Recent DeepSeek, Qwen, GLM models have impressive results in benchmarks. Do you use them through their own chatbots? Do you have any concerns about what happens to the data you put in there? If so, what do you do about it?
I am not trying to start a flame war around the China subject. It just so happens that these models are developed in China. My concerns with using the frontends also developed in China stem from:
- A pattern that many Chinese apps in the past have been found to have minimal security
- I don’t think any of the 3 listed above let you opt out of using your prompts for model training
I am also not claiming that non-China-based chatbots don’t have privacy concerns, or that simply opting out of training gets you much on the privacy front.
I run AI locally for privacy reasons and because I sometimes work without Internet connections. The main purpose is to correct my English for formal letters and emails. I found the Gemma3 model to be working best on the limited resources of my laptop. Deepseek-R1 does not work at all, ‘Thinking…’ for a long before giving an answer (if at all). The text that Qwen produces is insufficient. So I choose a non-chinese model for practical reasons.