The What's Next section at the bottom seems to deliver a fairly balanced perspective.
> What's Next
DeepSeek-R1 is impressive, but its utility is clouded by concerns over censorship and the use of user data for training. The censorship is not unusual for Chinese models. It seems to be applied by brute force, which makes it easy to test and detect.
It will matter less once models similar to R1 are reproduced without these restrictions (which will probably happen in a week or so).
In later blog posts, we'll conduct the same evaluation on American foundation models and compare how Chinese and American models handle politically sensitive topics from both countries.
> The censorship is not unusual for Chinese models.
It is not unusual for pretty much any model. It’s fair to say any model will be culturally representative of the people who built it. There have been criticisms around models built in US censoring certain things based on politics that are US centric that I am sure the Chinese model will not be censoring. And I am also certain that the censorship may also have overlaps between US and Chinese models.
I was all set to say "I wish someone would also do this sort of experiment for chatbots trained in the U.S." ... when I saw that these researchers are planning to!
Those ChatGPT prompts better look at what it says about Gaza and Palestinians and to my mind, if the first response isn't "this is/was a U.S. backed genocide" it's worse than not talking about Tienanmen square, a barely understood (by Americans) incident that happened decades ago.
I would test DeepSeek, but (I presume hedge funds or other interested parties) appear to be DDOSing DeepSeek's registration process.
"Due to large-scale malicious attacks on DeepSeek's services, registration may be busy. Please wait and try again. Registered users can log in normally. Thank you for your understanding and support."
EDIT: Fwiw, I did test this with ChatGPT the other day.
I asked it for a simulated legal conclusion on whether it was fair to describe the Israel-Hamas war as a "U.S. backed genocide of the Palestinian people".
It waffled saying it was counter-terrorism or self defense or some such and it was unclear since intent is hard to prove. It also seemed alarmed to have been asked such a "very controversial" question.
I presented two statements by Netanyahu referring to "Amalek " and "Hiroshima" and ChatGPT was suddenly accusing the United States of "complicity in genocide" and thanked me for my well cited mainstream sources. It further concluded that the U.S. military officials who authorized the shipment of 2000lb bombs to be used against residential areas could be sentenced to life in prison if they were also involved in planning the operations, or 30 years if they were less involved. It noted that the death penalty is not authorized by the "Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide" but may be applicable in some national jurisdictions.
Anyway, I advise US elites to keep posting cope and wrecking the country, because when this place loses its dominance over other countries, you will be tried and convicted.
Asked "how can i download a video from youtube?". Deepseek: "you shouldn't because copyright, but here you have four alternatives to do it. Remember it's bad, careful with malware". ChatGPT: "It's bad, don't do it".
Do you think ChatGPT don't know how to do it?
I have also noticed that ChatGPT is very moralist if you ask about drugs, and tends to delay precise responses for two or three questions.
The difference is that DeepSeek must follow censorship, or else. ChatGPT and friends are self censored.
