So far, a general tiktok ban (as opposed to a tiktok ban on things like government phones) has only been in effect in the USA. I highly doubt Europe would play ball at any attempt at banning imports of DeepSeek.

Besides, it's kinda too late for this. The model is freely accessible, so any attempt at banning it would be _completely_ moot. If DeepSeek keeps releasing their future models for free, I don't see how a ban could ever be effective at all. Worse case scenario, big tech can't use those models... but then individuals (and startups willing to go fast and break laws) will be able to use them and instantly get a leg up on the competition.

Used to. If they're going to start a trade war, pull out of NATO and invade Greenland instead, there'll not be much soft power left to drag Europe anywhere.

Perhaps a few years ago, yes. But considering that the US president is now threatening to invade and annex part of a European country, I don't think past results can be extrapolated to the present.

Not really anymore, and I would bet that the way things are going, Twitter will be banned in the EU before Tiktok.

And yet, Huawei is still doing fine.

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

BYD cars are everywhere in Latin America and Europe. Xiaomi phones also.

What about Brazil.

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It never meant anything. There's no such thing as a free market economy. We haven't had one of those in modern times, and arguably human civilization has never had one. Markets and their participants have chronically been subject to information asymmetry, coercion/manipulation, and regulation, among other things.

I don't think all of that is a bad thing (regulation tends to make it harder to do the first two things), but "free markets" are the economic equivalent to the "point mass" in physics: perhaps useful sometimes to create simple models and explanations of things, but will never exist in the real world.

The Nvidia export restrictions also might be shooting us in the foot too, or at least Nvidia. They really benefit from CUDA remaining the de facto standard.

DeepSeek's technology is out of the bag.

Every LLM provider in the US will be using it to lower OpEx.

One of them is likely to pass those savings along to consumers to gain market share.

Facebook is in the business of providing weights for free.

The idea that we are all doomed unless we immediately migrate to DeepSeek is fantasy.