DeepSeek gives Europe's tech firms a chance to catch up
133 comments
·February 3, 2025harry8
turblety
Just to confirm, Ollama's naming is very confusing on this. Only the `deepseek-r1:671b` model on Ollama is actually deepseek-r1. The other smaller quants are a distilled version based on llama.
diggan
Which, according to the Ollama team, seems to be on purpose, to avoid people accidentally downloading the proper version. Verbatim quote from Ollama:
> Probably better for them to misunderstand and run 7b than run 671b. [...] if you don't like how things are done on Ollama, you can run your own object registry, like HF does.
kgwgk
It’s definitely on purpose - but if the purpose was to help the users making good choices they could actually give information - and explain what is what - instead of hiding it.
rightbyte
It is very interesting how salty many in the LLM community are over Deep Seek.
DS has more or less been ignored for a very long time before this.
TeMPOraL
It's also not helping the confusion that the distills themselves were made and released by DeepSeek.
If you want the actual "lighter version" of the model the usual way, i.e. third-party quants, there's a bunch of "dynamic quants" of the bona fide (non-distilled) R1 here: https://unsloth.ai/blog/deepseekr1-dynamic. The smallest of them is just able to barely run on a beefy desktop, at less than 1 token per second.
avereveard
Also Ollama is traditionally very sloppy with the chat templates they use, which does impact model performances.
diggan
> Ollama is traditionally very sloppy with the chat templates they use
Not that I don't believe you (I do, and I think I've seen them correct this before too), but you happen to have specific examples when this happened?
vergessenmir
I feel this particularly when I use gguf support.
How do you get accurate information on the template structure?
diggan
The press and news are talking about R1 while what you've been testing is the "distilled" version.
Sadly, Ollama has a bit of a confusing messaging about this, and it isn't super obvious you're not actually testing the model that "comes close to GPT-4o" or whatever the tagline is, but instead testing basically completely different models. I think this can explain the mismatch in expectation vs reality here.
rightbyte
You are hard to impress. Running a 1/20x sized version locally that would be sci fi level 10 years ago.
For such small models I would recommend specialized models only. Like Deep Seek Coder. But I think that one is lagging behind the state of art now.
harry8
Like an 8 year old factoring large numbers it's not amazing how well it is done it's that it is done at all that amazes. Sure. Amazing but not at all useful and not something one would expect the kind of fuss we've seen.
Seems the explanation is the deepseek-r1 models I was using are not, in fact, deepseek-r1. Thanks all for the heads up.
rightbyte
Ye, to your defence it seems like the Ollama project did it confusing on purpose to mess with Deep Seek.
thom
The distilled versions are terrible and the full version seems very slow, but the latter is certainly in o1’s league.
belter
Did you try: https://chat.deepseek.com/
npn
>What am I missing?
Like everything. You do not even mention your machine spec, so I'm assume you just pick the ones that fit, which probably the quant versions.
Quant versions of the "small" models do not perform that well. Not the way you expected them to be.
siwakotisaurav
You’re using slightly improved qwen and llama not r1. R1 only has 600b model
deoxykev
My take: the distills under 32B aren’t worth running. Quants seem to impact quality much more than other models. 32B and 70B unquantized are very good. 671B is SOTA.
rom16384
In my own tests even the 70B distill has an unacceptably high rate of hallucinations that makes it hard to trust the results.
sega_sai
Given the current state of US government I wouldn't be surprised if soon it would introduce sanctions against anyone trying to use Deepseek.
alwayseasy
You're right: Republican Senator Hawley introduced that bill Friday. https://www.hawley.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Haw...
null
guerrilla
New reasons I never thought I'd have to have to use a VPN. Italy already banned DS by the way.
walthamstow
Italy also banned ChatGPT when it was released.
diggan
And unbanned as soon as OpenAI made ChatGPT compatible with the data/privacy laws in the country. I'm sure DeepSeek will be able to make the adjustments too.
lyu07282
I imagine if lets say Hetzner were to offer hosted DeepSeek they would be forced out of the US market, no longer be allowed to even buy NVIDIA. That is a high-risk, assuming EU companies would ever even chose to switch to Hetzner over Azure/etc., which they won't. The EU is acting like and ruled by people who believe the US isn't an hostile entity, that attitude is never going to change and the biggest reason why AI in the EU is dead.
bootsmann
Azure/AWS biggest competitor is going to be LIDL, not Hetzner. Hetzner competes with Digitalocean et al.
belter
> Azure/AWS biggest competitor is going to be LIDL
You can't be serious...I heard to open an account your are supposed to send them a fax... :-)
buyucu
Both Microsoft and Nvidia are already hosting DeepSeek.
hirokio123
It's interesting how ChatGPT is securing major deals with governments and large corporations, while DeepSeek is gaining support from smaller startups. The contrast is also intriguing from the perspective of the power dynamics between the U.S. and China.
highcountess
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pinoy420
Side note: what are people’s opinions of the UK regarding AI now? Completely insignificant? I feel the UK has taken a nosedive over at least the past 30 years.
