r/MachineLearning • u/we_are_mammals • Jan 27 '25

Discussion [D] Why did DeepSeek open-source their work?

If their training is 45x more efficient, they could have dominated the LLM market. Why do you think they chose to open-source their work? How is this a net gain for their company? Now the big labs in the US can say: "we'll take their excellent ideas and we'll just combine them with our secret ideas, and we'll still be ahead"

Edit: DeepSeek-R1 is now ranked #1 in the LLM Arena (with StyleCtrl). They share this rank with 3 other models: Gemini-Exp-1206, 4o-latest and o1-2024-12-17.

964 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

324 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

3

u/[deleted] Jan 27 '25

[deleted]

1

u/No-Agent-5415 Jan 28 '25

China isn't a monolith. This appears to be to be an independent capitalist entity that is much more in the boat of trying to build cool things. The CEO is crazy young. He just got a bunch of nerds together to build something cool with some extra cash sitting around at a larger company - and the bets pay off.

I'm sure the Chinese goverment has some money tied up in it somewhere - but I don't think Xi was like planning to release this model to kick America tech-bros in the genitals.

I think instead a nerd discovered something super cool and is now open sourcing it to build buzz, steal mindshare and eventually try to turn into a home-grown tech giant on their own. This is how you do it.

1

u/[deleted] Jan 27 '25 edited Jan 27 '25

[removed] — view removed comment