News of Speir News and Entertainment Platform RSSWed, 30 Jul 2025 09:40:23 GMTTo our loyal viewers: the Speir World News site is back, after being down and up and down for a week, as we are making some improvements—which we will soon unveil. But our various changes were complicated by ongoing operations against the site from agencies who don't want you to have access to what we publish—a distinctly different narrative on world events than you will find anywhere else, with various "insider" information, that, we hope, places you inside policy making circles, to view over the shoulder of those making decisions, as they are made—for better or worse.In the days ahead, we will be making a pitch for all of you to join our family, and become subscribers, with subscriptions with various privileges, starting as low as $5.00/month. But the site will remain free-- we will put nothing behind paywalls, nor bombard you with obnoxious ads. There will be some restrictions on non-subscribers. This all will be made clear in the near future.Meanwhile, back to the news. We will make available some items that we could not post, but which remain relevant to understanding a world struggling to survive.

]]>Wed, 30 Jul 2025 09:40:23 GMTBackground – 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 prompte... Read more

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