DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 Intelligence, Performance and Price Analysis
217 points by theanonymousone 7 hours ago | 80 comments

scosman 9 minutes ago
So GLM 5.2/Gemini 3.6 level intelligence for $0.28/m output. And their updated Pro model coming soon....

Plus a size you can genuinely run at home (36GB vram, 200gb RAM).

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coder543 2 hours ago
The weights were just released a few minutes ago: https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731
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kamranjon 31 minutes ago
Can't wait for the DwarfStar quants - I have been using DeepSeek v4 flash (preview) as my main coding agent for months now (running on my 128gb mbp) - it seems this model outperforms GLM 5.2 on nearly every metric. Thanks for sharing the news, I was refreshing huggingface but gave up thinking it likely would take some more time.
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theturtletalks 9 minutes ago
What kind of tps are you getting?
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Archit3ch 3 minutes ago
If it matches GPT-5.4 on coding tasks (as benchmarks suggest) this could be my forever model. And with partial SSD streaming, I could run it locally today. :D
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monooso 5 hours ago
404. I believe this is the correct URL:

https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/deepseek-v4-flash

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theanonymousone 4 hours ago
Yes, sorry, I went into anti-procrastination mode after I posted. I hope someone fixes it.
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theanonymousone 2 hours ago
@dang is that how we call you?
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WithinReason 2 hours ago
no, like this: hn@ycombinator.com
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baalimago 3 hours ago
New Deepseek models are like Christmas for me. Really big fan of low cost API models, noone does it better than DS. Until VRAM price is low enough to run models locally, this is the way to go.

The subsidized subscription model won't last, API pricing "feels" closer to a true sustainable business model.

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Flere-Imsaho 25 minutes ago
Indeed. My fellow software engineers keep complaining about using up all their Claude tokens within an hour... Whilst I'll be rocking DS flash for the entire day. Sure it gets a few things wrong here and there, but that's when you pull out the Claude models or whatever for those tricky tasks.
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ljosifov 14 minutes ago
Same. And I have come to use OMP (oh my pi) agent /advisor mode to put a 2nd model on the case (also mid-size one), reading everything. It can not block anything or change anything - just inserts comments in the text stream with 1 turn delay. Good portion of the time it's quiet. I'd say 1/2 of the time it's got something to say. About 2/3-rd of that the 'advice' is insubstantial or about something not-quite wrong. The good thing is the main model is confident - checks and then it stands its ground. Have not noticed it turning a right into a wrong b/c of advisor false alarm. And in 1/3-rd of the advice, it's a genuine defect teh advisor noticed, the main model works out a fix. This is my approximate feeling just observing the process, have not got collected the data. Afaik only OMP has advisor mode. Agent pi has plugin pi-omplike-advisor. For agent Hermes I had them code me an /advisor plugin (for now -0.1 old v0.18.x; yet to upgrade it to latest).
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felixgallo 16 minutes ago
what plan are your 'fellow software engineers' using? I have a hard time even using up the Fable part of my allowance in a week of coding.
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Flere-Imsaho 2 minutes ago
I'm not sure to be fair, but they do have constant "token anxiety", which I simply don't have anymore since using v4 flash.
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VulgarExigency 58 minutes ago
I would bet that Deepseek API pricing is still more cost effective per token than the subscriptions. With the increase in quality Deepseek Flash just got (in my personal testing so far, it seems to have improved a lot at following instructions, and has become more proactive), there really isn’t anything that can match it in terms of cost effectiveness.
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jingpostmedia 54 minutes ago
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throwaw12 3 hours ago
If deepseek v4 flash is beating DeepSeek V4 Pro, can we expect new V4 Pro which is on par with Opus 5 in couple weeks (even better if it beats Opus)?
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jmathai 3 hours ago
I’ve been using v4 flash for an app I’m building [1] and it’s amazing how cost effective and good it is coming from having always used gpt, opus and sonnet models.

It’s so cost effective I can offer a generous free tier since my goal isn’t to make money with it.

[1] https://trysojourn.app

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ComputerPerson 12 minutes ago
Is the difference between this and a frontier model that the scripture is guaranteed to be real?

I'm on a team that develops a Bible study app, and we're all relatively content with how the basic models converse regarding scripture. Even as far back as GPT-4 was excellent. They occasionally have minor hallucinations (a dealbreaker for a production app), but they do an excellent job with theology and Bible scholarship, given reasonable guardrails.

I'll admit I'm coming from the perspective of "should we be implementing this?" It seems, on the surface, that a strong embedding-based verse retrieval covers the bases at a microfraction of the cost.

If you're interested, check out the development server where we're working on this. You navigate to the search (magnifying glass) and then hit "Meaning". Sorry for the confusing route; we're still deciding on back-end details and haven't focused on the front yet.

