When DeepSeek first came out I enthusiastically sang its praises. But that was just before it really caught fire and became slow... slow... slow.
Asking the bot if it planned to expand its servers to alleviate bottlenecks, it gave me a typically cold communist answer - refer to the "official documentation" - without telling me how or where it was.
When I asked for more it directed me to the "official website." There I couldn't see any info about expanding servers.
Others have complained that the bot will not comment on the authoritarian leader of China, nor on the Tiananmen Square incident.
Some American commentators have leaped on this but I'm not sure that is entirely fair. I have experienced a fair amount of censorship with Google Gemini. It's a bit more subtle, however. Gemini tends to churn out politically correct content - according to American liberals - warning of the dangers of emphasizing anything else. That's a kind of censorship—i.e. the machine telling us how to 'think properly.'
The strength of American social conditioning is that its citizens don't know they are conditioned. Because American conditioning is subtler and more pervasive than one scary leader filling citizens with fear,¹ Americans internalize their ideology, making it far more powerful, resilient, and resistant to revolution. And when their outgoing president unconditionally pardons his son who was facing sentencing for two criminal cases, what do they do? Complain a bit, forget, and move on.
Just watch Americans during their national anthems at a sports match. It's practically church for them. Many cry, make big swooping gestures and smile from ear to ear. This frenetic patriotism is something I find hard to relate to as a Canadian. If you are secure in your beliefs, you don't have to repeat it over and over. You don't have to yell it from the rooftops. You just know. If you are insecure, however, you'll continually tell yourself and everyone outside your country how much better you are than them.
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¹ With Trump it seems America might be entering this kind of brute authoritarianism, a shift from reasonableness to aggressive and deceitful unreason found so often throughout history. Let's hope the better half of America keeps Trump and his 'manifest destiny to Mars' dreams in check.
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