DeepSeek focuses on research over revenue
58 comments
·March 14, 2025patrickhogan1
It’s commendable what DeepSeek is doing by open sourcing and showing the chain of thought.
This title is misleading though - where it tries to state that DeepSeek only focuses on research and not revenue.
1. DeepSeek is reported to be profitable. It earns revenue from its API.
2. DeepSeek was founded by Liang Wenfeng who cofounded the quantitative hedge fund High-Flyer in 2015. The AI work is used at the hedge fund to trade and earn revenue. Liang Wenfeng is transparent about this in interviews.
3. DeepSeek has strong backing from the government now that they have made a break through. DeepSeek has received support from Beijing[1].
[1] The timing between
1. This meeting - https://www.ft.com/content/27f062b4-cf1f-4353-8d7f-8690d972f...
2. This announcement - https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/06/tech/china-state-venture-capi...
Personally I dont see this as a bad thing. Its completely logical and smart for a government to support break through innovation. We should do the same in the US.
ttctciyf
"Focuses on" does not mean "exclusively undertakes".
Hence "I focus on enjoying life more than chasing money" does not imply "I don't do anything for money". It does not preclude me from engaging in paid activities. It simply means they are not the main priority.
So pointing out that I have earned money is not a contradiction of my claim.
The comment seems to be entirely ignorant of the basic semantics of "focus".
guccihat
> This title is misleading though - where it tries to state that DeepSeek only focuses on research and not revenue.
IMO, the title is quite accurate and supported by the content of the article. The team is prioritizing AI research at the expense of short term profit.
If the title was "DeepSeek is solely a research effort" you would have a case.
yubblegum
Agreed, per Liang Wenfeng's public comments, his aim was and remains to inspire his fellow Chinese geeks to lead in innovation and not be satisfied at simply following the lead, and creating better versions, of foreign (read Western) mind products.
jstummbillig
Lest we forget, this is an option because others did figure out the expensive way how most of the things DeepSeek relies upon work. You might even call it research.
patrickhogan1
Yes, but the real question is: Why are they able to do that? I understand we're debating nuances here, but my concern is about the overall impression the title gives. It positions DeepSeek as some kind of higher ideal, yet the article achieves this impression by deliberately overlooking key facts.
For example, why can Google afford to run Waymo, a self-driving car company? Is it because Google prioritizes self-driving cars and safety over profit?
No. It's because Google's core business—selling advertisements, monetizing personal data, and essentially profiting from surveillance—generates enormous amounts of money.
With all of this said. I am a fan of DeepSeek and the amount of openness they have.
rfoo
If anything, it sounds more like an "EA working as intended" story.
acheong08
> DeepSeek has strong backing from the government now that they have made a break through
This is one thing I'd like western governments to implement as well. When such a potentially world changing technology comes up, fund its research and socialize its benefits. Instead, all we take from China is more surveillance, censorship, and anti-encryption laws (UK)
PeterStuer
We do massively back research and innovation with public money.
But then we privatize the gains.
OtomotO
ONLY if it's Open Source!
I am done paying taxes upon taxes upon taxes (not US based) and helping others becoming richer.
It's totally fine for the government to add backing, but then it must be Open Source OR it must partly belong to the citizens!
Quid pro quo!
dragonelite
Yeah the research result and IP should belong to the public commons, if the initial researchers get a head start with exploiting the IP im fine with that.
spiderfarmer
And open source models.
delusional
They are. There's a ton of research taking place at public institutions and by government contract. We socialize the benefit by charging taxes on the profits.
If you instead mean something like "we should give already rich billionaires even more billions to toy around with" then no. We should not do that. Let's cut the parasitic billionaires out, and just fund the researchers. You know, like we are doing.
_bin_
you can complain about "parasitic billionaires", and some probably qualify, but academic institutions aren't majority-responsible for LLMs. transformers came out of google and, although some academics toyed with them, most of the interesting work has been from companies. i care more about results than sticking it to the "evil billionaire" or whatever.
perhaps the better question is why "parasitic billionaires" and their companies are producing better results than academic institutions, and how we can fix said institutions to get them running well again.
riobard
> DeepSeek has received support from Beijing, including access to state-funded data centers.
Source?
patrickhogan1
The timing between
1. This meeting - https://www.ft.com/content/27f062b4-cf1f-4353-8d7f-8690d972f...
2. This announcement - https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/06/tech/china-state-venture-capi...
Am I surprised they are getting help? No. I think any country who has this type of break through technology should be supporting it.
riobard
The first link from FT is paywalled and the second link from CNN does not mention "data center" even once, yet you were stating as a fact that
> DeepSeek has received support from Beijing, including access to state-funded data centers.
I do believe as you said that
> DeepSeek has strong backing from the government now that they have made a break through
but please do not confuse people by stating your beliefs as facts.
troll_v_bridge
[1] It’s based in China
qwertox
> 3. DeepSeek has strong backing from the government now that they have made a break through.
Maybe a bit more than just "strong backing":
Chinese AI jewel Deepseek reportedly restricts employee travel amid AI security concerns
https://the-decoder.com/chinas-deepseek-reportedly-restricts...
Chinese AI treasure Deepseek has reportedly restricted some of its developers from leaving the country by requiring them to surrender their passports, likely due to concerns over data security and potential acquisitions.v3ss0n
So you do think they are just volunteers?
rdsubhas
> This title is misleading though - where it tries to state that DeepSeek only focuses on research and not revenue.