HPsquared
DeepMind has made some really amazing stuff.
The UK will need to be an AI hotspot if we want to continue being a financial centre.
teamonkey
The UK is a financial (and legal) centre because of its regulations. They make the UK a trustworkthy broker for international companies to deal with. (Also its deregulations, making it easy to squirrel money away to tax havens.)
Not sure why AI would help there.
tim333
The trouble in the UK is we have good academics like Hassabis at Deepmind but are not as competitive in business hene Deepmind being bought by Google.
f1shy
In general, in all related to CS and software the UK is ages ahead of the mainland Europe. Also in AI. But still of course way behind US.
belter
> In general, in all related to CS and software the UK is ages ahead of the mainland Europe
You are you going to have to support this statement a little bit better :-)
f1shy
Well, you can try to do a job search in those countries, and look at titles and the job descriptions. Also looknat the curriculums of universities in those countries, and don’t be fooled by the official sites. Look in forums how good they are in AI topics.
Cumpiler69
How about that the Danish pharma giant Novo Nordisk, makers of Ozempic, is opening their AI/ML lab in London next to DeepMind and other tech giants, instead of in its back yard?
The only one close to UK in Europe is probably Switzerland and France but they too are mostly focused on research in universities rather than pushing out commercial products the way the US is exceeding at. Everyone else is not even in the game.
kypro
We have the talent, but lack the vision to ever build something significant.
Founders are more likely to want to tackle smaller problems with a more secure business model.
Investors are much less likely to back high-risk/high-reward speculative business propositions.
Government will insist that we need to go slow and steady and prioritise goals like inclusivity and safety over performance.
The public will be sceptical of any large AI company, especially if they're pushing regulatory boundaries, and demand government intervention.
captainbland
It's not an AI specific thing. The UK's investment in harder science/tech seems to be seriously anemic.
Every job posting I see seems to be some variation on the theme of pumping some representation of money around or retail/ecomm/HR management.
HPsquared
That activity is a major "export" of ours, though.
yuumei
The government wants to introduce a law to make it illegal to possess AI tools that are capable of CSAM output. As we know this is impossible, any company starting in the UK with AI will likely fail compared to other countries if this law passes.
pinoy420
I scariest part of this which I do not see people worried about, is the one sentence about requiring suspects to open their phones at the border for inspection.
HeatrayEnjoyer
Opening phones at borders is already common practice everywhere, including the US. Unless you're a citizen countries don't have to let you in.
krageon
They did brexit and started mattering even less than they already did: Not at all.
rcarmo
I would agree with the (highly summarized) premise of the article if Europe actually had a technology strategy. I’ve seen the multiple announcements of “national pride” LLM initiatives that aim to create “a native national chatbot”, sometimes launched under extremely cringe circumstances (like the Portuguese one, announced at WebSummit and that is going to be trained at a “partially Portuguese” “supercomputer” in Spain, which most of us found hilarious).
Otherwise, Europe is doomed to doing pointless, prematurely dead-ended one-offs.
Xuban
If French, German and British nations start competing (like in the old days) for AI supremacy, it will unleash a level of creativity that we long forgot we are capable of in Europe.
DrScientist
DeepMind - the company owned by Google, but behind things like AlphaFold is based on London. And one of the fathers of modern AI - leading the resurgence of research into neural nets - Geoffrey Hinton is British-Canadian.
He moved from Britain originally due to the difficulty in getting his research funded.
So the issue isn't one of intellectual capital - and while it's obviously the case that well place monetary capital is an issue - it's not clear to me what the real underlying issue is.
Perhaps Europe needs a tech/industrial revolution again - where the power shifts from the old guard to the new. Perhaps too many people in charge in Europe are from a certain class that studied history at university.
h8hawk
Hinton is not the "father of modern AI." This overlooks the contributions of many others.
https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/physics-nobel-2024-plagiari...
DrScientist
Sure the ideas go away away back - but most people had given up on neural nets after the initial excitement, and sure others were also working on it - however the difference for me is he used it to solve real world interesting problems - and by showing what was possible - that ignited the resurgence.
Now you could argue that the people in the 60's and 70's didn't have the compute available to make non-toy networks, and it was only applying the same techniques on bigger datasets with more compute that was the real difference.
Sure - but that happens all the time in science - every innovation is building on the shoulders of others and the assignment of the Nobel prize is as a result often rather arbitrary.
