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Title: Open Source Advocate Argues DeepSeek is 'a Movement... It's Linux All
Over Again'

Link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/04/20/0332...

Matt Asay answered questions from Slashdot readers in 2010 (as the then-COO
of Canonical). He currently runs developer relations at MongoDB (after
holding similar positions at AWS and Adobe). This week he contributed an
opinion to piece to InfoWorld arguing that DeepSeek "may have originated in
China, but it stopped being Chinese the minute it was released on Hugging
Face with an accompanying paper detailing its development." Soon after, a
range of developers, including the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence
(BAAI), scrambled to replicate DeepSeek's success but this time as open
source software. BAAI, for its part, launched OpenSeek, an ambitious effort
to take DeepSeek's open-weight models and create a project that surpasses
DeepSeek while uniting "the global open source communities to drive
collaborative innovation in algorithms, data, and systems." If that sounds
cool to you, it didn't to the U.S. government, which promptly put BAAI on its
"baddie" list. Someone needs to remind U.S. (and global) policymakers that no
single country, company, or government can contain community-driven open
source... DeepSeek didn't just have a moment. It's now very much a movement,
one that will frustrate all efforts to contain it. DeepSeek, and the open
source AI ecosystem surrounding it, has rapidly evolved from a brief snapshot
of technological brilliance into something much bigger - and much harder to
stop. Tens of thousands of developers, from seasoned researchers to
passionate hobbyists, are now working on enhancing, tuning, and extending
these open source models in ways no centralized entity could manage alone.
For example, it's perhaps not surprising that Hugging Face is actively
attempting to reverse engineer and publicly disseminate DeepSeek's R1 model.
Hugging Face, while important, is just one company, just one platform. But
Hugging Face has attracted hundreds of thousands of developers who actively
contribute to, adapt, and build on open source models, driving AI innovation
at a speed and scale unmatched even by the most agile corporate labs. Hugging
Face by itself could be stopped. But the communities it enables and
accelerates cannot. Through the influence of Hugging Face and many others,
variants of DeepSeek models are already finding their way into a wide range
of applications. Companies like Perplexity are embedding these powerful open
source models into consumer-facing services, proving their real-world
utility. This democratization of technology ensures that cutting-edge AI
capabilities are no longer locked behind the walls of large corporations or
elite government labs but are instead openly accessible, adaptable, and
improvable by a global community. "It's Linux all over again..." Asay writes
at one point. "What started as the passion project of a lone developer
quickly blossomed into an essential, foundational technology embraced by
enterprises worldwide," winning out "precisely because it captivated
developers who embraced its promise and contributed toward its potential." We
are witnessing a similar phenomenon with DeepSeek and the broader open source
AI ecosystem, but this time it's happening much, much faster... Organizations
that cling to proprietary approaches (looking at you, OpenAI!) or attempt to
exert control through restrictive policies (you again, OpenAI!) are not just
swimming upstream - they're attempting to dam an ocean. (Yes, OpenAI has now
started to talk up open source, but it's a long way from releasing a
DeepSeek/OpenSeek equivalent on GitHub.)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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