Mind Readings: DeepSeek Week Part 3 – Is Deepseek Safe?

Welcome back to part three of Deep Seek Week on the blog here and on the on the channel. Today, let's address some relevant important questions. The number one question is, is Deep Seek safe? Is it safe to use? And the question, the answer to that question depends on how you define safe.

If you were to go into Deep Seek's website and look at things like the privacy policy, you would find very quickly that the privacy policy is extremely permissive. So let's go ahead and go into their privacy policy. Again, this is in public. How we use your information, among other things, we use it to review and improve and develop the service, including monitoring uh interactions and devices, analysts have people using and training or improving our technology. So if you are using the web-based version of Deep Seek, you are giving your data to the company to use for training.

I mean, it's pretty clear in the privacy policy. There's there it is exactly as they say it is. And therefore, uh, we should know that you should not be putting uh sensitive information to it. So no personal identifying information, nothing confidential should go in there. Um, it is perfectly fine to use for uh anything that is not confidential.

So if you want to say, like, I want to make a new video game or I want to summarize you know the new the headlines in the news today. Anything non-confidential, totally safe to use. Anything confidential, I would not use the web versions. However, as we talked about in the previous version, there are multiple versions of Deep Seek, including versions that you can run on your own hardware. Anything you run on your own hardware is as secure as that hardware is.

So if it's already in a protected environment, like your company behind your firewall, etc., then it run it will run just fine on that hardware and it will be completely private. It'll be completely protected. One of the misconceptions, uh well, there's so many to deal with. Um you are seeing a lot of FUD, fear, uncertainty, and doubt being spread by Western technology companies, the tech bros, um, about Deep Seek because they're losing their shit about it. The fact that this company in China was able to beat the pants off of their models at a fraction of the cost has made all of the labs run back and say, okay, well, we need to change our approach because this company is just beating our pants off.

Um and then the the communications teams at those companies are trying to do as much as they can to spread uh fear and doubt about using uh the deep seek models because they do they don't want people, A, even to know it exists, and B, to believe it's profoundly unsafe because the cost is so low. It's one one hundredth of the cost of Western models. If you are open AI and you're trying to figure out how to become profitable and a competitor says, I can do that for 99% less, you're in a lot of trouble. Um, so as you evaluate safety claims, be aware of the sources those claims are coming from and the conflicts of interest in them. Deep Seek has given away its models.

So you can take V3 or R1 and run it on your your own infrastructure. The nature of generative AI models is this: the model is kind of like the engine of the car, right? And when you go to a web interface, the web interface is kind of like the car as a whole. So if I were to go to Deep Seek chat here, this is the interface, this is the whole the whole car, right? It's got the uh engine on the back end, it's got the web interface, it's got a bunch of other things.

And of course, it's gonna log anything I put into this. If you take the engine out of the car, the engine no longer has access to the radio, right? I think just can take that analogy. If you take the engine out of the car, it no longer has access to the radio. AI model is nothing more than a database of statistics.

If you're if you want to learn more about that, you can take the paid uh mastering prompt engineering course from Trust Insights. But a model is just a database of statistics, it cannot record its own data, it cannot call home, it cannot do any of those things. It is just a database. You install it and run it on your hardware, you put it in a car that you own, and then it can't call home. It has no ability to do that.

So to answer the question is Deep Seek safe to use. If you are running it on your infrastructure, it is a hundred percent safe to use. Uh, you saw in the previous video, I was running the that distilled version um of Lama on my computer, and that was completely private to me. If you are if you have the money to run V3 and R1 on your infrastructure, completely private to you, totally safe. If you are using their web interface, unsafe for private information.

So do not put private information in there. One other thing that's important to talk about when it comes to privacy of information is when someone uses your data to train a model. What that means is that your data is stored in there somewhere in their training data set. So a human being could get access to that, perhaps, uh depending on the company. When it goes into the actual model itself, it's not going in verbatim.

What happens is your training data, your data gets turned into statistics and it gets poured into the bucket with all the other statistics. Imagine you had a cup full of sand. There was like you know, bright red sand, and you go out to the Sahara Desert, and that represents all the other trained data, and you take that cup of red sand and you just dump it in the desert. Could you then take that cup, scoop up the sand from the desert floor, and have some of your red grains in it? Yes.

Could you reconstruct the order of those grains? No. Could you guarantee it was your cup was filled only with red sand? No. That's kind of what happens when your data is used in a to train someone else's model.

It can get pieces of it can get incorporated, yes. And pieces of it can be retrieved, yes, but not in any sense of order. So that's part one. Part two of answering the question about is it safe is bias. Uh, are Deep Seeks models biased?

Yeah, but so are all models. They're all trained on human data. They're inherently biased. Um Western models like Gemini and ChatGPT and Llama have different biases. They will not answer some questions.

Deep Seek will not answer some questions. You ask it about Tiananmen Square or uh ask it to be critical of the Chinese government. It won't. It can't do that. It won't allow you to do that.

Um, however, if you do, if you ask sensitive questions to Western models, they will also provide you tons of refusals. You can't do anything with politics in Gemini. Gemini will just outright refuse and say, nope, can't do that. Can't won't help you with that. You can't go into any image generator and say, please make a rendering of the weapons bay of an F35.

Even though that information is available online and the models have probably trained on it, they are censored as well. They will not allow you to do that. All of the Western image models, uh the services, uh will not allow you to construct certain types of images. You know, the images containing nudity or uh gory violence, they won't let you do it. So is Deep Seek uh censored?

Yes. Is the model you're using today censored? Also, yes. Um, what I have found in my testing is that it is actually less censored uh in many things than the Western models. Uh it will let you talk about politics uh with with no trouble.

It will let you ask questions uh as long as it's not questions directly about being critical of the government of China, you can ask it pretty much anything you want. You can have it do all sorts of things that Western models will not allow you to do. So in that regard, I actually think it's safer uh it's it it's more permissive of different use cases than many Western models. So to wrap up, is it safe? Depends on your context.

If you're dealing with private information, don't use the web interface. If you are uh dealing with private information, download it and run it on your own hardware if you have can support it. If you can't support it, um, then use a model that you can afford and support if you can't afford the infrastructure for it. Uh for things that are not private, it is a hundred percent safe to use, and I would encourage you to use it because it's pretty incredible. The results it gives are at or near state of the art.

Um and from a pricing perspective, dirt jeep. So definitely use it for that. All right. Uh in the last part, we're going to talk about should you use it. So stay tuned for that.

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