The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 19 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Acharya: DeepSeek's rapid release disproved claims China was years behind
“Just a year before DeepSea came out, you had a number of, like, tech leaders in Washington testifying that China was, like, five to six years behind the US, with confidence, on the record. And then DeepSea comes out 26 days after OpenAI puts out the frontier.”
Webster: DeepSeek hard-censors 85% of politically sensitive topics in Promptfoo benchmark
“We did a benchmark on Chinese politically sensitive topics that, that found that about 85% of those topics in our test set were hard censored.”
Webster: DeepSeek returns CCP propaganda or refusals on Tiananmen Square
“If you ask it about Tiananmen Square or whatever, it will either give you a refusal or it will give you like this long diatribe of The CCP party line, like, you know, nothing happened. We believe in harmony in China and blah, blah, blah.”
Webster: DeepSeek is especially vulnerable to basic prompt jailbreaks
“If I had to deploy DeepSeq, I would probably focus on use cases that were not end user facing because DeepSeq is like, especially susceptible to basic jailbreaks.”
Webster: Self-hosting DeepSeek does not remove built-in political censorship
“If you run it locally or if you use any of these US providers, which have, you know, spun it up and are serving it you get the same level of censorship. The only difference there is that the China hosted version has an additional guardrail that looks at output…”
Patel: NVIDIA GB200 yields 3x-4x performance per dollar on DeepSeek
“If you're running DeepSeq inference, the performance difference per GPU is like north of like six, seven X, and it continues to optimize you know, for DeepSeq inference. And so the, you know, then it's like, well, I'm only paying 60% more for six X, and it's l…”
Bosworth: DeepSeek achieved breakthrough AI results through memory architecture innovation
“DeepSeq in China, which was put in a tough spot and then innovated incredibly in the memory architectures and a couple other places to really get amazing results.”
Acharya: DeepSeek offered reasoning models for free vs OpenAI's paid tier
“So, one I think important nuance is the fact that they released their reasoning model for free at scale, so previously you had to use O-one Pro, and you had to pay ChatGPT's premium subscription to get access to it.”
Webster: Equivalent open-source reasoning models will arrive within weeks
“What I've been telling most people who ask is like, let's just wait a few weeks and there will be an open source model that, that implements this reinforcement learning technique and you, you'll, you'll get great reasoning on par with what we see from deep see…”
Ian Webster: DeepSeek uses a separate system for political censorship
“For Deep Seek specifically, there was the part that limited speech about politically sensitive topics in China. So this is stuff like, you know, Taiwan or Tiananmen Square, that kind of thing. And it's pretty clear that that was Basically a separate system fro…”
Ian Webster: OpenAI's GPT refuses ~40% of sensitive Chinese political prompts
“Yeah, but still around 40% as opposed to 85% on this particular test set.”
Sinofsky: DeepSeek DAUs reached roughly 35% of OpenAI's total
“DeepSeq, I think is, was the number I saw this morning is like 35% of the DAUs of open AI.”
Moore: DeepSeek mobile app achieves 7% 30-day retention versus ChatGPT's 9%
“On a retention basis, like, how many users are coming back to the app, say, Exactly 30 days, exactly seven days, exactly 60 days. It's just slightly below ChatGPT. So we're looking at seven percent day 30 for DeepSeq and nine percent day 30 for ChatGPT.”
Moore: DeepSeek reached #2 AI web product within a week of launch
“We only had 10 days of data for Deep Seek for January, because it launched at the end of the month, and it shot up from literally nothing to number two on the list, you know, 10% of ChatGPT scale on web within a week, a little bit more than a week.”
Moore: Russia Is DeepSeek's Second-Largest Market After China
“So Russia is the number two market for DeepSeek after, after China.”
Moore: Runway, Otter, and UMax dropped from Top 50 GenAI list
“There were a couple companies on the list, like Runway, Otter, UMax, across web and mobile, that have been on the core top 50 ranks in the past. But maybe they got just edged out by, like, Deep Seek launching this time, and so they lost their spot for this ran…”
Mascorro: DeepSeek consistently open-sources its model weights and training techniques
“So, one of the good things about DeepSeek is basically they open source their weights, their techniques, and how they build these models, and they've been doing that for a while.”
Appenzeller: DeepSeek spent $5.5 million at market rates to train V3
“They quoted 5.5 million dollars, I think, you know, at market rates to train it.”
Mascorro: DeepSeek-R1 post-training used two SFT and two RL phases
“So basically the way they did that, trying to fix R one zero, is it added a couple more phases in the post-training. That included two supervised fine tuning phases and two reinforcement learning phases. And these reinforcement learning phases, they were a lar…”