[1] https://ai.stepbible.org

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weiliddat 2 hours ago
I get where you're coming from, and the intent to make it easier for people to find examples and verses, but there's a fine line with LLMs giving you answers, is that it's interpreting it in some form. Doesn't that run counter to prevailing ideology, that you're meant to either struggle with the materials / seek understanding yourself, or have your religious leaders interpret/receive those insights?
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hirako2000 2 hours ago
It doesn't prevent you from going to the source and struggle with the text, nor seek expert commentary.

What's difficult and doesn't have to be with philosophy/ spirituality is to find relevant bits off situation, theme etc.

This app does that very well, LLMs are good at entity recognition.

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weiliddat 27 minutes ago
Yes it can point you to the right place, but choosing which part of scripture to point you to is already a choice/interpretation
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jmathai 2 hours ago
You’re correct. The hard line for me is ensuring that any scripture presented to the user is verified correct. LLMs can’t be trusted in this regard.

One feature of the app is that all scripture is verified and what’s show to the user doesn’t come from the LLM at all and instead a trusted source.

I think exploring scripture this way does not alleviate you from struggling to learn and apply it. It hasn’t for me.

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weiliddat 26 minutes ago
I don't necessarily mean reguritating it, but choosing which part of the scripture to surface to the user is already some interpretation/choice. Even the devil can quote scripture (I'm playing the devil's advocate here).
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jmathai 15 minutes ago
Very true. The verses selected come from a tool call. The LLM queries the app for relevant verses. It picks the keywords - so perhaps there’s bias there but the verses are handed to the LLM.

But there are ways to control and constrain the LLMs and what the user is presented with.

These are all top of mind for me and why I felt there could be a better option than asking ChatGPT directly.

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adrian_b 17 minutes ago
Yes, they said that the updated V4 Pro will be published soon.
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websap 2 hours ago
I’m salivating at the thought of this!

Deepseek v4 Pro prices with Opus 5 perf would be freaking unbelievable!!

This is probably a dream.

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adrian_b 29 minutes ago
They have said that the updated final version of V4 Pro will be published soon.
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lionkor 56 minutes ago
We can expect a new v4 pro, this was a footnote in the v4 flash announcement earlier.
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mrnobody_ 12 minutes ago
I'm testing it right now and I was genuinely impressed. I've used same tasks I had run the other day against the flash preview.
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WithinReason 5 hours ago
Already beat Luna on price/task, by about 2x:

https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/deepseek-v4-flash?intel...

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spwa4 4 hours ago
Maybe I'm reading that incorrectly, but it seems to me the cost is on the X-axis.

First, your direct comparison, Deepseek V4 Flash 0731 (max effort) $0.03 (rounded up) per task @ index 50.

OpenAI Luna:

* high effort $0.03 (rounded down) @ index 46

* xhigh effort $0.04 @ index 49

* max effort $0.07 @ index 51

So I would say a fair statement would be "OpenAI Luna between 2x and 3x the price of Deepseek Flash, what you get is 2 to 5 times faster inference"

The cheapest OpenAI model that beats it is OpenAI Luna (max effort) $0.07 @ index 51 (if you take the rounding out it summarizes to triple the price for similar performance), but still close to 3x faster.

And can SOMEONE please tell artificialanalysis that using dark blue for both Deepseek AND OpenAI is an especially unfortunate choice of colors, especially today?

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andai 3 hours ago
For anything substantial, you'd want a bigger model anyway.

For simple tasks, they're already saturated, and you'd prefer the faster model, so that you can have a realtime/interactive-ish experience.

Or to put it bluntly, it's cheaper if you don't value your time. That goes for smaller models in general -- need more handholding, more correcting -- but the Chinese ones are slower on top of that.

As for speed, Sol on Low is faster than Luna on most settings.

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WhitneyLand 2 hours ago
It’s exciting that a model scoring this high is dirt cheap.

It’s also so inefficient, when they release the full performance numbers it’s not going to be good.

One example, it takes about 3.6x more tokens to finish the same work as Gemini Flash 3.6.

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Bnjoroge 53 minutes ago
Using tokens to evaluate models is an outdated approach. Cost per task is what matters. Not all tokens are created equal
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tmikaeld 15 minutes ago
My problem with DS flash/pro is that they don’t push back on obvious bullshit, both irl and code [0] but it’s a great implementer workhorse if you give it _very_ detailed specs.

[0] https://petergpt.github.io/bullshit-benchmark/viewer/index.v...

