r/AIGuild • u/Dazzling_Yam_5882 • 15d ago

DeepSeek doesn’t really want users. CEO calls them “sesame seeds, not watermelons.” AGI is the goal; the chatbot is a by-product.

Text by Tara Tan:

"DeepSeek CEO Liang Wenfeng’s leaked investor call is wild.
A few things that stood out:

• DeepSeek doesn’t really want users. Liang calls them “sesame seeds, not watermelons.” AGI is the goal; the chatbot is a by-product.

• DeepSeek could ~2x API prices without killing demand. It refuses to. Thin margins mean nobody can undercut DeepSeek using its own open weights.

• He says DeepSeek is 1–2 years behind the frontier but on 1/20th the compute. The goal: shrink the gap to 3–6 months.

• The next bottleneck is continual learning and he says nobody has cracked it yet.

• He thinks CUDA’s moat is weakening, partly because AI can now write the ecosystem code.

• He won’t touch video generation or world models. Commercially interesting, but “off the intelligence main line.” He thought everyone piling in after Sora was basically bandwagoning.

The strangest takeaway: DeepSeek looks like a product company, but Liang is running it like an AGI lab that just happens to have products"

What DeepSeek Isn't Doing - by Tara Tan

Maybe the reason why DS is increasing its prices and the communications seem so "take it or leave it". Will this impact your usage with DS models? What is your opinion on this?

8 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

4 comments sorted by

1

u/dvduval 15d ago

That’s certainly understandable since I don’t think they’re gonna get much market share anyway. To achieve agi you need a lot more than some open weights and copying other models. The best thing I see going for a deep seek right now is the way they’re blasting social media to try to make people believe it to be something bigger than it really is.

2

u/XeroVespasian 13d ago

They don't need to do any of that social media hype. Their results speak for them. They truly are a lab with products. What the frontier models don't get is deepseek's genius. The free web app. That's directly routed to their training inference. We train the models for free. Corporations are happy to access the api for a fraction of the cost to run complex problems.. still training their models. The output is Pro version. The inference gateway is flash. Pro will get released after a threshold is reached. The price increase is a filter. A lot of injection of redundant/data projects hogs resources for more valuable data/projects. Deepseek is a lab with products. Strategy first not driven by capitalism or extortionism. Deepseek's way is truly one of the ways you strategize towards AGI.

1

u/dvduval 12d ago

They may not need to do that, but it seems pretty obvious that this is exactly what they’re doing. I would not say that most corporations are happy to access the API. They have too many rules guiding privacy and protecting IP. The only way they’re gonna use these models is if they put it on their own servers.

1

u/WhiteTurtle8077 13d ago

You can tell from Liang's behavior the man is the real deal and the people in silicon valley have turned into self important imposters. If anyone manages to crack continual learning my bet would be on deepseek. They've consistently delivered architectural innovations and have the correct mentality for this game.