DeepSeek's new chain-of-thought AI model has Silicon Valley developers seething that a startup from — gasp — China could build something just as good, if not better, than what they've come up with, for a fraction of the cost and with far superior energy efficiency.

Exhibit A: OpenAI programmer Steven Heidel, who couldn't help injecting some old-fashioned China bashing to distract from the fact that his company just got smoked in a race it had a several year and multibillion dollar head-start in.

"Americans sure love giving their data away to the CCP in exchange for free stuff," Heidel wrote on X, referring to the Communist Party of China.

Following overwhelming backlash, his tweet was appended with a community note: "DeepSeek can be run locally without an internet connection, unlike OpenAI's models."

This is true. DeepSeek's r1 model is open-source, totally free, and if you're concerned about your privacy, you can download and run all 404 gigs of it on your own rig. Because it's a chain-of-thought model, anyone can see how the AI "thinks," which goes a long way as far as trust.

(After the community note dunk, Heidel followed up with a post urging users to only use the DeepSeek model locally.)

Needless to say, to smear the AI model, whose underlying code is free for anyone to poke around in, as some sort of Chinese spyware is really rich coming from someone who works at OpenAI, a company that quickly ditched its noble, non-profit and open-source beginnings as soon as it got a taste of money. Today, it's firmly for-profit and closed-source.

It'd be remiss to brush aside privacy concerns surrounding Chinese platforms, and indeed the censorship present in the app version of DeepSeek. But OpenAI's data ethics track record isn't exactly squeaky clean, either. It trained its AI model by devouring everyone's data on the surface web without ever stopping to ask permission. It and its CEO Sam Altman have also invested in a number of companies whose commitment to privacy is questionable.

Plus, pretty much every outfit in Silicon Valley pawns off their customer's data to data brokers, who in turn sell that information to thousands of other companies so they can barrage you with ads — and most perniciously, to government agencies for surveillance purposes. 

To that end, it might be worth mentioning that OpenAI appointed a former National Security Administration director to its board — a move that Edward Snowden blasted as a "calculated betrayal of the rights of every person on earth."

Of course, Heidel isn't alone. Just days before his faux-pas, Neal Khosla, CEO of the AI-powered health clinic Curai, called DeepSeek a "CCP state psyop" and an act of "economic warfare to make American AI unprofitable." (Counterpoint: American AI is why American AI is unprofitable.)

In reality, the US has been waging plenty of economic warfare on that front, including implementing export controls in 2023 that effectively banned advanced US-made AI chips, including those made by Nvidia, from entering China. 

Ironically, that pressure may have pushed Chinese developers to make its models more efficient with less hardware, while American competitors gluttonously relied on scaling up their datacenters comprising literal billions of dollars worth of GPUs to make gains.

That the immediate response of Silicon Valley to DeepSeek's achievements is to link it with CCP conspiracies is a sign of deep-seated insecurity, and — let's face it — racism. The same anti-Chinese rhetoric, similarly under the guise of protecting Americans' privacy, fueled the push for the (now-suspended) ban on TikTok.

"I think if any of these AI bros were remotely serious about using this technology to improve society they'd be excited at the idea of someone managing to run laps around them for 1/10th the computing power but instead they are seething, sinophobically," wrote a Bluesky user.

More on AI: Mega-Hyped Chinese AI App DeepSeek Says It's Been Hit by "Large-Scale Malicious Attacks"


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