The Significance of DeepSeek for the Average Person

Original Link: justin3go.com

Overview

Recently, DeepSeek has been quite popular, almost flooding the screen, and even GitHub Trending is almost entirely filled with DeepSeek-related content.

Undoubtedly, the emergence of DeepSeek is of great significance. While there are currently some controversies, I will not discuss them here. I am more concerned with what specific role and assistance DeepSeek provides to an average person like me.

Going back to the root, DeepSeek’s functions and advantages essentially stem from these three points:

1. Effectiveness: The model’s capability meets or even surpasses that of world-class large models. This is a prerequisite; only if it performs well will the following two points be more valuable;
2. Open Source: This means it can be deployed locally, offering localization advantages such as fine-tuning, unrestricted use, privacy, etc.;
3. Data Advantage: It surpasses Western models in ancient Chinese philosophy and literature, given China’s literary history extends thousands of years longer than that of the West (since the West lost much of its Roman/Greek/Egyptian literature).

Apart from these, there are some additional features, such as supporting web searches during deep thinking and explicitly demonstrating the thought process chain.

Specifically?

Based on the three core advantages above, here I briefly list some specific advantages—of course, feel free to add:

1. Removal of financial constraints; post local deployment, when you need to perform lengthy tasks like translation, you no longer have to worry about cost consumption;
2. Removal of rate limitations; post local deployment, it’s your model, and the rate depends entirely on your local computing power. Compared to API calls, OpenAI imposes tiered rate restrictions, and even slight anomalies might lead to account suspension;
3. Removal of regional restrictions; many top large models' API calls limit usage in some regions (like China), preventing access to APIs, clients, etc.
4. Removal of application-level restrictions; precisely because many large models restrict regional API calls, many applications have had to abandon users in those regions. As far as I know, ByteDance's AI IDE Trae cannot be used normally in China;
5. As an independent developer, you also have better model options without needing to use various tricks;
6. Privacy protection; many companies restrict employees from using AI coding assistants like Cursor and Copilot, even if they promise not to use your data to optimize their models. However, you still end up sending critical data and code because these are remote API calls;
7. Restrictions on Chinese language; it seems some large models have already started limiting Chinese input, and some perform worse in Chinese than they do in English, especially during the early days of large models;
8. Chinese writing; DeepSeek excels in ancient Chinese philosophy and literature, leading to better performance in Chinese writing;
9. Metaphysical fortune-telling; similarly, DeepSeek better understands Chinese culture, and some users have been using it for profile analysis with remarkable results;
10. DeepSeek R1 1.5B can run entirely locally in the browser via WebGPU, offering better options for edge computing;

Conclusion

Thanks to DeepSeek for open-sourcing a world-class foundational model. This not only offers people like me—ordinary individuals and developers—more options but also stimulates technological development to some extent.