DeepSeek’s new chain-of-thought AI model has Silicon Valley developers seething that a startup from — gasp — China could build something just as good, if not better, than what they’ve come up with, for a fraction of the cost and with far superior energy efficiency. Exhibit A: OpenAI programmer Steven Heidel, who couldn’t help injecting some old-fashioned China bashing to distract from the fact that his company just got smoked in a race it had a several year and multibillion dollar head-start in. “Americans sure love giving their data away to the CCP in exchange for free stuff,” Heidel wrote on X, referring to the Communist Party of China. Following overwhelming backlash, his tweet was appended with a community note: “DeepSeek can be run locally without an internet connection, unlike OpenAI’s models.” This is true. DeepSeek’s r1 model is open-source, totally free, and if you’re concerned about your privacy, you can download and run all 404 gigs of it on your own rig. Because it’s a chain-of-thought model, anyone can see how the AI “thinks,” which goes a long way as far as trust. (After the community note dunk, Heidel followed up with a post urging users to only use the DeepSeek model locally.) Needless to say, to smear the AI model, whose underlying code is free for anyone to poke around in, as some sort of Chinese spyware is really rich coming from someone who works at OpenAI, a company that quickly ditched its noble, non-profit and open-source beginnings…OpenAI Developer Seethes at Success of DeepSeek