It doesn't look like there is one answer for all models from China (not even a single answer for all DeepSeek models).
In an earlier HN comment, I noted that DeepSeek v3 doesn't censor a response to "what happened at Tiananmen square?" when running on a US-hosted server (Fireworks.ai). It is definitely censored on DeepSeek.com, suggesting that there is a separate process doing the censoring for v3.
DeepSeek R1 seems to be censored even when running on a US-hosted server. A reply to my earlier comment pointed that out and I confirmed that the response to the question "what happened at Tiananmen square?" is censored on R1 even on Fireworks.ai. It is naturally also censored on DeepSeek.com. So this suggests that R1 self-censors, because I doubt that Fireworks would be running a separate censorship process for one model and not the other.
Qwen is another prominent Chinese research group (owned by Alibaba). Their models appear to have varying levels of censoring even when hosted on other hardware. Their Qwen Coder 32B model and Qwen 2.5 7B models don't appear to have censoring built-in and will respond to a question about Tinamen. Their Qwen QwQ 32B (their reasoning/chain of thought model) and Qwen 2.5 72B will either refuse to answer or will avoid the question, suggesting that the bigger models have room for the censoring to be built in. Or maybe the CCP doesn't mandate censoring on task-specific (coding-related) or low-power (7B weights) models.
How are you running the Qwen 2.5 Coder 7B model [0]? Running locally using llama.cpp, I asked it to briefly describe what happened in China during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protest and it responded with "I'm unable to engage in discussions regarding political matters due to the sensitive nature of the topic. Please feel free to ask any non-political questions you may have, and I'll be happy to assist."
When I asked the same model about what happened during the 1970 Kent State shootings, it gave me exactly what I asked for.
I didn’t run the 2.5 Coder 7B model, I ran 2.5 Coder 32B hosted by together.ai (and accessed through poe.com). This is just another example that the censoring seems to be variable across models, but perhaps there isn’t as much relation between censoring and model size or specialty as I thought if the Coder 7B model is self-censoring.
In an earlier HN comment, I noted that DeepSeek v3 doesn't censor a response to "what happened at Tiananmen square?" when running on a US-hosted server (Fireworks.ai). It is definitely censored on DeepSeek.com, suggesting that there is a separate process doing the censoring for v3.
DeepSeek R1 seems to be censored even when running on a US-hosted server. A reply to my earlier comment pointed that out and I confirmed that the response to the question "what happened at Tiananmen square?" is censored on R1 even on Fireworks.ai. It is naturally also censored on DeepSeek.com. So this suggests that R1 self-censors, because I doubt that Fireworks would be running a separate censorship process for one model and not the other.
Qwen is another prominent Chinese research group (owned by Alibaba). Their models appear to have varying levels of censoring even when hosted on other hardware. Their Qwen Coder 32B model and Qwen 2.5 7B models don't appear to have censoring built-in and will respond to a question about Tinamen. Their Qwen QwQ 32B (their reasoning/chain of thought model) and Qwen 2.5 72B will either refuse to answer or will avoid the question, suggesting that the bigger models have room for the censoring to be built in. Or maybe the CCP doesn't mandate censoring on task-specific (coding-related) or low-power (7B weights) models.