I mean paying for deepseek is sending money to China, and any company in China is pretty much an extension of the CCP (or can become one at the snap of their fingers). I don't think this is much better or worse than the American AI companies.
If that's a concern, an easy alternative is using companies like novita or fireworks.ai to run open source chinese models. They are incredibly price competitive, have strict data retention policies, and in general are quite fast. Also, you don't get used to a model and suddenly get rug pulled when the provider decide to upgrade.
It's a testament to how much American companies have been fucking over their own reputations that people would view them as not "better or worse" than an extension of the CCP.
A decade ago, just that kind of comparison would've been pretty unthinkable.
Deepseek proper is the only provider offering Deepseek V4 Pro at such an insanely low price. All the other providers are like 5x.
If someone says they're using Deepseek, it's probably a safe bet that they're sending money to China. People choose an inferior model (Deepseek) because it's cheaper. Not many people are willing to use Deepseek but also pay the 5x price to have an American company run it for them.
