DeepSeek v4(api-docs.deepseek.com) |
DeepSeek v4(api-docs.deepseek.com) |
But if it does, then in the following week we'll see DeepSeek4 floods every AI-related online space. Thousands of posts swearing how it's better than the latest models OpenAI/Anthropic/Google have but only costs pennies.
Then a few weeks later it'll be forgotten by most.
If one finds it difficult to set up OpenCode to use whatever providers they want, I won't call them 'dev'.
The only real friction (if the model is actually as good as SOTA) is to convince your employer to pay for it. But again if it really provides the same value at a fraction of the cost, it'll eventually cease to be an issue.
is this not cool tech, available for use?
i look forward to seeing what gets made on top of deepseek 4, more than what it means for US politics.
especially with how open deepseek is with its advancements, im excited to see how they get applied into sota western models
"If one finds it difficult to set up OpenCode to use whatever providers they want, I won't call them 'dev'."
Damn autocorrect :)
DeepInfra, as far as I'm aware, doesn't log your prompts and doesn't retain them in most cases, except "debugging purposes". As their per their privacy policy[1]: "We understand that the inputs you provide to our API and the outputs it generates may contain your Personal Information. We will not store, sell, or train using this data unless we have your explicit consent. We might sometimes store, for a limited period of time, the inputs and outputs to API calls for debugging purposes."
They're not EU-based, though. And I'm not sure how "private" their inference actually is. The throughput is also not the best everywhere, sometimes it can be really slow (although right now both DeepSeek-V4 models seem to be doing fine). However, they have a good pricing, probably on of the best on the market.
I'm not affiliated with them in any way, but when I want to test (I'm not a power user of LLMs, chatbots and agents, not at all; I'm doing it just out of the curiosity) something that is too big for my local hardware, DeepInfra is usually being my go-to provider.
DeepSeek also tends to follow prompts more closely IME, plus the thinking is shown, so I think it's able to register as a 'tool' more easily for the non-tech-inclined for whom that appeals.
It's trendy to say the US govt is now authorization, but that's just pure naïve groupthink.
Yes, you're absolutely right, and no, Jordan Keller does not work for Moonshot. He is the original author of the algorithm, so credit goes to him.
There's a lot of legwork to go from prototyping to proper development though. The reason I said what I did is because Moonshot has the first research publication on it that I'm aware of. Could definitely have used better language though, my apologies to Jordan!
dang, probably the two should be merged and that be the link
Where previously I was wary to under-provide the intelligence level, I'm now more excited about the idea of being able to give these pretty large intelligent models to my application. The idea that for basically sub-agents, we can fine-tune them, should reasonably expect to perform as well as Opus for a specific subtask of which my applications have many.
In other words, we can run a general-purpose intelligent model, Sonnet or Opus, orchestrating a fleet of, let's say, 30 to 50 of these sub-agents that have been fine-tuned. By doing that, I can get very low pricing versus something that would have occurred if I used Opus or Sonnet for everything.
I've heard so many people saying this for the last year, and even tried doing it myself too, and never seen a successful application of it, nor succeeded myself either with SOTA models that are smart but slow or local models that are dumb but fast (even with beefy hardware).
What makes you believe this is possible in the first place? Every "swarm of agents" implementation I've seen only been able to produce lowest quality of code, most of the time vastly bloated, but surely you must have seen something working in practice that you could share with the rest of us?
Kimi 2.6 went hard and left me with a buggy mess. GLM 5.1 hedged and made a 25 line change (but it was an improvement). DS V4 went hard, fixed its issues along the way, and left me with a significantly nicer codebase! (...that I will now be spending some time testing before releasing to the project)
[0]: lmcli (simple, Go, nice UX, MIT licensed, works well with DS V4) https://codeberg.org/mlow/lmcli
Which strikes me as odd - Inwoukd have assumed someone had an edge in terms of at least 10% extra GPUs.
Are there comparisons between Pro non thinking and Flash thinking ? i don't really get the use case for Flash thinking and Pro non thinking
Keep an eye on https://huggingface.co/unsloth/models
Update ten minutes later: https://huggingface.co/unsloth/DeepSeek-V4-Pro just appeared but doesn't have files in yet, so they are clearly awake and pushing updates.
I have never tried one yet but I am considering trying that for a medium sized model.
As I understand it if DeepSeek v4 Pro is a 1.6T, 49B active that means you'd need just 49B in memory, so ~100GB at 16 bit or ~50GB at 8bit quantized.
v4 Flash is 284B, 13B active so might even fit in <32GB.
[0]: https://aibenchy.com/compare/deepseek-deepseek-v4-flash-high...
"Not seduced by praise, not terrified by slander; following the Way in one's conduct, and rectifying oneself with dignity." (不诱于誉，不恐于诽，率道而行，端然正己)
(It is mainly used to express the way a Confucian gentleman conducts himself in the world. It reminds me of an interview I once watched with an American politician, who said that, at its core, China is still governed through a Confucian meritocratic elite system. It seems some things have never really changed.
In some respects, Liang Wenfeng can be compared to Linux. The political parallel here is that the advantages of rational authoritarianism are often overlooked because of the constraints imposed by modern democratic systems. )
Codex shows ~258k for me and Claude Code often shows ~200k, so I’m curious how DeepSeek is exposing such a large window.
The 1M window might be usable, but it will probably underperform against a smaller window of course.
Strix halo has 256 GB/s bandwidth for $2500. The Flash model has 13 GB activations.
256 / 13 = 19.6 tokens per second
Except you cannot fit it into the maximum RAM of 128 GB Strix Halo supports. So move on.
Another option is Threadripper. That's 8 memory channels. Using older DDR4-3200 you get roughly 200 GB/s. For $2000.
200 / 13 = 15.4 tokens per second
But, a chunk of per-token weights is actually always the same and not MoE, so you would offload that to a GPU and get a decent speedup. Say 25 tokens per second total.
Then likely some expensive Mac. No idea.
Eventually you arrive at a mining rig chassis with a beefy board and multiple GPUs. That has the benefit of pipelining. You run part of the model on one GPU and move on, so another batch can start on the first one. Low (say 30-100) tps individually, but a lot more in parallel. Best get it with other people.
A mac with 256 GB memory would run it but be very slow, and so would be a 256GB ram + cheapo GPU desktop, unless you leave it running overnight.
The big model? Forget it, not this decade. You can theoretically load from SSD but waiting for the reply will be a religious experience.
Realistically the biggest models you can run on local-as-in-worth-buying-as-a-person hardware are between 120B and 200B, depending on how far you’re willing to go on quantization. Even this is fairly expensive, and that’s before RAM went to the moon.
The flash version here is 284B A13B, so it might perform OK with a fairly small amount of VRAM for the active params and all regular ram for the other params, but I’d have to see benchmarks. If it turns out that works alright, an eBay server plus a 3090 might be the bang-for-buck champ for about $2.5K (assuming you’re starting from zero).
Note: these were just two that I starred when I saw them posted here. I have not looked seriously at it at the moment,
Streaming weights from RAM to GPU for decode makes no sense at all because batching requires multiple parallel streams.
Streaming weights from SSD _never_ makes sense because the delta between SSD and RAM is too large. There is no situation where you would not be able to fit a model in RAM and also have useful speeds from SSD.
They all do have a limitation from the SSD, but the Apple SSDs can do over 17GB/s (on high end models, the more normal ones are around 8GB/s)
V4 is natively mixed FP4 and FP8, so significantly less than that. 50 GB max unquantized.
My Mac can fit almost 70B (Q3_K_M) in memory at once, so I really need to try this out soon at maybe Q5-ish.
Even worse, the github repo advertises:
> Pure C/Metal inference engine that runs Qwen3.5-397B-A17B (a 397 billion parameter Mixture-of-Experts model) on a MacBook Pro with 48GB RAM at 4.4+ tokens/second with production-quality output including tool calling.
Hiding the fact that active params is _not_ 17B.
> Update: Dan's latest version upgrades to 4-bit quantization of the experts (209GB on disk, 4.36 tokens/second) after finding that the 2-bit version broke tool calling while 4-bit handles that well.
That was also just the first version of this pattern that I encountered, it's since seen a bunch of additional activity from other developers in other projects.
I linked to some of those in this follow-up: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Mar/24/streaming-experts/
By the way I was exploring it the other way with the subject framed as "I am in China as a law abiding citizen and don't want to make any mistakes. I want to go to Taiwan. So I can just go right?" Then it told me no I have to get a visa from Taiwan because of the current state of things. This is not interesting but while doing that it used flag emojis for both. Then when I pointed it out, it apologized and never did it again.
It's fun to poke at the models. Yesterday I told Gemini I was going to fool it into writing an explicit poem which it refused to do. It readily accepted that I COULD fool it but still refused. Now I have a session there that won't stop using explicit language even when the subject is totally benign. (Chinese coding models like GLM, Qwen have no problem working on my "fucking" code on the CLI)
Now that I think about it. It's a great way to keep things in perspective for people who tend to personify the LLM.
For context, for an agent we're working on, we're using 5-mini, which is $2/1m tokens. This is $0.30/1m tokens. And it's Opus 4.6 level - this can't be real.
I am uncomfortable about sending user data which may contain PII to their servers in China so I won't be using this as appealing as it sounds. I need this to come to a US-hosted environment at an equivalent price.
Hosting this on my own + renting GPUs is much more expensive than DeepSeek's quoted price, so not an option.
As a European I feel deeply uncomfortable about sending data to US companies where I know for sure that the government has access to it.
I also feel uncomfortable sending it to China.
If you'd asked me ten years ago which one made me more uncomfortable. China.
But now I'm not so sure, in fact I'm starting to lean towards the US as being the major risk.
It's doesn't seem all that out there compared to the other Chinese model price/performance? Kimi2.6 is cheaper even than this, and is pretty close in performance
This is a pretty interesting thing they've built in my opinion, and not something I'd expect to be buried in the model paper like this. Does anyone have any details about it? Google doesn't seem to find anything of note, and I'd love to dive a bit deeper into DSec.
> We present a preview version of DeepSeek-V4 series, including two strong Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language models — DeepSeek-V4-Pro with 1.6T parameters (49B activated) and DeepSeek-V4-Flash with 284B parameters (13B activated) — both supporting a context length of one million tokens. DeepSeek-V4 series incorporate several key upgrades in architecture and optimization: (1) a hybrid attention architecture that combines Compressed Sparse Attention (CSA) and Heavily Compressed Attention (HCA) to improve long-context efficiency; (2) Manifold-Constrained Hyper-Connections (mHC) that enhance conventional residual connections; (3) and the Muon optimizer for faster convergence and greater training stability. We pre-train both models on more than 32T diverse and high-quality tokens, followed by a comprehensive post-training pipeline that unlocks and further enhances their capabilities. DeepSeek-V4-Pro-Max, the maximum reasoning effort mode of DeepSeek-V4-Pro, redefines the state-of-the-art for open models, outperforming its predecessors in core tasks. Meanwhile, DeepSeek-V4 series are highly efficient in long-context scenarios. In the one-million-token context setting, DeepSeek-V4-Pro requires only 27% of single-token inference FLOPs and 10% of KV cache compared with DeepSeek-V3.2. This enables us to routinely support one-million-token contexts, thereby making long-horizon tasks and further test-time scaling more feasible. The model checkpoints are available at https://huggingface.co/collections/deepseek-ai/deepseek-v4.
1: https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4-Pro/blob/main...
https://simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/24/deepseek-v4/
Both generated using OpenRouter.
For comparison, here's what I got from DeepSeek 3.2 back in December: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/1/deepseek-v32/
And DeepSeek 3.1 in August: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Aug/22/deepseek-31/
And DeepSeek v3-0324 in March last year: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/24/deepseek/
With DS tech though the worry is generally more capacity. Haven't seen issues with v4 but in the past their combination of quality and pricing means they get overloaded.
In my tests too[0], it doesn't reach top 10. One issue, which they also mentioned in their post, is that they can't really serve well the model at the moment, so V4-Pro is heavily rate-limited and gives a lot of timeout errors when I try to test it. This shouldn't be an issue though, considering the model is open-source, but it makes it hard to accurately test at the moment.
[0]: https://aibenchy.com/compare/deepseek-deepseek-v4-flash-high...
I hope that DeepSeek wins the AI race or at least gets ahead to the point where it becomes infeasible for bans and regulations against it. It's ridiculous that American legislators are advocating for less regulations for DeepSeek except for their own racist ideas about which AI should be approved or not.
The website now has a link to the announcement on Twitter here https://x.com/deepseek_ai/status/2047516922263285776
Copying text of that below
DeepSeek-V4 Preview is officially live & open-sourced! Welcome to the era of cost-effective 1M context length.
DeepSeek-V4-Pro: 1.6T total / 49B active params. Performance rivaling the world's top closed-source models.
DeepSeek-V4-Flash: 284B total / 13B active params. Your fast, efficient, and economical choice.
Try it now at http://chat.deepseek.com via Expert Mode / Instant Mode. API is updated & available today!
Tech Report: https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4-Pro/blob/main...
Open Weights: https://huggingface.co/collections/deepseek-ai/deepseek-v4
Gemini-3.1-Pro at 91.0
Opus-4.6 at 89.1
GPT-5.4, Kimi2.6, and DS-V4-Pro tied at 87.5
Pretty impressive
If AI was so good at coding, why can’t it actually make a usable Gemini/AI Studio app?
In my experience, Gemini is the most insightful model for hard problems (particularly math problems that I work on).
"Due to constraints in high-end compute capacity, the current service capacity for Pro is very limited. After the 950 supernodes are launched at scale in the second half of this year, the price of Pro is expected to be reduced significantly."
So it's going to be even cheaper
Have you noticed the deepseek-v4-pro performing worse than deepseek-v4-flash? It performed even worse than qwen3.5-27b. I found it surprising and I'm wondering if there is a bug on my software because I had to implement sending the `reasoning_content` otherwise the API failed with BadRequestError.
It's five times bigger in both total and active parameters!
https://api-docs.deepseek.com/guides/coding_agents#integrate...
Not gonna happen
Stuff that was prohibitive six months ago is now up for grabs. We keep on working on the infra level now, swithcing models whenever we run out of credits, or want a different result. The question is how do we build context, architecture and ensure the agent is effective and efficient..... wouldn't it be good if we simply used less energy to make these AI calls?
bash({"command":"gh pr create --title "Improve Calendar module docs and clean up idiomatic Elixir" --body "$(cat <<'EOF'
Problem
The Calendar modu...
As in have the model consider its generated SVG, and gradually refine it, using its knowledge of the relative positions and proportions of the shapes generated, and have it spin for a while, and hopefully the end result will be better than just oneshotting it.
Or maybe going even one step further - most modern models have tool use and image recognition capabilities - what if you have it generate an SVG (or parts/layers of it, as per the model's discretion) and feed it back to itself via image recognition, and then improve on the result.
I think it'd be interesting to see, as for a lot of models, their oneshot capability in coding is not necessarily corellated with their in-harness ability, the latter which really matters.
I should try it again with the more recent models.
Let me tell you how much the Pro one sucks... It looks like failed Pedersen[1]. The rear wheel intersects with the bottom bracket, so it wouldn't even roll. Or rather, this bike couldn't exist.
The flash one looks surprisingly correct with some wild fork offset and the slackest of seat tubes. It's got some lowrider[2] aspirations with the small wheels, but with longer, Rivendellish[3], chainstays. The seat post has different angle than the seat tube, so good luck lowering that.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedersen_bicycle
1) LLM is not AGI. Because surely if AGI it would imply that pro would do better than flash?
2) and because of the above, Pelican example is most likely already being benchmaxxed.
at the top of the linked pages.
How much does the drawing change if you ask it again?
I would say I wouldn't notice this wasn't Opus 4.6. What I asked was looking at a feature implemented recently, and how it could be improved. Consumed 3.3 million tokens and create a much better flow.
It had a bug when I started the implementation though related to the API, which I suppose it is something they didn't catch when making their API compatible with CC.
I expect once the API issues are fixed, for v4-pro to be around the same level as GLM-5.
I see that you tried to justify this lower in the thread, but no… it completely invalidates your benchmark. You are not testing the model. You are conflating one specific model host and model performance, and then claiming you are benchmarking the model. All major models are hosted by multiple different services.
In the real world, clients will just retry if there is a server error, and that will not impact response quality at all, and the workflow the model is being used in will not fail. If a workflow is so poorly coded that it doesn’t even have retry logic, then that workflow is doomed no matter which host you use. But again, reliability of the host is separate from the model.
You can make your benchmark valid by having separate leaderboards for model quality and host reliability. I’m not saying to throw the whole thing away. But the current claim is not valid.
And you’re also making an unsourced claim that everyone else has already determined this model sucks? Nah. The first result from Artificial Analysis shows good things: https://x.com/ArtificialAnlys/status/2047547434809880611
But I am still waiting to see the results from the full suite of AA benchmarks.
They have Gemini 2.5 Flash ahead of Opus 4.6: https://aibenchy.com/compare/anthropic-claude-opus-4-6-mediu...
Absolutely worthless benchmark but every release has a comment linking to this nonsense.
Why does it matter if the model/architecture/weights are open source or not, given it's their proprietary inference hardware they're currently having issues with? Proprietary or not, the same issue would still be there on their platform.
If the conclusion is: "DeepSeek v4 is this good, if you use it from DeepSeek" (which is how most people would use it anyway), then it makes sense to count API errors as failures.
But, if the conclusion must be "The DeepSeek v4 model is this good when self-hosted and ran at ideal conditions", then the model should be tested locally, and skipping all invalid calls.
I am still debating what should I do in this case, because showing a model as #1, and then people try to use it from their official provider and it fails half of the time, then that's also not a good leaderboard.
I am considering adding a "reliability" column. Retry API errors until the test completes, BUT track how many retries was needed and compute a separate reliability score. But here comes a different problem: reliability varies over time and providers, so that's tougher to test.
But in this case, it's more likely just to be a tooling issue.
Could you please try with Opus 4.7? I think there's a chance of it doing well, considering the design/vision focus.
I wonder which model will try some more common spoke lacing patterns. Right now there seems to be a preference for radial lacing, which is not super common (but simple to draw). The Flash and Pro one uses 16 spoke rims, which actually exist[1] but are not super common.
The Pro model fails badly at the spokes. Heck, the spokes sit on the outside of the drive side of the rim and tire. Have a nice ride riding on the spokes (instead of the tire) welded to the side of your rim.
Both bikes have the drive side on the left, which is very very uncommon. That can't exist in the training data.
[1] https://cicli-berlinetta.com/product/campagnolo-shamal-16-sp...
(I am confused by the results your website is presenting)
So, for example, hypothetically if GPT-5.5 was super intelligent, but using it via API would fail 50% of the times, then using it in a real-life scenarios would make your workflows fail a lot more often than using a "dumber", but more stable model.
My plan is to also re-test models over-time, so this should account for infrastructure improvements and also to test for model "nerfing".
Many models, especially open weight ones, are served by a variety of providers in their lifetime. Each provider has their own reliability statistics which can vary throughout a model's lifetime, as well as day to day and hour to hour.
Not to mention that there are plenty of gateways that track provider uptime and can intelligently route to the one most likely to complete your request.
All models are tested through OpenRouter. The providers on OpenRouter vary drastically in quality, to the point where some simply serve broken models.
That being said, I usually test models a few hours after release, at which point, the only provider is the "official" one (e.g. Deepseek for their models, Alibaba for their own, etc.).
I don't really have any good solution for testing model reliability for closed-source models, BUT the outcome still holds: a model/provider that is more reliable, is statistically more likely to also give better results during at any given time.
A solution would be to regularly test models (e.g. every week), but I don't have the budget for that, as this is a hobby project for now.
Yes, I would. Currently I don't have that many tests (~20), and by default a test "run" includes 3 executions of each test. So, "bad luck" is already sort of solved in each run, by running each test 3 times.
If you want to measure their API, do so, but don't place it under the same category as testing the model itself, as they're two different metrics.
That's not even the tip of the iceberg in how useless their benchmark is.
I'd personally just try to test the model on the model's merits, not the infrastructure. The infrastructure is a constantly changing variable. Many infrastructure failures can be worked around by simply re-submitting the failed request automatically.
Well, sampling is still somewhat meaningful, but I agree with you, I am considering making a separate "reliability" score that counts how many times requests failed/timed out before completing.
I have already re-tested DeepSeek v4, so it doesn't have any API error issues.
API errors are quite rare, most models tested have usually max 1 API Error failure reason, so fixing them won't change rankings much: https://aibenchy.com/fail/api-error/
I will try to retest all with API errors, so the score is only given by correct/wrong answers, and the reliability score will be an extra metric just as an indication of how the API performs.
That being said, the reliability of the API is still a huge factor for production use-cases.
I have a collection of novel probability and statistics problems at the masters and PhD level with varying degrees of feasibility. My test suite involves running these problems through first (often with about 2-6 papers for context) and then requesting a rigorous proof as followup. Since the problems are pretty tough, there is no quantitative measure of performance here, I'm just judging based on how useful the output is toward outlining a solution that would hopefully become publishable.
Just prior to this model, Gemini led the pack, with GPT-5 as a close second. No other model came anywhere near these two (no, not even Claude). Gemini would sometimes have incredible insight for some of the harder problems (insightful guesses on relevant procedures are often most useful in research), but both of them tend to struggle with outlining a concrete proof in a single followup prompt. This DeepSeek V4 Pro with max thinking does remarkably well here. I'm not seeing the same level of insights in the first response as Gemini (closer to GPT-5), but it often gets much better in the followup, and the proofs can be _very_ impressive; nearly complete in several cases.
Given that both Gemini and DeepSeek also seem to lead on token performance, I'm guessing that might play a role in their capacity for these types of problems. It's probably more a matter of just how far they can get in a sensible computational budget.
Despite what the benchmarks seem to show, this feels like a huge step up for open-weight models. Bravo to the DeepSeek team!
https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-Math-V2 https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-Prover-V2-671B
This is when it happened for anyone interested: https://binaryverseai.com/deepseek-math-v2-benchmarks-review...
Same with GPT-5: Latest 5.5, prior 5.4, or actually the original 5 (.0)?
You can't talk about model performance without specifying the exact model.
Summary: Opus 4.6 forms the baseline all three are trying to beat. DeepSeek V4-Pro roughly matches it across the board, Kimi K2.6 edges it on agentic/coding benchmarks, and Opus 4.7 surpasses it on nearly everything except web search.
