Has anyone here tried the app?

“The success of Chinese firm DeepSeek has sent shockwaves through the artificial intelligence industry - bringing the world's attention to its previously low-profile boss.

More than $1trillion was wiped off the value of global technology stocks yesterday after DeepSeek's advanced AI technology was revealed to the world - sparking panic that the West could fall behind in the AI arms race.

Its founder Liang Wenfeng, DeepSeek's CEO, was not one for fame or fortune, according to his colleagues, but had always hoped he would command the respect of the US-dominated tech world.

Now responsible for one of the biggest shake-ups in the AI sphere, it is safe to say the entrepreneur has achieved just that.
……

The chatbot has since become the most downloaded free app in the country - with its skyrocketing popularity seeing the value of its rival AI firms tumble and sending shockwaves through Wall Street and Silicon Valley. …”

https://mol.im/a/14333923

Buy in now. This is hugely overblown. Now's the time to get in.

The decline in the stock price of Nvidea and the other go-go AI stocks of the past few years appears to be rooted in the belief that cheap open source AI will savage the profits of proprietary AI firms, and they won't have enough money to spend on expensive GPUs. I completely reject this notion. Open source has proved a boon to almost everyone in the software industry, despite excessive naysaying, and I see no contradictory effect here. I actually expect economical AI to drive demand higher, significantly expand implementations of AI applications, and increase GPU demand long term. I put my money where my mouth is, buying leveraged Nvidea-oriented ETF shares at the current discounted price (30% down from where it was a few days ago).

This feels very much like the shift in computing power from the data center (mainframes and minis) to the desktop as occurred in the 70's and 80's.

I am no "industry analyst" but I do have a deep faith in the open source movement. YMMV.

Same stuff, different day.

It's a different thing, kind of leveraging other AI platforms as resources rather than doing it all itself.

Also note they got where they are by using various flavors of nVidia's second-tier 'OK to ship to China' chips, which, while cheaper than their state of the art chips, are still crazy-expensive compared to regular CPU/GPUs. It's not like they are going to be running on cheap hardware anytime soon.

Here's some background from WSJ today: WSJ 1/28/25 "How China's DeepSeek Outsmarted America'

quote:

The other part is the rocky introduction of U.S. export controls, which gave DeepSeek a window to buy powerful American chips.

The Biden administration in 2022 put in place controls on chips exported to China. U.S. companies that wanted to sell to China first needed to throttle a chip function called interconnect bandwidth, which refers to the speed at which data is transferred.

In response, Nvidia, the world’s leading designer of AI chips, came up with a new product for China that complied with this parameter.... resulted in a chip that some analysts said was almost as powerful as Nvidia’s best chip at the time.

U.S. officials vented publicly and privately that while Nvidia didn’t break the law, it broke the spirit of it. ...

A year after the initial controls, the government tightened the rules. Still, that left an opening of about a year for DeepSeek to buy Nvidia’s powerful China-market chip, called the H800. In a research paper published in December, DeepSeek said it used 2,048 of these chips to train one of its AI models.

Since the rules were revised in 2023, Nvidia designed a new export-control-compliant chip for China that is significantly less powerful than the H800.

Some American AI industry leaders are skeptical that DeepSeek has revealed all of its secrets. They said Chinese researchers could have stockpiled leading-edge Nvidia chips before the U.S. restrictions, or used workarounds such as accessing Nvidia-enabled computing power from countries outside the U.S. and China. The Biden administration in its final days implemented new rules to address such blind spots.

To me, it's just another CCP software tool to collect huge amounts of data from those using it to use for their advantage.

I won't use Tick Tock and I won't use this or any other communist-backed app.

I heard from more than one source that the DeepSeek app gets access to your email account. I wouldn't do it.

My opinion, they're lying about their source of processors.
This whole ruse was meant to damage American AI stocks.
Payback for the technology.
They either A, set up shell companies to acquire H100s(about 50,000 @ $20K each), or B using the A100 7nm clones, 100K plus of them.

My lefty programmer friends are giddy over this.
Me, I'm VERY suspicious,

One said that the Chatgpt is limiting searches on history like Martin Luther King.
I can find no evidence of this.

quote:

Originally posted by WaterburyBob:
To me, it's just another CCP software tool to collect huge amounts of data from those using it to use for their advantage.

I won't use Tick Tock and I won't use this or any other communist-backed app.

You and me both

I read it's got a key logger and it also tells you all your data is stored in Chyna

So TikTok should be banned but this is a good idea? That’s quite the disconnect.

quote:

Originally posted by calugo:

quote:

Originally posted by WaterburyBob:
To me, it's just another CCP software tool to collect huge amounts of data from those using it to use for their advantage.

I won't use Tick Tock and I won't use this or any other communist-backed app.

You and me both

Same. I feel like it's a ruse to gather intel.

quote:

Originally posted by Shaql:
I read it's got a key logger and it also tells you all your data is stored in Chyna

Where did you read that? Link?

This brought to you by the architects and craftsmen of the Tofu Dreg cities…Call me skeptical, but I am in the camp of no way in hell…

quote:

Originally posted by bdylan:
Buy in now. This is hugely overblown. Now's the time to get in.

I have a little bit of river boat gambler in me. I shoved 2 months salary I had sitting on the sidelines into Nvidia (profits from last year's Nvidia trade) and some other data center/ crypto mining stocks yesterday. We'll see how it works out down the road.

