There’s a related report focusing on the Serbian prime minister’s resignation:

Serbia’s PM Milos Vucevic resigns amid Chinese contractor controversy – [unpaywalled link]

Vucevic was mayor of Novi Sad before becoming prime minister in elections last April. His successor as mayor also resigned on Tuesday. Protesters claim the Chinese consortium responsible for renovating parts of Novi Sad station had bypassed safety regulations with the ­assistance of corrupt officials.

…

There is a growing perception that the president [Vucic, who is now about to decide whether to form a majority government or hold a snap parliamentary election] is trying to quash democratic freedoms in Serbia and turn the country back towards Moscow, despite ­Belgrade’s formal efforts to join the European Union. Serbia is a candidate to join the bloc but must first normalise relations with its neighbour Kosovo, which broke away from Serbia after a Nato intervention in 1999 that brought an end to Slobodan Milosevic’s brutal crackdown on ethnic Albanian separatists.

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‘So what?’: Privacy warnings about DeepSeek fall on deaf ears

Privacy activists are warning about the invasive nature of DeepSeek, which collects a trove of personal user information that could be handed over to the Chinese government

People, however, just don’t care.

Luke de Pulford, co-founder of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC), shared screenshots from the Chinese AI chatbot’s privacy policy, which stated data it collects is stored in “secure servers located in the People’s Republic of China.”

…

“Just fyi, @deepseek_ai collects your IP, keystroke patterns, device info, etc etc, and stores it in China, where all that data is vulnerable to arbitrary requisition from the [Chinese] State,” said de Pulford, leader of IPAC, a global group of lawmakers who seek to hold China accountable for democratic abuses.

“Anticipating tedious whataboutery: the difference between this and free-world social media apps is that you can enforce your data rights in rule of law countries. This is not the case in China,” said de Pulford. >

‘So what?’: Privacy warnings about DeepSeek fall on deaf ears

Privacy activists are warning about the invasive nature of DeepSeek, which collects a trove of personal user information that could be handed over to the Chinese government

People, however, just don’t care.

Luke de Pulford, co-founder of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC), shared screenshots from the Chinese AI chatbot’s privacy policy, which stated data it collects is stored in “secure servers located in the People’s Republic of China.”

…

“Just fyi, @deepseek_ai collects your IP, keystroke patterns, device info, etc etc, and stores it in China, where all that data is vulnerable to arbitrary requisition from the [Chinese] State,” said de Pulford, leader of IPAC, a global group of lawmakers who seek to hold China accountable for democratic abuses.

“Anticipating tedious whataboutery: the difference between this and free-world social media apps is that you can enforce your data rights in rule of law countries. This is not the case in China,” said de Pulford. >

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The guys at HF (and many others) appear to have a different understanding of Open Source.

As the Open Source AI definition says, among others:

Data Information: Sufficiently detailed information about the data used to train the system so that a skilled person can build a substantially equivalent system. Data Information shall be made available under OSI-approved terms.

• In particular, this must include: (1) the complete description of all data used for training, including (if used) of unshareable data, disclosing the provenance of the data, its scope and characteristics, how the data was obtained and selected, the labeling procedures, and data processing and filtering methodologies; (2) a listing of all publicly available training data and where to obtain it; and (3) a listing of all training data obtainable from third parties and where to obtain it, including for fee.

Code: The complete source code used to train and run the system. The Code shall represent the full specification of how the data was processed and filtered, and how the training was done. Code shall be made available under OSI-approved licenses.

• For example, if used, this must include code used for processing and filtering data, code used for training including arguments and settings used, validation and testing, supporting libraries like tokenizers and hyperparameters search code, inference code, and model architecture.

Parameters: The model parameters, such as weights or other configuration settings. Parameters shall be made available under OSI-approved terms.

• The licensing or other terms applied to these elements and to any combination thereof may contain conditions that require any modified version to be released under the same terms as the original.

These three components -data, code, parameter- shall be released under the same condition.

Clearly, however, there are concerns about censorship, democracy and security. One of the drivers of the Chinese AI industry has been access to extraordinary amounts of data, which is more difficult to get hold of in the West.

This is a very brief paragraph about real issues. The whole article basically says that “China is better because it’s cheaper,” but it doesn’t say exactly why it’s cheaper. You’ll find a lot of reliable information about slavery-like labour in China and the absence of any workers’ rights. This BBC article ignores that completely.

Is Deepseek Open Source?

Hugging Face researchers are trying to build a more open version of DeepSeek’s AI ‘reasoning’ model

Hugging Face head of research Leandro von Werra and several company engineers have launched Open-R1, a project that seeks to build a duplicate of R1 and open source all of its components, including the data used to train it.

The engineers said they were compelled to act by DeepSeek’s “black box” release philosophy. Technically, R1 is “open” in that the model is permissively licensed, which means it can be deployed largely without restrictions. However, R1 isn’t “open source” by the widely accepted definition because some of the tools used to build it are shrouded in mystery. Like many high-flying AI companies, DeepSeek is loathe to reveal its secret sauce.

I feel safer knowing that my data is not in a country where the company can use it against me

Where is this country that can’t use your data against you?

Is Deepseek Open Source?

Hugging Face researchers are trying to build a more open version of DeepSeek’s AI ‘reasoning’ model

Hugging Face head of research Leandro von Werra and several company engineers have launched Open-R1, a project that seeks to build a duplicate of R1 and open source all of its components, including the data used to train it.

The engineers said they were compelled to act by DeepSeek’s “black box” release philosophy. Technically, R1 is “open” in that the model is permissively licensed, which means it can be deployed largely without restrictions. However, R1 isn’t “open source” by the widely accepted definition because some of the tools used to build it are shrouded in mystery. Like many high-flying AI companies, DeepSeek is loathe to reveal its secret sauce.

@unknowing8343@discuss.tchncs.de

@Kissaki@beehaw.org

Hugging Face researchers are trying to build a more open version of DeepSeek’s AI ‘reasoning’ model

Hugging Face head of research Leandro von Werra and several company engineers have launched Open-R1, a project that seeks to build a duplicate of R1 and open source all of its components, including the data used to train it.

The engineers said they were compelled to act by DeepSeek’s “black box” release philosophy. Technically, R1 is “open” in that the model is permissively licensed, which means it can be deployed largely without restrictions. However, R1 isn’t “open source” by the widely accepted definition because some of the tools used to build it are shrouded in mystery. Like many high-flying AI companies, DeepSeek is loathe to reveal its secret sauce.