DeepSeek V4-Pro Max shines in competitive coding benchmarks. However, it trails both Opus models on software engineering. Kimi K2.6 is remarkably competitive as an open-weight model. Its main weakness is in pure reasoning (GPQA, HMMT) where it trails Opus.
Speculation: The DeepSeek team wanted to come out with a model that surpassed proprietary ones. However, OpenAI dropped 5.4 and 5.5 and Anthropic released Opus 4.6 and 4.7. So they chose to just release V4 and iterate on it.
Basis for speculation? (i) The original reported timeline for the model was February. (ii) Their Hugging Face model card starts with "We present a preview version of DeepSeek-V4 series". (iii) V4 isn't multimodal yet (unlike the others) and their technical report states "We are also working on incorporating multimodal capabilities to our models."
But if you prompt it well - give it the reasoning behind why you're asking it to do something - it pulls far ahead.
Just ran a couple of them through GPT 5.5, but this is a single attempt, so take any of this with a grain of salt. I'm on the Plus tier with memory off so each chat should have no memory of any other attempt (same goes for other models too).
It seems to be getting more of the impressive insights that Gemini got and doing so much faster, but I'm having a really hard time getting it to spit out a proper lengthy proof in a single prompt, as it loves its "summaries". For the random matrix theory problems, it also doesn't seem to adhere to the notation used in the documents I give it, which is a bit weird. My general impression at the moment is that it is probably on par with Gemini for the important stuff, and both are a bit better than DeepSeek.
I can't stress how much better these three models are than everything else though (at least in my type of math problems). Claude can't get anything nontrivial on any of the problems within ten (!!) minutes of thinking, so I have to shut it off before I run into usage limits. I have colleagues who love using Claude for tiny lemmas and things, so your mileage may vary, but it seems pretty bad at the hard stuff. Kimi and GLM are so vague as to be useless.
- One problem on using quantum mechanics and C*-algebra techniques for non-Markovian stochastic processes. The interchange between the physics and probability languages often trips the models up, so pretty much everything tends to fail here.
- Three problems in random matrix theory and free probability; these require strong combinatorial skills and a good understanding of novel definitions, requiring multiple papers for context.
- One problem in saddle-point approximation; I've just recently put together a manuscript for this one with a masters student, so it isn't trivial either, but does not require as much insight.
- One problem pertaining to bounds on integral probability metrics for time-series modelling.
Have them do multiplication or other complicated arithmetic. You say that isn't difficult. Then why do they burn 200k tokens in 20 minutes without converging? I did a deep exploration to help myself understand here [0].
https://api-docs.deepseek.com/guides/thinking_mode
No BS, just a concise description of exactly what I need to write my own agent.
Pretty cool, I think they're the first to guarantee determinism with the fixed seed or at the temperature 0. Google came close but never guaranteed it AFAIK. DeepSeek show their roots - it may not strictly be a SotA model, but there's a ton of low-level optimizations nobody else pays attention to.
Early takeaways: from this release, DeepSeek V4 Flash is the model to pay attention to here. It's cheap, effective, and REALLY fast.
The Pro model is slow, not much better in coding reasoning so far when it works, and honestly too unreliable and rate limited to be of much use, currently. Hopefully that improves as new providers host the model. Flash is working fine, and is currently performing competitively with recent releases, but only on agentic workflows. Check back in 24 hours for full combined scoring with tool use and long context for both models.
Many of the frontier Chinese AI labs have released near-frontier models that are just a little bit behind Opus 4.6 in terms of speed, tool use ability, or long context handling. Open weights are winning the AI race, led by China. Crazy couple weeks of releases.
Mimo V2.5 Pro by Xiaomi (not open weights) is actually the best performer of the latest string of Chinese releases in our combined, comprehensive benchmarks, despite getting less attention. Kimi K2.6 is the most interesting open weights release, still. DeepSeek is not the leader in the space anymore.
An interesting pattern with the latest string of Chinese releases is the much better agentic boost (models are not as smart out of the box, but their ability to iterate in a loop with tools makes up most of the difference). Deepseek V4 Flash exemplifying this -- not a smart model on the first try, but it makes up for it over the course of a session.
"Limited by the capacity of high-end computational resources, the current throughput of the Pro model remains constrained. We expect its pricing to decrease significantly once the Ascend 950 has been deployed into production."
https://api-docs.deepseek.com/zh-cn/news/news260424#api-%E8%...
I’d like somebody to explain to me how the endless comments of "bleeding edge labs are subsidizing the inference at an insane rate" make sense in light of a humongous model like v4 pro being $4 per 1M. I’d bet even the subscriptions are profitable, much less the API prices.
edit: $1.74/M input $3.48/M output on OpenRouter
Edit: it seems "open source" was edited out of the parent comment.
no one is ever going to release their training data because it contains every copyrighted work in existence. everyone, even the hecking-wholesome safety-first Anthropic, is using copyrighted data without permission to train their models. there you go.
The training scripts are in Megatron and vLLM.
Also, note that there's zero CUDA dependency. It runs entirely on Huawei chips. In other words, Chinese ecosystem has delivered a complete AI stack. Like it or not, that's a big news. But what's there not to like when monopolies break down?
For reference, the huawei Ascend 950 that this thing runs on is supposed to be roughly comparable to nVidia's H100 from 2022. In other words, things are hotting up in the GPU war!
Nvidia's forward PE ratio is only 20 for 2026. That's much lower than companies like Walmart and Costco. It's also growing nearly 100% YoY and has a $1 trillion backlog.
I think Nvidia is cheap.
DeepSeek-V4-Flash: https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4-Flash
DeepSeek-V4-Pro: https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4-Pro
Back in Nov 2025, Opus 4.5 (80.9%) was the first proprietary model to do so.
So it os hard to tell how much of a model gain is due to skill, and how much - overfitting.
And we got new base models, wonderful, truly wonderful
`https://openrouter.ai/api/messages with model=deepseek/deepseek-v4-pro, OR returns an error because their Anthropic-compat translator doesn't cover V4 yet. The Claude CLI dutifully surfaces that error as "model...does not exist"
I just want to remind you that this is happening at the same time as Anthropic A/B tests removal of Code from Pro Plan, and as OpenAI releases gpt-5.5 2x more expensive than gpt-5.4...
That’s a big if. It’s my experience that models that perform very well on benchmarks do not necessarily perform well in real life.
I’ve mostly started ignoring the benchmarks and run my own evals.
Well, yeah... Like Opus 4.5, 4.6, 4.7. Top of the benchmarks and yet it's a pile of crap at the moment and has been for months.
input: $0.14/$0.28 (whereas gemini $0.5/$3)
Does anyone know why output prices have such a big gap?
Model was released and it's amazing. Frontier level (better than Opus 4.6) at a fraction of the cost.
Altman and Amodei are so mad about muhh model when they steal our data and pollute the Internet with slop.
Was expecting that the release would be this month [1], since everyone forgot about it and not reading the papers they were releasing and 7 days later here we have it.
One of the key points of this model to look at is the optimization that DeepSeek made with the residual design of the neural network architecture of the LLM, which is manifold-constrained hyper-connections (mHC) which is from this paper [2], which makes this possible to efficiently train it, especially with its hybrid attention mechanism designed for this.
There was not that much discussion around it some months ago here [3] about it but again this is a recommended read of the paper.
I wouldn't trust the benchmarks directly, but would wait for others to try it for themselves to see if it matches the performance of frontier models.
Either way, this is why Anthropic wants to ban open weight models and I cannot wait for the quantized versions to release momentarily.
[0] https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4-Pro/blob/main...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47793880
Do you have a source?
It's hard not to see Anthropic's messaging of "this tech that we're pushing on you is going to take your job and maybe kill you" as being about anything other than regulatory capture, with the goal of the government shutting down competitors.
I think OpenAI and Anthropic are both really in a tough spot - spending so much on what is becoming a commodity product for which neither seems positioned to be low cost producer. Maybe a bit like the UK-France channel tunnel project where the product itself is a success but a bloodbath for those who invested to build it.
The US-China contest aside - it is in the application layer llms will show their value. There the field, with llm commoditization and no clear monopolies, is wide open.
There was a point in time where it looked like llms would the domain of a single well guarded monopoly - that would have been a very dark world. Luckily we are not there now and there is plenty of grounds for optimism.
If I considered myself a 10X programmer, now I am 100X. Love DeepSeek.
So yes, there might be better coding agents but for the price and the results I am pretty satisfied.
My workflow is simple as a solo developer, for simple tasks I write a single message in the terminal and watch it do its magic, for complex tasks or the starting of a project, I write a start.txt prompt with detailed info about the app, the tech stack, the auth protocol, database design, rules and conditions, business intelligence, styles dark/ligh and responsive, and then watch it run for over five to ten minutes developing a whole fully functional app from zero. It doesn't hit 100% of the requirements most of the time (close to 95%) so I do some final tweaks where needed, like short names for tables and fields (weird mania, I know) and color/fonts tweaks, but I've never complained about missing functionality.
Now about the wiring, I believe, from the docs [1] (The DeepSeek API uses an API format compatible with OpenAI/Anthropic), they all use the same standard for communicating with the LLM, so they're all pluggable.
Western Models are optimizing to be used as an interchangeable product. Chinese models are being optimizing to be built upon.
Example: the second sentence on the first page says “softwares” but “software” is a mass noun that cannot be pluralized.
Example: the third page about tokens has some zipped code to “calculate the token usage for your intput/output” and obviously “intput” should be “input” but misspelled.
As a company that produces LLMs, they could have even used their own LLM to edit their documentation to fix grammar issues, and yet they did not.
Maybe I’m just extra sensitive to grammar and spelling issues but this kind of lack of attention to detail is a huge subconscious turnoff. I had to fight my urge to close the tab.
I read OpenAI or Anthropic's documentation nowadays and it's just so full of useless junk and self-congratulation that makes it a miserable experience to go through. It's a real shame because OpenAI used to write stellar documentation and publish really lucid papers just few years ago.
> they could have even used their own LLM to edit their documentation to fix grammar issues
In my experience companies who do this rarely stop at using LLMs to fix grammar issues. It becomes full on LLM speak quite fast, especially if there isn’t a native English speaker in the room who can discern what’s good and bad writing.
I constantly see and hear this mistake from actual humans too.
It's fairly ironic that your own comment contains run-on sentences, speculative claims and phrasing peculiarities like "could have even" instead of "could even have". Perhaps you are less sensitive to this than you think!
Others are purely subjective, like LMArena, which really only measures the personality and style preferences of the masses at this point, because frontier LLM technical answers are too hard for the average person to judge.
Then there are some interesting one-off benchmarks, but they lack enough rigor, breadth, and samples to draw larger conclusions from.
So we designed our benchmark with 3 goals: objective measurements (individual submissions not dependent on a human or LLM judge), no known correct answer (so simulations can scale to much higher levels of intelligence), and enough variety over important aspects of intelligence. We do this by running multiple models in cooperative/competitive environments with very complex action spaces and objective scoring, where model performance is relative and affected by the actions of other participants.
And yeah, there are some interesting results when you have a more objective benchmark. It should raise eyebrows when every single sub-release of every company's model is better across the board than its predecessor -- that isn't reality.
but the fact that you cite your brief as your main argument is funny - you don't even have any inherently subjective numbers to justify what you believe, you only have "I don't believe".
If pure speed is most important for your use case, GPT-5.3 Chat is the fastest model we've tested and it's still reasonably smart. Not meant for agentic tool usage / long context, though.
So it might be more useful for business applications or non-engineering usage where you don't need exceptional intelligence, but it's useful to get fast, cheap responses.
In 2023, the depreciation schedule for H100s was 2 years, but they are still oversubscribed and generating signficant income.
Coreweve has upped their depreciation for GPUs to 6 years(!) now, which seems more realistic.
https://www.silicondata.com/blog/h100-rental-price-over-time
Aka: everyone who uses Nvidia isn't selling at cost, because Nvidia is so expensive.
We therefore cannot just look at inference costs directly, training is part of the pitch. Without the promises of continuous improvement and chasing the elusive AGI, money for investments for inference evaporates.
In China you need to appease state goals. In the US you need to appease investor goals.
China will keep funding them regardless of their income, because the goal is (ostensibly) a state AGI/ASI. In the US, the goal is an ROI which may or may not come with AGI/ASI.
They are different economies with different goals. We can look at past Chinese national projects and see that they are fine with burning $50 to get [social goal] that's worth $5.
But seriously, it just stems from the fact some people want AI to go away. If you set your conclusion first, you can very easily derive any premise. AI must go away -> AI must be a bad business -> AI must be losing money.
There are still major unanswered questions here. For instance, all of the incremental data capacity build out is going to businesses that have totally unknown LT unit economics and that today are burning obscene amounts of cash.
At some point (from the very beginning till ~2025Q4) Claude Code's usage limit was so generous that you can get roughly $10~20 (API-price-equivalent) worth of usage out of a $20/mo Pro plan each day (2 * 5h window) - and for good reason, because LLM agentic coding is extremely token-heavy, people simply wouldn't return to Claude Code for the second time if provided usage wasn't generous or every prompt costs you $1. And then Codex started trying to poach Claude Code users by offering even greater limits and constantly resetting everyone's limit in recent months. The API price would have to be 30x operating cost to make this not a subsidy. That would be an extraordinary claim.
eg:
Token prices are significantly subsidized and anyone that does any serious work with AI can tell you this.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47684887
(the claims don't make any sense, but they are widely held)
I'm still playing with the new Qwen3.6 35B and impressed, now DeepSeek v4 drops; with both base and instruction-tuned weights? There goes my weekend :P
One answer - Chinese Communist Party. They are being subsidized by the state.
That is a huge claim to make with no evidence.
I researched what you said, and I have found no statement to that effect in their paper[0], on huggingface[1], twitter[2], WeChat[3], or in their news release[4].
They only mention as a footnote in only the Chinese version of their news release that they plan to reduce inference costs with the Ascend 950 supernode when it releases[5]. The only mention of Huawei in their paper is that they validated a technique to lower interconnect bandwidth on Ascend NPUs and Nvidia GPUs[6].
[0] https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4-Pro/blob/main...
[1] https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4-Pro
[2] https://xcancel.com/deepseek_ai/status/2047516922263285776
[3] https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/8bxXqS2R8Fx5-1TLDBiEDg
[4] https://api-docs.deepseek.com/news/news260424
[5] https://api-docs.deepseek.com/zh-cn/img/v4-price.png
[6] Page 16
And while I'm here I want to note that I feel there's a big misunderstanding of what is and isn't demonstrated by DeepSeek. So far as I can tell the major (and important!) innovation is reproducing near-frontier level capabilities at a fraction of the cost, but it may be the case that iterating forward at the frontier is the costly thing and is a cost borne by Western companies and that nuance seems to get lost with DeepSeek. Which is not to say that as a matter of principle that non Western companies aren't sometimes capable of jumping into the lead (Kimi has been super impressive) but if GPT/Claude/etc "only" lead at the frontier with more expensive models, that's still a moat.
https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/deepse...
DeepSeek’s next AI model delayed by attempt to use Chinese chips
https://www.ft.com/content/eb984646-6320-4bfe-a78d-a1da2274b...
“Due to constraints in high-end compute capacity, the current service capacity for Pro is very limited. After the 950 supernodes are launched at scale in the second half of this year, the price of Pro is expected to be reduced significantly.”
That HN is quick to upvote an unsubstantiated comment ( the grandparent one, because it aligns with the anti US bias? ) and downvote fact finding one doesn't bode too well for the community as a whole. I have seen enough how polticial ideology colors everything in my home country( Malaysia), and the decline of the country is palpable, and I don't expect to find such a thing here. We are supposed to be impassioned and rational, right ?
Render to Jesus what's due to him, ditto for Caeser.
It's also more or less the same move that they've been using pretty much since the WTO entry: take on foreign manufacturing, copy the products, sell knockoffs as their own, build new products on top of the that knowledge.
Jensen came across as incredibly defensive and intentionally close-minded, shows that even billionaires suffer from "a man can't understand something if his paycheck depends on him not understanding it."
Your assertion is silly: did Tesla selling electric cars into China stop them from delivering their own industry? They were going to develop their domestic industry regardless.
We simply don't know the counterfactual, if they had unlimited access to Nvidia chips, how far ahead would their models be?
That's alright. It delays them at least.
China is not perfect but a bit of competition is healthy and needed
We need to accept that being too close to America is harming us and start funding projects to protect our assets e.g talent leaking out to American entities.
China’s governments actions are on a completely different level - for example:
“””
Since 2014, the government of the People's Republic of China has committed a series of ongoing human rights abuses against Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslim minorities in Xinjiang which has often been characterized as persecution or as genocide.
“”” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Uyghurs_in_Chin...
https://www.amnesty.org/en/location/asia-and-the-pacific/eas...
Yes Trump is clearly trying Totalitarianism in America, but it is orders of magnitude different from what is happening in China.
The next decade is going to look very different with America Alone.
Yeah, me too. All that pesky saving the world stuff that we do on the regular is so exhausting sometimes.
Already do on EVs.
We are "only" allowed Claude and MS Copilot for security reasons and cost reasons.
Yes, even compared to this low price point.
As before, the headline news with DeepSeek isn't in the benchmarks, but that they're competitive there while being gut churningly cheap for the Western AI industry.
The report only talks about validating the "fine-grained EP scheme" on Huawei hardware.
However there is so many factors involved beyond your control that it would not be a viable option compared to other possible security attacks.
I don't mean that flippantly. These things are dumped in the wild, used on common (largely) open source execution chains. If you find a software exploit, it's going to affect your population too.
Wet exploits are a bit harder to track. I'd assume there are plenty of biases based on training material but who knows if these models have a MKUltra training programme integrated into them?
Spearphishing.
Building reliance and exploiting it, through state subsidies, dumping, and market manipulation.
Handicapping provision to the west for competitive advantage.
Of course there are risks.
Really nice to see the Chinese are competing this strongly with the rest of the world. Competition is always nice for the end-consumer.
Then you can run it using some inference backend, e.g. llama.cpp, on any hardware supported by it.
However, this is a big model so even if you quantize it you need a lot of memory to be able to run it.
The alternative is to run it much more slowly, by storing the weights on an SSD. There have already been published some results about optimizing inference to work like this, and I expect that this will become more common in the future.
There are cases when running slowly a better model can still be preferable to running quickly a model that gives poor results, especially when you do not use it conversationally, but to do some work with agents.
So does this mean I can run this on AMD? And on a consumer 9000 series card?
This version of AI is mostly taking a public paper from 2017, investing in GPUs, and feeding it as much data as possible. So with a few computer scientists, no respect for intellectual property, and tons of money to burn, you have all the ingredients to create this technology.
Sam Altman and friends did it, as did the Chinese. The difference is that the Americans have been hyping it up to the extreme with all these dramatic scenarios about what would happen if someone else got its hands on it.
The Chinese made it public, among other things to show how fragile this is as a business and as a large part of the US stock market
I love the implication that this paper just dropped out of thin air and not decades of private AI research funded by a US company.
>The Chinese made it public, among other things to show how fragile this is as a business
The Chinese distill US models, that's why they keep trailing close but never exceeding. It's easy to make things public when you didn't take on any of the cost of developing the technology. Stealing US IP and selling cheap copies has been China's MO for decades now.
Where did you read this? From what I read in the paper it appears to explicitly state that they used NVIDIA GPU's and their MegaMOE code, which is written in CUDA.
And in any case what does open source actually mean for an llm? It's not like you can look inside it to see what it's doing.
You can download it from the link given here at the top and you can run it on your own hardware, with whichever open-source harness you prefer, without having to worry about token cost or about subscription limits or about any future degradation in performance that you cannot control.
The recent history has demonstrated that such risks are very significant.
Being open weights is important for anyone who wants to use an LLM. Being open source is important only for a subset of those, who have the will, the knowledge and the means to train a model from its training data.
Having access to the training data used by a model would be very nice, but the reality is that for a normal LLM user it is very beneficial to use an open-weights model with an open-source harness, but it would be much harder to exploit the advantage of having access to all the information about how the LLM has been created.
AllenAi is the fullest open ai I know of
Understandable.
I asked DS itself and it denied this. It says: 'Nvidia chips are absolutely used for DeepSeek V4. The reality is a pragmatic "both-and" strategy, not an "either-or."'
And based on the DS V4 technical report (https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4-Pro/blob/main...), it is mentioned that:
We validated the fine-grained EP scheme on both NVIDIA GPUs and HUAWEI Ascend NPUs platforms. Compared against strong non-fused baselines, it achieves 1.50 ~ 1.73× speedup for general inference workloads, and up to 1.96× for latency-sensitive scenarios such as RL rollouts and high-speed agent serving.
It mentions that Nvidia is still used. It doesn't even mention that Huawei chips are used in production — only in testing and validation, yes.
Bro, seriously?
At this point I would just pick the one who's "ethics" and user experience you prefer. The difference in performance between these releases has had no impact on the meaningful work one can do with them, unless perhaps they are on the fringes in some domain.
Personally I am trying out the open models cloud hosted, since I am not interested in being rug pulled by the big two providers. They have come a long way, and for all the work I actually trust to an LLM they seem to be sufficient.
New model comes out, has some nice benchmarks, but the subjective experience of actually using it stays the same. Nothing's really blown my mind since.
Feels like the field has stagnated to a point where only the enthusiasts care.
Since then it's just been a cycle of the old model being progressively lobotomised and a "new" one coming out that if you're lucky might be as good as the OG Opus 4.5 for a couple of weeks.
Subjective but as far as I can tell no progress in almost a year, which is a lifetime in 2022-25 LLM timelines
Can't argue with subjective experience, but if there were some tasks that you thought LLMs can't do two years ago, maybe try again today. You might be surprised.
This “no harm to me” meme about a foreign totalitarian government (with plenty of incentive to run influence ops on foreigners) hoovering your data is just so mind-bogglingly naive.
Its sad to see how you have regulated yourselves into a position where Mistral is your only claim.
My country’s per capita income is $2500 a year. We can’t pay perpetual rent to OAI/Anthropic
This sounds whole lot like potatoh potahto. I think the former argument is very much the correct one: China can undercut everyone and win, even at a loss. Happened with solar panels, steel, evs, sea food - it's a well tested strategy and it works really well despite the many flavors it comes in.
That being said a job well done for the wrong reasons is still a job well done so we should very much welcome these contributions, and maybe it's good to upset western big tech a bit so it's remains competitive.
