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Final week, Chinese language startup DeepSeek despatched shockwaves within the AI group with its frugal but extremely performant open-source launch, DeepSeek-R1. The mannequin makes use of pure reinforcement studying (RL) to match OpenAI’s o1 on a variety of benchmarks, difficult the longstanding notion that solely large-scale coaching with highly effective chips can result in high-performing AI.
Nonetheless, with the blockbuster launch, many have additionally began pondering the implications of the Chinese language mannequin, together with the opportunity of DeepSeek transmitting private consumer knowledge to China.
The issues began with the corporate’s privateness coverage. Quickly, the difficulty snowballed, with OpenAI technical employees member Steven Heidel not directly suggesting that Individuals like to “give away their data” to the Chinese language Communist Social gathering to get free stuff.
The allegations are important from a safety standpoint, however the truth is that DeepSeek can solely retailer knowledge on Chinese language servers when the fashions are used by way of the corporate’s personal ChatGPT-like service.
If the open-source mannequin is hosted regionally or orchestrated by way of GPUs within the U.S., the information doesn’t go to China.
Issues about DeepSeek’s privateness coverage
In its privateness coverage, which was additionally unavailable for a few hours, DeepSeek notes that the corporate collects info in numerous methods, together with when customers join its providers or use them. This implies every part from account setup info — names, emails, numbers and passwords — to utilization knowledge akin to textual content or audio enter prompts, uploaded information, suggestions and broader chat historical past goes to the corporate.
However, that’s not all. The coverage additional states that the data collected will probably be saved in safe servers situated within the Folks’s Republic of China and could also be shared with legislation enforcement companies, public authorities and others for causes akin to serving to examine unlawful actions or simply complying with relevant legislation, authorized course of or authorities requests.
The latter is vital as China’s knowledge safety legal guidelines permit the federal government to grab knowledge from any server within the nation with minimal pretext.
With such a variety of data on Chinese language servers, a myriad of issues may be triggered, together with profiling people and organizations, leakage of delicate enterprise knowledge, and even cyber surveillance campaigns.
The catch
Whereas the coverage can simply increase safety and privateness alarms (because it already has for a lot of), you will need to be aware that it applies solely to DeepSeek’s personal providers — apps, web sites and software program — utilizing the R1 mannequin within the cloud.
If in case you have signed up for the DeepSeek Chat web site or are utilizing the DeepSeek AI assistant in your Android or iOS gadget, there’s probability that your gadget knowledge, private info and prompts to date have been despatched to and saved in China.
The corporate has not shared its stance on the matter, however provided that the iOS DeepSeek app has been trending as #1, even forward of ChatGPT, it’s truthful to say that many individuals might have already signed up for the assistant to check out its capabilities — and shared their knowledge at some degree within the course of.
The Android app of the service has additionally scored over one million downloads.
DeepSeek-R1 is open-source itself
As for the core DeepSeek-R1 mannequin, there’s no query of information transmission.
R1 is totally open-source, which implies groups can run it regionally for his or her focused use case by way of open-source implementation instruments like Ollama. This ensures the mannequin does its job successfully whereas preserving knowledge restricted to the machine itself. In response to Emad Mostaque, former founder and CEO of Stability AI, the R1-distill-Qwen-32B mannequin can run easily on the brand new Macs with 16GB of vRAM.
In its place, groups may use GPU clusters from third-party orchestrators to coach, fine-tune and deploy the mannequin — with out knowledge transmission dangers. One in all these is Hyperbolic Labs, which permits customers to lease a GPU to host R1. The corporate additionally permits inference by way of a secured API.
That mentioned, in case one’s wanting simply to speak with DeepSeek-R1 to resolve a specific reasoning downside, one of the simplest ways to go proper now’s with Perplexity. The corporate has simply added R1 to its mannequin selector, permitting customers to do deep net analysis with chain-of-thought reasoning.
In response to Aravind Srinivas, the CEO of Perplexity, the corporate has enabled this use case for its clients by internet hosting the mannequin in knowledge heart servers situated within the U.S. and Europe.
Lengthy story quick: your knowledge is protected so long as it’s going to a regionally hosted model of DeepSeek-R1, whether or not it’s in your machine or a GPU cluster someplace within the West.