Also don't underestimate the value of reducing to practice - the difference between coming up with an idea and actually making it work in practice.
kelipso
I wouldn't discount the issue of intellectual capital. There are just a handful of universities in the UK that produce world class level work in CS. While there are dozens of such universities in the US. Numbers like that make a big difference.
And if I remember correctly, PhDs in the UK are kind of weird compared to the US. Your thesis has to be research that you haven't published yet.
rcarmo
Well, they were completely right in studying history, but maybe they should have studied better economics too.
DrScientist
The most common degree for UK politicians is PPE - politics, philosophy and economics.
I'm not sure the problem is an understanding of economics, it's an understanding of how the real world works, and how to make it better - they are often too easily swayed by big lobby groups with vested interests.
Cumpiler69
We both know that's not gonna happen. Europe is way too entrenched in its ways by this point. The good ol' glory days that brought in Airbus and Concorde are gone and not transferrable to the modern, dynamic and very internationally competitive SW world, nor are its leaders strong and motivated enough to enact policy changes that favor disruption of the old money guard at the expense of the status quo. Case in point we have no SW giants, no Airbus equivalent of the SW world. All Europe's giants are decades to centuries old. 20 years ago EU's GDP was on par with the US's, now we're only half the US's GDP. We're cooked.
Plus, we first have to prioritize solving more urgent and important topics like affordable housing (WHEN?!), the collapsing pension and welfare systems which is a ticking timebomb, cheap energy, collapsing demographic (see affordable housing), illegal immigration, Putin's war next door, the rise of the right wing (see illegal immigration) before jumping into another pissing contest with the US and China on something that's not gonna help fix the pressing issues we have right fucking now. I don't see how we can recover from this downward spiral when I look at the inactions of our politicians who are just kicking the can down the road and blaming the EU and other countries of the union for their own systemic failures.
Winning the AI race might sound cool but it might also be similar to winning the race to the moon: a cool flex but not super useful to the general population if they can't afford a place to live or getting healthcare in a timely manner. Until ChatGPT can wipe your retired old ass in a care home I doubt many people will see AI investments as being a top priority.
lnsru
You just wrote my thoughts in polite manner. I am adding up, that German universities have no capability to do applied research. All the time everything “applied” was not worthy for them. “Applied” was the level of Hochschule (higher school) type institutions. Even being good these institutions didn’t had good reputation. So the best and brightest went to universities far away from practical research applications. The system isn’t built for great AI race. Add poor salaries and yearly contracts for research positions and all the smart pupils are gone. Gone to work for Google or Facebook or even Huawei!
Imho death spiral could be turned by providing enough affordable housing. That would be really long term goal, but the democracies do not have long term goals - the time after election ist time before election.
kmmlng
It's not like the US doesn't have a problem with affordable housing, so I don't see how this plays any role in the divide.
Germany has plenty of applied research organizations, from universities (e.g. RWTH) to things like Fraunhofer. The funding schemes behind these organizations are horrible and I would argue that in many ways, they are machines to burn up potential. Even with all this, Germany has been doing okay on the publicly funded AI research front, but that is irrelevant. The US isn't leading because of publicly funded AI effort, but because of privately funded AI effort.
xienze
The problem with “build more affordable housing” in countries that are desperately importing the entire world in an attempt to keep welfare programs afloat is that the amount of housing required to be built EVERY YEAR is staggering.
When a new citizen is born, there’s 18+ years for the required housing supply for that person to be created. When a new citizen is imported, they need housing TODAY. It’s just not a sustainable model on a continuous basis, but no one wants to hear that.
Schiendelman
Government can't solve affordable housing. It is the problem causing unaffordable housing.
Housing affordability is 100% because we let people tell their neighbors they cannot build as much housing as they want to, where they need to build it more slowly. There's no middle ground, there are no acceptable structures of land use law if you want affordability. If you get to tell your neighbor how much housing they can produce, bureaucracy will form around that and it will drive up the price of housing.
Cumpiler69
>Government can't solve affordable housing. It is the problem causing unaffordable housing.
They CAN solve housing because, like you said, they're the ones causing it. They just don't want to because the housing bubble is making a lot of people rich.
croemer
What about SAP? It arguably deals in SW and is the most valuable DAX company.
Cumpiler69
What about SAP? What innovations does SAP make? Nvidia alone is worth 10 SAPS and US has about 20 Nvidias. It's not even a competition. It's like Usain Bolt vs Grandma.
hcfman
Nah, the new AI law likely has introduced unacceptable business risk to such things now. But we can always dream.
wtcactus
I don't believe it does while the Bureaucrats in Brussels keep getting paid to stifle innovation. If we look at it from a practical view, thousands of mid-level politically appointed people in EU, get paid to make life miserable to anyone that wants to innovate. That's their job.