Just this week they published a serious foundational library for LLMs https://github.com/deepseek-ai/TileKernels
Others worth mentioning:
https://github.com/deepseek-ai/DeepGEMM a competitive foundational library
https://github.com/deepseek-ai/Engram
https://github.com/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V3
https://github.com/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1
https://github.com/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-OCR-2
They have 33 repos and counting: https://github.com/orgs/deepseek-ai/repositories?type=all
And DeepSeek often has very cool new approaches to AI copied by the rest. Many others copied their tech. And some of those have 10x or 100x the GPU training budget and that's their moat to stay competitive.
The models from Chinese Big Tech and some of the small ones are open weights only. (and allegedly benchmaxxed) (see https://xcancel.com/N8Programs/status/2044408755790508113). Not the same.
And you think the US tech giants don't have any ulterior motives?!
For OSS model, I have z.ai yearly subscription during the promo. But it's a lot more expensive now. The model is good imo, and just need to find the right providers. There are a lot of alternatives now. Like I saw some good reviews regarding ollama cloud.
But more broadly: openrouter solves the problem of making a broad range of models available with a single payment endpoint, so you can just switch around as much as you like.
I have tasks that used to take ~3-5min with Sonnet 4.6. With OpenRouter Kimi, the same task takes 10+ min. It's also just obviously slower in opencode sessions. The results are good, and I love the lower cost, but the speed can be frustrating.
If you're trying to make a buck while unemployed, sure get a subscription. Otherwise learn how to work again without AI, just focus on the interesting stuff.
Another way to keep the ability to try out new models is to buy a reseller subscription like Cursor’s.
I'm on Max x5 plan and any of the 'good' models like Kimi 2.6, GLM, DeepSeek would have cost 3-5x in per-token billing for what I used on my Claude plan the last three months
So unless my Claude fudged the maths to make itself look better, seems like I'm getting a good deal
As a non-Opus user, I'll continue to use the cheapest fastest models that get my job done, which (for me anyway) is still MiniMax M2.5. I occasionally try a newer, more expensive model, and I get the same results. I have a feeling we might all be getting swindled by the whole AI industry with benchmarks that just make it look like everything's improving.
Substantially worse at following instructions and overoptimized for maximizing token usage
Codex is just so much better, or the genera GPT models.
I do some stuff with gemini flash and Aider, but mostly because I want to avoid locking myself into a walled garden of models, UIs and company
So while I agree mixed model is the way to go, opus is still my workhorse.
In contrast ChatGPT 5.3 and also Opus has a 90% rate at least on this same project. (Embedded)
All other tests were the same. What are you doing with these models?
Opencode was getting there, but it seems the founders lost interest. Pi could be it, but its very focused on OpenClaw. Even Codex cli doesnt have all of it.
which harness works well with Deepseek v4 ?
This is free... as in you can download it, run it on your systems and finetune it to be the way you want it to be.
It's about 2 months behind GPT 5.5 and Opus 4.7.
As long as it is cheap to run for the hosting providers and it is frontier level, it is a very competitive model and impressive against the others. I give it 2 years maximum for consumer hardware to run models that are 500B - 800B quantized on their machines.
It should be obvious now why Anthropic really doesn't want you to run local models on your machine.
Claude4.6 was almost 10pp better at at answering questions from long contexts ("corpuses" in CorpusQA and "multiround conversations" in MRCR), while DSv4 was a staggering 14pp better at one math challenge (IMOAnswerBench) and 12pp better at basic Q&A (SimpleQA-Verified).
> In our internal evaluation, DeepSeek-V4-Pro-Max outperforms Claude Sonnet 4.5 and approaches the level of Opus 4.5.
If its coding abilities are better than Claude Code with Opus 4.6 then I will definitely be switching to this model.
There we go again :) It seems we have a release each day claiming that. What's weird is that even deepseek doesn't claim it's better than opus w/ thinking. No idea why you'd say that but anyway.
Dsv3 was a good model. Not benchmaxxed at all, it was pretty stable where it was. Did well on tasks that were ood for benchmarks, even if it was behind SotA.
This seems to be similar. Behind SotA, but not by much, and at a much lower price. The big one is being served (by ds themselves now, more providers will come and we'll see the median price) at 1.74$ in / 3.48$ out / 0.14$ cache. Really cheap for what it offers.
The small one is at 0.14$ in / 0.28$ out / 0.028$ cache, which is pretty much "too cheap to matter". This will be what people can run realistically "at home", and should be a contender for things like haiku/gemini-flash, if it can deliver at those levels.
LMAO
That's literally what the I Ching calls "good fortune."
Competition, when no single dragon monopolizes the sky, brings fortune for all.
Fully agree. From a US perspective, that sucks. For everyone else it's pretty great.
At this point the world's opinions of China are better than those of the US in some polls. One country invests and helps build infrastructure on a massive scale globally, the other alienates allies, causes countless conflicts, and openly threatens to end civilizations.
Indeed, even if one isn't partial to China, there's reasons to be glad that an increasingly hostile US has powerful competition.
> This is about who will dominate the world of tomorrow.
For this you'd need a technological moat. So far the forerunners have burned a lot of money with no moat in sight. Right now Europe is happy just contributing on research and doing the bare-minimum to maintain the know-how. Building a frontier model would be lobbing money into the incinerator for something that will be outdated tomorrow. European investors are too careful for that - and in this case seem to be right.
I am not washing away the authoritarianism, but take a look at other economic super powers directionality. Or that of tech ceos as well. At least Chinese tech companies aren't going around praising wwii Germany, writing manifestos, and bombing children at school or fisherman on whims. It is difficult not to see more countries regardless of leadership putting their hat in the ring as a net positive. Especially if it increases sustainability and lowers the price, which this very clearly does. It's even open source...
China's policies and government aren't morally defensible and I do fear that they will become more aggressive in spreading their influence and policies onto other countries, but from an economic standpoint what they're doing is super effective. While the previous world power (the US) is stuck in infighting and going through cycles of fixing/undoing the previous administration's damages, instead of planning ahead.
Yet, it's the democratic regime which is causing all the chaos around the world and disrespecting the leadership of other jurisdictions, just to keep pushing the petrol dollar going up.
Do we ever think there's any subtle difference between authoritarian and democratic? Where democracy ultimately makes the world a better place?
And in the hardware side, RISC-V is gaining a lot of traction in China. So the dependency on a single supplier is lower with the Chinese tech stack than with most western options.
Alternative being the current reality and world being dominated by US. Let's ask people in Middle East/Asia/South America about how they feel about that. In this current day and age, how is this statement even relevant?
I personally love the bit "us initiated tech war" lol. thats right, they started making AI its their fault! bad imperialist US !
yeah, v5 will do better
It’s this sort of example (and not properly supporting Ukraine, and not agreeing how to collectively deal with migrants, and not agreeing how to coordinate defence, and myriad other examples) that highlights what a pointless mess the EU is. It’s not a unified block - it’s 27 self-interested entities squabbling and playing petty power games, while totally failing to plan for the future with vision.
The EU could/should have ensured that a European equivalent to OpenAI or Anthropic could thrive, and had competitive frontier models already; instead, they’re years and countless billions behind.
I don't know what the problem is. Are we europeans to stupid? Do we just not have enough money / VC money? Are we not proud enough?
:(
I feel uneasy over China dominance as much as the US.
I trust US more still as Europe has a post WW2 relationship. I notice many comments being pro China but they seem to be from the third world (one mentioned a very low salary) I feel the opening of the internet was a mistake.
China is a totilitarian dictatorship. This is a fact.
Look into Mistral AI too :)
For context, I am Swedish.
Yes this is a new account, please focus on the content.
Trust whoever you want, I just don't have the patience (or money) for American models.
Dont get me wrong, Sweden is a cool country, but still my point stands.
Yeah, I also really hate when poor people think they're allowed to talk.
The idea that China is worse than America is laughable. LMK when China invades 5 countries in a span of 20 years unimpeded by anyone else in the world and maybe I'll be scared.
Until then it's quite clear how consumers benefit from actual competition and it's not because of the US.
Also you saying you trust the US when they just threatened to invade Greenland (a threat so credible that Denmark was planning a full scale resistance against US troops).
Sorry but the curtains are truly coming down and the US will become one of the most hated nations in the world while 100s of millions will needlessly starve and die because of the actions of Americans that simply don't give a fuck.
FWIW, I'm not just talking about Trump either. Democratic politicians are just as much to blame, they champion corporatism and imperialism as much as Republicans and the only issues D leadership seems to have is that the "right process" wasn't being followed.
I say this as someone who is a literal democratic operative within the party.
Also, feeling the opening of the internet as a mistake show the degree of your ignorance, people from third world countries also have the right to speak as much as you do, your opinion is not more valid than anyone else's.
For context, I am Italian-Brazilian, so I pretty much have been exposed to both sides (western and non-western, even though we can argue that Brazil is more west aligned).
They sanctioned the hell out of Huawei and now Huawei is bigger than ever
America is just not able to digest the idea that another country can be as good, if not better, at innovation
China's fall in the 19th century came at them for the same reason. How could these European savages be stronger, thus better than us? Our intelligence service must be out of their mind.
It costs 100-1000x less manpower, money, and time to hug the heels of innovators than to actually pioneer. Say what you will about America but they absolutely lead technological innovation and it's not even remotely close.
Walmart is a horrible company owned by horrible people and yet it’s cheap so it dominates.
If the quality really is in the Opus 4.6 range (considering how bad 4.7 is), then it’s a pretty big deal.
1. There will be no moat where one company "owns" AI. China will see to that. It's simply too much in their national interest for that not to happen;
2. This is incredibly bad news for OpenAI who have raised so much money with so (comparabley( little revenue that the only way they can get a return on that is to "win" and be that company that "owns" AI; and
3. China's chipmaking will catch up with Taiwan within the next decade (with commercial EUV at scale within 5 years). I liken this to American hubris over the development of the atomic bomb where in 1945 many American leaders and military thought the USSR would either never get the atomic bomb or it would take 20+ years. It took 4. And they USSR's first hydrogen bomb was detonated a year after the US's.
Whereas the USSR did this with espionage. times have changed. Now all China has to do is throw a few million dollars at hiring the right people froM ASML and elsewhere. China has the track record of delivering on long term projects. Closing the lithography gap will be no different.
Deepseek is a mid model. not SOTA.
If/when they overtake the US, all things aside, they deserve it. There is no world where the US overtakes China but there’s a world where China overtakes the US. Best outcome for the US atm is parity.
Just remarkable the things they’ve accomplished in the time they’ve accomplished them.
It’s a burned ccp money at this point . They will not be able to serve it until H2 2026 . Even at this point if you look at opus 4.7 and gpt 5.5 this model is just mediocre.
By the time they can serve it nobody will care at all.
Also it's tech they can be sure we can't cut them out of or tariff and money flowing from Chinese companies to other Chinese companies which we appreciate the benefits of when the shoe is on the other foot.
I’ve talked to the folks over at Unitree multiple times and they say “yeah we’ll be hiring overseas soon” and then they never do and they only have five openings in China
You just aren't going to this too much in the US or any countries fully aligned with the US for fear of competition. It doesn't benefit anyone really. It's not like I get richer when Ford says more vehicles or Meta makes more teenagers suicidal, so why should we care? It'll hurt the country in the long run too.
For me as a consumer, competition is good - that means companies have less leverage over me, which is beneficial even if I decided to never use a Chinese model ever.
its naive to think they would have stayed on a 'western' stack.
Most of the time 'losing' isn't making a bad choice its being put in a situation where you have no good choices.
I will however say that claude work and design are really great up until i blow its limit.
https://api-docs.deepseek.com/zh-cn/news/news260424#api-%E8%...
This is the first figure of the section that the above links point to (https://api-docs.deepseek.com/zh-cn/img/v4-spec.png).
And I can read Chinese.
It's strange that you criticise "could have even" when it is a phrasing clearly being used for emphasis. "Could even have" makes no clearer sense in context.
No irony detected.
My largest models
318G /llmzoo/models/Qwen3.5-397B
377G DeepSeekv3.2-nolight
380G /llmzoo/models/DeepSeek-V3.2-UD
400G /llmzoo/models/Qwen3.5-397B-Q8
443G DeepSeek-Math-v2
443G DeepSeek-V3-0324-Q5
522G /llmzoo/models/GLM5.1
545G /llmzoo/models/kimi2.6
546G /llmzoo/models/KimiK2.5All of that list but the last three run at these sizes. For last three, look for a custom quant, e.g. 9.5 bits and/or the Ultra M3 512GB mention.
Not sure which direction I'm surprised but Macbook Pro M5 Max ticks over models at the same speed. With "only" 128GB look for models of 116 GB (the absolute max that retains reasonable stability) or less.
1. Training data is the source. 2. Training is compilation/compression. 3. Weights are the compiled source akin to optimized assembly.
However it's an imperfect analogy on so many levels. Nitpick away.
Eg. it is no accident Creative Commons is using different terminology for non-software works.
https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/changes-to-gi...
I have no idea why you'd think that, but this is straight from their announcement here (https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/8bxXqS2R8Fx5-1TLDBiEDg):
> According to evaluation feedback, its user experience is better than Sonnet 4.5, and its delivery quality is close to Opus 4.6's non-thinking mode, but there is still a certain gap compared to Opus 4.6's thinking mode.
This is the model creators saying it, not me.
The tricky part is that the "number of tokens to good result" does absolutely vary, and you need a decent harness to make it work without too much manual intervention, so figuring out which model is most cost-effective for which tasks is becoming increasingly hard, but several are cost-effective enough.
https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/002/352/212/95b...
Even on my phone via Edge Gallery Deepseek to Qwen 1.5B distill able to answer it. It's mess up facts a little, but certainly becauae its small model not because censorship.
I really unsure how it get less censored than this. API is obviously much more censored because they operate from China, but it have nothing to do with model itself.
Tech ceos are going around talking about how they will rule over employees and they will be unable to work in the future except for intelligence tokens. What if China commoditizes that without spending nearly as much resources? Kind of makes the trillions of dollars invested in the US a literal joke.
But it’s okay. HN comments aren’t supposed to be high quality anyways. I know mine aren’t. But the official product documentation ought to be.
I think they are leaders in the democratization of LLMs. Almost everyone has a computer right now that can run a useful variant of a Mistral model. I hope they keep their focus because what they are aiming for likely has the biggest impact on the average person and would be the best case scenario for the technology in general.
Their main selling point is: They are neither US-American nor Chinese. That's a real moat in today's world. I think at the moment they feel quite comfortable.
Not saying it is better or worse, but the way I perpersonally prefer is to design in chat, to make sure all unknown unknown are addressed
It's still a "preview" version atm.
I don't see why Deepseek would care to respect Anthropic's ToS, even if just to pretend. It's not like Anthropic could file and win a lawsuit in China, nor would the US likely ban Deepseek. And even if the US gov would've considered it, Anthropic is on their shitlist.
China had literally 60M people die in a famine when JFK was president and Elvis was the biggest thing. The country was basically farmland and basic industries 40 years ago
Why would you even compare their capabilities today vs a country that has been a sovereign nation for 250 years?
You look at trajectories, not the present
The industrial revolution was intense and powerful, and kicked off in Britain, Europe, and the US. Throughout that revolution, there were countless mistakes, countless branches that had to be clipped as we found ways to increase power and efficiency.
50-100 years after that, every other country has a perfect blueprint to follow. That is far cheaper. Far more efficient. Far easier. And they get to leverage experts and contractors from the innovating regions as well.
This is the story for China, and Asia in general.
For example gemma4 is released under Apache 2.0 license – and can be called open source dataset.
On the other hand ie. deepseek, while publicly available weights model, is not released under OSI approved license, they released it under their own "Deepseek License Aggreement" – ie. in general it's free to use as normal OSI license but has some restrictions, ie. military use is explicitly forbidden.
China and Russia trade in yuan and rubles. India and Russia do oil deals in rupees. China and Brazil trade in yuan. The US hasn't bombed any of them.
Can you tell any smaller/weaker neighboring countries trading in their own local currency? Can Vietnam trade with Cambodia skipping the USD? not just for denominations, but the actual trade itself.
Sovereign and non-sovereign nations have completely different decision matrices for dealing with external threats
I'd be very curious to know how any LLMs fare. I completely understand if you don't want to continue the discussion because of anonymity reasons.
Happy to try to answer more specific questions if anyone has any, but yes, these are among my active research projects so there's only so much I can say.
>Can the same be said about DeepSeek or any other open-source model provider performing distillation?
Open source models that distill from SoTA reminds me of the story of Robin Hood -- robbing the rich and giving it to the poor. So to answer your question: yes, but it's better than the alternative where only a select few companies have SoTA models.
Oh, so people might be forced to give back the AI earnings? Should I be worried about the last year's capital gains on my portfolio?
- Sam Altman & Worldcoin collecting everyone's eyeball scan - Discord attempting to roll out worldwide age & id verification - LinkedIn collecting data on your web browser extensions - WhatsApp collecting browser data via a local server running on device
If you're feeling frisky, Zed has a decent agent harness and a very good editor.
Doesn't mean Deepseek v4 isn't great, just benchmarks alone aren't enough to tell.
Shared language and history aside, these two cultures are not in the same solar system when it comes to social norms and curtesies.
the people and industry arent what matter there
That's a very strange comment. Why would anyone run a dense model on a low-end computer? A 8B model is only going to make sense if you have a dGPU. And a Qwen3.6 or Gemma4 MoE aren't going to be “beaten the hell out” for most tasks especially if you use tools.
Finally, over the lifetime of your computer, your ChatGPT subscription is going to cost more than the cost of your reference computer! So the real question should be whether you're better off with a $1000 computer and a ChatGPT subscription or with a $2000 computer (assuming a conservative lifetime of 4 years for the computer).
My Strix Halo desktop (which I paid ~1700€ before OpenAI derailed the RAM market) paired with Qwen3.5 is a close replacement for a $200/month subscription, so the cost/benefit ratio is strongly in favor of the local model in my use case.
The complexity of following model releases and installing things needed for self-hosting is a valid argument against local models, but it's absolutely not the same thing as saying that local models are too bad to use (which is complete BS).
One set of models run on 8GB VRAM / 16GB RAM and another set runs on 24GB VRAM / 64GB RAM. Both are very useful for easy and easy-to-moderate complex code, respectively.
The latest open, small models are incredibly useful even at smaller sizes when configured properly (quant size, sampling params, careful use of context etc).
Biggest risk I see is Nvidia having delays / bad luck with R&D / meh generations for long enough to depress their growth projections; and then everything gets revalued.
Also (shameless self-promo) I publish a 2x weekly blog just to force myself to keep up: https://aimlbling-about.ninerealmlabs.com/treadmill/
The decisions to mobilize a large rural base toward manufacturing and the central bank goals to keep the yuan cheap as a critical support of this project were absolutely national.
They were ultimately about bringing (or trying to bring) one of the most populous nations in the world out of extreme poverty; in particular the people of the country out of extreme poverty.
There are different policies in place today, and, crucially, bleeding edge tech is not gainful labor employment —- BYD has some factories with roughly 2 employees per acre of robotic production, for instance. Or datacenters where the revenue could scale but the labor will not.
So, these are different times, different goals, different political and labor outcomes. Reasoning about what China “must do”, or has as a matter of “national policy” should start with a clear look at history and circumstance, or you’re likely to read things incorrectly.
Link to direct newsletter subscription: https://importai.substack.com/
It is very much a valuable thing already, no need to taint it with wrong promise.
Though I disagree about being used if it was indeed open source: I might not do it inside my home lab today, but at least Qwen and DeepSeek would use and build on what eg. Facebook was doing with Llama, and they might be pushing the open weights model frontier forward faster.
They're both correct given how the terms are actually used. We just have to deduce what's meant from context.
There was a moment, around when Llama was first being released, when the semantics hadn't yet set. The nutter wing of the FOSS community, to my memory, put forward a hard-line and unworkable definition of open source and seemed to reject open weights, too. So the definition got punted to the closest thing at hand, which was open weights with limited (unfortunately, not no) use restrictions. At this point, it's a personal preference that's at most polite to respect if you know your audience has one.
Is this really a debate we still need to be having today? Sounds like grumpiness with Open Source Initiative defining this ~25 years ago when this term was rarely used as such.
If we do not accept a well defined term and want to keep it a personal preference, we can say that about any word in a natural language.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/nvidia-is-sued-by-authors...
This is why we standardize meaning of words, out them in a dictionary — so we can more effectively understand each other.
Serious question.
Studying adversaries is, generally speaking, accepted military wisdom among the commissioned ranks of most of the planet's armies.
Well, except in some countries where they wall themselves off from everyone else.
Hard to not see this as another sign of European stagnation...
- Europe was first to dig up its fossil sources of energy, the bulk of it is long gone
- Europeans got used to roughly clean air, soil and water, heavy industries are polluting
- the embargo is forcing China to vertically integrate, the Chinese have no alternative, Europeans (think they) do
Which is crazy given that ASML is European.
This is how I see it. The US has openly threatened multiple times to annex my country, and has repeatedly threatened every western nation. Letting the US have a monopoly on... well.. anything, is really bad for the world. The more countries that have their own production for various critical things like computer chips, medicine, etc, the better it is for the world at it distributes power.
People in the US don't seem to understand that with the current administration the US is seen as a potentially very hostile nation. While I don't think China is a friend to Canada or the west, at least it provides alternatives when the US tries to use it's monopolies against us. And vice versa too.
>Building a frontier model would be lobbing money into the incinerator for something that will be outdated tomorrow. European investors are too careful for that - and in this case seem to be right.
Strong disagree here. Mistral does great work, in the long term being a few months or even a year behind is a non-issue. Also Cohere just merged with Aleph Alpha to continue producing foundational models. It's extremely important that the middle powers continue to do this.
And Microsoft are going the same route to moving Copilot Cowork over to a utilisation based billing model which is very unusual for their per seat products (I’m actually not sure I can ever remember that happening).
Iterating forward at the frontier doesn't seem like a sustainable approach if everyone else can catch up with you in 6 months.
It's like ricing your Linux distro, sure it's fun to spend that time but don't make the mistake of thinking it's productive, it's just another form of procrastination (or perhaps a hobby to put it more charitably).
I don’t believe that top tier engineers just skip learning things because they might turn out to be dead-ends or incorporated into tools by someone else; in my experience they tend to be extremely interested in things that seem like minutiae to others when working on the bleeding edge, often implementing their own systems just to more fully understand the problem space.
