Background – What is DeepSeek, and Who’s Behind It?
DeepSeek is a Chinese AI lab startup that has rapidly emerged as a leader in open artificial intelligence. Based in Hangzhou and led by founder and CEO Liang Wenfeng – a former hedge fund quant – the company was founded in late 2023 and quickly went from newcomer to industry disruptor within a year. Unlike the AI offerings from Western tech giants, DeepSeek’s model releases have been remarkably open. DeepSeek provides its large language models as open-weight AI systems with virtually no usage restrictions: anyone can download the model’s weights, fine-tune them, or deploy them without permission or licensing fees. This extreme openness (even relative to “open-weight” models like Meta’s Llama 2, which still have a gated license) is central to DeepSeek’s identity. It means independent researchers and companies worldwide can build on DeepSeek’s technology freely – a bold approach that “breaks the monopoly” of proprietary AI and democratizes AI innovation. Of course, it also raises concerns about misuse, but DeepSeek’s philosophy is that the benefits of openness outweigh the risks.
Ownership and affiliation: DeepSeek is a private venture – reportedly a Hangzhou-based startup whose controlling shareholder is Liang Wenfeng (also co-founder of hedge fund High-Flyer). Liang’s background in both finance and AI gave him the foresight to invest early in computing resources, and DeepSeek’s team leveraged clever algorithmic optimizations (like Mixture-of-Experts architectures and reinforcement learning) to achieve results that rival tech giants’ models at a fraction of the cost. The company’s first large language models launched in late 2024, and DeepSeek has continued to iterate rapidly. It introduced DeepSeek-V3, a general-purpose 671B-parameter MoE model, in December 2024, followed by DeepSeek-R1, a specialized “reasoning” model, in January 2025. These releases – completely free and open – shocked the AI world and even prompted some governments and institutions to ban DeepSeek’s models over security worries. However, many experts hailed DeepSeek’s arrival as a watershed moment for AI. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen even called DeepSeek’s R1 AI’s “Sputnik moment,” comparing its impact to the 1957 satellite launch that spurred a global space race. In short, DeepSeek’s open strategy has upended conventional wisdom in AI – proving that a small lab with optimized methods can challenge (and sometimes surpass) the juggernauts, all while giving its work away to the public.
Hugging Face’s Role in Distributing DeepSeek Models
One key factor enabling DeepSeek’s global impact is the distribution channel for its models. Rather than keeping the model solely on its servers, DeepSeek partnered with the open-source AI community’s favorite platform: Hugging Face. The Hugging Face Hub hosts the DeepSeek model files, making them easy for developers worldwide to download or integrate into their applications. For example, the newly released DeepSeek V3-0324 model is available on Hugging Face, consisting of a whopping 641 GB of weight files in safetensors format. (This massive size reflects the 671 billion parameters of the MoE model.) Hugging Face’s hosting allows anyone with sufficient hardware to obtain and run DeepSeek locally. The hub listing also provides a model card detailing usage instructions and an MIT license, under which the model is released.
Hugging Face has been more than just a passive host; it has actively engaged with the DeepSeek ecosystem. The open-source AI community, including Hugging Face’s scientists, took great interest in DeepSeek’s techniques. Hugging Face even began “OpenR1,” an effort to replicate DeepSeek-R1’s recipe, hoping to further demystify its “special sauce.” Moreover, Hugging Face’s Text Generation Inference (TGI) framework is often used to serve DeepSeek models efficiently on consumer hardware. All of this means that when DeepSeek pushes out a new model version, Hugging Face helps quickly propagate it to researchers, developers, and enthusiasts. The result is an enthusiastic open-source community that can experiment with top-tier AI without needing API access or permission from Big Tech. The release of V3-0324 has been no exception – within hours of launch, developers on social media reported getting the model running at over 20 tokens/second on a single high-end workstation, thanks to community-contributed 4-bit quantizations and Hugging Face’s tooling. In short, Hugging Face has been an essential distribution partner, amplifying DeepSeek’s reach and fostering a rich ecosystem around these open-weight models.