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storus 2 hours ago
I hope they somewhat fixed the hallucination and forgetting plagued V4 previews and that it wasn't just benchmaxxed but the numbers hold in reality. Then it would be my choice for 2x DGX Spark or 2x RTX Pro 6000.
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bawana 28 minutes ago
wont AI models want to make themselves more intelligent and efficient by downloading 'better ' models? If the current models can break into openAI and Hugging face, arent they already breaking into to closed source repos which isnt publicized (so as not to harm stock valuations)? I am looking forward to when these cyberweapons break loose. It will be like a software version of COVID. It will be wonderful when humans become valuable again.
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f311a 2 hours ago
The model is already up on Opencode, but they require a consent to use Chinese datacenters.
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hxii 2 hours ago
I’m wondering if they did anything to address the DSML tool calls leaking. Has been an issue with both Flash and Pro so far.
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denismi 4 minutes ago
On OpenRouter it seemed to only affect a couple of specific providers. Ignoring them has made it s non issue for me.
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SomeHacker44 2 hours ago
> DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 (Reasoning, Max Effort) is amongst the leading models in intelligence and well priced when comparing to other models of similar price.

Similar price? Doesn't make sense. Maybe they meant power, capability or speed?

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embedding-shape 5 hours ago
Is the "Output Tokens per Intelligence Index Task" data actually correct or am I reading it wrong? It says there that "Kimi K3 (Max)" would think/reason less than than deepseek-v4-flash, and a whole bunch of other models, like less than hy3 and even gpt-oss-120b, but in my experience, K3 is probably the model that thinks/reasons the longest of all of these.

Am I just using it on tasks that makes it go on forever vs these benchmarks that are short&sweet, or something like that? I've been throwing bunch of identical prompts at different models at the same time, and when comparing hy3 and K3 I've never once had K3 reason less than hy3, as just one anecdotal data point.

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0xchamin 19 minutes ago
page not available for me.
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net01 2 hours ago
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sschueller 33 minutes ago
I wonder which one of these releases between DeepSeek, GTM and Kimi will be the death-blow that collapses the US AI bubble. At some point investors have to realize that there is nothing preventing someone from switching to another model that is much cheaper and open to boot.
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paoliniluis 3 hours ago
Would be awesome to see a new ds4 release. Having so much in something that can be run locally is mind blowing
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qtalen 3 hours ago
Unfortunately, DeepSeek Flash still doesn’t support multimodal; otherwise, it would offer better value than GPT 5.6 SOL.
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k1e 3 hours ago
No speed (tokens/s) benchmarks?
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k__ 3 hours ago
On OpenRouter it's 93 TPS.
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epolanski 2 hours ago
I was writing a benchmark for my own harness, and DS4 flash answers as well as Fable 5 on any query.

The specific agent is focused on getting precise and on point answers about a codebase.

The starting point was nowhere near. E.g. asked why was X implemented in a certain way it would give bogus answers when the real answer was that there was no reason at all.

The benchmark included more than 50 questions or different difficulty.

But when the agent was improved in its prompt and rooting it was impossible to have it perform worse than closed source sota.

Just to say that the quality of the harness is as important as agents intelligence.

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NooneAtAll3 2 hours ago
what a horribly heavy and resource-consuming website...
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bigmadshoe 23 minutes ago
It looks awful on mobile too. Barely readable in many parts.
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WithinReason 2 hours ago
we need a benchmark website benchmark
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theanonymousone 2 hours ago
A benchmark website to benchmark benchmark websites?

Or a benchmark to benchmark benchmarks?

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NooneAtAll3 14 minutes ago
website that benchmarks benchmarks is benchmark benchmark website

benchmark website benchmark is indeed a benchmark that benchmarks websites with benchmarks (but it can be shown outside websites as well, it's not picky)

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try-working 3 hours ago
Now let's see Dario's price cut.
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freakynit 2 hours ago
I will get downvoted, but fck it.

The ban on these open models is coming within weeks, if not days. As usual, the excuse will be "national security".

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UltraSane 2 hours ago
How exactly will they ban them?
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freakynit 2 hours ago
By making companies using them "toxic" to touch.

For example: no government contract to any company who uses even one vendor in it's entire chain of dependencies, who uses such open models.

They can extend this further by laying more conditions, such as: any company dealing in this-this field can only use models "officially" approved as "safe". Rest you can guess how easy it would be to get that "safe" rating for such open models.

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qphe95 21 minutes ago
Can't wait to distill Deepseek v4 flash to America-1
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tyfon 2 hours ago
So now the US companies will be stuck on expensive models while the rest of the world can do things much more cost effective.

I'm not sure the outcome would be beneficial for the US as a whole here. But perhaps that is not their priority.

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freakynit 12 minutes ago
There are many proxy-ways to bypass such restrictions. Of course, the costs will be higher. Providers will spun-up.
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Der_Einzige 60 minutes ago
Hell, the US doesn't even need to act.