And no, I'm not loading Deepseek or Tiktok apps onto my phone.

I was discussing this with my financial advisor yesterday. Musk and a few other tech giants say that China got all the Nvidia chips they wanted and the cost of their venture is in the same range as western AI outfits. It’s China so it’s not like they’re open about anything that won’t benefit them.

And as others stated, ain’t downloading it. “Free” Chinese software has a huge built in expense.

I know nothing about them, but my instinct is that they've copied the work of others and they're lying about the infrastructure and efficiency, while using it as a state intelligence tool.

quote:

Originally posted by Pipe Smoker:

quote:

Originally posted by Shaql:
I read it's got a key logger and it also tells you all your data is stored in Chyna

Where did you read that? Link?

This is a Forbes article that popped up in my news feed.
DeepSeek Warning—New Chinese Security Threat Puts You At Risk

Zak Doffman
Contributor
Zak Doffman writes about security, surveillance and privacy.

Timing really is everything. A week on from TikTok’s short-lived ban over fears of Chinese harvesting U.S. data, despite consistent denials from the platform and its parent that it’s doing anything of the sort, here comes another app that admits to doing exactly that. And if you still think TikTok is bad — this is so much worse.


DeepSeek has shocked the U.S. in many ways almost overnight. Seemingly beating leading generative AI platforms with a cut-price, open-source, software-led approach that has taken a sledgehammer to their business plans. Seemingly running blatant China-friendly censorship in plain sight, not via a subtle algorithm no one sees. And seemingly taking worries about AI’s data privacy risks to a whole new level.


DeepSeek isn’t hiding any of this — far from it. “The personal information we collect from you may be stored on a server located outside of the country where you live,” it tells users. “We store the information we collect in secure servers located in the People's Republic of China.” As for what that information might be —everything.


“We collect your information in three ways: Information You Provide, Automatically Collected Information, and Information From Other Sources.” And that includes personal data when you set up your account, anything you enter into its platform, including “your text or audio input, prompt, uploaded files, feedback, chat history, or other content that you provide to our model and Services.”


But there’s more. “We automatically collect certain information from you,” DeepSeek says, “including internet or other network activity information such as your IP address, unique device identifiers, and cookies.” The platforms also “collects certain device and network connection information,” which includes “your device model, operating system, keystroke patterns or rhythms, IP address, and system language.” And when “you log-in from multiple devices,” DeepSeek says, “we use information such as your device ID and user ID to identify your activity across devices to give you a seamless log-in experience and for security purposes.”


This data is much more powerful than anything ever shared with or harvested by TikTok — whatever the reality of where that data is sent, or the potential to firewall DeepSeek by running it offline, or whether to trust its open-source code (albeit not its training data) to keep you safe. Most of the harvested data is not needed for the purpose of the platform. And once it’s gone, it’s gone. Just ask what a powerful AI engine in state hands could do with all that personally identifiable information.


None of that information is stored in the U.S. Everything goes to China. The same China whose controversial national security laws with their obligation on Chinese firms to share any and all data with government agencies has wrought so much political TikTok hand-wringing around the world. I asked DeepSeek about their adherence to these laws with the data they collect. Nothing from them yet.


This month, Harmonic Security warned about the huge enterprise risk from generative AI platforms, through user prompts and uploads. And they didn’t have anything as blatantly high-risk as DeepSeek when they compiled their report.


DeepSeek is in some ways a U.S. invention. Funded by a Chinese investment firm, it has set out to deliver ChatGPT outcomes without access to ChatGPT levels of expensive hardware spend, given U.S. restrictions. That means innovation and workarounds. And whatever the realities behind the scenes, given China’s heavily interlinked and state subsidised tech sector, the results are extraordinary. Has Chinese industry launched a U.S.-beating AI platform on the U.S., independently of state support. Perhaps. But this is strategic in a way TikTok never was.


“The world’s top companies typically train their chatbots with supercomputers that use as many as 16,000 chips or more,” The New York Times explains. “DeepSeek’s engineers said they needed only about 2,000 Nvidia chips… DeepSeek’s research paper raised questions about whether big U.S. companies could maintain a significant lead in A.I. Many experts believe that A.I. technology will become a commodity, with many companies selling much the same product.”


And now with those U.S. stocks reeling from a surprise DeepSeek hit, and the Chinese app topping Apple’s App Store, we are firmly out on the ice. There are all kinds of implications here. AI security in a world where users cannot help themselves but venture into whatever’s newest and shiniest. A complete lack of regard for security and privacy when using AI chat — as was evident before this. And a finger-in-the-dam moment for Chinese viral apps that won’t be stayed by a TikTok ban or change of ownership, and clearly needs something more expansive to be kept at bay.


Meanwhile, if you really must use China’s latest viral toy, please do bear in mind where all your data is going and staying. Be very careful what you share, whether it’s your own personal information or — worse — your employer’s.

^^^^^
Thanks. I’ll delete the app. I never opened it.

quote:

Originally posted by bdylan:
Buy in now. This is hugely overblown. Now's the time to get in.

NVDA, MRVL, MSFT

Also consider CIBR

China's main mantra is if you can cheat, cheat.

Nvidia is going to be investigated for the 50,000 missing processors.