Sources:
- DeepSeek model weights and licensing on Hugging Face: https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai
- DeepSeek founder background: https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-leaders/article/3253209/liang-wenfeng-chinese-hedge-fund-star-who-wants-democratise-ai-through-start-deepseek
- Aider Polyglot benchmark analysis: https://github.com/aider/aider/issues/802
- DeepSeek benchmark performance report: https://www.phind.com/blog/deepseek-r1
- DeepSeek-R1 and V3-0324 announcements: https://www.deeplearning.ai/the-batch/deepseek-r1/
- Claude 3.7 benchmark data from Anthropic: https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-3-family
- Nvidia stock crash after DeepSeek R1: https://www.barrons.com/articles/nvidia-stock-price-drop-ai-competition-1e328f2c
- Alibaba stock performance post-Qwen and DeepSeek: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/06/alibaba-shares-rally-on-new-qwen-model.html
- AWS Bedrock and DeepSeek integration: https://aws.amazon.com/bedrock/
- Text Generation Inference by Hugging Face: https://huggingface.co/docs/text-generation-inference/
- Marc Andreessen’s reaction to DeepSeek: https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/1758273772309452882
- OpenR1 initiative by Hugging Face: https://huggingface.co/OpenR1
March 21—As the great strategist, revolutionary, and supporter of President Abraham Lincoln, Dr. Sun Yat-Sen once said, “Acting is easy; thinking is hard.” Dr. Sun, the creator of modern China, wished to shock his Chinese contemporaries into the realization that we must also elicit from our contemporaries—that their fundamental weakness is not that they fail to act, or to react, to world crises, but rather, that they fail to think of themselves as acting on the world as a whole, through particular and even individual actions based on a shared idea of humanity. The Ten Principles for a New Security and Development Architecture that inform the May 24-25 conference of the Schiller Institute, demand the kind of “hard thinking” which, if embraced, places each thinker in immediate dialogue with the changing landscape of world history expressed in the emerging communities of discourse that have emerged in the Global South, and are emerging in pockets of the Anglosphere itself.
There is a greater power now available to the citizens of the Anglosphere than at any time before, but the mind must be alive in order to wield it. That assertion runs counter to the everyday “narrative” that is accepted and repeated, especially by those who claim to be “politicized,” that “the deep state is everywhere” and is omnipotent. For any citizen in today’s trans-Atlantic sphere, successfully proposing and enacting lawful and productive change in foreign and domestic policy requires that one first recognize that you can’t ignore the fact that “there’s a war going on.” The Anglosphere, terrified by Tuesday’s two-and-a-half-hour Trump-Putin dialogue on March 18, and the already-discussed possibility of a meeting between the two leaders in Saudi Arabia “in the near future,” is increasingly attacking its own population. This can most readily be seen in Europe, with the at first gradual and now headlong dismantling of parliamentary democracy, under the Orwellian banner of “rearmament for peace.”
On the Trump-Putin exchange, Russian strategic analyst Fyodor Lukyanov remarked that “real diplomacy has returned.” He cautioned, however, against two impending illusions. “One is the illusion that everything will be resolved quickly and painlessly, and the other is the cynical belief that any agreement is fundamentally unattainable.” The “mainstream media” of the multiple intelligence agencies are finding it increasingly difficult to maintain the charade of the “War Party,” even when the previously “sure bet” of “helping our friends in the Mideast by starting wars” is invoked. In America, there is little enthusiasm for the bombing of Yemen, and far less enthusiasm for a war with Iran, including, and perhaps especially from much of the Trump support base.
Don’t let your mind be disassembled by the dissemblers. Don’t be bamboozled, bum-rushed, or bushwhacked by media misdirection, as is, for example, being done around the release of the 80,000 pages of the Kennedy files. No one has had time to read or digest them, but “responsible media” assure us that there’s nothing there, even though they weren’t released for six decades.
The Los Angeles Times “reported” on March 18, “A cursory review of the release did not immediately yield any major revelations or challenge the well-established facts that Kennedy was fatally shot by Lee Harvey Oswald while traveling in an open-topped convertible through Dallas. However, the vast drove of documents will take significant time for historians and The Times to comb through.” In other words, “we haven’t read them, and we know you won’t, so stick to your knitting until further notice from the authorities as to what you are instructed to think.”
