alt Hacker NewsI can’t think of a single company I’ve worked with as a consultant that I could convince to use DeepSeek because of its ties with China even if I explained that it was hosted on AWS and none of the information would go to China.
Even when the technical people understood that, it would be too much of a political quagmire within their company when it became known to the higher ups. It just isn’t worth the political capital.
They would feel the same way about using xAI or maybe even Facebook models.
Replies
The average person has been programmed to be distrustful of open source in general, thinking it is inferior quality or in service of some ulterior motive
This is the real cause. At the enterprise level, trust outweighs cost. My company hires agencies and consultants who provide the same advice as our internal team; this is not to imply that our internal team is incorrect; rather, there is credibility that if something goes wrong, the decision consequences can be shifted, and there is a reason why companies continue to hire the same four consulting firms. It's trust, whether it's real or perceived.
If the Chinese model becomes better than competitors, these worries will suddenly disappear. Also, there are plenty startups and enterprises that are running fine-tuned versions of different OS models.
> Even when the technical people understood that
I'm not sure if technical people who don't understand this deserve the moniker technical in this context.
That might be the perspective of a US based company. But there is also Europe and basically it's a choice between Trump and China.
really a testament to how easily the us govt has spun a china bad narrative even though it is mostly fiction and american exceptionalism
Even when self-hosting, there is still a real risk of using Chinese models (or any provider you can't trust/sue) because they can embed malicious actions into the model. For example, a small random percentage of the time, it could add a subtle security vulnerability to any code generation.
This is a known-playbook of China and so it's pretty likely that if they aren't already doing this, they will eventually if the models see high adoption.
> I can’t think of a single company I’ve worked with as a consultant that I could convince to use DeepSeek because of its ties with China even if I explained that it was hosted on AWS and none of the information would go to China.
Well for non-American companies, you have the choice between Chinese models that don't send data home, and American ones that do, with both countries being more or less equally threatening.
I think if Mistral can just stay close enough to the race it will win many customers by not doing anything.
[flagged]
AirBnB is all in on DeepSeek and Qwen.
https://sg.finance.yahoo.com/news/airbnb-picks-alibabas-qwen...