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The US is ordering every civilian agency to rip out DeepSeek, even tools built on it (madrobot.blog)
submitted 6 hours ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 43 points 6 hours ago (23 children)

Honestly, reasonable.

I mean, I sure don't trust OpenAI or Anthropic any more than I trust DeepSeek, but that's because I don't have legal control over them. The US government does, and it is correct to ban tools that are controlled by adversaries.

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  • [–] 79 points 6 hours ago (14 children)

    You can run deepseek locally, have transparency into the tools and models.

    There is less government control with deepseek than American born AI.

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  • [–] 36 points 6 hours ago (6 children)

    Everyone conflates "AI model" with "AI platform."

    The truth of the matter is that if you are interfacing with the DeepSeek service, you don't have control of the version of the model being run, the hidden system prompts, or any co-agents that might modify output before its sent to the user/service.

    The model itself could be completely innocent. It may not have had any weights modified and was trained on honest greenfield data. But we control literally nothing about the environment it is running inside of.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 hour ago

    There are US hosted deepseek llm access points. openrouter, zen are local, but its more groups that can spy/train from you.

    you don’t have control of the version of the model being run, the hidden system prompts, or any co-agents that might modify output before its sent to the user/service.

    A bit of a paranoid concern. Your worry is that service may try to lie to you, perhaps because of your nationality. There have been quality issues from US served Chinese models. Completely free access points will get ultra compressed/quantized/lobotomized in order to be cheapest to serve but also give a poor impression of the model. Q4 quantization is considered a good balance between cheaper and full quality. But that will still make more mistakes, and US services can fake providing full precision. Every model can choose to lie to you, and you can screen shot it. Using a secret liar model in place of advertised model is possible from any provider, but they are incentivized to be as good as they can be.

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  • [–] 48 points 6 hours ago (4 children)

    Meanwhile Elon Musk has a panic attack and reprograms Grok Everytime it tells the truth because it's "Woke".

    Don't act like US based models are not being manipulated as fuck. Hell it's probably the ultimate end game for these pricks. Get these things mainstream for "all knowledge" and then "Hey ChatGPT, tell me about slavery?" "Ok user, slavery was a tool used by the benevolent superior white men to help grateful black people find work and shelter." Except it doesn't say "black people" in the actual future timeline.

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  • [–] 18 points 5 hours ago (2 children)

    I'm not acting like they're innocent either, I don't and won't ever use any of them. But if you are thinking about it from the perspective of geopolitical warfare, the Chinese should doubly not trust grok and the US should doubly not trust DeepSeek. Using the adversaries tool is a fool's mistake outside of R&D.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 hour ago (1 child)

    But the main reason for this move isn't concerns about privacy or spying. That's only the cover story. It's to make sure taxpayer money keeps flowing to US companies like Anthropic, Musk, and OpenAI which are only marginally better in most tests than Chinese models and are many times the cost in some cases. Propping up the bubble a bit longer so that more taxpayer money can be stolen is the number one priority. Do you honestly think Trump gives a damn about the security of the US?

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  • [–] 7 points 4 hours ago (5 children)

    It's still a risk. You can train an LLM to respond maliciously to a very narrow range of requests that would not be easy to spot in general testing. If you know how the LLM is used, you can target that very specifically. It doesn't have to be as blatant as "always deny the Tiananmen Square massacre ever happened".

    Given how thoughtlessly people use AI, and how opaque some of the systems are, I think this is a legitimate concern.

    And yes, every government outside America should ban the use of ChatGPT and Claude. Obviously.

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  • [–] -1 points 4 hours ago (4 children)

    But you don't need to rely on testing. Deepseek is open source so they could just go through the code

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  • [–] 12 points 4 hours ago

    Well, open weight is not open source. There's a lot of black box still left in those models.

    It's still far more open to investigation and analysis than the likes of ChatGPT, though. Lots of work has been done to allow some degree of investigation into how the "brains" of an LLM work and in the case of Deepseek you can actually apply those techniques to the model you know you're using.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 hours ago* (2 children)

    I'm not aware of any realistic way to vet published model weights like that.

    It works for some open-source software, because you can download the source and compile it yourself. But most of the "open" models don't publish their entire training set, or enough details on the training for it to be truly reproducible. DeepSeek doesn't publish their data sets, and they probably couldn't, legally, since they "collaborate with third-party data providers to obtain proprietary datasets". And even if they did, it would be prohibitively expensive to train it on your own, unlike simply compiling open-source code.

    The actual code for training LLMs is relatively trivial. The secret sauce is the training data and fine-tuning.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 hours ago (1 child)

    You have agents classify what each portion of the network responds to and how. One compares it to filling out a very large crossword puzzle: https://already-clean.goodfire.com/

    That's the theory anways, not sure if it will stand the test of time...

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  • [–] 35 points 6 hours ago (3 children)

    Isn't that the same argument they made for TikTok though? They are just trying to eliminate competition to prop up companies here.

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  • [–] 4 points 4 hours ago (1 child)

    Yes and yes.

    I don't think TikTok is really comparable though, unless there are somehow people using it for important government work.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 hour ago

    There are outreach campaigns telling you to get vaccines and warning you about recalls, or at least there used to be. Not really comparable, but still important government work that could benefit from TikTok.

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  • [–] 13 points 6 hours ago

    Exactly the reason why every country outside of America should drop all support for their IP and military purchases.

    It’s not safe when dealing with a facist regime that controls the on/off switch to their own military operations and defences.

    We’ve seen with Ukraine and the U.S. throttling access to starlink, and removing their sales or munitions to Ukraine to defend themselves again another rogue state.

    Rogue states cannot be trusted.

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  • [–] 14 points 6 hours ago (2 children)

    I have no idea why anyone would be using the online version of deepseek or qwen or glm or kimi in the us gov, surely they would be using chatgpt or claude?

    i was so confused im like who cares if they’re running deepseek in lm studio or on their own servers but then they mentioned the sign up process

    It says DeepSeek's sign-up process collects personal information and may "track and digitally fingerprint users", and that its apps work by having people type in information, which could mean sensitive data from US government staff or contractors ends up in China.

    im like right, the online version, that makes sense

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  • [–] 5 points 5 hours ago (1 child)

    I know people in state gov who couldn’t even use CoPilot (blocked by firewall) until an explicit contract was put in place with Microsoft about data handling. (On top of their existing Microsoft contracts.) All other LLM’s, ML, or “AI” are blocked unless approved, as well.

    Seems like the federal government does not have its shit together.

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  • [–] 0 points 4 hours ago

    I worked for a Microsoft studio for a while that took forever to allow Copilot to be used internally, and they were all Microsoft. It was very frustrating, especially given that permission was finally granted for Copilot use just a matter of weeks before the whole studio got abruptly shut down anyway.

    Corporate bureaucracy. Weird and dumb.

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