Microsoft Bans Employees From Using DeepSeek App
Microsoft Bans Employees From Using DeepSeek App
Microsoft has banned employees from using the DeepSeek app, citing security and propaganda concerns.
Funny how every time anyone talks about replacing capitalism everybody trots out the examples of innovation and competition as things we would lose. Meanwhile capitalists are over here doing their level best to sabotage innovation and buy or legislate their way out of competition so they can remain complacent in their dominant market position. 'Won't someone please think of the billionaires' is wearing kinda thin when they're actively undermining the purported benefits of their wanton exploitation and delivering nothing but stagnation and enshittification.
Yeah the whole "capitalism fuels innovation" thing is dead. Anyone that still believes this is braindead. It optimizes towards killing competition by any means, not innovating.
One can get Deepseek R1 from many providers (including US hosts, or various other nationalities). Microsoft even has their own anti-CCP finetune, MIT licensed: https://huggingface.co/microsoft/MAI-DS-R1
...Banning the app is reasonable, and a tiny inconvenience for anyone who needs DS.
In other words, this is a big nothingburger because V3/R1 are open models. The story would be different if it was (say) an API-only model like Qwen Max or GPT4o, where ultimately one is beholden to the trainer's servers.
I literally run deepseek r1 on my laptop via ollama, and many other models, nothing gets sent to anybody. Granted, it's the smaller 7b parameter model, but still plenty good.
Microsoft could easily host the full model on their infrastructure if they needed it.
True, though there's a big output difference between the 7B distil (or even 32B/70B) and the full model.
And Microsoft does host R1 already, heh. Again, this headline is a big nothingburger.
Also (random aside here), you should consider switching from ollama. They're making some FOSS unfriendly moves, and depending on your hardware, better backends could host 14B models at longer context, and similar or better speeds.
Correct me if I'm wrong here but a company can't dictate what you do on your own time on your own hardware, so I assume this simply affects work computers. Assuming thats the case I don't really see a problem here. I've never been able to download any applications at all on any work computer I've ever used short of apps the company itself uses.
Seems completely understandable to me to bar employees from using a competing service especially if there are genuine security concerns.
Ever heard about software devs not being able to work on personal projects because all the code they produce, even off the clock is owned by their employer?
Hasn't been true for my past two jobs at least (US based), what I do outside of company premises / my own hardware and my own time is mine. They only own what was done on company's dime. Not saying it doesn't happen, but that's not my experience so far, and I'm not sure if would be legal.
I mean if It’s only for business machines I get it. If you want a proper silo where your ip and isn’t going to be stolen by an LLM, any organization should run an in house self hosted model that is trained on their own data and doesn’t pass data back to the upstream. That just makes sense. Especially if it just passes your work to your competitors.
I mean if we ever properly gleam information from LLMs, it’ll be the biggest source of leaks and whistleblowing ever created from video games to National security. Don’t use cloud hosted llms if you want privacy and security.
Absolutely. Companies have every right to control what tools are authorized to use on their hardware, and what touches their data or users data. It could be as complex as security or as simple as don't use a competing service, but it all makes sense. Don't tell me how use my stuff and I won't tell you how to use yours.
If it's BYOD then that's another multiple layers of cans of worms not worth getting into.
Ignoring the content of the article for a second. Did they not proofread this at all? There are so many spelling, grammar, and sentence fragment mistakes. I would joke that it was written by AI, but it has too many mistakes for even that to be the case.
Atleast we know its by humans
AI has unreliable results for all but morons who can’t tell the difference due to lacking basic reading comprehension skills.
The fact that its essays and other output are considered at all “good” is an indicator of how poor our education system really is. Most are objectively bad.
That said, I’m far more comfortable with China getting my data from it than the USA. But there’s zero reason for me to use it in the first place.