So long as there are big players releasing open weights models, which is true for the foreseeable future, I don’t think this is a big problem. Once those weights are released, they’re free forever, and anyone can fine-tune based on them, or use them to bootstrap new models by distillation or synthetic RL data generation.

“But… the future refused to change” – game over screen, Chrono Trigger

It’s strongly dependent on how you use it. Personally, I started out as a skeptic but by now I’m quite won over by LLM-aided search. For example, I was recently looking for an academic that had published some result I could describe in rough terms, but whose name and affiliation I was drawing a blank on. Several regular web searches yielded nothing, but Deepseek’s web search gave the result first try.

(Though, Google’s own AI search is strangely bad compared to others, so I don’t use that.)

The flip side is that for a lot of routine info that I previously used Google to find, like getting a quick and basic recipe for apple pie crust, the normal search results are now enshittified by ad-optimized slop. So in many cases I find it better to use a non-web-search LLM instead. If it matters, I always have the option of verifying the LLM’s output with a manual search.

Google search results are so terrible that at this point it’s a mercy.

Slightly off topic, but the writing on this article is horrible. Optimizing for Google engagement, it seems. Ironically, an AI would probably have produced something vastly more readable.

No AI org of any significant size will ever disclose its full training set, and it’s foolish to expect such a standard to be met. There is just too much liability. No matter how clean your data collection procedure is, there’s no way to guarantee the data set with billions of samples won’t contain at least one thing a lawyer could zero in on and drag you into a lawsuit over.

What Deepseek did, which was full disclosure of methods in a scientific paper, release of weights under MIT license, and release of some auxiliary code, is as much as one can expect.

It’s an interesting subject. If not for Beijing’s heavy hand, could Chinese internet companies have flourished much more and become international tech giants? Maybe, but there is one obvious counterpoint: where are the European tech giants? In an open playing field, it looks like American tech giants are pretty good at buying out or simply crushing any nascent competitors. If the Chinese did not have their censorship or great firewall, maybe the situation would have been like Europe, where the government tries to impose some rules, but doesn’t really have much traction, and everyone just ends up using Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc.

As a rule, multinationals agree to do what the government wants. You’ll notice that TikTok also agreed to follow the EU’s various new rules on social media. It’s only a few American firms that have the power and chutzpah to ignore local governments and do whatever they want.