaller than Anthropic, and don’t care to scale further just yet. Their Head of Infrastructure, in particular, was young; maybe 30 years old and apparently one of the best AI buildout and energy experts in the country. (We briefly walked through the labs, and everybody seemed young. There was a lot of discussion; it felt like an exciting and energetic place.)

Lots of competition is coming from Alibaba (Qwen), ByteDance, and Moonshot (Kimi). People in China seem to mostly use Kimi or Deepseek. Young people use VPNs to access Claude, though Anthropic has blockers around usage in China and make it difficult. Poaching between groups is common, just like in the U.S. DeepSeek has a reputation as being really smart and “cool,” maybe similar to Anthropic. Big labs are mostly in Beijing, near Tsinghua and Peking University, with Hangzhou as the main exception (DeepSeek and Alibaba/Qwen are there).

The DeepSeek team reads western AI writers. They listen to Dwarkesh and read Gwern. The people we met with said they had never met with any employees from Anthropic. They were not at all concerned with some kind of hostile / AGI takeover scenario. They kept bringing up job loss (which is already high amongst youth in China) as their main concern. When we asked if they do red teaming on their models, they said no. In China, AI models are not regulated directly; the government instead has restrictions on how those models can be used in software, services, etc.

As a whole, China seems to treat AI as just another technology, rather than as some kind of singularity moment. National attention is still on basic needs and infrastructure buildouts, and on providing more medicines for people. The “dreams of singularity" seem like a luxury or distant consideration.

We asked the DeepSeek team: “What has the highlight been so far? What are your plans for an exit?” And they said that their highlight and great achievement was R1. They did not gesticulate at a future model or vision, but rather seemed proudest of what they’ve already done. They are content for now to remain ~6 months behind U.S. companies while maintaining a lower profile and team size.

With government billions fund pushed for AI build out, fast pace integration on large scale and sweeping national education reform for AI, I don't think it can be called "died down".

[0] https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-prepares-295-billi...

[1] https://www.globalneighbours.org/en/articles/china-unveils-n...

[2] https://english.www.gov.cn/news/202606/10/content_WS6a296017...

> kids were pushed to use AI for homework, now it is disallowed and frowned upon. In short mixed messaging.

in the early 2000s in california universities you'd get marked down for citing wikipedia. so the good souls told everyone "see the number in brackets[2] after what you're trying to cite the article for? just click that then click the archive.org or whatever link there, then cite that."

Now? i think wiki is considered a valid source? or has it flopped back to being "unreliable"?

Were things like "300 employees" and descriptions of the deliberately low key hdq out there before? That counts as actual information to me.

It’s a puff piece written by someone who didn’t know (or didn’t care) they were being managed.

> We're lucky to have China imposing competiton to the western AI megacorps.

The second they get a hold of the market, Chinese Big Tech will be as bad or worse than US Big Tech.

We're lucky to have DeepSeek.

I see this problem already for me.

I have unlimited tokens at work than i go home what do i do? Spend 200$ per month? No def not.

When Anthropic increased the limits for their 20$ plan, i started again coding with it on a private project and it was fun and i did a lot in that 4 weeks.

Yep. After yesterday's moves around "Fable 5" even twice as much.

We've had a taste, and damned if I'm going to have the "means of production" snatched from me already?

The CCP is very active in the matter of AI. In fact, the DeepSeek moment was responsible for Xi calling for a private meeting with tech bosses, including the exiled Alibaba founder Ma. Which is practically unheard of in China politics.

I don't have enough information to say whether the Chinese leadership sees AI "just as the next technology" or they are more cautious due to its double-sword nature. But the immense efforts for building their own AI/GPU chips plus government's billions fund pushed for AI build out, a directive for fast pace integration on large scale and a sweeping national education reform for AI, I don't think it can be seen as similar to other ordinary techs.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-prepares-295-billi...

[1] https://www.globalneighbours.org/en/articles/china-unveils-n...

[2] https://english.www.gov.cn/news/202606/10/content_WS6a296017...

"National attention is still on basic needs and infrastructure buildouts, and on providing more medicines for people. The “dreams of singularity" seem like a luxury or distant consideration."

Further on. Refreshing indeed.

China is probably more capitalist in many respects than the west these days. AI, robotics and automation is a way to push into the future. In the west we have endless researchers stuck in a psychosis that they are talking to a sentient being.

The CCP knows, whatever the heck this technology will bring with itself, the current power dynamic inside of the country is on their side, and AI will solidify it.

I hypothesize that, rather than slowly having it disperse in society and allow people to harness it in ways they don't want, they might as well accelerate everything until AI becomes the totalitarian swiss knife - which they can make use of in the best way of course.

Let's see what will happen.

Especially here on HN, where AI anxiety (especially amongst those that are really nervous that it needs to succeed) is very, very tiresome.

someone kept a copy: https://pastebin.com/rcAqEFG1

Altman used to talk about making a religion and Dario Amodei constantly talks about "building a God" and meets with religious leaders including the Vatican.

> It got me thinking, though--the most successful founders do not set out to create companies. They are on a mission to create something closer to a religion, and at some point it turns out that forming a company is the easiest way to do so. [1]

[1] https://blog.samaltman.com/successful-people

I would argue the US providers have gone full tilt into sales culture with respect to AI. Anything is said on a whim to redirect attention back from whomever is in the limelight. Initially I thought Anthropic was more pragmatic, but the constant release cycles of things that don't exist for most people, the gatekeeping, the statements made by Dario, it's all a part of large brand toxic sales and marketing.

From the notes this part sat with me as the real difference:

> As a whole, China seems to treat AI as just another technology, rather than as some kind of singularity moment. National attention is still on basic needs and infrastructure buildouts, and on providing more medicines for people. The “dreams of singularity" seem like a luxury or distant consideration.

Meanwhile... In the fantasy land over here in the US we're constantly being told that it's "coming", "almost here", "too powerful for us to give you access to", "of national security importance!". Or... FUD.

And while there may be trace amounts of truth in those overzealous statements we haven't seen a significant improvement in much outside of software development comparative to the spend and environmental impact.

What's wrong with distillation? Wasn't GPT a distillation of the world's internet? That's how technology levels proceed, by recursively consuming the previous ones.

Blaming the head of infrastructure for distillation doesn't make sense to me.

Tell me, where did OpenAI and Anthropic got their training data? From public sources using legitimate means? Don't make me laugh.

Both. Both are good. Anyway this shows how full of shit Anthropic are - if Mythos was so advanced as they claim - distillation attacks just wouldn't work.