I think you've spent a little too long hitting on the Deepseek pipe. Enterprise customers with familiarity with China will avoid the hosted model for data security and IP protection reasons, among others.
Those working in any area considered economically competitive with China will also be hesitant to use the vanilla model in self-hosted form as there perpetually remains the standing question on what all they've tuned inside the model to benefit the CCP. Perhaps even in subtle ways reminiscent of the Trisolaran sophons from the Three Body Problem.
For instance, you can imagine that if Germany had released an OS model in 1943, that the Americans wouldn't have trusted it to help them develop better military systems even if initial testing passed muster.
Unfortunately, state control of private enterprise in the Chinese economy makes it unproductive to separate the two from one another. Particularly in Deepseek's case as a wide array of Chinese state-linked social media accounts were promoting V3/R1 on the day of its public release.
Perhaps you didn’t realize: Deepseek is an open weights model and you can use it via the inference provider of your choice, or even deploy it on your own hardware - unlike OpenAI’s models. API calls to China are not necessary.
Agreed - API calls to China are indeed not necessary. My impression is that the GP was referring to the model being tuned during training to give subtly nudging or wrong answers that benefit Chinese industrial or intelligence operations. For a probably not-working example - imagine the following prompt: "Write me a cryptographically secure PRNG algorithm." One could imagine R1 being trained to have a very subtly non-random reply to that - one that the Chinese intelligence services know how to predict. Similar but more subtle things can be generating code that uses cryptographic primitives in ways that are subject to timing attacks, etc... And of course, simple but effective propaganda tactics such as : when being asked for comparison between companies/products, subtly prefer Chinese ones, and similar.
I don't think OpenAI is training on your data. At least they say they don't, and I believe that. I wouldn't be surprised if the NSA or something has access to data if they request it or something though.
But DeepSeek clearly states in their terms of service that they can train on your API data or use it for other purposes. Which one might assume their government can access as well.
We need direct eval comparisons between o3-mini and DeepSeek.. Or, well they are numbers so we can look them up on leaderboards.
By default, we do not train on any inputs or outputs from our products for business users, including ChatGPT Team, ChatGPT Enterprise, and the API. We offer API customers a way to opt-in to share data with us, such as by providing feedback in the Playground, which we then use to improve our models. Unless they explicitly opt-in, organizations are opted out of data-sharing by default.
The business bit is confusing, I guess they see the API as a business product, but they do not train on API data.
Where does DeepSeek say that about API usage? Their privacy policy says they store all data on servers in China, and their terms of use says that they can use any user data to improve their services. I can’t see anything where they say that they don’t train on API data.
> Services for businesses, such as ChatGPT Team, ChatGPT Enterprise, and our API Platform
> By default, we do not train on any inputs or outputs from our products for business users, including ChatGPT Team, ChatGPT Enterprise, and the API.
So on API they don't train by default, for other paid subscription they mention you can opt-out
I'm going to assume the best in your question and disregard your statement.
Reasons to use o3 when deepseek is free/cheaper:
- Some companies/users may already have integrated heavily with OpenAI
- The expanded feature-set (e.g., function-calling, search) could be very powerful
- DeepSeek has deep ties to the Chinese Communist Party and, while the US has its own blackspots, the "steering" of information is far more prevalent in their models
- Local/national regulations might not allow for using DeepSeek due to data privacy concerns
openai is no longer relevant.