Chinese models are really good. How you use them depends on what your goals are. If you want something on par with Claude or ChatGPT, you need to go to Deepseek or Qwen's website. You can also find these models on openrouter. If you want a local/small model, then get ollama and find a model in the repository. You could also get anythingllm or LM Studio and get models from within the app. There's also huggingface.

Since you asked about safety, deepseek on the official website does collect info and there was a time some of that info was leaked but you can get around that using something like openrouter. Note similar things happened to ChatGPT and Meta AI. There is also the potential for bias (there was a time people were spamming their Deepseek Tiananmen Square responses -- personally, it just would not process my query) but Grok has that same issue.