The article says it had to be open source because otherwise people wouldn't trust the Chinese but ByteDance, Tencent, Baidu, and Alibaba also do LLMs and are not open source.
It's funny reading an article interviewing the ceo:
>Until now, among the seven major Chinese large-model startups, it’s the only one... that hasn’t fully considered commercialization, firmly choosing the open-source route without even raising capital.
>While these choices often leave it in obscurity, DeepSeek frequently gains organic user promotion within the community.
The ceo's actual argument for open source is quite interesting, basically that it helps attract the best people and the value is in the team. It's kind of what used to work for OpenAI before it became the ClosedAI division of Microsoft.
It's funny reading an article interviewing the ceo:
>Until now, among the seven major Chinese large-model startups, it’s the only one... that hasn’t fully considered commercialization, firmly choosing the open-source route without even raising capital.
>While these choices often leave it in obscurity, DeepSeek frequently gains organic user promotion within the community.
The obscurity thing hasn't lasted! (article nov 2024 https://www.chinatalk.media/p/deepseek-ceo-interview-with-ch...)
The ceo's actual argument for open source is quite interesting, basically that it helps attract the best people and the value is in the team. It's kind of what used to work for OpenAI before it became the ClosedAI division of Microsoft.