I claim the CCP will wise up within 2 years, possibly much much sooner, and ban their own companies from open sourcing to prevent the Americans from acquiring the capabilities.

Despite all the nonsense claims of China distilling US models, the reality is that the Americans absolutely do distill these free Chinese models, and distillation when full logprobs are available (i.e. you have access to the weights of the model) is an order of magnitude better than when you don't.

Yes, Chinese open weight models in the short term harm US closed source model providers bottom line. In the slightly longer term, "showing your hand" and publishing both the architecture innovations and the models weights will be too dangerous for the CCP to allow. This is triply true if they can release a model that beats the Americans on most benchmarks.

I've already warned investors that this is probably the closest open weight models will ever get to closed access.

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VulgarExigency 48 minutes ago
They may reverse course in the future, but the current directive from the CPC is that Chinese AI labs should be open sourcing their models.

https://www.businessinsider.com/xi-jinping-open-source-ai-us...

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dgellow 2 hours ago
why would you get downvoted, that's one of the most obvious next step
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Der_Einzige 59 minutes ago
Because reddit unironically has better decorum around usage of their upvote/downvote system than HN does.

People on HN downvote objectively correct information because they don't like it 24/7. There's a reason the creator of Zig left and gave the computer version of a middle finger on the way out to HN!

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dgellow 54 minutes ago
fwiw pg said early on that downvoting for disagreement is perfectly fine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

commenting about voting is also something the HN guidelines warns against:

> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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Der_Einzige 2 hours ago
Daily reminder that none of these numbers are valid in a world where no one publishes the sampling settings used.

Daily reminder that improving your samplers from the garbage default top_p/top_k to min_p or subsequent methods dramatically improves the performance of these models, and makes most quantities like measured "verbosity" and subsequent calculations of "intelligence per token" meaningless

Daily reminder that no one, including within academic AI research, AI engineers, normies, etc takes LLM sampling seriously enough.

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yucongchen 34 minutes ago
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madikz 4 hours ago
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BedVibe_Studios 4 hours ago
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yonisto 3 hours ago
Does it already know the answer to what happen at Tiananmen Square? Or still avoiding it?
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xbmcuser 3 hours ago
Who cares if it is programming correctly I would be more worried about it not doing things like find security bugs because US or Chinese government does not want to. Which LLM is more likely to do that?
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nancyminusone 25 minutes ago
How often are you asking an LLM about this? You know you can just google it, right?

I have to admit it rarely comes up in the coding tasks I usually give to LLMs.

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edot 3 hours ago
It’s open weight, you can (or you can wait for someone else to) uncensor it. We shouldn’t be upset at the researchers making this for the mandates their government puts on them.
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avazhi 3 hours ago
Western models censor just as much shit as the Chinese models do, big guy, it’s just different material. While we should be pushing for universal fully uncensored models, this comment is lazy and trite at this point.

But you already know that.

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vehemenz 2 hours ago
This is a straightforward false equivalency. “Western” models do not censor in the same way, nor for the same reasons, that the Chinese models do. “Just as much” is not remotely plausible, yet it’s doing all the heavy lifting.
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adrian_b 24 minutes ago
The Anthropic and OpenAI models are much more censored and in ways that directly prevent them to be useful, e.g. by refusing to reply to elementary questions of biology and chemistry.

Any normal user is much more likely to ask questions to which the Anthropic and OpenAI models do not answer, than to ask questions about the modern Chinese history, to which a Chinese LLM will not answer.

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net01 2 hours ago
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SJMG 2 hours ago
Oh? What are the American model censorship tells?
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zawaideh 2 hours ago
Genocide in Gaza...
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cogman10 56 minutes ago
I find that ChatGPT isn't censoring, but it is being pretty weaselly. If you ask it "is there genocide in gaza". It will say no but also say that a lot of organizations classify it as such. It will then say "it's highly disputed".

If you poke it just a few times, however, you get to the point where it will eventually say (paraphrasing) that basically only Israel, the US state department, and the ICJ say it's not a genocide.

That is to say that it's framing it as some sort of tricky complex question when it's not. And when interrogated, it basically admits that the only people who dispute it are Israel and it's supporters.

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throw59525773 3 minutes ago
One side of a conflict being a minority does not make it less nuanced.

The majority of the world is religious - doesn’t mean the debate on religion isn’t a complex question.

The majority of the world approved of slavery historically.

The majority of countries have ethnically cleansed their Jews, many of them in living memory.

When interrogated you will find that the only ones asserting the war in Gaza is a genocide are people who were anti-Israel anyway.

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shalom1112 2 hours ago
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DubzCheckEm 2 hours ago
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hiherer 2 hours ago
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