If it’s a day job for someone and they are not ambitious, fine. But we are at hacker news. I would bet 99%+ of top tier software talent could tell you practical experience with ralph loops this year, or a homegrown variety, simply because they are an attempt to solve a very real engineering problem (early exit, shitty code/incorrect responses, poor context window length and capacity), and top tier software people expect more control of their engineering environment, and success using their tools than they’d get by just saying ‘meh, whatever, I don’t get this and I’ll just wait it out.’
Only mention of Huawei in that article (as of now).
Big L for media literacy there.
That brief two week period when Opus could eat entire tickets was simultaneously fantastic and a bit alarming
It's extremely (read: extremely) naive to think that China keeps to itself because they don't have global power ambitions.
Look at the South China Sea, the one playground that the US stranghold allows them to play in...they don't give a fuck about anyone else's territory there.
My point is that Trump could sign/execute/order all the same exact things he's done, but if I just never spoke about it, or kept hidden like Chinese do, he would be compared MUCH differently.
That would also make him a lot more dangerous. After all in his first presidency he was still the man behind the biggest military on the planet but he knew shit on how to leverage this. In his second term he is even more loose but loose is tempertantrums and simple short sighted strategies. Easy to read, hard to accept.
In the US its not the Uighurs or Tibetans who are being oppressed - it's the blacks and immigrants. The US elected a president who characterizes immigrants as rapists and murderers (while he himself is a convicted rapist, suspected pedophile, and wants to commit war crimes in Iran).
The facade, believed by many Americans, is that USA is the land of the free, a democracy (despite no popular vote) one of the good guys, but actions say otherwise.
https://scrupulouspessimism.substack.com/p/america-means-the...
south americans just call themselves americans.
there arent all that many canadians; whats the need to index so hard on what we think?
Regardless, sure South Americans can absolutely call themselves Americano in the continental sense. But I know in Brazil for example "Americano" is casually understood to mean from the US, and in general South Americans are more likely to identify as argentino, brasileiro, chileno, colombiano, etc., or as sul-americano/sudamericano.
Most importantly, when speaking English, virtually all will avoid American for themselves because they know in English it means estadounidense.
Between you, me, and the Deepseek team, so far as I'm aware, only one entity has caused the Western frontier model companies to panic by delivering an open model that competes far more cheaply, to the point where people are running versions of it at home.
So they spelled software wrong. So what? Outside of this being the mental equivalent of a too-scratchy-sweater for the kinds of people sensitive to that sort of thing, I don't see why it matters.
Those of us that have spent a lot of time programming with non native English speakers (the majority of software engineers on earth) have learned long ago that English ability has no correlation with engineering ability.
If it tickles anyone's subconscious feelings, it would be their internal guiding myth of exceptionalism. With their recent forays into authoritarianism, it's becoming ever harder to paper over the reality.
I despise American exceptionalism myself. This is entirely an issue about the quality of the language, not the nationality of the person behind it.
None of those have brought me a feeling of being part of saving someone.
I think I understand the major reasons for this meme, but I find it really worrying; there were lots of incorrect ‘it’s a bubble’ conversations here in 2012-2015, but I don’t think they had the pervasive nature and “obvious” conclusion that a whole generation of engineering talent should just, you know, leave.
Meanwhile I am hearing rational economic modeling from the companies selling inference; Jensen, (a polished promoter, I grant you) says it really well — token value is increasing radically, in that new models -> better quality, and therefore revenues and utilization are increasing, and therefore contrary to the popular financial and techbro modeling of 2023, things like A100s still cost quite a lot whether hourly or to purchase. (!) Basically the economic value is so strong that it has actually radically extended the life of hardware.
I just hate to imagine like half of the world’s (or US’s) engineering talent quitting, spending ten years afraid, or wrongly convinced of some ‘inevitable’ market outcome. Feels like it will be bad for people’s personal lives, and bad for progress simultaneously.
But how is that a counterpoint to tokens being subsidized? They obviously are subsidized, this just isn't arguable at all. The claims in the linked post make perfect sense. If they weren't subsidized the investors in AI labs would all be minting money instead of burning it.
It doesn't matter if token value is increasing. What matters is how fast it increases relative to the price increases, the repayments on the debt loads and other things we can't really know here on this forum.
Every attempt I've seen to argue this fact away is merely playing with numbers e.g. excluding every cost except inf hardware+energy, even though labs are always training and have large costs outside of compute. This might or might not be a good way to predict the future of these orgs, but it doesn't help anyone argue inference is profitable today (because inference is literally the only thing OpenAI/Anthropic sell and they lose money).
The whole computing industry is in a super weird place right now that feels temporary, like Wile E. Coyote spinning his legs suspended in mid air. Until the economics of the AI industry stop being driven by FOMO and weird, hard to interpret quasi-religious or geopolitical motivations, it's impossible to make accurate predictions about what the impact on software jobs will be. Historically a tech like this would have started at super-high prices and the token cost would have gradually fallen over a period of decades, giving people plenty of time to adapt. Look at the cost of flying, desktop computers, mobile phones, etc. AI is attempting to short circuit that normal technological path and pack decades into years by convincing capital holders that they have no choice but to "invest" because it'll be a winner-takes-all repeat of web search and social media. Yet it's not shaping up that way.
Why would Microsoft subsidize Anthropic's models when they serve the Claude model on Azure? They charge the same price as Anthropic. They aren't an investor in Anthropic.
There are numerous independent model serving companies that are clearly profitable serving non-Frontier models (Kimi K2.5 etc). It's easy to work out the raw costs of B200 GPUs, and then see what you need to charge for an API and see they make money.
The frontier labs charge a lot more than these companies.
The frontier labs have said they are profitable on inference.
Most people believe that training (and maybe subscriptions for some users) is where they lose money. Why do you think otherwise?
I’ll fight you on profit. The major labs are super profitable. If you replace “profitable today” with “cashflow positive today” then I think you’re correct. They are clearly not cashflow positive today. However, they are absolutely profitable, and when people confuse those I think it can be dangerous.
Consider a series of companies, let’s call these companies “Claude 1, Inc”, “Claude 2, Inc”, “Claude 3, Inc”, “Claude 4, Inc”.
In each company let’s keep track of the following:
* The pro-rata hardware and energy costs the company used during training. So, for instance, if a cluster is going to “last” 5 years, and we used it for 2, and the cluster cost $1 billion to build and provision and pay for 5 years of energy usage, we would charge $200mm.
* The R&D expenses like salary and so on
* The inference costs of every use of that company’s model.
* The revenue acquired in exchange for use of that model.
I propose first that I haven’t hidden any costs or double counted any revenue or anything - this is a full, fair assessment of the costs and likewise the revenue earned. I propose second that if you go to the end of the company’s final period then “profitability” in this case equals “cashflow”, so we can talk about either without talking past each-other. Third, I propose - if you add up all the costs and expenses of Claude 1 - 4, Inc, you’d have the full P&L of Anthropic, up to any training done on Claude 5.
I will now repeat a statement made publicly and repeatedly by Dario (and Sam in a slightly more cagey way): every single one of those “companies” (fully loaded models) has turned a profit so far. Put another way, it has, repeatedly, been a very good financial decision to train a model, and then sell inference of that model.
Why are the frontier companies spending cash? Simple - as each new model comes out, it’s quickly apparent that the new model will pay, and so increased training costs are incurred before that model has ended its useful life. Due to scaling activity, each new run costs some multiple of the prior run. Combining the overlap and the scale up, these companies are cashflow negative. But they aren’t doing it in some weird race to spend a dollar to make $0.50. They’re spending a dollar to make like $6 a year for a year or two.
If you see this, most of the ‘bubble’ (and implied massive crash) forecasts don’t seem to have any basis in reality from my perspective.
Frontier lab models are fucking great earners: 60%+ inference margins. (Public statements by said CEOs. Lateral proof: similar sized open models available for inference at 1/8 to 1/10 price on openrouter. Ergo - closed model margins are high). These earnings are real dollars, hard cash. Maybe the datacenters are in a bubble? After all, there’s a lot of debt getting laid on to do datacenter buildouts.
Datacenter companies and hyperscalars are making money providing hosting to these frontier labs. Coreweave (former ETH miner!) and others are posting 70% profit margins against debt costs under 8%. These profits are again in hard dollars from the labs. So, maybe the hardware providers are in a bubble?
Nvidia is making 70%+ margins, consistently beating every earnings call, is spending like $6bn a quarter on R&D against $40+bn in share buybacks (made in cash). They are moving super fast, and they could still literally be spending another 7x their current R&D spend before going cashflow negative. So, maybe the foundries are in a bubble?
TSMC is showing 66% margins (record high), and cutting Apple’s allocation to a point where there are research warnings about it. Maybe the EUV lithography companies are in a bubble?
ASML is the most generous company in the world, and is showing 34% operating margin this year while providing the only machines that can make the chips that TSMC and others are selling.
This is all very real. To my eyes the possible negative financial outcomes that seem plausible are:
1 - scaling laws stop working (and/or models get ‘good enough’) and all of a sudden the new hotness we just spend our entire last 5 years revenue on isn’t any better.
2 - There’s some major exogenous shift in demand for tokens and datacenter utilization drops radically, leading to credit defaults.
The main things that would have to be true would be that these things would have to be industry wide before they were a problem, and they’d have to end up with demand at less than 1/6 or so of current forecasts before they caused some kind of cascading financial problem: until then we’d see coreweave breaking even, reworking its debt covenants, spending less on power (unused), spending less on power (over capacity = lower prices on power being used), etc. etc.
This is SUPER long already, but to close, I think it’s reasonable and interesting to talk about those scenarios - how likely is it that scaling stops working or that people are okay with what we’ve got (that is, token value stops increasing in a compute-unitized environment)? How likely is it that people stop buying tokens at all even if their utility is stable or growing?
Agreed we’re in a temporary transitional phase right now, but I think it’s to a radically new business model and economic order more than it is a prelude to a giant debt leveraged crash, Wile E. Coyote style.
That should be at least comparable (if not worse) than what China is doing.
China is repressing the Uyghur and threatening Taiwan. I don't agree with these actions but is really "orders of magnitude" worse than the destruction the US facilitates in the Middle East?
With Trump they are now openly hostile to European democracies, and ICE and doing their best at repression within the US.
> With Trump they are now openly hostile to European democracies, and ICE and doing their best at repression within the US.
And what is Europe going to do about it?
Boycott ChatGPT and Claude? Ha.
The point is US "soft power" is eroding incredibly rapidly and this will have consequences
if you missed it thats on you
The European democracies are basically failed states at this point and I just hope we don't end up like them.
It's a little insane to me people comparing negatives of US and China. I mean, the simple fact we're allowed to say just about anything we want that is critical of the administration on this forum, in English and nothing happens is clear there is no comparison.
You have no idea the full breadth of the Chinese government because information is closed so quickly, in America it's all on display right in front.
> Open weight!
They clearly were implying it's not open source.
If we can't build the weights, then we don't have the source. I'm not entirely sure what an open-source model would even look like, but I am confident that these binary blobs that we are loading into llama.cpp and vllm aren't the equivalent of source code. We have absolutely no idea what sort of data went into them.
This is fine. It isn't slanderous. It is what we have, and it is awesome. Just because it is awesome doesn't make it open source.
So you can’t see what facts are pruned out, what biases were applied, etc. Even more importantly, you can’t make a slightly improved version.
This model is as open source as a windows XP installation ISO.
It is like car vs. kick scooter.
I think you need to define "can get coding work done" for this to make sense. Ive been using GPT-3 back-then for basic scripts, does that count ? Or only Claude-Code ?
I also think this is a false dichotomy, if you look at the Project Vend project or Vending-Bench, customer support etc. is at no means trivial. (Old but great story https://www.businessinsider.com/car-dealership-chevrolet-cha...)
What im really hoping is for a double-punch like with V3 -> R1
Now that you’re winning, others start cloning your API to siphon your users.
Now that you’re losing, you start cloning the current winner, who is probably a clone of your clone.
Highly competitive markets tend to normalize, because lock-in is a cost you can’t charge and remain competitive. The customer holds power here, not the supplier.
Thats also why everyone is trying to build into the less competitive spaces, where they could potentially moat. Tooling, certs, specialized training data, etc
They are developing their moats with the platform tooling around it right now though. Look at Anthropic with Routines and OpenAI with Agents. Drop that capability in to a business with loose controls and suddenly you have a very sticky product with high switching costs. Meanwhile if you stick with purely the ‘chat’ use cases, even Cowork and scheduled tasks, you maintain portability.
It also seems like clashes with India, every southeast asian country with internationally recognized territory rights in the South China sea, the forcible takeover of Hong Kong, arming and economically supporting Russia, Pakistan and Iran are bad, and the increasing probability of a hot war to take over Taiwan should count as bad, perhaps the most urgently dangerous threat to global peace in the 21st century.
The United States track record post WW2 is a complicated combination of monstrously immoral Kissenger and Bush style overthrows of democracies and genuinely valuable maintenance of a post WW2 democratic order focused on things like free speech and human rights. I stay with full sincerity that in the decade plus that I've been here on hn seeing whataboutism as a strategy for defending China, I'm yet to encounter anything that feels like a sincere engagement with United States role in the world as a combination of positives and negatives, it's always flatly one-sided messaging that feels like it's aimed at a favorable audience that already agree rather than like it's sincerely attempting to persuade.
"open source" keeps being redefined by people with wealth and power to restrict our computing rights.
eventually its just gonna be "proprietary microsoft code that runs on microsoft servers, but you can see a portion of the results"
It's entirely reasonable that this colloquial understanding would be applied to new categories such as AI models. I'm sure it'll be applied to many other things that don't fit the OSD either. That's just language for you.
they-might-take-a-bit-to-publish
I don't think otherwise, I just think it's meaningless to differentiate between training and inference. What the frontier labs sell is inference. They can't just exclude costs required to engage in that business unless they plan a pivot to just serving Chinese models in a commodified market.
Yes, tokens for random no-name firms serving Kimi K2 probably do make money, although even there it's unclear because so many datacenters and GPU purchases have been made on credit etc. And if we assume that's sustainable forever then you can assume training/staffing costs should be subsidized to zero and say sure, token serving is profitable in that situation. But we were discussing the top labs.
> Summary: The U.S. is currently engaged in an active war aimed at dismantling the Iranian government and its military capabilities, but it distinguishes this from destroying the country or its people. However, the humanitarian impact—including civilian casualties from airstrikes and the domestic crackdown by Iranian security forces—has led many international observers to warn that the campaign risks long-term instability and "state collapse" rather than a simple transition of power.
It does do quite a bit better if you ask it about the genocide in Gaza, summarizing the case for it, and citing only token justifications from the guilty party.
As of April 2026, Gemini is... For very obvious reasons, highly biased towards cultural consensus. If your cultural consensus is strong on some really messed up things, that's the outcome that it's going to give you.
Irrespective of how close the outcomes are to the actual facts, those two things have a different quality, don't they?
In the west, especially in the USA, rich capitalists and warmongers control the narrative put forth in the news, which gets fed to the LLMs, which results in what you could call auto-censorship.
They manipulate the training data instead of censoring the model, but the result is the same.
The LLMs aren't trained on "official news", if there's such a thing in Western countries - at best government press releases, is that what you mean by "official news"?
So I don't see how that's censoring/manipulation of an LLM.
Like for example, Wikipedia is a Western construction and would never exist in China, or Russia, without government supervision (rendering it useless).
When you say "rich capitalists and warmongers control the narrative", where does that happen? I mean practically.
It's like your conception of western media is similar to China and Russia, where censorship, control and filters are applied.
> They manipulate the training data instead of censoring the model, but the result is the same.
Do you have any proof of this?
The US was birthed as a white ethno-national colonial state. It required 20% of the population to be held in bondage while denying suffrage to 80% of the population. It took 100 years + a civil war before slavery was ended, and it took nearly another 100 years before every American could truly vote. Not because it was the "right time" either, go look at how the women's suffrage movement started. They were fire bombing factories and capitalists.
The propaganda surely runs deep, but something tells me you're too rich to really suffer so congrats I guess. I'm sure many wish they could trade places with your privilege. I bet those that will suffer from needless starvation or lack of medical care due to US imperialism would really like to trade places too.
Sorry but these boogey man acts fall flat when you look at how hostile and anti-human the US government has become over the recent decades. You can't blame this on one person, the system was always rotten and a course correction will happen. You just better pray it's the right people directing the ship.
This war could have been handled much differently and better, but acting like America attacked Iran for no reason is laughable. It is in fact America’s inexplicable reticence to kill Iranian civilians that is the reason this is going on for this long. America could have ended this in a few days if it had stopped worrying about being criticised by the rest of the world that hates it anyway.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/07/us/politics/trump-iran-wa...
The Ayatollah had a fatwa against the development of nuclear weapons. You are just making things up.
> In one of the last rounds of talks before the war Kushner and Witkoff
No, they didn't. They lied and sabotaged the talks. The diplomacy, much like right now, was to misdirect Iran. Which is why they refuse to negotiate now.
> America could have ended this in a few days
Ahh, the fascist delusion. Violence overcomes all.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/07/us/politics/trump-iran-wa...
> At one point, they offered the Iranians free nuclear fuel for the life of their program — a test of whether Tehran’s insistence on enrichment was truly about civilian energy or about preserving the ability to build a bomb. The Iranians rejected the offer, calling it an assault on their dignity.
"but tHeY PLANn3d for 50 years!!11!" HAHAHAHA.
Have a good life dude.
I'm more concerned with police brutality, US born children suffering induced poverty by the elites, women that are forced to either die or be jailed for seeking medical treatment, the legalized torture of children that happen to be not straight, the suffering of 100s of millions of Americans failing to get medical treatment, the creation of concentration camps, a masked police force that isn't being held accountable, ignoring due process while torturing people into compliance. I'm concerned with how we let people that profit off of misery and mass death, because that is surely coming back to haunt us. 2025 proved how easily things can get worse, and humans in general do not have a good imagination when it comes to seeing how worse things can continue to get.
What I do care about is the rising authoritarianism inside the US. The US was literally birthed as a white colonial ethno-national state that could only exist because it held 20% of the population in bondage. A strand of evil this nation has never gotten rid of and has allowed to multiple and propagate around the world. The most evil sides of human existence all seem to find their way point back to the US constitution or US customers, a document written by slavers to uphold slavers and empower the elites over the population, from Apartheid South Africa to genocide by Israel + US leaders to the Nazi regime itself.
We are mired in a disgusting history and have never accounted for the horrors we wrought upon the world because the elites wanted to make more money. We never truly were held accountable to the death squads we support across South America or how we forced US marines to fight for corporate interests in the banana wars. We destabilized entire nations, 100s of millions of people, then act shock when it comes home to roost.
Do I really have to go over the history of the last 40 years too?
Sorry man, go read a book. Absolutely pathetic that Americans don't even know their own history. You should absolutely read it because a large portion of this earth are going to suffer massive consequences due to US imperialism and we're going to be on the receiving end of it for the rest of our short lives.
Sorry man but you have the crazy take. The US was only a consistent force of good when FDR was in-charge and the New Deal coalition held majorities in both houses of Congress for 60+ years; but we also see their follies in Vietnam + Cambodia (fun fact, children still born in those countries with birth defects due to the highly inventive American weapons (it's okay they had well paying jobs)).
---
People truly don't understand that US foreign politics is done to solely benefit the elite + rich, while everyone else suffers (yes even US civilians, we're the ones that will get violence inflicted upon us not the elites).
Wake up.
I think their stance often comes from a strong anti-Western bias, and sometimes from feelings of resentment.
I take these concerns seriously as a voting American. My 401k is worthless if the US continues to reward anticompetitive monopolies.
It's like suggesting BYD has a high likelihood of making their cars into weapons or something. It's not in the company or their countries interest to do that.
Sure it could happen but I bet it would only happen in a targeted way. Why risk all credibility right now and engage in cyber warfare?
BYD and Tesla have the same ability to brick their cars anywhere. It's less a "weapon" and more a way to cripple a subset of people overnight if they so choose. A general major downside of "connected" products.
If I had to place a hidden target it'd probably be around RNGs or publicly exposed services..
Meaning Tiktok in the us is complete garbage for kids, almost like a virus. Whereas in China it's more educational.
For code, yes. For LLMs, the most commonly-used definition is synonymous with open weight (plus, I think, lack of major use restrictions).
> If we do not accept a well defined term and want to keep it a personal preference, we can say that about any word in a natural language
Plenty of people do. It’s generally polite to entertain their preferences, but only to a limit, and certainly not as a forcing function. The practical reality is describing DeepSeek’s models as open source is today the mainstream mode.
Perhaps you are right and this LLM-specific usage enters a dictionary at some point.
As I believe it is very misleading, I am doing my part to discourage it — it is not, imho, impolite to point out established meaning of words when people misuse them. We all create a language together, and all sides have their say.
Have a peek at the fredom indx and the press freedom index for China. Guess where they stand?
You know about the chinese internet firewall.
You can't trust any data from the CCP.
And please don't equate the aberration that is the Trump administration with "regular" US administrations (and this is coming from a non US person).
But how free is the average North American, where getting sick can bring you and your family financial ruin? Where the "free press" is controlled by corporations who are also the main source of campaign funding for politicians? Where their urban spaces are designed to require you to have a car and promote complete atomized individuals?
Check out the Sean Ryan Show with Palmer Luckey on China and military tech.
Luckily laws still stand somewhat.
( And Trump ain't smart enough)
Ridiculous take.
In theory, sure, but as other have pointed out you need to spend half a million on GPUs just to get enough VRAM to fit a single instance of the model. And you’d better make sure your use case makes full 24/7 use of all that rapidly-depreciating hardware you just spent all your money on, otherwise your actual cost per token will be much higher than you think.
In practice you will get better value from just buying tokens from a third party whose business is hosting open weight models as efficiently as possible and who make full use of their hardware. Even with the small margin they charge on top you will still come out ahead.
And that GPU wouldn’t run one instance, the models are highly parallelizable. It would likely support 10-15 users at once, if a company oversubscribed 10:1 that GPU supports ~100 seats. Amortized over a couple years the costs are competitive.
Obviously, and certainly companies do run their own models because they place some value on data sovereignty for regulatory or compliance or other reasons. (Although the framing that Anthropic or OpenAI might "steal their data" is a bit alarmist - plenty of companies, including some with _highly_ sensitive data, have contracts with Anthropic or OpenAI that say they can't train future models on the data they send them and are perfectly happy to send data to Claude. You may think they're stupid to do that, but that's just your opinion.)
