I won’t be DeepSeeking

posted in: Life and things | 0

Unless you’ve just emerged from an untrackable wasteland somewhere I expect you’ll have encountered Artificial Intelligence of one form or another. It’s on phones, your car, on Facebook, in MS Word etc etc. And now a Chinese company has produced DeepSeek, its answer to ChatGPT.

To me, it’s like so many Chinese endeavours. Take the car industry. Chinese cars like the MG (you didn’t think it was still made in Britain did you?) incorporate all the best features of (say) Mercedes but in a much cheaper package. In the same way, DeepSeek-R1 rivals the capabilities of models like OpenAI’s GPT-4 but is available to the public for free and offers affordable options for developers. vox.com

DeepSeek’s approach emphasizes efficiency and accessibility. The company has achieved significant performance with relatively low training costs. The design allows for strong performance while maintaining economical training and efficient inference. arxiv.org Or at least, that’s what the company is telling us. To date training a Large Language Model has been hugely expensive. So, I’m a bit sceptical. Or to put it another way, I think they might be telling porkies.

Many, many people have jumped on the DeepSeek bandwagon, enough to cause drops in share prices on the stock market. It’s fast and responsive. But don’t ask it difficult questions about the massacre in Tianmen Square or expect to get honest answers about the Uyghur people. I suppose most people don’t care about the censorship. It’s not something that will encroach on their use of the app.  And the app is either free or cheap and that’s a major consideration for many.

I haven’t tried it. And I won’t.

I don’t have a problem with AI in principle. But I do have a problem with China. I don’t use TikTok for the same reason. All your data goes back to the Chinese Government. Lots of people will say the Chinese Government isn’t interested in little people like me, which is true. The main targets will be corporations, people developing software, or military weapons. But it’s easy to manipulate social media audiences if you know what sorts of things they discuss with an AI. And that is about you and me.

Sure, that could be done using other AI apps. But I trust them a little more than the Chinese Government. Even the name is a giveaway. Western AI has reassuring, innocuous names like Chat, Claude, Alexa, Siri. DeepSeek sounds an awful lot like DeepSneak.

On the plus side, the IT companies have been given a wake-up call. Competition has arrived.

A few days ago (27th January) the world marked the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp by Russian forces.

Very few survivors of that hell on Earth are still alive but the legacy remains in their families. A few of these people, now well into their nineties, were interviewed talking about that place – and how they can see the germs of what became the Holocaust scattered around in our society today. Just this morning we’ve learned of yet another antisemitic attack at a Sydney school.

Nine News reported: “President of the Jewish Board of Deputies David Ossip told ABC Radio the graffiti found at Mount Sinai College was “pretty vile and hateful. It seems to be another act of antisemitic vandalism, this time targeting a school and a property adjacent to the school,” he said. “[It] is just grotesque and absolutely sickening that school children on their first day of school are going to have to walk past this … hate speech as they make their way into school.”

Auschwitz is a truly sobering place to visit.

But everyone should remember it doesn’t start with cattle trucks packed with people. It starts with graffiti on Jewish schools and businesses, and firebombing of shops and synagogues, and parades supporting Palestine and vilifying Israel. The police should find the perpetrators and put them in jail. If they’re not Australian they should be deported. And we should not be allowing anyone who finds this behaviour acceptable into Australia.

Let’s finish with a pretty picture, untouched by any form of AI.

A glorious winter morning at the beach

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