Agreed, they also have great documentation. There's something to be said for documentation that is so concise, well laid out, and immediately actionable for those looking to get started quickly.
I spent only two minutes reading their documentation and it’s clear no one did any proofreading and it’s full of mistakes made by non-native speakers.
Example: the second sentence on the first page says “softwares” but “software” is a mass noun that cannot be pluralized.
Example: the third page about tokens has some zipped code to “calculate the token usage for your intput/output” and obviously “intput” should be “input” but misspelled.
As a company that produces LLMs, they could have even used their own LLM to edit their documentation to fix grammar issues, and yet they did not.
Maybe I’m just extra sensitive to grammar and spelling issues but this kind of lack of attention to detail is a huge subconscious turnoff. I had to fight my urge to close the tab.
Yeah I think those details are the least of most peoples concerns. I can't vouch one way or another for DeepSeek's documentation but for me what matters most when reading documentation is being able to get the information I want efficiently, not whether someone spelled "software" as "softwares", which is a very common spelling in Asia as an FYI.
I read OpenAI or Anthropic's documentation nowadays and it's just so full of useless junk and self-congratulation that makes it a miserable experience to go through. It's a real shame because OpenAI used to write stellar documentation and publish really lucid papers just few years ago.
I try hard not to care but subconsciously spelling errors and grammar issues scream low-quality work to me. It’s the kind of mistake that’s the easiest to correct, and they didn’t bother.
> Example: the second sentence on the first page says “softwares” but “software” is a mass noun that cannot be pluralized.
I constantly see and hear this mistake from actual humans too.
It's fairly ironic that your own comment contains run-on sentences, speculative claims and phrasing peculiarities like "could have even" instead of "could even have". Perhaps you are less sensitive to this than you think!
There is a difference between conversational speech and formal speech like documentation. It isn't rational to criticise use of the first when such speech is complaining about errors in the latter.
It's strange that you criticise "could have even" when it is a phrasing clearly being used for emphasis. "Could even have" makes no clearer sense in context.
First you clone the API of the winner, because you want to siphon users from its install-base and offer de-risked switch over cost.
Now that you’re winning, others start cloning your API to siphon your users.
Now that you’re losing, you start cloning the current winner, who is probably a clone of your clone.
Highly competitive markets tend to normalize, because lock-in is a cost you can’t charge and remain competitive. The customer holds power here, not the supplier.
Thats also why everyone is trying to build into the less competitive spaces, where they could potentially moat. Tooling, certs, specialized training data, etc
Our (western) economic model forces competing individual companies to be profitable quickly. China can ignore DeepSeek losing money, because they know developing DeepSeek will help China. Not every institution needs to be profitable.
Ah yes, the Western economic model forcing individual American companies like Amazon , Youtube and Uber to become profitable after.. checks notes _14 years_ for Uber, 9 years for Amazon, many years for Youtube.
yes, they want to win the same way they won more or less every other economic competition in the last 30 years, scale out, drop prices and asphyxiate the competition.
Yeah, it’s an interesting one. I think inertia and expectations at this point? I don’t think the big labs anticipated how low the model switching costs would be and how quickly their leads would be eroded (by each other and the upstarts)
They are developing their moats with the platform tooling around it right now though. Look at Anthropic with Routines and OpenAI with Agents. Drop that capability in to a business with loose controls and suddenly you have a very sticky product with high switching costs. Meanwhile if you stick with purely the ‘chat’ use cases, even Cowork and scheduled tasks, you maintain portability.
No, they are not. If they were "racing to AGI" they would be working together. OpenAI would still be focused on being a non-profit. Anthropic wouldn't be blocking distillation on their models.
If by AGI you mean IPO, sure. I genuinely don't believe Dario nor Sam should be trusted at this point. Elon levels of overpromising and underdelivering.
If you want other people to know whether you're being genuine or sarcastic, you'll have to put a bit more effort into your comments. Your comment just adds noise.
https://api-docs.deepseek.com/guides/thinking_mode
No BS, just a concise description of exactly what I need to write my own agent.