I'm surprised that people here don't care at all about these models openly training on your data, especially if you use them straight from the model developer. Whereas things like "GitHub now automatically opts everyone into using their code for model training" get hundreds of justifiably angry comments, I never see this brought up anymore on posts like these talking about using Chinese models through OpenRouter. This might be explained by "well they're different people", but the difference is very stark for that to be the whole explanation.

The cool thing about open-weights model is that you are free to use alternative providers that won't phone home to the original model creators.

I see 6 alternative providers listed on Openrouter for DeepSeek V4 Pro for example.

I am personally okay helping them as long as they publish the models and dont keep them closed. And I dont trust the settings where providers say they wont train on it.

I am fine with them training on my open source code (which is pretty bad but not the point, because they're providing the service for free). I will be super pissed if I pay for enterprise and they train on it though. I believe this is the opinion of majority programmers.

Because they give it away for free and offer APIs at very acceptable rates. Not that hard to figure out, Robin Hood stealing our data tax back comes to mind.

You definitely have a bone to pick. Chinese researchers usually have given the world the most cheap and consistent high quality research around LLMs. They don't pretend, they do the work and release the goodies. Mostly so cheap, every one in the world has a chance to use close to frontier models. Why would you respond with "Anger"?

You let us know what your real complaint is about and let's not feign indignation at open models and research.

If the data is opensource on github, then in my opinion it should be fair game.

What do you mean specifically? Data passed through OpenRouter? Or that they too indiscriminately ingest data all over the web? If the former, I assume it's just that anyone still using them just doesn't care where the data comes from. If the latter, well, it seems like every day there's some news on some new model from somewhere, and it takes dedication to complain every time. There's also the factor that I believe DeepSeek is more open with the model, while others keep it entirely proprietary, which feels fairer and (personally) is also less offensive.

AWS Bedrock has DeepSeek models running on their infrastructure. That should be enough to prevent training on user data (there's a markup compared to DeepSeek's pricing though).

And unfortunately AWS doesn't have prepaid billing, so you can't just give the internet access to your API key without getting FinDDoS'd.

My policy is that I don't allow agents to access all code. Some of it is shielded behind bind mounts. Maybe this is a pathetic, artisanal (or ego-driven), reaction of mine to the inevitable. I allow them to work on about 90% of the code (most codebases fully), with some code being considered too valuable to expose to the vendor. When data is involved, LLMs only get to see anonymized data.

This cute policy of mine won't affect anything though. The more we use the models, the more the models will replace this kind of work. Centralisation of power is inevitable; in Medival Europe, we used to have state & church ruling. In modern times but before the internet, it was probably state and banks. Maybe with ongoing digitization (bank offices disappearing) making banks less costly to operate; combined with with bank bailouts, maybe govenments will fully nationalize or at least banks will consolidate.

Then the AI companies will consolidate with the internet information and communication companies (Google/Meta for the US, and Alibaba/Tencent for China). Maybe we'll end up with a few de-facto governmental megacorps that rule in tandem and close cooperation with the formal government, who might handle mostly infra, utilities and the army. The megacorp would control narrative more and take more of a paternal role (educating and protecting the citizens, normally handled by formal governments).

Does this make sense?

As opposed to?

Do you really think OpenAI, Anthropic or any other entity in the same business respects your data?

The Chinese AI companies who release open weights actually deserve whatever input you give them. They are the reason why there is competition and not duopolies in the domain.

Two factors. First is anti-americanism (or at least anti-american-capitalism).

But the more important one is the social contract. Github came far before LLM era. The branding around it is being the storage of open source projects and many users want to it stay away from AI hype. You won't expect LLM providers to stay away from AI hype (duh) so it's less an issue for them.

If they give me the resulting model in the end, they can train on my data all they want. Hell, I'll send them more of it.