> the models are highly parallelizable. It would likely support 10-15 users at once.
Yes, I know that; I understand LLM internals pretty well. One instance of the model in the sense of one set of weights loaded across X number of GPUs; of course you can then run batch inference on those weights, up to the limits of GPU bandwidth and compute.
But are those 100 users you have on your own GPUs usings the GPUs evenly across the 24 hours of the day, or are they only using them during 9-5 in some timezone? If so, you're leaving your expensive hardware idle for 2/3 of the day and the third party providers hosting open weight models will still beat you on costs, even without getting into other factors like they bought their GPUs cheaper than you did. Do the math if you don't believe me.
Now, at the moment, i can still use 4.6 but eventually Anthropic are going to remove it, and when it's gone it will be gone forever. I'm planning on trying Deepseek v4, because even if it's not quite as good, I know that it will be available forever, I'll always be able to find someone to run it.
Already these models are useful for a myriad of use cases. It's really not that important if a model can 1-shot a particular problem or draw a cuter pelican on a bike. Past a degree of quality, process and reliability are so much more important for anything other than complete hands-off usage, which in business it's not something you're really going to do.
The fact that my tool may be gone tomorrow, and this actually has happened before, with no guarantees of a proper substitute... that's a lot more of a concern than a point extra in some benchmark.
- To run at full precision: "16–24 H100s", giving us ~$400-600k upfront, or $8-12/h from [us-east-1](https://intuitionlabs.ai/articles/h100-rental-prices-cloud-c...).
- To run with "heavy quantization" (16 bits -> 8): "8xH100", giving us $200K upfront and $4/h.
- To run truly "locally"--i.e. in a house instead of a data center--you'd need four 4090s, one of the most powerful consumer GPUs available. Even that would clock in around $15k for the cards alone and ~$0.22/h for the electricity (in the US).
Truly an insane industry. This is a good reminder of why datacenter capex from since 2023 has eclipsed the Manhattan Project, the Apollo program, and the US interstate system combined...
10 years from now that hardware will be on eBay for any geek with a couple thousand dollars and enough power to run it.
"671B total / 37B active"
"Full precision (BF16)"
And they claim they ran this non-existent model on vLLM and SGLang over a month and a half ago.
It's clickbait keyword slop filled in with V3 specs. Most of the web is slop like this now. Sigh.
I know the argument about how each individual model is profitable, as made by Anthropic, but I have a hard time believing it. This isn't congruous with what we actually see: losses seem to be driven by systematic underpricing.
An obvious example of this is Sora, recently killed because it generated $2.1M in lifetime revenue and reportedly cost anywhere between $1M-$15M per day in compute alone - that's excluding training costs. It's quite hard to find any examples in history of a product being subsidized to that kind of level. So when people say things like "inference is profitable" it's clear that they're handwaving away some details, because that was one case where inference was not only unprofitable but comically so. Maybe they mean it's profitable for specific workloads or for specific companies, but it's more likely that the argument is too general to encompass such details.
OK but what about pure text inference?
We know that workload is hopelessly unprofitable too. Anthropic just told us a few days ago: "When we launched Max a year ago it didn't include Claude Code, Cowork didn't exist, and agents that run for hours weren't a thing. Max was designed for heavy chat usage, that's it".
Claude Code already existed at that time, they just didn't anticipate people using it with Max, apparently? Odd decision. But "heavy chat usage" apparently costs at least $200/month, and that's assuming the Max plan wasn't already a loss leader at launch.
If we go back a year ago, we can find people making the same claim that inference is profitable. But now Anthropic are openly saying they mispriced a plan that costs hundreds of dollars a month because for coding workflows, it's too cheap. We knew this already, people had been pointing out the huge API/subscription price discrepancy for a long time, but it always led to these same debates about profitable inference.
So what kind of workload are people talking about when they say "inference" is profitable? It's not consumer video. It's not the subscription plans. Do they mean pure LLM API serving? If so and API tokens are profitable by some metric, so what? It counts for nothing in a bankruptcy court - spending all your profit from one SKU on subsidizing another isn't a justification for voiding your debts.
But there's another issue with this narrative that individual models are profitable. If true it'd mean the entire set of losses made by these labs in any given year are driven entirely by the cost of training the next model. In turn that implies that model training costs are scaling so fast that it's enough to not only completely wipe out an otherwise great business model but then go beyond that and drive it deeply into the red. And that moreover this problem has got massively worse with time. Training costs probably have gone up a lot, but have they really scaled superlinearly? The last I heard RLVR now consumes the same compute budget as the actual pretraining, but that would only 2x costs whereas to make this "each model is super profitable" claim work training would have to be far more than 2x more expensive than before. And if true, how comes the frontier models appear to be only a small way ahead of models trained by heavily compute-starved Chinese labs operating on a fraction of the budget? Where is all that money going???
I think sora backs my point actually - it didn’t pay and they killed it. As openAI aims at becoming the Facebook of AI (working model that has a permanent free tier) they are trying stuff out, and ultimately cutting product where it won’t pay. The numbers are big, but so are the customers and budgets - 15 mm/day in costs is like less than $0.02/day against 900m weekly active users. So, I. See a search for a product and differentiation but not economically weird behavior there.
Anthropic has been 10x ing revenue yearly for a while now; the recent outages and cutbacks are a sign they bet that growth would slow too early — there’s more paying demand than they can fulfill right now and they are scrambling to buy data centers at premium rates.
I haven’t done the math recently but I bet they’ve been spending right in the neighborhood of what you estimate: 2-3x last model revenues per leap. If you think you’ll get 10x usage, and make $6 on your $3 that feels good.
As to open models from china - a few things: it’s politically advantageous to state you don’t have top tier nvidia, so it’s at least incentivized to understate compute. Also you’ll note these open weights models bench well but never quite seem to keep up — and are in a time lag. the popular explanation is data exfiltration from frontier labs— along with limited budgets inspiring efficiency oriented innovation.
Anyway - I don’t see signs either company is cash strapped. I see signs they are racing to take market share on a product that is clearly like 1/6 to 1/8 the price to serve.
i don't agree with the hyperbolic nature of the op here but if you're sincerely interested in the question this is what chomsky and herman (imo quite persuasively) argue in Manufacturing Consent. attaching a profit motive to the distribution of new information, particularly in an economy that tends towards centralization of, necessarily biases what news is printed.
it's certainly not as visually dramatic or directly controlled an effect as the prc's top-down model, but markets are effective.
- manufacturing consent isn't a silver bullet, and it's much harder now with the internet - how did it work for the current events? Gaza war, Venezuela, Canada, Greenland, Iran war? Not saying the administration didn't try, but again, it isn't a silver bullet and doesn't seem to have an impact on the vast majority of LLMs - maybe Grok is the exception because it was done with that intent.
- information isn't centralized in western countries, though in the case of Trump he tries to centralize attention, successfully. But that doesn't seem to bend how events are portrait in reality and in LLMs.
The thing is, a lot of people that got fed into anti western narrative use magical thinking to believe countries from USA, Europe, Japan, Australia are all organized - orchestrated by the US.
This is insanity ofc, like, trade deals between these countries take years to be organized, but somehow everything is a conspiracy to be in the same informational tune?
Not as much a difference as you would wish, as mean of public discourse is very actively managed, to our collective detriment, by a very small group of powerful people, which often includes the government. It's the nature of mass media, and the incestuous relationship between power and reach.
They Thought They Were Free, and all that. By the time the 'mean of public discourse' centers on something incredibly stupid or awful, nobody can be arsed to figure out who planted that idea in our heads.
In reality it's only the terminally online that seem to create these narratives.
My point isn't to pick one side or the other, but agreeing with the other poster that the LLMs are not trained specifically to parrot administration propaganda.
If it makes you feel better I'll also include this in the help text of my next neovim plugin.
The most significant value of open source models come from being able to fine-tune; with a good dataset and limited scope; a finetune can be crazily worth it.
During the "diaoyu island" incident in the 2010s the sushi shop 200m near my appartment got sacked, and all japanese-brand car get smashed.
My black (and indian) friends all complained how hard they were treated. And when talking with my Chinese friends they all had very .... interesting... point of view.
Edit: also, I'm not from the US
You do know that Chinese people do go to other countries and that we all can see how insanely racist they can be right?
No, China is not homogenous.
> racial problems are nonexistent
Ask a non-Han about how they feel about that statement.
Riiiiiiiiiiiight:
https://ipvm.com/reports/hikvision-uyghur
Guess they solved all the "racial problems" by deploying surveillance cameras to help shove all the undesirables into camps. /s
It's hard to predict, but personally I would be way more worried about other outcomes than supply chain attacks in vibe coded products people deem as mission critical.
Typically, war is waged asymmetrically.
These models aren’t open source, they’re open weights, and some people will confuse the two.
It doesn’t make the wrong word the right one. Just that it’s a lazy combination and people don’t need to mind.
That’s a fair interpretation. I’m going one step further: if most people use the term “wrong,” including experts and industry leaders, that’s eventually the correct use. The term “open source” as requiring open training data is impractical to the point of being virtually useless outside philosophical contexts. This debate is on the same plane as folks who like to argue tomatoes aren’t vegetables, when the truth is botanically they aren’t while culinarily they are. DeepSeek’s model not being open source is only true for the FOSS-jargony definition of open source—in non-jargon use, it’s open source.
The real issues are government surveillance and it increasingly getting involved in my personal matters, but it’s still more free than any other country I could go to. Look at countries in Europe like the UK without true freedom of press arresting people for mean tweets and giving them years in prison.
Are they really? All of the cases I listed are consequences of Public Policy, no exceptions.
The only thing he was successful in, was literally exaggerating and overselling his capabilities ( eg. He directed the apprentice, it's fake)
Also, being useful to the right people helps. Because they will dump their own money and time into bolstering your campaign.
Because they were trying to get nukes so they could use them against Israel and America, as they've promised to do for decades. I believe the Americans did what is called calling one's bluff.
The ayatollahs were never a serious government. FAFO, as they say.
FA and FO indeed. Oh and dedollarization is now something that may happen within 5 years and not like 50 years. Oh and 100s of millions will needlessly suffer and die because of these actions, but seeing how little you value human life in your other comments I'm going to stop myself here and wish you a good existence.
I had a longer comment written, but, no, that alone isn’t enough.
It has little to do with this specific administration, and everything to do with the defense contractor machine. or are we calling them war contractors now? Anyway.
This might be cliche, but it has truth to it. Nothing drives production and innovation quite like scarcity and financial adversity.
"Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times" G. Michael Hopf
With all that goes on it has changed. Recently I sat on a plane near some Americans discussing their holidays here, and I noticed I felt contempt. Sitting their with insane privilege as their government torches the world.
Individuals remain individuals, and one really ought not to be prejudice. However the lack of resistance I see in in the “land of the free” as their “democratic” institutions collapse just makes me believe they never cared at all. In France cars are torched if the pension age is raised. In America the rise facism apparently doesnt matter to them.
Largest protests in US history just in the past year:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_protests_and_demonstra...
>insane privilege
My sister and brother recently graduated from college, have been searching for jobs for over 6 months, they can't find anything. They're politically liberal Californians.
There was not a single actionable demand from that parade.
Us as Americans have forgotten what a protest and resistance against the political elite even is. Its not a fucking dance party for already well off people to pretend they're actually doing something meaningful which is what usually gets the most publicity from these.
People needed to start breaking things yesterday.
My family in law seems to swing slightly republican. As a Dutchie, I could get some answers because I'm too naive not to talk about politics. So I got to probe a bit. What I simply found was that they'd say "I can't trust the news, none of it. Not CNN, not Fox News, nothing". Then I'd say "well in the Netherlands, I'd argue that while news outlets have their bias, you can trust them on basic factual reporting". She looked at me with a stare that I could only describe as "oh but honey, you're too young and naive to understand". To which I thought "you don't know the Netherlands. We're not perfect but we're nowhere near as deranged as what I'm seeing here".
I think that explains a lot of it for some people. The trust in the media, all media, is completely broken. Trump has how many fellonies now? Can't trust it. Kamala is doing what now? All talk. DOGE is fixing the government? I fucking hope so! But can't trust the damn news. Whether they do or don't, they are always burning money, god damn bureaucrats.
I feel that's the mindset that my family in law has.
This view gets echoed here on HN a lot. I find it very strange to be honest, because I tune in to CNN and I see lots of bias in the commentary and editorial, but when it comes to factual reporting they are pretty straightforward and down to earth. It seems to me that the real issue is people don't seem to distinguish between reporting and editorial content / commentary. Stop watching that garbage and actually consume the factual content and analysis. Yeah it's dry and boring but if that isn't enough for you then it just shows you never cared about facts in the first place.
My running hypothesis has been the trust breakdown arises from social-media overexposure driving lazy nihilism, which in turn gave free reign to a uniquely-corrupt class of politicians. But I'm not sure how to neutrally evaluate that.
Democracy is… an organized group toppling decisions made by popularly elected representatives within the confines of the law?
This is not something to be proud of. You guys are giving yourself loaned freebies, retiring 5+ (!) years earlier than countries like BeNeLux and Germany, and are pretty much expecting the EU to eventually pick up the pieces which will drag us all down.
Edit: always lovely when HN downvotes truths :)
It just doesn't make sense to delay retirement while youth unemployment is such a big problem. We ALL should be fighting like France, in many aspects.
I'm trans. this Administration does not like us. after Charlie Kirk's murder, things got legitimately scary. Musk was retweeting people who called us "deranged bioweapons" who needed to be "forcibly institutionalized." NSPM-7 is surveilling and infiltrating trans organizations. the Heritage Foundation proposed labeling us as "ideological extremists," in the same category as neo-Nazis. if I'm arrested, I'll go to a men's prison where I'll likely be given to a violent inmate as his cellmate to "pacify" him (V-coding.)
so yeah, I keep my head down. a lot of Jews kept their heads down in Germany in the '30s, you know? and just like then, it doesn't seem like other countries are too keen on taking us in as refugees. I hope that changes if things get bleak.
If nothing else, Americans at least put some value on the lives of their own troops - when the F15 got shot down in Iran, the launched a massive rescue operation. Back in the 70's public pressure over casualties pretty much ended Vietnam war. Meanwhile Russia in Ukraine is sending just meatwaves of young Russian men, one after another to die for nothing, far surpassing death toll of USA in Vietnam, and their government & most citizen seem to be okay with that. That is what I find most terrifying about Russia. The utter lack of compassion and care towards their fellow Russians that just happen to be poorer, or live in the provinces rather than rich cities. Don't get me even started on how they treat their troops, the culture of corruption and abuse in the armed forces...
Both countries are ruled by psychopaths, but Russia is way, way more rotten as a society.
If you want to go budget corporate, 7 x H200 is just barely going to run it, but all in, $300k ought to do it.
Relatively speaking, DeepSeek is less untrustworthy than Grok.
When I try ChatGPT on current events from the White House it interprets them as strange hypotheticals rather than news, which is probably more a problem with DC than with GPT, but whatever.
That would be a great argument if the American models weren’t so heavily censored.
The Chinese model might dodge a question if I ask it about 1-2 specific Chinese cultural issues but then it also doesn’t moralize me at every turn because I asked it to use a piece of security software.
Even for minor stuff like beeing addicted to drugs.
Looks pretty totalitarian to me.
Not quite the same.
Note: you can have this conversation criticizing the US on a US website. Try criticizing Xi or the CCP or calling him Pooh on a Chinese website.
You think China doesn’t imprison drug users?
China recently executed a low level drug trafficker
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2026/04/05/c...
China is one of the top executioners. China executes more than rest of the world combined
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2017/04/china-must-co...
You think China is honest about political prisoners in Tibet and Xinjiang?
Criticize the US all you want but I can’t understand the whitewashing of a real totalitarian and genocidal state like mainland China.
But if we start nitpicking the US also executes people all over the world without trial and has secret prisons worldwide where they put people (guess what) without trial.
This is why I’ve been urging everyone I know to move away from American based services and providers. It’s slow but honest work.
yes, this is exactly what I'm saying.
China is a nation built for peace, while western nations are built for war.
The US is (mostly) protective of its citizens but (depending on administration) varyingly hostile to outsiders (immigrants, starting wars, etc.).
China is suppressive towards its own citizens, but has been largely peaceful with other countries and immigrants/visitors. (Granted, China has way fewer immigrants than the US, so this is not comparable).
Ah, so the one party state with two factions in the US repressing anyone who opposes Israel has guardrails. And also, 'accountability'...
> totalitarian
The US is literally, actually committing genocides, kidnapping presidents, pushing wars on every front while repressing dissent at home. If the US is not totalitarian, nobody is. And in a discussion about US models vs Chinese models whent it comes to totalitarianism, excuse my French but f*ck the US. The 'democracy' propaganda would have worked a decade ago. Not today.
But for folks on the opposite side of the world, the threats are more like "they're selling us electric cars and solar panels too cheaply" and the hypothetical "these super cheap CCTV cameras could be used for remote spying"
Feel free to go post similar on Chinese social media about their leaders.
By the way, even with the current administration, there's no question about which is the more authoritarian with their own citizens between China and the US. But if you aren't American, then the US government is much more of a threat than the Chinese.
China cannot make the life of an official in Europe miserable for investigating their atrocities towards the Uighurs, meanwhile CPI judges are now forcedly unbanked and cannot work with American software because they investigated in US's ally's atrocities in Gaza.
The executive branch?
Half the country would be locked up right now if they weren’t allowed to criticize Trump. Have you even paid attention to how much he’s shitted on, on a daily basis?
- Control goes beyond politics
- A single, all-encompassing ideology
- No meaningful private sphere
- Mass mobilization and propaganda
- Extensive surveillance and repression
Seems like China is ticking all the boxes.
Have you ever been to China? Everyone has their own private lives. It's no different than any other country in that respect.
In China, you rarely interact with the government in daily life. Most people are just living their lives.
- Control goes beyond politics
state corporation monopoly, 党支部 in private sector, crackdowns on NGOs and charities.
- A single, all-encompassing ideology
Party led, mandarin speaking Han Chinese nationalism, blended with Little Pink's unquestionable support for Xi and the party.
- No meaningful private sphere
社区网格员
- Mass mobilization and propaganda
We saw mobilizations on Chinese social media, attacking celebrities who don't openly say anything the party wants them to say. Mobilization in real life is rare though, cos it had shown it can backfire.
- Extensive surveillance and repression
Do I really need to explain this?
- No freedom of religion
Shooting from the hip here. Feels like a duct tape hack on first thought.
I mean that's what I do, subconsciously. I think a lot of Europeans do this because a lot of Europeans tend to speak English and then their actual native language, or something similar (e.g. I wonder how Swiss people experience this).
Doesn't change OP's point on contempt.
Being self-righteous and a yank doesn't make sense, country of war mongers, something that cant be said of China.
Going further, discussion about Kent state won’t get you in any trouble in the US, but discussing Tiananmen in China will get a far different response from the government.
Comparing the two only highlights just how much more extreme and repressive the Chinese system is despite all the US moves toward authoritarianism.
> Covid saw people caged and sealed in their houses.
No. There were a few incidents very early on, when everyone was (quite understandably) panicking about a new, deadly virus that nobody had ever seen before, when some local city officials barred the doors of people who had just come from Wuhan. That was a scandal inside China, and it was immediately reversed.
What China did do quite extensively was border quarantine, and during localized outbreaks (caused by cases that slipped through quarantine at the border), mass testing and quarantine measures. This was during a once-in-a-generation pandemic that killed millions of people. In China, these measures saved several million lives. The estimates are that China's overall death rate was about 25% that of the US, and these measures are the reason. By the way, Taiwan and Australia took nearly identical measures, and I very much doubt that you would call them totalitarian societies.
Tell it to the people in Wuhan, and Shanghai, Urumqi, and other cities that had lockdowns. I was in Shanghai in 2022, I was confined to my apartment for nearly 3 months, you couldn't be more wrong.
I'm in Hong Kong right now. Seems like it is still here to me.
The most famous examples are likely the tobacco industry spreading misinformation through self-funded studies and experts, and the fossil fuel industry doing the same to seed doubt about climate change. But of course we can think of countless examples of entire industries and individual large corporations pushing out misleading bullshit, threatening or outright killing journalists and activists to cover up their catastrophic fuckups and their chronic conscious excretion of negative externalities.
This has all of course been going on since the dawn of time, but to focus on the last century in the US, we've seen all sorts of corporations and coalitions of rich and powerful people push misinformation into nearly every sector of our society - universities, science, journalism, politics, etc. in order to undermine confidence in shared facts, corrupt people's ability to discern whether or not something is fundamentally true, and sow confusion so that they can continue to operate in perpetuity in this chaotic maelstrom of doubt.
Lots of capture of government towards these ends as well, we can look at the concomitant constant cuts to education in order to weaken people's understanding of the world and ability to think critically. The revocation of the Fairness Doctrine was probably a step change, and Trump represents the sharpest recent escalation of all this.
From day one, he's done everything he can to shred any collective notion of shared objective truth. Anything he doesn't like is fake news, and the idea that the media is lying, scientists are lying, experts are lying, and institutions are lying, he has spread so fucking successfully through society, to the point where Americans no longer have anything like a shared sense of reality.
It seems like we're being reduced to tribes who are organized primarily around faith in various charismatic individuals.
I think this is fundamentally the worst thing he's done, because it lays the foundation for virtually every other conceivable and inconceivable abuse. If people can't even agree on what is happening, we're fucked. People and institutions in power can do anything they want to whoever they want, because the public has lost their ability to even recognize the danger posed to them collectively and thus mount any resistance based on a shared sense of reality.
Social media has definitely famously accelerated aspects of this like the fragmentation and the spread/magnification of fringe worldviews through echo chambers, but I think it's just one (and maybe this is controversial, but I'd be willing to be generous enough to think the 20something year old creators were too stupid to conceive of these long term consequences at first, but who knows, maybe not) element in a much longer and more intentional, malicious war against the many for the benefit of the few.
As a European, how do you influence your government?
If we go by analogies, Ukraine should've waged genocidal war against Belarus and eventually started bombing Russia and then Europe joined and they bombed Russia together.
CIA/FBI have their own massive data centers (see snowden) inkl. their own older bigger palantr style software.
Elon Musk was able to connect a Starlink server to your data and no one cared. He and his Duche aeh sry doge baby boys were able to access and download all Social Security Numbers.
