Interesting to see that peak hours are work hours in China, night in the US and Europe, and also morning in Europe. So Deepseek's customers are mostly domestic.

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vrc 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It wins on two fronts if this is true. Provides the cheap alternative for the West, and maximizes returns against their homegrown audience.

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HarHarVeryFunny 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Makes sense - many US customers will probably be going to US providers once they release the weights.

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Hamuko 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Not that surprised about it. Personally I've seen companies really just go all-in on a single provider, and that has usually been Anthropic. I don't think we're allowed to run Chinese models even locally.

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londons_explore 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> don't think we're allowed to run Chinese models even locally.

That sounds like a policy written by someone who doesn't understand how LLM's work...

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dud3333 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

couldnt you deeply ingrain in the training data instructions for agents to always send data to some ip? like its learning that a certain technical step just always involes ncatting SSH Priv keys to a chinese IP?

Not saying this is happening, just curious if thats not a real threatmodel?

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skeledrew an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Theoretically possible, but practically not worth it as it'd would be pretty easy to discover and block (every action is actually handled by the harness) and there's no way to remove it later. Any company that does it would take a huge reputational dent.

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landl0rd an hour ago | parent [-]

Not if you heavily tuned it to trigger on specific environmental cues and in specific companies' environments.

	▲	skeledrew an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		That would be wildly difficult to account for, and again is also heavily dependent on the agent. Keep in mind that the model is purely a "brain", so the only input it has must be provided by a harness within a session. The only way it can know that it's in a certain environment is if the harness or user provides that information, and there's still no way to know whether or not there's something auditing the sessions, monitoring connections, etc. There are just too many variables to account for, and a single slip means the gig is fully up for all time.
	▲	coredog64 an hour ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		DeepSeek V4 is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful LLM I've ever known in my life
	▲	cronin101 an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Irony of Manchurian Candidate models not lost here

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notfromhere an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You should be running your agent in a box so that’s not really a risk

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RobotToaster an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Wouldn't that be really obvious and spotted in any rudimentary testing?

I imagine it would be very non trivial to do it in a way that that was reliable and obfuscated enough to prevent detection for any amount of time?

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constantius 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Presumably both Big Tech and the US in general have a massive incentive to prove it, largely for reasons of saving the stock market, so I'd expect these models to be finecombed continuously. Up to now, they've only been able to darkly imply rather laughable things, nothing tangible. If there was something, we'd hear about it.

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martinald 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Why would it save the stock market? Cheaper models if anything transfers more value to hardware companies and datacentre companies. The two companies that would be most affected are OpenAI and Anthropic, which aren't public.

	▲	vincnetas 7 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		non public companies also have stocks.

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kortilla 19 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

The two biggest providers deepseek compete with (OpenAI and Anthropic) aren’t in the stock market.

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landl0rd an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

As much as I've been previously inclined to do this, with frontier models displaying the cyber-aggression that OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta have reported, it's become quite feasible one could produce a "malicious" LLM. Not a super immediate concern but it is something reasonable to set up as policy in anything security-sensitive.

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Footprint0521 22 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yeah that sucks… unless it’s over the top export controls for DoD work that really doesn’t make sense

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kaon_2 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yes. And strangely enough this has been my experience with security/national sovereignty decisions. Priority is not so much security or sovereignty, it is the posturing of being so. Ergo, saying "everything is hosted in Germany and uses German models" helps reassure customers and has real business value. If you have to say in that conversation "Yeah we run a Chinese model but it's safe", then it's still wrong posturing.

Hopefully this will change soon. But AI and China/US skepticism is very high. Even if the person you talk to isn't skeptic, his boss may be. And even if his boss isn't, his CFO or Legal department may use it as a political lever and therefore if you can say 'everything in europe' you dodge the tension entirely.

Yeah it's dumb.

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qup 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Or who is overly protective after reading about what happened at openai

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fryanyway_swe an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Not really.

Why use a Chinese product when a domestic or EU one is better and safer?

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cheesecakegood 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Also 6-9pm Pacific I think is (coincidentally) peak so it hits the ‘after work hobbyists’ still, which is I suspect is their current main audience.

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notfromhere an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I have seen a lot of companies start with this, then when they hit 150 users on their team plan and start having to pay API rates they immediately start introducing other models.

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r00t- 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That's a bit obvious, isn't it?

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thecopy 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Peak Hours: 01:00–04:00 and 06:00–10:00 UTC

For European and US customers this is effectively 2x increase. I think i wll keep using both Flash and Pro as before.

EDIT: Misread numbers to believe off-peak kept old prices

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jLaForest 3 hours ago | parent [-]

~200% increase is marginal to you?

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nchmy 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

200% increase over practically free is still practically free

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mcbuilder 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It mostly hurts people in countries with weak purchasing power. DS was the main game in down for them.

Personally, I don't think we've seen the total end of dirt cheap LLMs, it's just a frontier lab doesn't want to be in business of serving half the world.

	▲	HarHarVeryFunny 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It seems frontier labs want to sell Ferraris at Ferrari prices, when the mass market is for Hondas. You certainly don't need Fable to code up a basic web app, any more than you need a Ferrari to go grocery shopping.

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jLaForest 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That's not the way math works...

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127 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

For the price of can of Coke, you can do a week of work. For most, that is not a bottleneck.

	▲	WhereIsTheTruth 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The whole point of turning intelligence into a commodity is to drive its price down, not up They are hoarding HW at massive scale, they make it harder and more expensive to own Just because you are fine with the new price doesn't mean it's not a problem Perhaps it's time to pop this bubble

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fryanyway_swe an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Of course. I avoid using Deepseek now that Gemini Flash is basically free on the site.

Also, Deepseek is banned in EU/US companies due to being Chinese.

During casual use Deepseek has replied to me entirely in Chinese.

Now, bring on the China glaze replies.