Haha, get fucked.

Just this weekend I was experimenting with Deepseek, to compare the costs and see how well it works. Nothing major, I wanted to see how capable it is in rewriting the AI to my hobby game, because it was something I was struggling with for years (it has been released before AI became a thing, and I'm not planning vibecoded updates, but I was curious), and compare costs with what I'm seeing is my AI spending in my job that runs Claude models.

It kind of did the whole thing (it didn't really work that well, and performance sucked, but it was an improvement in behaviors, so basically on-par with Claude), and throughout the whole process Deepseek was faster, and the whole thing (around 300m tokens) has costed me a whopping 2$.

Doing the same thing with Claude would cost me around a 500-1000$.

I also keep hearing the argument "you're sending your data to the Chinese!", and I have been thinking about that, and does it matter? Isn't it actually a way better outcome?

If I send my data to the US, withing minutes it's shared with every single data broker who can blast adds and personalize the whole internet around what they thing I want so they can send me their bullshit. It's also given to Flock and similar companies, so they can track me around the globe. If I send it to the Chinese, I get what? Better ads behind the Great Firewall? Get banned from ever going to China?

Sure, I wouldn't trust it with any corporate and sensitive data related to my job, the corporate espionage can be a problem, but that's not my use case. Other that that, it actually sounds like it's a positive feature, that your data are only being sent to China, instead of US.

Or am I wrong about that? It's a honest question, I don't really have a horse in the race for either, and I'm not really planning to keep using AI for my own projects because however addicting, it sucks in the long term, but I wonder if I'm missing something in this regard.