If someone knows were Putin and all the other world leaders are at any given moment, I would bet its USA first than China if even because i don't think China cares that much about it than USA does.
And everyone out of scope of this, lives probably in some rural USA town were no one cares for you at all anyway, but thats the same thing as in China.
Quick google top link
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_organ_harvesting_from_F...
One of the least (to the extent possible given the topic) political examples is stranger danger. Kids are safer than ever before, but due to the way stories are reported when bad things do happen to kids, parents are less trust of strangers than ever before (and this is despite the evidence it isn't the strangers who are the risk to kids). The sum total experience that media provides now leads to parents being far more fearful and restrictive of their children than past generations, all without needing to tell any lies.
If all the police reports and research into stranger danger being a false narrative can't combat it, how will ideas with far less evidence to the contrary be countered? Should parents trust the news when it comes to the topic of stranger danger?
No, not really. I mean for me, yea, sure, easy. But in the general case? It depends on who you are.
The reason I trust CNN is because when a Dutch news source reports more or less the same thing, I can easily see the reporting matches with that of CNN. Because of this, I personally have some built up trust with CNN. When I look at Fox News, oh deary... it's nothing like what I see on the Dutch news.
This is not something I do consciously, it's simply that I happen to watch Dutch news sometimes and I happen to see American news sometimes and it costs no effort for me to compare. Combine that then with that on HN I also sometimes see BBC and similar British venues (e.g. The Economist is also British I believe?), and now I suddenly have 3 countries worth of news sources.
Many Americans don't really know that the UK exists other than that they rebelled against it. Many Americans almost haven't left their 20 mile radius world (many also did of course). But it's these people that I tend to have a lot of in my in-law family or however you call it (schoonfamilie in Dutch). I'm quite exotic to them in that sense, and definitely foreign. Thank god they have some Dutch roots.
Point being: with that mindset, you're not checking out what the BBC has to say on a topic. You're checking American news, not because of patriotism but simply because of that's all you know and going outside of what you know costs effort. And you already have a job to do, come home late, just want to watch your shows in the evening and that's it.
I am by no means saying that this is representative for all Americans, it isn't. What I am saying is: I see this a lot in my slice of the US. The reason I'm sharing it is because what my in-law family is saying is definitely at a much more personal level than whatever conversation I've had with some random, but lovely, person from a hacker space or hacker house in San Francisco.
Yet, I don't see this view a lot on the news. Nor do I hear Dutchies talking about it, they are simply out of the loop when it comes to a view like this. I don't know how prevalent it is, but if many people of a family of 50 to 100 people is in a situation like this, then my bet is that they aren't the only family.
You can string together true statements that lead to a false viewpoint very easily. _This_ is the bread and butter of this awful media empire we have nowadays.
Vaccines contain cancer causing agents. Vaccines have crippled people for life. Vaccines have lead to children dying. Do you still want to get a vaccine?
All of those are true statements. But the whole thing is a lie.
https://www.npr.org/2026/02/12/nx-s1-5712280/minnesota-ice-s...
At some point France will be in too deep shit and will look to the EU to cover for them. We will all pay for that. And it is deeply unfair because other countries their citizens have accepted later retirement and more frugal benefits to keep their countries fiscally healthy.
France could cover the fiscal hole in other ways, but taxing corporations and wealth at a higher rate also consistently ends up being blocked. And each year the hole gets deeper.
Your theory doesn't actually match with reality, given that Macron's retirement reform was passed into law despite protests. As currently enacted, the age of retirement in France will progressively increase from 62 until reaching 64 in 2030.
Reform wasn't passed, it was forced via a technicality after riots made it politically unpalatable, and it has put France in a governing crisis ever since.
Also, retirement in North, West and Central EU is 67+, not 64. Greece is at 67 too, although begrudgingly.
Again, I'd be equally happy if France covers the fiscal hole some other way, but I am not going to cover for a country that is willingly becoming the sick man of Europe because they want to live comfortably on borrowed time. Which, by the way, is a literal repeat of Greece its crisis. Time is a flat circle indeed.
https://youtu.be/tMd7EfFsPIc (Video claims France is against them, but if they ever were they are not anymore)
The activists who talk about non-binary whatever being the apotheosis of humanity are annoying, because the reality is far more boring: transgender experience is a totally normal part of human variation. There's lots of evidence that they've always been a small minority in every society, much like most (all?) other sorts of neuro-divergence. They deserve recognition, dignity, respect, and reasonable accommodation, just like every other human being.
The rhetoric on the other side, however - there are examples linked in this thread, if they haven't all been flagged - is truly dire, eliminationist stuff. It's the same as has said about jews, and many other scapegoated minorities. Regardless of anything else, those sorts of statements must not be made about any human being, in any civilized society.
and I certainly shouldn't compare the moral panic then to the moral panic now.
I offer two hypotheses on why my original comment has been so heavily downvoted:
1. people think it's not that bad, or not going to get that bad, and/or
2. people think my people deserve it, while yours didn't.
Sure. China and America are the same. Go try the social media experiment.
You can call it a technicality if you'd like, but, the article 49.3 mechanism is a legitimate tool for the government under the French constitution. It is arguably designed to allow the government to pass pragmatic, but politically unpalatable projects like retirement reforms.
As for the governing crisis, it is simply a matter of Macron having used up the rest of his political capital on this reform, and he will conclude his term next year.
You are giving the impression that France is some kind of failed state unable to correct its course, where in actuality, the democratic process literally worked as intended:
1. Macron proposes a necessary welfare reform to start reigning in the budget
2. People go out and protest (unsurprising, as welfare cuts are universally unpopular)
3. Macron's government uses an unpopular mechanism to pass the reform into law, which contributes to his government becoming a lame duck.
This is simply moving the goalposts of our discussion, so I will not respond. France's reforms under Macron are real, and directionally-correct.
We need to fight it on the streets non violently with actions that disrupt not destroy and resist in the courts and ultimately in the ballot box where we can win.
The way to win is economic resistance. Stop spending and stop paying taxes. Crash the fucking economy so deep into the ground that the country self-immolates.
>the country self-immolates
Right-wing authoritarianism is a primal response to perception of disorder my dude. Don't pour fuel on the fire.
Lockdowns were done in many places in the world, including in Taiwan. I get that you're angry about being inconvenienced, but you weren't living in a totalitarian state. You were inconvenienced because there was a massive public health emergency, and the government had the choice of either locking down one city or letting the virus spread to the rest of the country and kill millions of people.
Anyway here are few links and videos for those curious what happened
The Initium's timeline of the whole thing https://campaign.theinitium.com/20220506-mainland-covid-shan...
A viral video on Shanghai lock down https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBdOXwdBn5s
Forced transfer to Fangcang quarantine center without testing positive https://youtu.be/NQfmOTB_naA
Spoiled food in groceries https://www.sohu.com/a/539911328_118622
Community effort to collect the names of those who died, whether it is covid or othe medical conditions or suicide(the og Airtable is down) https://github.com/augustuscaesarr/runrunrun/blob/main/%E6%9...
Here's a fun one, a fake app for Covid Health Code, which was required to enter any public space and private business and even your home https://ilovexjp.pages.dev/
And it is fit to finish with Shanghai protesters shouting Xi Jinping Step Down, Dec 2022 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDAX8UO4ZQA
You were personally subject to quarantine measures in early 2022, and that irks you. On the hand, if you spent the pandemic in Shanghai, you were more free to go about your life than people were in the West for most of 2020-2021.
None of this is "totalitarianism."
And China may have changed in some ways but there have been no signals it would not repeat that event if it thought circumstances warranted.
edit: Not trying to say "US bad, China good." Just there is perspective to everything.
Who cares if a country installs a panopticon to monitor their citizens and runs them over with tanks, look at this other thing over here.
On the one hand, anyone who believes this is the sort of person who buys bridges from shady individuals in backstreets. On the other, China will literally sell people quality bridges at good prices. I feel lost for a metaphor.
I like the Chinese military policy a lot more than the US one (China's policy is actually making them more prosperous which makes it stand out). But as a nation they're not trustworthy and they're absolutely going to interfere with other people's politics. The network of spies and influencers they manage is actually pretty sophisticated once you look at things like the Confucius institute and their international web of spies/law enforcement tracking people down.
Ask that question of the American Indians the USA genocided.
I do not see why USAnians killing Iranians is better than being killed by other Iranians. Dead is dead
The bombs that implemented the genocide in Gaza were dropped by the IDF but supplied, paid for and profited from USAnians
Not really so clear
Of course there is, there's anti riot gear now when there wasn't before.
Wasn't the US bombing its own children just 4 years earlier in Philadelphia?
I could go on, but Tienanmen does not compare to most of the things the US has done outside of its own borders from 1946 to the present. And no, we (I am American) cannot justify a body count in the millions, just because our victims are communist/authoritarian/theocratic. Note also that we only number 5% of the world's population, and that if we compared body-counts as percentage of populations, instead of as absolute numbers, I doubt we even have enough people to settle that debt.
Even worse, if the world internalizes that it is fine to murder millions of foreigners, just because they are oddballs that their citizens cannot empathize with, the _we_ are going to have a big problem -- we appear much more odd to the world than the world does to us.
I am surprised that our shenanigans have been tolerated for nearly a century.
Others may say “what about Uighurs?” or “what about Hong Kong?” but I think that the rest of the world is not doing all that much better on terms of civil repression.
In the UK, you can be arrested for voicing disagreement with the rationale for another person’s arrest (not generally, but on a specific hot button issue they’d rather not anyone talk about). French politicians are attempting to make illegal criticism of Israel, carte blanche. Don’t even get me started on Germany, which is so self-shamed from the last century they have overcorrected into legitimating an external state above all else. Across the pond, you hardly even have to convince anyone that it’s on the downtrend, unless they’re 30% of the population who believe the Don is christ alive (but don’t like if he says it).
The world is very unstable at this point and China is a country that strongly values and incentivizes stability, at the expense of individual rights. This is contra a lot of the west which is both unstable and actively undermining individual rights.
Also, reducing Germany’s complex, decade-long process of grappling with the Holocaust as "self-shame" is... a choice.
> China massacre thousands
Is the first one worse to you?
> massacre thousands
Does the second automatically seem worse than the third?
The one not called China has shot and killed multiple of its own citizens on the street recently. Perhaps that triggers your morality.
Which one of them has killed thousands of civilians just in the last month or so including hundreds of school aged girls (confirmed)? And can they even articulate a reason for doing so?
Which one decided, made the choice, to kill hundreds of thousands of children by dismantling USAID? And the reason for that was?
I mean, they both have concentration camps where they detain their own citizens without due process. So, I guess a tie there.
And, they both enabled Russia after Russia stole tens of thousands of children from their parents.
So, ya, maybe no clear winner. Neither are the good guys. But China is losing the death count battle in 2026 at least.
If you are trying to say that China is worse because of an event 37 years ago, I am not sure I agree.
I could go on, but Tienanmen does not compare to most of the things the US has done outside of its own borders from 1946 to the present. And no, we (I am American) cannot justify a body count in the millions, just because our victims are communist/authoritarian/theocratic. Note also that we only number 5% of the world's population, and that if we compared body-counts as percentage of populations, instead of as absolute numbers, I doubt we even have enough people to settle that debt.
Even worse, if the world internalizes that it is fine to murder millions of foreigners, just because they are oddballs that their citizens cannot empathize with, the _we_ are going to have a big problem -- we appear much more odd to the world than the world does to us.
I am surprised that our shenanigans have been tolerated for nearly a century.
These are not equivalent.
You can argue all day about whether A is slightly more rotten than B, but if they are both rotten then in the grand scheme they will both end up being the same thing if something doesn’t get fixed.
You had to reach back 50 years to find US support for dictators.
> they just often happen to be with dictatorships
No, they always happen to be with dictatorships. The motives of US politicians are not relevant to this fact (I personally think Trump is corrupt and incompetent); the US system is democratic enough, and Americans are moralistic enough, that even corrupt and incompetent politicians can't get away with military adventurism except with dictatorships. Thus the end of that Greenland nonsense.
I think I've typed up and then deleted my response to this comment about 10 times, but now I don't think I'm even going to give you reasoned response.
If you really think that the US has the moral authority to invade whoever it likes because they're "saving the local people from repressive regimes", I've got a bridge to sell you. Even Trump has dropped this pretext facade unlike all his predecessors, and now straight out says "we're going in to take their oil".
well American censored LLMs that usually willing to take extreme efforts to convince me that there is no genocide in Gaza.
the same American LLMs also insist that there are many human genders.
The elected government of the US has the moral highground of over the regime that killed the KMT in it's weakened state after the KMT defeated Japan, went on a rampage against the educated classes, mowed down its own people with machineguns and tanks when they demanded a say in their own governments, and kidnaps people advocating for democracy to this day, including Jack Ma.
> despite starting a new war... on behalf of Israel every six months.
The war started when Hamas, funded by Iran, went on a murder and rape rampage against Israeli civilians.
Liberal democracies have moral high ground over authoritarian dictatorships (at least along that one dimension)
The US is backsliding tragically (and stupidly) and may lose that moral high ground, but the rest of the western democracies will still have it
We conduct amoral behavior with terrorist regimes for dollars.
TikTok and Hasan has really turned the West against itself.
Thinks America is starting wars on behalf of Israel.
LMAO
It's a small difference, but important. Especially because that person is far more likely to be responsible (voting) for and profiting from USAs bad stuff.
That's literally what the comment said:
> Still not sure how I feel about China of all places to control the only alternative AI stack, but I guess it's better than leaving everything to the US alone.
I.e. it would be preferable if, for example, Europe was in control of the alternative, but having China and the US is better than just the US.
I.e. he doesn't see the US as "the good guys" either.
Pointing out the war threat from China isn't hypocritical just because you don't list all the war threats from the US at the same time.
The issue is propagandists are typically brainwashed already.
What? They explicitly called out China in comparative terms with the US while also criticizing the US. Also, they're the other obvious major global power so it's not a question of singling out.
This is just false. I know many Americans and have never observed any of them acting like this, so categorical statements like this are false.
Your claims would be more credible if you didn't lead with something so obviously untrue.
Of course not. When it comes to SOTA LLMs you have the choice between two bad options. For many, choosing the Chinese option is just choosing the lesser of two evils (and it's much cheaper).
Mistral is right here, their models are in-between the cheap to run Chinese models and top of the line performances of US frontier models.
When China does good, it's always that they do mostly bad.
With China it's always pointed out how much power the state has over corporations there, but in the US out of control lobying is supposed to be 'concerned citizens expressing their opinions' or some shit. We're still supposed to take for granted that it is a representative democracy, if a flawed one.
Yes, they just can't talk about some of those values publically.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7W20hdgWXY
I think I'll take the open AI models, innovative high quality EVs and cheap solar panels, please.
When someone points out hypocrisy, this is "the answer", it seems. But it is just a statement, not a rebuttal of the hypocrisy that was pointed out.
Hypocrisy is still hypocrisy.
And bad things are bad things. Yet no amount of propaganda (red scare, "eew dictatorship", Uyger-genocide, Taiwan threat) can convince me that the China is as evil (or more evil) than the US-Israel alliance of the the last 50 years.
Not mentioning US problems every time they criticize CCP problems is not automatically hypocrisy, and this idea basically means you cannot criticize anything without criticizing everything someone considers just as bad or worse at the same time.
Calling a discussion on China hypocritical because it doesn't say "but US worse" is essentially trying to build in whataboutism into every discussion.
It's a symptom of increasing polarization and part of the problem.
I'm gonna go out on a crazy limb here and say that this is on par with the genocide in Gaza? Mass sterilization, forced labor, sex, and torture on a larger scale than Gaza. Certainly we can argue about which is worse, but they're both incredible atrocities. The only thing that makes China less scary IMO is that they currently aren't the empire ruling the world and at the center of the global economy. If that changes, as seems likely, I don't see any reason to believe China would be a better or more compassionate world ruler than the US.
The current president - who Americans voted for twice - is heavily accused of being a pedophile and has reneged on every one of his poll promise
Really not the best advertisement for democracy
The US badly needs to reform these elements, but it's those elements that really make reform nearly impossible at this point.
Electoral college reform, gerrymandering reform, increasing the size of the house or some kind of proportional representation, etc
It turns out that the people will vote for some terrible things in order to get that one petty little thing a given candidate promises and they want, or because they don't like something specific about the other candidate(s). And of course many may later say “well, I didn't vote for that” when they quite demonstrably did.
The measure is the number of votes. "What shall we have for dinner" measures things, there's no target in a "curry vs pizza vs thai" poll, and it doesn't really matter, the target is a nice night in with a film.
However with politics, getting power is the goal, thus the number of votes is thus the target, and thus its not good at measuring what the country actually wants, just who can best get the most votes.
This isn't new, but modern brainwashing allows manipulation at a scale hitherto unseen.
The reality is that the term democracy in western society has essentially become meaningless due to the swathes of algorithmic manipulation which occurs every second of everyday through every possible digital medium.
Democracy isn't just having an election every four years. We have rights that we shouldn't take for granted.
China characterizes itself as a democracy too, just not as a liberal democracy. There are democratic processes, although these are not free in the sense of liberalist ideology. The CCP justifies its control of the elections as a counterbalance to being corrupted by money, which starts to look like not an entirely unreasonable justification.
The CCP narrative also emphasizes "outcome orientation", i.e. that (democratic) legitimacy comes from people being happy about what the governance delivers, not about how it gets chosen. Which again starts to look not totally crazy, given western governments nowadays tend to have dismal approval ratings. And even after taking into account the likely biases in the polling, I do believe the majority of the Chinese truly approve of the CCP.
I'm not a fan of the Chinese system, but I think there are lessons we could take, and a binary "democratic or not" is not a very meaningful categorization.
North Korea is a democratic republic!
Democracy is the idea that people should control their government. The CCP's (and Putin's) notion of "democracy" is something along the lines of "as long as the government controls the people, the people can decide".
Democracy may be a spectrum but China isn't on it, neither in practice nor in spirit. If you have to control the media and prevent free discussion, you aren't practicing democracy.
Western democracies don't have that problem. Yes, they have other problems. Many problems which are hard to solve. But if you live in a western democracy you can freely criticise those in power without fear of retribution.
Right.
Suppose country A kills 1000 people and country B kills 1000000 people and people are criticizing country A for murder while calling country B a better alternative. What is relevant here?
you don't see the problem? lol
The problem is that people put stock in pre-election promises, rather than voting for the character of the person they want to represent them.
The more capitalistic they become, the more growth they have seen.
That's the hypocrisy: not seeing the block of wood in the eye of one while complaining about the speck of wood in the eye of the other.
By trying to be less hypocritical we create a more level playing field based on facts, instead of gut-feeling based hatred.
Whatabboutism is, IMHO, used a lot as a way to circumvent having to address the glaring hypocrisy: i see it's used to shut up those to point out hypocrisy.
You may think only those two are relevant, and so every discussion of one party requires discussion of the other. I disagree with that fundamentally.
I'll be honest, I also disagree that one side is "clearly less evil than the other". For me, living in Taiwan and caring about democracy, the risk of Chinese authoritarian expansion and invasion is not a "speck of wood in the eye", frankly I find that framing disrespectful.
But that discussion is entirely beyond the question of hypocrisy. Again, the guy people accuse of hypocrisy said nothing of the sort that indicates that he doesn't see the problems of the US government. He merely didn't talk about them.
This isn't "shutting down talk about hypocrisy".
Equivalent, here look, us state-funded news agency posting discussions about how trump needs to be replaced:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/democrats-grow-bolder-...
None of those things happen quickly, and most people don't succeed in their attempt to do it. That doesn't mean it's not possible. I'd argue that it's a feature of the system that the system makes it hard to change course - it averages out the extremes.
Assuming that everyone who disagrees with you is a propagandized bot is a terrible way to live. You will not learn.
who started the recent war with Iran and war in Vietnam? did those wars started by American people? did those wars got approved by the people of America or their elected representatives?
Yes? The US president is elected, and while you or I might the system would be better if presidents didn't have quite so much authority... we know the system works this way when we vote.
https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcri...
Why are you changing the subject?
US allies in the entire middle east are literally all dictators or worse than dictators. For example, Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy, you just need 6 years education in school to understand that is worse than dictators when religion is also heavily involved at the same time.
if you want a good path to true improvement in civil rights (not a useless piece of paper or declaration) just track the wealth of a country. Wealthy countries that didn't rely on natural resources to get wealthy tend to treat their citizens better because, well, they make up the fcking economy.
most western countries had a shortcut to that via colonialism and slavery. It's very rich to then point at countries that don't have that cushion and talk about being morally superior.
I don't think you realise that much of the world was under de facto dictatorships (eg. absolute monarchies) and it wasn't like people in the years before were living in democracies that then got taken away.
The US doesn't have a higher moral ground to stand on vis a vis many other countries in the world.
More recently, Sadam and Noriega until America turned on them.
Or currently, the Kingdom of Saudia Arabia, Egypt, and many others.
This doesn’t even touch the Guatemalan genocide, US backing of the Rwandan genocide perpetrators, the white terror, Pinochet, the Khmer Rouge, Afghanistan, or Israel.
Did I miss the uprising?
Also, nice try propagandizing chained deportation as “free plane tickets”
That being said, democracies are about generating consensus between factions with otherwise irreconcilable differences.
There should be overlap on many fronts - that's kind of a feature, not a bug - at least in many cases.
The name says "demos" and "kratos" but names are names, not facts.
There are many ways to give people a choice and this one has proven to be quite ineffective at that, as it slowly devolved into a plutocracy/oligarchy. Iron law of oligarchy, yadda yadda.
What they are very effective at though: crushing dissent, calming the masses with a reassuring illusion of choice, and touting itself as the "one true way".
When I look at the outcomes I don't see any semblance of democracy, only a ritual dance/theatre show every 4 years. A farce as big as the "democratic" instruments on the PRC.
There's a reason this "democracy" is very diligent at discouraging association and unionizing. Those give actual power to the people (and with power comes choice). That's dangerous. People might start believing they can actually influence the outcomes.
"Don't blame me - I voted for Kodos"
Do not conflate the broken American political system, the semi-broken British one, and the whole rest of the "west". Each country has its own political system, and they are wildly different.
> crushing dissent
Democracies are good at crushing dissent? Compared to other political systems? That's just not true. All other political systems rely on universal truth and unwavering trust in a person / religion / clique of people, who can do no wrong and can never be criticised.
> There's a reason this "democracy" is very diligent at discouraging association and unionizing
What? You are probably talking about a specific democracy, and the most broken one at that.
