cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/31525284
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While the financial, economic, technological, and national-security implications of DeepSeek’s achievement have been widely covered, there has been little discussion of its significance for authoritarian governance. DeepSeek has massive potential to enhance China’s already pervasive surveillance state, and it will bring the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) closer than ever to its goal of possessing an automated, autonomous, and scientific tool for repressing its people.
Since its inception in the early 2000s, the Chinese surveillance state has undergone three evolutions. In the first, which lasted until the early 2010s, the CCP obtained situational awareness — knowledge of its citizens’ locations and behaviors — via intelligent-monitoring technology. In the second evolution, from the mid-2010s till now, AI systems began offering authorities some decision-making support. Today, we are on the cusp of a third transformation that will allow the CCP to use generative AI’s emerging reasoning capabilities to automate surveillance and hone repression.
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China’s surveillance-industrial complex took a big leap in the mid-2010s. Now, AI-powered surveillance networks could do more than help the CCP to track the whereabouts of citizens (the chess pawns). It could also suggest to the party which moves to make, which figures to use, and what strategies to take.
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Inside China, such a network of large-scale AGI [artificial general intelligence] systems could autonomously improve repression in real time, rooting out the possibility of civic action in urban metropolises. Outside the country, if cities such as Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia — where China first exported Alibaba’s City Brain system in 2018 — were either run by a Chinese-developed city brain that had reached AGI or plugged into a Chinese city-brain network, they would quietly lose their governance autonomy to these highly complex systems that were devised to achieve CCP urban-governance goals.
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As China’s surveillance state begins its third evolution, the technology is beginning to shift from merely providing decision-making support to actually acting on the CCP’s behalf.
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DeepSeek [...] is this technology that would, for example, allow a self-driving car to recognize road signs even on a street it had never traveled before. [...] The advent of DeepSeek has already impelled tech experts in the United States to take similar approaches. Researchers at Stanford University managed to produce a powerful AI system for under US$50, training it on Google’s Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental. By driving down the cost of LLMs, including for security purposes, DeepSeek will thus enable the proliferation of advanced AI and accelerate the rollout of Chinese surveillance infrastructure globally.
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The next step in the evolution of China’s surveillance state will be to integrate generative-AI models like DeepSeek into urban surveillance infrastructures. Lenovo, a Hong Kong corporation with headquarters in Beijing, is already rolling out programs that fuse LLMs with public-surveillance systems. In Barcelona, the company is administering its Visual Insights Network for AI (VINA), which allows law enforcement and city-management personnel to search and summarize large amounts of video footage instantaneously.
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The CCP, with its vast access to the data of China-based companies, could use DeepSeek to enforce laws and intimidate adversaries in myriad ways — for example, deploying AI police agents to cancel a Lunar New Year holiday trip planned by someone required by the state to stay within a geofenced area; or telephoning activists after a protest to warn of the consequences of joining future demonstrations. It could also save police officers’ time. Rather than issuing “invitations to tea” (a euphemism for questioning), AI agents could conduct phone interviews and analyze suspects’ voices and emotional cues for signs of repentance.
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Deepseek is not open source.
https://github.com/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V3
This is just the weights, but you can train it yourself.
Between the papers, the source code, and the fully downloadable models that punch well above their weight class, it's the closest thing to actual open-source AI we've seen so far.
I would say the models don't really count as open source, but Facebook and OpenAI made their own perverted definition of "open-source" so while this technically meets that standard, I mostly impressed that it exceeds it.
How is it not? You can download and run model locally, it's open source same way llama is. Or am I missing something ? Is it maybe just the term issue, since model is not code, but a file with weights or whatever ?
Deepseek is opensource (according to Ed Zitron whom I trust with such things).
The data it (I guess the publicly available instance located in China?) has been fed on is not.
You can build your own DeepSeek and feed it whatever you want. Fully transparent.
The real kicker with deepseek is not its ties to China but that it is coded in a way that makes much better use of resources than anything the Silicon valley tech bros have achieved so far. By orders of magnitude.
That said, there's a very simple solution to ALL of that: just don't use A-not-I