I'm wondering how it benefits Deepseek. Why would they willingly give up their trade secrets?
It's obviously very valuable, as they are running a profitable company. It follows the same trend as when they released their cache optimizations a few months back: why do it? What followed their release of this technology was that Anthropic and OpenAI silently released models which were on-par or similarly intelligent, but "surprisingly" had much cheaper cached tokens. So their inventions were obviously just worked into their competitors, who just got much greater margins + became more profitable.
The same thing goes here: I'm sure there are inventions and optimizations which are unknown to Deepseeks competitors which yet again will be worked in. So once again, they're letting their trade secrets go.
My question is: why? How does Deepseek benefit from this? There must be some gain I'm not seeing as they keep doing this play over and over, and I doubt it's "for the good of open source", as China is practically as isolated as you can get. To believe that this is in the spirit of the open source community is heavily naive.
To rephrase: How would it benefit China? Maybe it is to show that there is no secret sauce, burst the bubble and then profit from the chaos that will ensue? Collapsing US tech giants means lesser MAGA backing, cheaper stocks, cheaper properly..
For the same reason every single open weight models gets released: it's a big flex and gets investors and developers excited.
Is it a sustainable model? Not really. Will it all blow up in our faces eventually? Maybe. But frankly, releasing code like this is far, far more sustainable than releasing whole models.
> I'm wondering how it benefits Deepseek. Why would they willingly give up their trade secrets?
Someone already suggested it may be same as with other open source software, but you rejected that comparison with an ad absurdum.