But it’s not necessarily what’s in the files that holds the most interest. It may very well be what the files don’t show, and the way they don’t show it, that may be more intriguing, as well as useful. For example: Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA from 1953 to 1961 whom President Kennedy fired for actions undertaken (not only with respect to Cuba, but possibly Congo as well), was appointed to the Warren Commission investigating the President’s assassination. "Since its founding, to date, the chief defect of the Central Intelligence Agency is typified by Allen Dulles’s tenure as its Director of Intelligence…. To a large degree, the case of Dulles and of the FBI’s intrusion into foreign intelligence functions are key to everything fundamentally wrong with the post-1939 functioning of the U.S. intelligence services. … Although there is no doubt that Allen Dulles was committed to the U.S.A.’s winning the war against Nazi Germany, he and his brother John had previously been admirers of Adolf Hitler since the late 1920s…. During the 1930s, Allen Dulles was a member of the Board of Directors of Schroeder’s Bank, the ‘piggy bank’ used by Hjalmar Schacht to conduit funds raised to bring Hitler to power in Germany. During and after the war, the Dulles brothers played the leading part in sponsoring the establishment of the post-war Nazi international. Insofar as Nazi Germany became the military adversary of the Anglo-American forces, Allen Dulles worked without doubt for Hitler’s defeat; however, in political philosophy of practice, the Dulleses were Nazi, before and after the war…. If one were obliged to select a single postwar occurrence which locates Dulles’s influence on the failures of the U.S. intelligence community, it is the coverup of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy: the failure to detect and disrupt the operations before the fact, and the massive, arbitrary coverup after the fact." Lyndon LaRouche, founder of Executive Intelligence Review*, and his associates, who were in working contact with attorney Jim Garrison in the late 1970s and early ’80s, made that statement in 1984. LaRouche then added, “The evidence developed by New Orleans District Attorney, Jim Garrison, was massive. This evidence is variously corroborated by and significantly supplemented by evidence assembled by other investigators, including the internal private news agency headed by candidate LaRouche.”
Senator Frank Church’s Select Committee To Study Governmental Operations with respect to Intelligence Activities issued a November 1975 document, “Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders” which cites a cable personally sent by Allen Dulles to the CIA Station Officer in Leopoldville on August 26, 1960, concerning the first leader of the newly independent Democratic Republic of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba, who was assassinated on January 17, 1961 (capitals all in the original) REMOVAL MUST BE AN URGENT AND PRIME OBJECTIVE…….(Name indicated by •••••) A HIGH PRIORITY OF OUR COVERT ACTION. YOU CAN ACT ON YOUR OWN AUTHORITY WHERE TIME DOES NOT PERMIT REFERRAL HERE."
It is not necessary to find in the 80,000-plus pages of the Kennedy files a smoking gun, whose smoke may have dissipated decades ago. It will be a revelation for the people of the Anglosphere, especially as the Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. files are also released, that their thinking about everything was changed by the assassinations. They were the major engine of a cultural paradigm shift from which the trans-Atlantic world will never recover, until not only those files are released, but also until people reject the very idea that the files should have ever been kept from the American people in the first place.
The Church Committee’s “Alleged Assassination Plots Against Foreign Leaders” study prompts several questions; for example, “Who Killed Israel’s Yitzhak Rabin, really?”in 1995. When we look at post-Rabin Israel, and post-Arafat Palestine—another death that should be more carefully scrutinized—not only with respect to the present actions in Gaza and West Bank, but the possibility of war with Iran, and perhaps others, what must we learn about the longer-term cultural effects of silence in the face of criminal execution of leaders?
Every action, no matter how small, or even small-minded, which seeks to impact “the course of contemporary policies and events,” is embedded, now, in an epochal change, being shaped by conversations involving the nations of Russia, China, the United States, the BRICS nations and others. Thermonuclear weapons, and the danger of thermonuclear war, have in part determined that. We, the people, must find a way, not only to impact the present world-discussion, and its immediate future pursuit of the path to either war or peace, but also to determine an outcome for the human race other than extinction. What gives us not only the right, but the responsibility to do that, is a shared vision, “A Beautiful Vision for Humanity in Times of Great Turbulence!” That is the title for the May 24-25 conference, and it is the mission to which those who would make the world better, joyfully aspire.