That's not what the title says though. It says "research over revenue" not only research no revenue.
I found the title misleading for a different reason: the "unlike silicon valley" part. IMHO SV couldn't care less about revenue than innovation, experimentation and ultimately valuation. Stock prices have been long detached from revenue multiples.
ergocoder
As the old wisdom goes: "if you are not paying for the product, you are the product."
feverzsj
Because they have infinite fund now.
https://www.wired.com/story/deepseek-china-nationalism/
https://restofworld.org/2025/china-embeds-deepseek-ai-in-eve...
alecco
There's a DeepSeek mania in China. Due to this, CCP did a 180 on the tech sector.
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3300629/dee...
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grahar64
Isn't the big complaint that Silicon Valley doesn't focus on revenue. Like there was a pretty funny bit of the "Silicon Valley" show that was mocking this fact.
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holoduke
Its happening for a while now. China is a huge contributer in various AI opensource projects. From video to audio to text. A very good thing and the reason why some of the US ai companies are in a somewhat desperate release mode. The only further thing we need is a strong hardware maker in China to bring back Nvidia in serious attention mode.
cute_boi
We should start calling DeepSeek as OpenAI. And KimiAI is also doing lot of good things.
Alifatisk
Kimi sadly only allows signup through WeChat, wish they fixed that so I can try it
dmortin
China naturally wants to distribute this model which is censored according to the wishes of the Party and parrots Chinese propaganda.
Though there can be applications where this aspect does not matter.
randomNumber7
I would say for most use cases it doesnt matter if I can talk withit about what happend somewhere in china more than 30 years ago.
Also the deepseek-R1 is pretty low censored. It was shown that some of the censorship is in the frontend. Here on hackernews was an article for example where someone talked with the model in hexadecimal ascii numbers (if i remember correct) and it happily talked about tianmen etc...
TechTechTech
The model is openly distributed, enabling others to improve it. Currently there are numerous uncensored and improved versions of Deepseek r1 out there already.
This community effect of improving models is why in my opinion the best LLMs will soon all be open.
mirekrusin
But it's open with open research papers and auxiliary tooling etc. THE GOOD states can fine tune it with hatered, isolation and warmongering – they show how to do it in cost effective way.
ein0p
How is that different from American models though? Other than the polarity of propaganda, I mean.
viccis
It's not, but a lot of fish don't realize they're swimming in water.
thaumasiotes
> but a lot of fish don't realize they're swimming in water
Where did this idea come from? Have we ever found a human who wasn't aware of the air?
oezi
While it would be nice to have some open source and research oriented players, it could also be a massively sponsored Chinese government effort to get people both domestic and foreign to spill their secrets to an entity from the PRC.
Keeping the model open has led to large number of Chinese companies to adopt it, which further increases the value as a spying tool.
acheong08
Why does everything have to be seen through the lens of conflict and warmongering? The goal should be the betterment of all humanity, and an "adversary" benefiting from a global improvement in quality of life should not be reason enough to deny everyone breakthroughs in technology.
woleium
Some people see the world as a zero sum game.
luma
If someone downloads the open model, how does that create a spying tool for China?
MaxPock
I'd also love to know .
throwaway3572
Honestly I don’t really know much about this stuff, and I have no idea how open or not open DeekSeek is, but this did get me thinking. Most people don’t compile from source so if you run a binary, and someone says it’s open there’s the source, how do you verify that is really is all the source, Couldn’t the binary be anything?
jampekka
The models aren't executable binaries. They are sets of network weights that can be run using various (typically open source) third party implementations.
manmal
Sibling comment already explains the open weights part; even if there was some small binary wrapper involved, it’s trivial to stop if from phoning home.
delusional
I'm in Europe. With the current US administration, I could say the exact same thing about American companies. The US government is clearly willing to use every single commercial enterprise located in the US as leverage.
At this point China seems like the less harmful of the two choices.
necovek
The way I look at it, I would probably use China-produced models for EU or US matters, and a West-produced models for China matters.
Certainly, one would also combine the two and have a fully open source model (including the training data) with no censoring summarise the two outputs.
XorNot
The enemy of your enemy is just your enemy's enemy.
Why does everyone insist on picking a side rather then having any pride in their own nations? Europe is large, educated and capable of it's developments. No one needs to pick anything.
necovek
Why would anyone see these countries as being one another's enemy, though?
They are battling to be the leading superpower in the world, but they are not enemies: annual trade volume between them certainly attests to that.
In that sense, you can also look to extract value from either side. In the US, I'd definitely turn to China's depictions of US events to understand how it looks from another superpower's angle: you can still take that critically and not at face value, but it might be refreshing in that it's not polarised in the same way (Republicans vs Democrats).
delusional
> The enemy of your enemy is just your enemy's enemy.
That's a little much. I'm not at war here. Where traditionally the US has been viewed as a mentor, or maybe a benevolent parent, by and of the European union nations, It has now switched into that of an abusive boss. I'm not at war with my boss. He is not my enemy. I do however have to continually adjust my stance towards him, always taking into account that he would sell me in a heartbeat if there was a benefit to him. That the company is not my friend. That stops me from sometimes doing the most mutually beneficial thing, because I have to protect myself by taking a defensive stance.
I'm very hopeful for Europe, and thankful that my system roughly works. It's not like I loved the US policy before Trump, but now flipped. What is happening in the US was always what I thought was most likely, corporatism run amok. That doesn't make the US "an enemy" but rather an unreliable friend.
https://archive.is/EjiO8