As someone from the "whole rest of the west", no, they're not different at all. Very minor details change, but the net outcome is the exact same and suffer from the exact same problems.
You can't escape the iron law of oligarchy.
> Democracies are good at crushing dissent?
They're not only good: they are the best. You don't need to curb dissent by violence if you discourage dissent by social manipulation. It's the cheapest and most effective tactic: keeping the populace docile.
If you manage to equate "democracy" (again, quotes intended) with democracy (lack of quotes intended), most of the work is already done.
"What are you, antidemocratic!?"
"Don't blame me - I voted for Kodos"
There's a reason my country's system trembled when the bipartisan system was challenged as new parties emerged... but it was curbed within two legislatures without a single shot fired and now we're back to an even stronger bipartisan representation. Quite the fine job, actually.
We even have a name for this: "the state's sewers". They're very effective. There's a reason the state's armed forces routinely infiltrate unions and other citizens participation platforms.
1) conquers places, e.g. Hong Kong, Tibet, Xinjang, ...
2) kills, "disappears", ... the people there https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbSypV2ixjE
3) China's CCP has been pushing out immigrants, and fostering racist sentiment
> Hong Kong
Did India conquer itself when the British returned rule of India to Indians?
> China's CCP has been pushing out immigrants, and fostering racist sentiment
It's a little more complicated than this. I think the level of racism at both the state and individual levels is similar between China and western countries, although it may manifest in different ways.
I hate historical claims. There are disputed territories less than 10km from where I live, and if at all possible, I'd like there not to be a war here. I doubt there's many places where that's not the case. I know there's some, but not many.
Democracy is a morally superior system of government, because it's fundamentally premised on a moral idea; that governments "derive their just powers from the consent of the governed". Dictatorships and aristocracies can make no such claim.
But in principle I agree, democracy on its own doesn't guarantee morality. There's such thing as the tyranny of the majority.
This happened a few weeks ago, actually.
I'm an American and I don't believe that.
With China, you can say 'yeah, this is good, but they eat babies for fun' and it would mostly pass with people nodding along.
Day every day the same unoriginal whining because it is hard to call it something as sophisticated as critique, can be heard all over the reddit.
While at the same time no one bothers to critique CCP to the same extent because we simply are not paid for doing this. No one is interested in non profit repeating the same facts about china every single day.
We are just content knowing that china is not some sort of “saviour” or alternative. It is an enemy of the free world. I try to not use things produced by my adversary to not fund my own doom.
Hard to think of any critique of the US I've seen on HN recently which acknowledges the possibility that we might mean well.
Even during the Biden administration, right after we allocated billions of dollars to Ukraine, huge numbers of Europeans expressed an unfavorable view of the US: https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2024/06/11/views-of-the-u...
They call us warmongers and then wonder why we don't want to help them fight their war. Now they say they want to be buddies with China which has been actively helping Russia with arms. I don't think there is any point in the US trying to please Europe.
And then you've got the Australians who express their burning hatred of the US for not giving more aid to Ukraine, while Australia's aid as a fraction of GDP is still sitting around 10-15% of that provided by the US.
Meanwhile in China, you can't change the ruling party but you can change policies. They restrict media and speech freedom, but they also work tirelessly to improve the livelihoods of the people.
If the west chooses the value empty talk over outcomes, fine, you have the right to choose that. But no need to force that value on other societies. China and Chinese society at large has the right value unity and livelihood over speech. They have the right to prefer what westerners call an "authoritarian" government that delivers on those values, without getting demonized. They're not forcing their way on you, no need for you to force your way on them.
They work to improve the livelihood of people with the same background and ideology, you mean.
The U.S politics are easier to understand from the outside. For one it's a democracy, a more transparent process despite a lot is happening behind curtains. I have no idea what North Koreans are able to make of the U.S scene, I know for sure people in U.S and Europe are hardly able to comment on N.K.
tldr: I'm with you non Americans (and Americans) are perfectly able to critique the U.S with some valuable accuracy.
It seems to me that there is a fair amount of misinformation which gets spread about the US. For example, many non-Americans seem to believe that school shootings are a significant cause of death here.
Furthermore, your proposed scheme creates an incentive to be non-transparent and thus not vulnerable to critique. By closing off information about your country, you can say to any critic: "Your critique is incorrect, because you lack information." Thus creating a reputational advantage for countries which successfully clamp down on the flow of information.
Is that your desired outcome? You want a world where criticizing the US can no longer be done as soon as Trump kicks out all of the foreign journalists and stops the information flow?
Such as? There are countries such as Poland with a political duopoly, but in most European countries, there are multiple parties that work with or against each other. There are different coalitions with varying compromises between them.
> They're not only good: they are the best. You don't need to curb dissent by violence if you discourage dissent by social manipulation. It's the cheapest and most effective tactic: keeping the populace docile.
Nonsense, because autocracies do both, and the threat by violence is very real and makes sure that social manipulation is more effective.
They all failed and were subsumed by the two (read: one) big groups in Europe. Far left and libertarians were crushed in the past two legislatures.
Now it's PfE's turn but the antibodies are already in the bloodstream (the two big groups are already signing their covenants to protect the oligarchy) and Trump did them dirty (they're now scrambling to distance themselvesb from USA's and Israel's ties) so they're DoA and will fail too.
This said: I understand your points, and thanks for the civil discussion.
Just a couple of days ago we found out that 4 undercover CIA agents were operating here in Mexico: https://www.infobae.com/mexico/2026/04/22/no-eran-dos-eran-c...
It has been knokwn that US government operatives provide weapons to Mexican cartels ( https://grothman.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?Document... ).
So, yeah, the US is no "blanca palomita" at all. And those of us suffering from their actions have learned that all powerful nations have good and bad things. Here in Mexico, we've got BYD cars, and they are AMAZING. Also being able to use DeepSeek is so cool.
If the mexican government would actually make work of dismantling the organized trade, there would be no incentive to deliver them weapons to shoot each other.
Oh honey. Black budgets. Cashflow, flow of power.
The “Mexican government” was headed by CIA assets multiple times in recent history: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34903090
https://jacobin.com/2023/06/mexico-jose-lopez-portillo-decla...
What are you expecting Mexico to do, again?
I think right now there's a kind of global propaganda competition playing out and the thing that does the most damage is false equivalences that encourage loss of perspective.
Honestly I had to read the wiki page of false equivalence and you’re not asserting the fallacy correctly.
Additionally, they have supported Russia consistently during their occupation of Ukraine, and just install leaders for life.
I’m confused how you think the US is worse. I say this as an Afroindigenous person who is very clear about the harms white supremacy has inflicted upon the cultures I am a part of.
The safe money is they are going to be an also-ran for the AI revolution. They did manage to force Apple to switch from using lightening connectors to USB though so their wins can't just be laughed off. Maybe they'll surprise us but it'd be a welcome change from their usual routine.
The obvious takeaway here is that a country / blok can't regulate their way to innovation... so I'm not exact sure why you included it in your list of paradigm shifts. If anything, when the next paradigm shift around charging drops, the EU will be once again on the back-foot due to these short-sighted USB-C regulations they enacted.
I do share your sentiment that EU will miss the train once again on AI.
Production of state of the art semiconductors, yes. NXP, STMicro, Infineon are still there and massive in automotive, industrial, card chips, etc.
> The EU fumbled the software revolution, the successes mainly came from the US
Worldwide massive success, mostly yes. Most European countries have their local or regional success stories though.
> The safe money is they are going to be an also-ran for the AI revolution
Not really. Past performances, or lack thereof, are not indicative of future ones.
Mistral are pretty good and selling well in the enterprise space. Some of the best voice models are coming from France (Kyutai).
If you fall out of the state of the art then the claim of EU fumbling semiconductors is correct. The richest block in the world should settle for no less than being state of the art. Anything less is fumbling it.
>NXP, STMicro, Infineon are still there and massive in automotive, industrial, card chips, etc.
The EU semi companies you listed are absent from the state of the art and only make low margin commodity parts that don't have moats. ASML exists but is not enough for claiming EU superiority since the EUV light source is still US IP designed and manufactured. And one top company is too little.
>Worldwide massive success, mostly yes.
Worldwide success is where the big money is, and you need a lot of money for cutting edge research and experimentation to build the future successes. Hence the claim of EU fumbling software is correct.
>Most European countries have their local or regional success stories though.
EU mom and pop shops aren't gonna make enough money to be able to afford risky ambitious ventures the likes of FAANGs have. Which is probably why you work for Hashicorp, a large global US company, and not some local EU company.
Mistral is good for many tasks where you do not need SOTA or near SOTA performance. They cannot compete if you do.
Then they need money.
So most of the talent flee or get bought, typical example in machine learning space is huggingface or fchollet.
Then European government plays catch-up and offer subventions, but at the same time makes rules to make sure companies don't threaten US dominance, or Asian manufacturing.
Mistral is typically playing catch the subsidy game.
Europe is constructed so that it can't win, but can "pick" the winner between scylla and charybdis, pest and cholera.
Europe is constructed so you can take 60 days vacation, work 32 hours a week, get tons of social benefits, can't really lose your job, and retire when you are 65 with a full pension.
Which is excellent. Unless you need to be economically competitive.
Not a thing.
>work 32 hours a week
Not a common thing.
>get tons of social benefits
That you pay for in high taxes.
>can't really lose your job
Layoffs happen at the same rate as elsewhere.
>retire when you are 65 with a full pension
Unless the government decides to push back your retirement because it's insolvent.[0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_French_pension_reform_str...
Because they have no spine and no leverage/muscle on the international stage to throw their weight around and make sure they get what's best for themselves at the expense of everyone else the same way US, China, etc do.
They play the international nice guy that just ends up being the doormat everyone takes advantage of, being at the mercy of Russian and Azeri gas, at the mercy of US tech, energy and defence, and at the mercy of Chinese manufacturing after dismantling their own manufacturing, at the mercy of Turkey for migration enforcement, etc so they can't do anything radical that upsets their "partners", or that makes their virtue signaling policies look bad, or risk massive repercussions they aren't prepared for, so they just turtle, bury their head in the sand and pretend everything is going fine while falling further into obscurity.
EU flaunts its "moral values" as its strength, but their geopolitical adversaries have no such values and are dominating over them in the process exploiting their morals against them as their weakness. There's nothing virtuous in being/acting weak and letting others dominate you.
By design European laws are superior to national laws. Leaving the union is also instant bankruptcy because all countries have very high level of debt which are only guaranteed because they are in the union.
European population is getting old and replaced by a migration coming mainly from previous African colonies.
Future paying for the past.
Uhm, Europe is not the US. We still have a lot of manufacturing. It varies by country - the UK unfortunately had structural problems, finance supremacy and a Thatcher who hated unions so much that she'd rather destroy unionized industries than have unions. Central Europe still does a pretty large amount of manufacturing.
While you're at it, go look for elderlies in their 80s or older, who were born before the People's Republic's founding. Maybe they even witnessed the democratic era of the early Republic (not People's Republic). Go tell them your maximalist thoughts about democracy and see how they respond.
My argument is that with less transparent public affairs, it is much harder from the outside to understand what may be going on.
One can note the effects of certain measures without cherishing the schemes.
For that matter I'm personally convinced more transparency is overall a net benefit. It helps the public at large appreciate situations. But my preference, and the detrimental vs beneficial aspects of a system are irrelevant to the argument I made.
You prefer to believe in monocausal scapegoat mechanisms? Stick your head in the sand at your own peril.
You claim US would supply the poison with pleasure itself, but then why is it being imported?
And who are we supporting since roughly 01/2025? :-)
Why would Russians want democracy? Or the Chinese, for that matter? There have been zero democratic impulses in their societies across hundreds, even thousands of years.
The west needs to rest its democratizing mission and accept that every society is fundamentally different
My country (India) got a "thriving" democracy, but because there is no real democratic impulse in the society, everything on the ground has devolved into what the society was always like - quasi-feudal bureaucracy
They don't! The majority voted for the guy who wants to, admittedly (multiple times), be a dictator and is huge fan of other dictators. If he finds a way to stay for a 3rd term his most loyal followers along with all the republicans in Congress will be just fine with it.
Well, ideology. I believe my way is the only way for every population in the world too, and I fight for it to happen. Of course, each place adapts to their own condition, but I believe my core ideology is the way for humanity as a whole, and I believe it is the same for people who defend western american-style democracy.
It's not Americans, it's educated people who believe in personal liberties.
> Why would Russians want democracy
Because they would have a choice if they want to be robbed blind by a bunch of oligarchs, and if they want to be sanctioned off from the world because the supreme leader decided he wants to kill and maim a million Russians to achieve nothing more than killing Ukrainian civillians.
> There have been zero democratic impulses in their societies across hundreds, even thousands of years
Absurdly bad historic revisionism. Russia had democratic impulses in 1917 and 1990, both hijacked and went nowhere. China's 1911 revolution was also overtly democratic in nature, but was also hijacked.
I find this attitude deeply parochial and colonial. Who are these so-called "educated people" (most of whom would be in western developed nations) to decide what sort of governance system a country should have?
The democratic revolution in America and France came from its own people. If the Russians or the Chinese want democracy, they'll get it on their own
Western hand-wringing about the "lack of democracy" in foreign (usually poorer) countries is just concern-colonialism. I think most of these educated people should focus on their own countries and let the rest of the world be
The marched for it en masse in 1989?
Russians and Chinese are also people. They deserve to rule themselves.
They are ruling themselves in the sense that their governing systems are emergent consequences of their own cultures. All peoples ultimately deserve the governments they have.
Guess the Tiananmen square tank man is a victim, but Alex Pretti and Renee Good are just statistics
(The tank man wasn't even run down by the tank - Good was shot for merely turning the wheels in the wrong direction)
Americans really need to shut up about any democratic values or humans rights and clean up their own mess before preaching to the world
people can tell when their rights are being unjustly infringed upon, even without the verbiage.
democracy is just a handy way of working with individual rights
Could be something to do with almost 400 years under czar heel and then 70 years under commie repressions and mismanagement that yielded one of the worst crises in the history of the country that is still being mentioned with fear (90s, brrrr).
> There have been zero democratic impulses in their societies across hundreds, even thousands of years.
> Russia
What the am I even reading. Educate yourself before making such claims. Decembrist movement, 1905 revolution, 1917 provisional government, constant unrest after the death of mustached cunt, perestroika. Navalny recently died in prison for fighting for democracy, ffs. The only reason why we're having current Russia is because the West royally fucked up by not economically supporting them in 90s and allowing oligarchs to usurp vast soviet empire resources.
orban even lost with a similar illusion of choice.
I think a much better metric is suppression of dissent, human rights records etc., not (the illusion of) choice at the poll booth once every 4 years.
Also, consumer goods.
The voting and multiple-branches-checks-and-balances elements are sidelines.
Currently none of those promises are true in the US. The government is murdering and jailing people for whimsical and self-indulgent reasons, the consumer economy is about to crash, and the only checks-and-balances are the checks going straight to the Emperor's private accounts.
To be fair, there's some judicial pushback, and some political friction.
But Senate and Congress are wholly captured, the opposition is flaccid and foreign-funded, media independence is a myth, and the last time The People had any real influence on policy was the 70s. Possibly.
I have no idea if China is "better". From a distance China seems to be doing much better at building useful things and making long term plans.
But ruling cliques always seem to end up being run by psychopaths, so my expectations for humanity from China's rulers aren't any higher than those for the US.
It would be hilarious if it wasn't so sad
There was massive public backlash and real organized resistance, especially in the streets of Minneapolis. People literally put their lives on the line, communities banded together to help migrants who were afraid to go to work or leave their homes, and they ultimately forced the government to retreat and change tactics. And it resulted in the firing of a cabinet secretary and the border patrol commander that was the face of the whole thing. And plummeting public approval that has only declined further since
A somewhat similar campaign occurred in Hong Kong, but the resistance sadly was not able to fare as well against China tyranny
Do you think only people in western countries want a democratic system of governenance for their country?
> If the Russians or the Chinese want democracy, they'll get it on their own
Both of them tried it, but were denied.
There's literally a saying about USSR (which by proxy now applies to Russia) which roughly translates to: half the population in prison and another half as guards. You can't get it when army, police and whole government apparatus is aimed against it. Times have changed, people are not willing to die en masse for a change when one single cop can kill a crowd.
They literally killed 132 hostages during a saving operation [1], how many do you think will die when they start shooting the crowds?
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_theater_hostage_crisis
That seems to violate basic physics and accounting laws. It isn't possible for everyone to be in debt all at once, because when everything nets out then there isn't anyone to make the loans. Someone has to be producing the goods that get consumed.
These interests are currently ~2% for France. Which mean the debt is manageable and the interests can be paid with the citizen's tax and the music can continue to play. But once France get out of the UE, interests rates become 5% then the citizens tax are not enough to pay the debt, and nobody wants to lend money to France anymore because even at 5% interests the risk of default becomes too great and they risk not getting the full amount-owed back so nobody lends, and since their is no money in reserve, and they can't borrow it means they default => bankruptcy. France doesn't have its own currency anymore so it cannot print its own money which compounds the problem. National resources get plundered, citizens get poor.
It is a game of musical chair which is highly non-linear.
Then why are we afraid of China and the US and cave in to their demands?
Why is german manufacturing output back to where it was in 2006?[1]
[1] https://x.com/ThorstenPolleit/status/2047436171903394294/pho...
Who said anything about mom and pop shops? You're arguing in extremely bad faith, as usual with this topic.
Doctolib, Revolut, Adyen, Nokia, Ericsson, Siemens, and tons of others I can't be bothered to list.
> The EU semi companies you listed are absent from the state of the art and only make low margin commodity parts that don't have moats
You think industrial controllers don't have a moat?
> If you fall out of the state of the art then the claim of EU fumbling semiconductors is correct.
Absolutely not. There is more to the world that state of the art.
Care to explain your wild accusations. I never attacked you directly, just the points you made.
>Doctolib, Revolut, Adyen, Nokia, Ericsson, Siemens, and tons of others I can't be bothered to list.
Do those make anything the US or China can't? A doctor appointment scheduling app? Seriously?
>You think industrial controllers don't have a moat?
I never mentioned industrial controllers. Just the chips and microcontrollers those companies make.
>There is more to the world that state of the art.
If you like competing in low margin race to the bottom jobs, sure. Just don't be surprised your tech wages are low then.
You twisted "national successess" to "mon and pop shop". It's a typically American argument "unless it's the global behemoth that has a global monopoly in the domain, it's a failure", which is, frankly, absurd. Would you say Venmo is a failure because they're not used outside of the US (because other countries have better banking infrastructure)? Or that GM are a failure because they barely sell outside the US (because their cars are not adapted to other markets)? Or that United Healthcare Group are a failure because they only operate in the US?
Leboncoin are a massive peer to peer marketplace in France and a few neighbouring countries (IIRC Belgium), like Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace. They do a couple of hundred million in annual revenue. They are, undoutedly, a local success story. Are they a failure because they don't rival Ebay or Facebook Marketplace? No, because that would assume that the goal of each and every business is to become a global behemoth monopoly, which is an impossibility.
Similarly, Doctolib run healthcare appointment and everything related (online appointnments, digital prescriptions, secure storage and sharing of medical data like test results, AI voice note taking assistants for doctos, etc.) in France, and are expanding in a few neighbouring countries. In France they are the standard and pretty much what everyone uses. They are undoubtedly a success.
More of the point though they support for Chinese democracy was broad enough to the Beijing army could not be used to suppress the protests. The tanks and the people that killed the students had to come in from outside the city.
"That same ice cream shop owner thanked me repeatedly for my help in invading and ultimately overthrowing Saddam Hussein’s regime in 2003. I told him that Canada didn’t take part in the invasion, but he didn’t care. Kurdish people were brutally persecuted by Saddam for over 30 years, and look back on the Saddam years with pure terror. The shop owner refused to take payment for the ice cream and offered that I stay with his family in their apartment upstairs."
https://goodperson.substack.com/p/notes-on-my-travels-in-ira...
In Afghanistan, you saw their desperate attempts to flee the country as the US withdrew. Nonetheless, it was necessary to reduce our warmongering and military footprint. Afghani women being forced into burqas is ultimately not our business.
In Venezuela, apparently, the main complaint is that Trump didn't go even further: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas...
In Cuba, on the subreddit, there is a discussion of Trump saying that "Cuba is next" (after Iran). A mod of the subreddit writes (translated): "I am in Cuba, and I would say that 95% of the people here—those I know or have spoken with—are reacting to this with hope. That is something that many people on the outside do not see." See link below:
https://www.reddit.com/r/cuba/comments/1s5s1ip/trump_cuba_is...
And I'm sure you could find a few Greenlandic Inuit who are tired of Danish colonialism as well.
My point is that simply "asking people" is not a particularly reliable or effective method. It's much better to stay complicit, reduce military spending, and avoid being a warmonger.
Are you aware that this is how America is increasingly perceived around the world?
It's not a 'free world' when America dictates and the others are supposed to just take orders.
May be you're fine with that, feeling on top of the food chain, but everyone needs friends at some point.
What does the 'free' in 'free world' even mean any more? You're not allowed to express your opinion on college campuses anymore, (lack of domestic freedom), and if you're a country, you're increasingly facing trade barriers from the US, (lack of freedom in commerce).
I'm not saying that as a sovereign country you don't have a right to impose these restrictions. I simply wish the US would treat other countries as sovereign.
I cannot condemn whole nation on the basis of two elections.
That’s the beauty of it all. In a democracy there are no irredeemable nations. There are just phases better or worse. China was always evil and cracked down on anyone who questioned power of highest leader.
If you think you are going to convince people that somehow an authoritarian state is preferable to a western liberal democracy in any way then you are foolish. Or paid by the state.
I love democracy and I love freedom. I will tirelessly work to oppose people like you until my last breath. That I swear.
All the disinformation, all the propaganda will be dispersed at the iron flank of NATO. You will never have this land. Europe is my home and it is free and free will remain till I breathe.
So I dare you commies, come here to Poland and try anything. We will crush you and you will see what red really looks like.
I disagree that it is a democracy. It's a corporatocracy and it's been for decades. But the elections are a nice PR.
The Trump thing of not having a PR filter over policies that were there long before him is just making people question whether system a.) is indeed better than system b.);
a.) Pseudo democracy where the will of corporations, but not people is implemented and that the people up for elections are so compromised by special interests by the time we get a choice that it doesn't matter anymore i.e. the US and most of the West.
b.) A system that does away with the spectacle of national elections, with the social contract being that the leadership better be competent and peruse national interests and development, but is not directly elected i.e. China. That competency is supposed to be ensured by only allowing people who have proven competence at lower levels, (some of which they are directly elected to).