Let us remind that the European Commission, announced with great pomp and circumstance last year that they were proudly the first ones to regulate AI: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/regulatory...
Let's think about it for a minute. Eu was already behind the race, and they were proud for actually creating even more barriers for their businesses and researchers to catch up in the AI race.
Europe will have a change (in AI and other areas) if they get rid of most bureaucrats in Brussels. That's it. Otherwise, what expects us, is a long, slow decline into obscurantism and irrelevancy.
bux93
Said barriers to AI are - not allowing the use of AI for social scoring, precrime and other nefarious profiling methods - for high risk applications, requiring a quality system.
You know, like the kind of quality system you need in place if you make food for human consumption, produce light bulbs, or any of a myriad of other production processes. Somehow the people doing catering at my employer's canteen manage to comply with that, but it's too complicated for tech bros.
wtcactus
I think you fail to realize that's not the utilization end goal that's the problem with regulations, but the fact that you need to put a lot of checks and bureaucrats overseeing the development process to make sure "the rules are being followed".
Regulation for building a house in Europe are also totally valid, and what kind of person wouldn't follow them, right?
But then you need to send a pre project for approval that takes 6 months (and pay for it), then during construction you need to get a local government worker to check the progress several times and see if the rules are being followed (and pay for it) and after you finish the house, you need to wait up to 12 months for a government official to come inspect the house and declare that your house follows all their rules (and pay for it) and you are finally allowed to live in it.
So no, let's not try and declare that these rules are obvious, and great, and we need them and what kind of people wouldn't want to follow them? When in fact, these rules mean that at every single step, you are going to wait for the government to bless what you tell them you want to do and then to make you wait again while they check if you did what they allowed you to do.
P.S. do you even have any idea of what kind of hurdles small and big companies in Europe have to go every time they need to do something just because of personal data protection rules?
tmtvl
The waiting time could be due to government agencies being overloaded due to shortages of personnel, but hiring more people costs money and people wouldn't like taxes to go up.
Also consider this: petrochem companies would have an easier time if they were allowed to dump waste into rivers instead of having to jump hurdles to process it properly. That doesn't mean that environmental regulation is bad and we should do away with it to let them innovate more.
ein0p
Not just Europe. Many companies in the US will benefit, too. As will companies in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. These are the first truly frontier-grade models released under a friendly license. The most potent non-reasoning model before this point was Mistral Large, and it has serious restrictions on allowed uses (research only).
sanxiyn
> OpenAI charges $2.5 for 1 million input tokens, or units of data processed by the AI model, while DeepSeek is currently charging $0.014 for the same number of tokens.
This is somewhat misleading, because OpenAI price is for uncached and DeepSeek price is for cached. DeepSeek uncached price is $0.14.
TeMPOraL
DeepSeek API has also been down for over a week now, so does this even mean anything?
highcountess
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world2vec
Besides Mistral which AI companies are out there in Europe really competing against the US and Chinese tech giants? Deepmind doesn't count, it's owned by Google for quite some time now.
diggan
Besides Mistral there are a bunch of smaller "research" models like https://huggingface.co/Almawave/Velvet-14B (Italian) and https://huggingface.co/projecte-aina/aguila-7b (Spanish/Catalan), but as far I'm aware, nothing that really competes with OpenAI/DeepSeek so far (which tbh, I don't think Google does at this time either? None of their models I've tried even came close to GPT4)
mrdevlar
No, I don't think so.
I think most of the work done in AI here is focused on current applications of AI not on the development of new AI.
alecco
Europe: Deepmind. But if you mean EU, practically nobody. A lot of talent would just move to US for a 3x salary and smaller income tax on it.
croemer
AlephAlpha pretends to
I've been trying both deepseek-r1:8b and deepseek-r1:32b using ollama on a local desktop machine.
Trying to get it to generate some pretty simple verilog code with extensive prompting.
It seems really bad?
Like specify what the module interface should be in the prompt and it ignores it and makes something up bad. Utterly rubbish code beyond that. Specify a calculation to be performed yet it calculates something very different.
What am I missing? Why is everyone so excited? Seems significantly worse to me than llama. Both o1-mini and claude haiku imperfect, sure, but way ahead. Both follow the same prompt and get the interface and calculation as specified. Am I doing it all wrong somehow (more than likely)?
After fixing up my open-webui install I tried "testing 1 2 3, testing. Respond with ok if you see this." Deepseek-r1:8b started trying to prove a number theory result.
Is there a chance this thing is heavily optimised for benchmarking not actual use?