You seem to severely overestimate the level of centralised command-and-control in China. It's not like every software company is going to the government for explicit sign-off of every open source release.

There is a pretty clear benefit to DeepSeek's reputation for all the other providers offering DeekSeek's open-weights model to have similar performance/benchmark scores.

In the past performance has varied wildly across inference providers, making this available should result in every inference provider implementing the same optimisations

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fakwandi_priv 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> On October 16, 2026, the Ministry of Commerce and the Ministry of Science and Technology issued Announcement No. 48 of 2026, publicly solicited opinions on the revision of the China Export Prohibition and Export Restriction Technology Catalogue (hereinafter referred to as the Catalogue), and implemented temporary management measures for pre-export registration of relevant technologies. Recently, the spokesman of the Ministry of Commerce answered questions from reporters on relevant issues.

https://m.bjnews.com.cn/detail/1792137269129878.html

Apparently globally recognized top 10 models (so Deepseek 4.1 Flash and GLM 5.3 Flash) would have fallen under this export registration.

	▲	swiftcoder an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> Apparently globally recognized top 10 models (so Deepseek 4.1 Flash and GLM 5.3 Flash) would have fallen under this export registration. The model, yes, but not the inference framework. There's also an explicit exception in there for open source releases (which may explain in part why these companies prefer to work in the open)

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_aavaa_ 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The other benefit is that as more of the stack is open sourced we can finally see just how cheaply these models can be served. Which in turn gives us insight into what the frontier labs might be doing.

That, and drive down prices everywhere.

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

You underestimate it.

7% of Chinas total population are members of the CCP. 7%. So at DeepSeek there's a good few handfuls of them.

If you want to understand the impact of that, read up on reporting lines in the CCP.

Not every company needs sign-off from the government for an OSS release, but every OSS release is visible to the government.

	▲	benjiro29 2 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> 7% of Chinas total population are members of the CCP. 7%. So at DeepSeek there's a good few handfuls of them. If you want a government job, you need to be member of the party. That is no different then the old USSR system. You end up with a overcount of "members" as people who ideology subscribe to the system, vs people who just become members for the better jobs. And yes, those people also get fired or leave government jobs (especially given the financial issues in the local governments the last few years because of the building crisis / lack of income). So this type of throw towel over everybody to make a point is just a useless statistic.
	▲	sampullman an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Every open source release is visible to me, too. Is your point that the government could stop it if they wanted? That's true of every government, but it's not a problem until it actually happens.

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pillefitz 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I would assume DeepSeek is considered one of China's strategic assets and is therefore heavily policed.