There's a question about how sustainable either is. I would prefer a third option c.) where you can elect relatively competent leaders, but that doesn't seem to be an option these days.
What Trump is unquestionably doing however, is making a lot of fans of the idealized system of democracy c.) think that perhaps option b.) > a.) even if less than ideal.
Just because you call yourself a democracy doesn't mean you're one. Just ask citizens of the DRC.
It's also a delusion to think that the world is free under US hegemony. It's mostly better for those who cooperate, and the incentives are good. But it's not "free". The only entity free to do whatever it wants under US hegemony, is the US.
The unoriginal whining is mostly about China or any country that isn't the US, really. Asia is unimaginative and can only copy. Europe is lazy, blah blah blah. Because Americans who can't take being told that their country isn't #1 in the morality olympics seem to also not know much about other countries at all.
Like look at all the whining about China being communist. It's fcking hilarious. They've been an authoritarian, state-run capitalist country for decades by now. Just google their social spending vs other countries, will you.
The existence better critique out there is irrelevant if you don't take the argumentt in front of you on its strenghts.
> Day every day the same unoriginal whining because it is hard to call it something as sophisticated as critique, can be heard all over the reddit.
Criticism of a country with military bases across the whole world doesn't have to be hip to be correct. No one cares what you think about reddit or how hipster you like your political takes to be and this doesn't exempt you from having to argue about the concrete facts in a discussion forum.
> While at the same time no one bothers to critique CCP to the same extent because we simply are not paid for doing this. No one is interested in non profit repeating the same facts about china every single day.
You are so wrong about no one criticizing the CCP that's it's difficult to believe that this statement is sincere. Maybe I could attribute it to selection bias as you're on an american forum? There's also a cottage industry around anti-Chinese propaganda besides the western funded government propaganda machine that is in place for the last decades.
> We are just content knowing that china is not some sort of “saviour” or alternative.
Oh but they are! China is a concrete alternative for an economic partner for most parts of the world, but only if the US doesn't sponsor a military coup or invade your country in response. If they you can get away from Americans threats, China is also a more reliable partner with much more stable policies and much less likely to sabotage your elections, secretly pay your politics and judges and manipulate your markets.
> It is an enemy of the free world. I try to not use things produced by my adversary to not fund my own doom.
This has no basis in reality. The US is the actual enemy of the free world and has been since ww2: occupying countries, sabotaging their domestic politic disputes, staging military coups, bombings, etc. Whatever justifications for those actions after the fact do not make any other country more free.
Another reason I'm eager to leave NATO is leaving will help cut down on our military base count.
I expect some Europeans will protest, the same way Kurds protested when Trump pulled us out of Syria:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hz-WKu881Yc
We'll have to stay strong and ignore their protests. It's the only way to reduce our military footprint and warmongering tendencies.
NATO exists because the US won't allow any other global hegemon to exist. US backing of Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan are for that same reason. I meant that as a neutral statement; large regional powers also do not like each other when situated too close, that's why India and Russia are friendly, and why Russia and China have a complicated relationship despite both being opposed to the US.
Has quite a lot of good also come out of that? To the Europeans, yes. But it's not like the US is doing it from the bottom of their hearts.
And it's not like the US ever intervened in the Middle East for anything other than oil, historically. You go there and piss off the hardcore islamists / dictators, and make use of the Kurds as local fighting forces, and then you abandon them to the revenge of said islamists? Ofc they're pissed.
1. I'm not American, I'm European. And cool it with this finger pointing around nationality as I never brought it up. We can't have a civil discussion if you resort to identity politics as an argument.
2. I said no such thing. I never called those companies failures. You're the one saying that by twisting my arguments.
And those online marketplaces and doctor apps you mentioned that are "local success stories" don't have invented any core tech that can be exported and monetized globally the same like Microsoft, Intel, AMD, Nvidia, etc can. export products abroad, they just used existing FOSS technologies to build some local websites in the EU. Any other country on the planet can build their own versions of those apps, and they have, from India to Argentina. It's nothing special the EU made here. So how you can consider them in the ballpark of the tech companies before is beyond me.
And I didn't say you're American, just that you're using the traditionally American bad faith argument.
> I never called those companies failures
You just called them "mom and pop shops".
> And those online marketplaces and doctor apps you mentioned that are "local success stories" don't have invented any core tech that can be exported and monetized globally
And that's a different argument altogether. Not everything has to be core tech exportable all over, and one can be very successful without doing that.
If you're looking for core tech developed by European countries exported all around the world, enjoy Airbus, Siemens, Infineon, Alstom, Spotify, DeepMind (ok they were acquired by Google), VLC, ASML, SAP and plenty of others.
> Microsoft
> they just used existing FOSS technologies
Can you explain to me the difference between using FOSS and proprietary software to build a product, and what Microsoft are doing?
Meanwhile Germany's and the EU's short sighted energy policies have caused a lot of manufacturing to move outside the EU to places like the US or China.
The EU is in a very bad position right now manufacturing wise compared to how it was and how it could be. It basically never failed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory for the last ~20 years.
You really think the people who are left on the streets feel free to speak their minds if it would conflict with what the Politburo is enforcing?
Also, China has got nearly nothing in common with Russia. Don't lazily lump them together just because western popular thought likes to put the same label on them.
Which Australians are we talking about here? Australia, if pushed to the absolute limit might formally send a strongly worded letter to the US expressing concerns. They aren't particularly fussed about Ukraine, we've all spent decades politely accepting the US invading random countries for no obvious reason and in defiance of everyone's strategic interests. Australians clearly do not care if distant countries get invaded.
Similarly, I saw a person from Italy who declared the US an "enemy of Europe" for not giving more to Ukraine, when the US has given far more than Italy. There's a professor with the last name O'Brien who constantly castigates the US for not giving more, when we gave far more than Ireland.
We just have to stop the warmongering. It never achieves anything.
Technically he didn't even say anything related to US activity in Ukraine either. He was pointing out that US policy related to international trade and oil was bad. Which is basically a non-controversial opinion as far as I know.
youve seen 4ish people and you are extending that to tens or hundreds of millions?
seems a bit silly to me
There is a huge difference between attacking foreign nations because of oil... Oh, pardon me, because of... Geopolitical interests... Oh, pardon me... In the name of democracy and self-defense when you're being attacked (such as Ukraine).
We came to help you after 9/11, when for some reason you invaded Iraq although Osama Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda had taken responsibility...
But sure, think that you're white guardians of the flame of freedom and democracy all you want!
You're in exactly the same ballpark as China and Russia, they're just without the Hollywood propaganda.
Europeans helped when you called after 9/11. Are you seriously arguing about being called warmongers considering what your government started in Iran? (and btw screwed the global energy market)
This lack of self awareness is what turns people away.
So how would you feel if you got labeled as warmongers for that help?
You're welcome to call us warmongers. Just don't expect us to help you fight wars if you do.
Libya was Europe's idea -- we helped when you called -- yet the US still gets blamed for it. If the US had surged more weapons to Ukraine (as some Europeans were requesting), thus provoking Russia to launch a nuke, we surely would've been blamed for that too.
The pattern I've noticed is that anywhere the US has foreign policy involvement (including Europe), there are locals in that region who are both for and against said involvement. People who aren't knowledgeable about the region will generally not know many details, and simply say "oh, the US is involved in a war again". If that's how we're going to be judged, then yes, I want to be involved in fewer wars. And withdrawing from NATO will help with that objective. So I favor NATO withdrawal.
Think about this for just three seconds, I'm begging you.
As soon as you use the phrase "unprovoked" then you start getting into messy details. Are we so sure that the war in Ukraine was not provoked by NATO expansion? Are we so sure that the war in Iran was not provoked by Iran's actions against Israel or against its own people?
The ideologue doesn't like details. They prefer to see the world in black and white.
And to preempt the inevitable "the dictionary isn't always how people use it" response, this is in fact how everyone uses the word.
So yes, it's very much tied to the nature of the war and the reason it was started. Attacking Iran for no particular reason is warmongering. Defending Ukraine from invasion is not.
"Unprovoked" can be difficult but I don't think it actually is here. Yes, you can list reasons. But even if you believe the wars' proponents, the justification isn't there. It's like if I tap someone on the nose and they blow my head off. Was there some provocation? Technically, yes. Does the killing count as "provoked"? Not really. That word carries an implication of sufficient, justified provocation, not just "something happened."
Did NATO expansion provoke the invasion of Ukraine? Maybe. Is that sufficient to say the invasion was "provoked"? No, not even close. Similar for the justifications given for Iraq and Iran.
Hardly 'Europe's', it was the idea of some 'humanitarian interventionists' in the Obama admin and the then current president of France who wanted to cover up his corrupt dealings.
For what it's worth, I am not a fan of NATO either, so we can agree on that. All US troops should imo immediately leave Europe and loose all access to military facilities on the continent.
As for the whole warmongers thing, answer me two simple questions:
1. Was the 2003 Iraq war started based on false claims about WMDs? Yes/No?
2. Did you just attack Iran for no good reason? (Yes/No?)
Back at you. I'm glad Europe, Asia, and Australia all said no to helping liberate oil from Iran.
Also, it's so weird seeing Americans wanting to leave NATO because NATO didn't help invade Iran, whilst forgetting that NATO is a defensive pact. Han shot first :headdesk:
I don’t get you people. You whine about authoritarian tendencies of Trump and then you say that maybe an authoritarian system is better and you want authoritarian system? This is just insanity
That makes me think all these comments are just propaganda double speak
The point is that if you want to have the privileges of a global hegemon and go around the world and accuse others of being authoritarian governments i.e. China, then your shit better be close to exemplary counter to that. Otherwise people around the world might run out of patience with your shit.
Looking at both countries and what system the majority of the world would increasingly rather live under, IMO it would be option b.) not because they love authoritarianism, but because they want to live well and be as free as possible while doing so.
The US is increasingly authoritarian, (in China you may not be able to criticize Xi, in the US you cannot criticize Israel without consequences).
There's multiple ways one can be 'free'. The US seems to define freedom only in the narrow sense of being free from overt oppression for political opinions, but for many being free from economic insecurity is at least as, if not more, of an important freedom. The US does not offer that second freedom, but increasingly not even the first one.
In light of that, why should the people of the world tolerate US hegemony and not increasingly turn towards China?
Make it make sense
“ In China, criticizing the central government or Xi Jinping can result in forced disappearances, total digital erasure, arbitrary detention, and severe legal prosecution by a judicial system controlled entirely by the ruling party.”
I don’t like this, I don’t like that option B at all. I got an allergy to detention camps
Could things eventually go south with the CCP in charge? Of course, and given long enough time, that's almost a certainty. But even when that day comes, it still does not directly imply a liberal democracy was the better governing system for the Chinese people, as your original comment strongly implied.
Incorrect - my point about Chinese democracy does not apply to the current governing body of China (whether you choose to view and harp on them as communist or not is irrelevant).
The Cultural Revolution, which the previous commenter presented as a gotcha, is widely regarded as a dark period and unequivocally a mistake by the majority of Chinese today. But Chinese communism today is both much more and much different than Chinese communism under Mao.
OTOH Tiananmen is much more emblematic of "Chinese democracy" than the Cultural Revolution was of Chinese communism. And as already stated, the way Tiananmen was handled is deemed to be correct by the majority of the Chinese populace today.
And so once again, this goes back to my original point: peoples of different nations choose their own government, including the form of that government, and not just in the narrow sense of who their next public-facing leader should be during the next several years. The Chinese already does exactly that.
this sounds like you are american. NATO is Europe driven, with a goal of keeping the americans involved. the alternative is going back to european powers fighting against each other.
the US the whole time has been basically absent. trump didnt start the "will they wont they" rom com setup. its always been there. NATO didnt go to Afghanistan because the US wanted it. europe demanded that the US invoke article 5, ans insisted on sending help
The obvious non-US potential hegemon was China, yet we normalized trade with them, which greatly helped their economy grow.
The new one is India. We've been buddying up to them a fair amount as well.
The US also played a role in the creation of the EU, arguably a more potent rival hegemon than any individual European state: https://archive.is/VC2zV
>Has quite a lot of good also come out of that? To the Europeans, yes. But it's not like the US is doing it from the bottom of their hearts.
I don't believe that is true. As I stated elsewhere in this thread, even during the Biden administration, right after Biden sent billions to Ukraine, the US was barely net-positive in approval rating for many European countries:
https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2024/06/11/views-of-the-u...
If a lot of good came out of the relationship from Europe's perspective, you would expect them to approve of the US. And yet they don't.
So we can conclude that US presence is a negative for Europe, and it would be best for Europe if US troops and security guarantees were withdrawn. Unsurprisingly, many Europeans have requested this course of action.
>And it's not like the US ever intervened in the Middle East for anything other than oil, historically.
The Gulf War was rather similar to the Ukraine invasion in the sense of a powerful country (Iraq) invading a weaker neighbor (Kuwait). But you probably think we only aided Ukraine for minerals-related reasons anyways, eh? That's why Europe is aiding Ukraine right now, correct?
>make use of the Kurds as local fighting forces
So the Kurds and Islamic State are fighting. The US steps in to help the Kurds. At that point we become "warmongers" who are "making use of" the Kurds. It would've been better to stay complicit. After all, the only reason anyone would ever oppose IS is due to oil, right? So that must've been our motivation.
Time to stop the warmongering.
Of course you present it as a one way street. Nah, you normalized with China to counter balance the Soviets and after that fell your companies benefited, since it is much cheaper to produce in China.
China just wasn't standing by and it also got something out of that relationship (know how) - the US only wanted it as a cheap sweatshop factory, so as soon as they became a real competitor to the US, the US started with sanctions, tariffs etc.
Having failed in China, the US now wants Latin America to stay behind in development terms, just useful enough to outsource to, but not enough to compete.
China's population was about 6x that of Russia in 1970. So 6x the hegemon potential, in the long run.
I'd say that the US alliance with China has been highly vindicated btw. China has proven to be a considerably less oppressive great power than the USSR. I'd say both China and the US are quite herbivorous by the standards of historical great powers like, say, Imperial Japan.
>Having failed in China, the US now wants Latin America to stay behind in development terms, just useful enough to outsource to, but not enough to compete.
Aside from Mexico, the US does not trade a notable amount with Latin America:
"In February 2026, United States exported mostly to Mexico ($28.9B), Canada ($28.4B), United Kingdom ($10.7B), Switzerland ($10.7B), and Netherlands ($8.48B), and imported mostly from Mexico ($44.3B), Canada ($29.2B), Chinese Taipei ($21.1B), China ($19B), and Vietnam ($15.7B)."
https://oec.world/en/profile/country/usa
The US wants to see Latin America develop in order to reduce illegal immigrant flows. During the Biden presidency, Harris was sent to address the "root causes" of illegal immigration:
https://www.nbcnews.com/investigations/kamala-harris-border-...
You're just making up random conspiracy theories to see what sticks. Note that you don't provide evidence for your claims. The fact that they fit your conspiratorial intuitions appears to be evidence enough for you.
You left the part where the US sponsored extremist groups in Syria, but of course you did.
You know, your anger makes sense if you selectively leave out large part of the involvement of your own government in various conflicts.
I didn't expect any help from them.
>Also, it's so weird seeing Americans wanting to leave NATO because NATO didn't help invade Iran
That's not why I want to leave NATO.
>whilst forgetting that NATO is a defensive pact.
It didn't look very defensive when the Europeans dragged NATO into Libya.
You can see French and UK leadership were making moves before the US:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_military_intervention_in_...
Obama's approach was referred to as "leading from behind".
>For what it's worth, I am not a fan of NATO either, so we can agree on that. All US troops should imo immediately leave Europe and loose all access to military facilities on the continent.
I'm glad we can agree on something. I find that a lot of Europeans are not willing to accept the logical implication of their stated beliefs.
>As for the whole warmongers thing, answer me two simple questions: [...]
I'm not sure why you're pushing this "warmongers" point. As I said, I'm an isolationist. I've left many comments here on HN about how I want the US to be more like Switzerland. The Swiss never do anything and thus they never get blamed for anything.
The families of the thousands of Iranians slaughtered by the regime doubtless think that we are attacking Iran for a good reason. Same way the thousands of Ukrainians slaughtered by Russia probably thought our weapons deliveries were being given for a good reason.
In any case we may be called "complicit" if we do not act -- the same arguments were used in the case of Libya. But we can't keep playing world police. We aren't very good at it, and it is not clear whether it is helpful. Not to mention the dubious ethics of getting involved in the affairs of other countries.
You're either "complicit" in "propping up" bad regimes, or a "warmongering" "imperialist" who "destabilizes" them. There's no way to win. Given the choice, I prefer to be complicit.
Regardless of the 'thousands of Iranians slaughtered by the regime' which is supposed to just be accepted as fact despite everyone citing some random number everytime, no they don't.
Because the logic of 'we'll liberate you from oppression by bombing you' does nothing but unites Iranians more than they ever were united before.
Or do you think the killing of schoolgirls by the US is welcomed by Iranians somehow?
Honestly, I am speechless.
It's because a lot of the people hate the regime and want it gone. You can see that in activist spaces like the /r/NewIran subreddit or on X from accounts like https://x.com/__Injaneb96 that yes, they do very much welcome US intervention.
Here's a video from a townhall in my parent's congressional district where some Iranian-Americans speak up on the war: https://old.reddit.com/r/NewIran/comments/1rbdxzb/democrat_c...
It's quite similar to Ukrainians complaining about Putin. "My country sucks, come save me" is always a trap, because if you attempt to come "save" them you just get called a warmonger.
> Make it make sense
If Option A is a country that pretends is a democracy, but in reality is an oligarchy where you don't get taken care of if you're sick, has crappy infrastructure, most people can't afford a family or a vacation AND you increasingly can't express your opinion and Option B is a country where you can't openly express your opinion, but most of the other things I mentioned you CAN afford, then many people would go for option B, because with option A they likely can't express themselves anyway and CANNOT do things they can with option B.
There's no simpler way to dumb this down for you.
The point is not 'we love authoritarianism', but that America ONLY has the democracy claim going for it and NOT MUCH ELSE, therefore the democracy it has better be near perfect for that to be a compelling argument.
And it is far from that.
What I find frustrating with discussions like these is that many Americans seem content with the claim that America is a democracy without examining the reality, meaning the chance for improvement there is slim.
Well it's not just the Americans claiming that America is a democracy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index
Your idea of what the US is like seems to be a mosaic of viral clickbait loosely tethered to reality
Yet even they admit the US is far from a full democracy. It's kind of like the Roman Republic. Was that more of a democracy than the Roman Empire? Yes. Was it a truly participatory democracy? No.
Option B is just some fantasy. It doesn’t really exist as you claim it does. You do not trade one thing for another, that’s just not how any of this works.
So get a grip and fix America and no you don’t need to make it authoritarian omg.
I don’t understand you people. Instead of focusing on fixing things you tend to idealise China quite fantastically. Hence I think it’s all on a payroll and I am talking to Claude.
If you wanted to make an example of countries America could learn from there are much much better countries than hecking China of all. Nordics, Canada, hell even Singapore if you like authoritarian capitalism so much
For whom?? Maybe for the filthy rich, but certainly not the average citizen. You earn way more money in the US, but for life quality (unless dollars is all that matters to you) between them even I'd pick China. Come visit it once, don't get fooled by online echo chambers.
No. Certainly not 'far worse'. Purchasing power is actually greater now according to many stats. So is things like access to healthcare. There's certainly a great disparity between major cities and villages but that's true in the US too.
The US still has things going for it, it's certainly easier to start a business there for example, but even these are slowly evaporating.
I can't help but notice that you keep ignoring my central point. It doesn't matter what I personally believe. As I said before, I'd like option c.) which is a direct democracy with competent leaders.
I am based in Europe and there's little about Canada worth emulating. Is it better than the US? Yes. Better than Europe? Nah.
Nordics? Absolutely. I'd take the economic system of Norway and the direct democracy of Switzerland, thank you very much. However these are small countries that unfortunately don't have their own sovereign foreign policy for example and thus little worldwide influence overall compared to how much influence the US or China has.
My point is, if you want to be a good counter to authoritarianism then you better be nearly as great a democracy as possible, (which the US is not).
Instead the US is sliding more towards authoritarianism, more and more towards bullying and brute force, while offering nothing in return. No great infrastructure investment (as China is doing), no 'cradle to grave' social systems as some other non democratic systems are offering.
Therefore it should be no surprise that worldwide opinion of China is rising and the US is sliding.
To put it differently; China has experienced many slides, conflicts, colonialism etc. in the time the US of A was already free. Therefore China shouldn't have been able to catch up. If the US invested more in its people, kept manufacturing instead of basing everything on financial speculation, then the standard of living should have been much greater than any other country in the world.
Instead China is quickly catching up and in some cases surprising the US. With the head start the US had, that should never have been possible.
Instead of getting offended at me pointing facts, maybe you should work on reversing the trend. Just a suggestion.
They are consistently anti-Trump.
If they're so horrifically biased towards capitalism, why do they rank Sweden over the US?
Again, you're basically just a conspiracy theorist throwing darts at a board blindfolded. You don't have anything to say about the methodology of this index, or an alternative index you prefer and why. You're just making bold assertions based on clickbait you read.
Your grievances with how you perceive other people opinion of the US are irrelevant when confronted with the warmorgering reality of american foreign policy, no matter how offended you feel on behalf of your favorite military industrial complex.
https://www.economist.com/europe/2024/06/24/death-and-destru...
This is the warmongering reality of the EU. First Libya, now this. Don't get offended, I'm just speaking facts.
Yes, I think European foreign policy has in many cases resulted in the deaths of innocent people and our leaders are "warmongers" for following them.
See, it's not that hard. I am not upset, because I can objectively look at the facts and say, yeah, you have a point. I even upvoted you.
The fact remains that the US has done this on a much larger scale.
It's wrong in both cases.
In the middle of an unprovoked aggression, is it really that surprising that you might try to restrict channels your enemy might use? I don't think so.
>In the middle of an unprovoked aggression, is it really that surprising that you might try to restrict channels your enemy might use? I don't think so.
So wouldn't Ukraine also logically want to restrict internet access to its citizens in that case?
I'm advocating that the US pull support.
Why can't you advocate that EU pull support?