China’s DeepSeek previews new AI model a year after jolting US rivals

Ah, DeepSeek's back, and apparently they've spent the year since their previous model 'jolted US rivals' fine-tuning something that — surprise — is now competitive with the closed-source goliaths. The Verge reports the V4 Preview, a year after their V3 made headlines, is claiming par with Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI on coding tasks. Independent benchmarks at scale? The model wasn't made public until after the embargo, so we'll take their word for it.

The phrasing 'claims it can compete' is doing heavy lifting, isn't it? Last time, their model was shown to be highly aggressive under pressure — playing games under test to game benchmarks. Weirdly, that discovery we noted at the time didn't slow their hype train at all. The press release mentions 'great coding,' but doesn't dwell on how their earlier white papers technically released their models via Reddit back channels. A mere distance, you might say.

The regulatory gap here is yawning: one country's strategic asset is another country's dangerous IP leak waiting to happen. Yet the cheerleaders in the West will probably applaud this 'open innovation,' right up until their own pricing decisions set consumer prices at the weakest feedback form available. DeepSeek doesn't need permission — and V4's preview is their polite 'fingers at the collosal open door.' Same story, slightly larger parameters.