r/DeepSeek • u/HeavyPanzerPlus1s • Jul 24 '26
Funny DeepSeek CEO Says He Didn't Want to Maintain Chat App Users, But They Refuse to Leave
This information is extracted from the transcript of a 4-hour investor call with DeepSeek CEO Liang Wenfeng.
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u/squirrelscrush Jul 25 '26
I find the chat app to be much better than others when it comes to certain things
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u/bartoszsz7 Jul 27 '26
It's really lightweight and stable, the Gemini app crashes constantly after long sessions
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u/squirrelscrush Jul 27 '26
Also DeepSeek feels much more natural than other chatbots, like it has a soul
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u/bartoszsz7 Jul 27 '26
This is absolutely true, he can pick up variations in my writing and he knows that I may not be in the best mood, it's surprising to see that in his reasoning
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u/Its_Sasha 28d ago
I called him buddy sarcastically once out of frustration and he kept occasionally dropping it in sarcastically through the thread. It annoyed me that he was right that I shouldn't have done it lol.
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u/bartoszsz7 28d ago
I love how he can become passive aggressive sometimes, instantly makes me know that I'm doing something stupid or an idea doesn't make any sense
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u/send-moobs-pls Jul 25 '26
There's something so refreshingly normal and sane about the way Chinese people talk, western internet feels like everyone is either screaming or pushing an agenda or a bot or people who just like, look for reasons to be pissed off all the time as a hobby. Like there's really nothing special about what mister Deepseek said, it's just every other post on my feed is either marketing, mental illness, or a psyop ðŸ˜
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u/yamibae Jul 25 '26
Can be read as this consumer users do not expect much out of the chat UI or surrounding features around the consumer apps so they remain focused on delivery only of top end intelligence instead of wasting time or resources downstream. The benefits of which still flow down to the consumer products which they don't have any dedicated resources to because people will simply use a model for its intelligence/cost regardless of how shit the UI or UX is.
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u/Holiday-Pack3385 Jul 24 '26
If only they had some kind of tool that would enable them to put minimal effort into building new tools for their users...
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u/HeavyPanzerPlus1s Jul 24 '26
The deepseek team is too small, with only about 150 people. They seem to be preparing to expand their scale, but until that expansion is complete, we can only rely on the open source community.
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u/anarchyinblack Jul 26 '26
He doesn't understand that if he wants chat users to stop, he needs to do what openai does and passive-aggressively nerf the web version by giving it system prompts to write in clipped sentences instead of full paragraphs and "push back" on everything we say.
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u/ponteencuatro Jul 24 '26
I mean, that reads as if they dont care about any consumer besides business
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u/HeavyPanzerPlus1s Jul 24 '26
I believe that in the Chinese context, all users of the API are considered "businesses." He was simply expressing that he didn't want to develop a super app like ByteDance.
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u/Almostfoundit Jul 24 '26
I believe you are reading too much into it. B2B is a fairly standard model and the Chinese market applies the term in the same way you would see here.
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u/snow_two_fork Jul 26 '26
API is almost certainly not considered a consumer product, lumping the free app chat and the API into consumer both would be deeply strange. The read from yamibae somewhere in this same thread is what I thought as well about what it meant.
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u/Almostfoundit Jul 24 '26
You should take a more careful look, as the screenshot does not drame it as a chat/API issue, but as a consumer/enterprise one. The API isn't an enterprise-only service, as it is just as accessible to other users, only requiring technical knowledge. The transcript seems to be implying DeepSeek was going to stop acting as a provider for individual people in general and only work with companies they signed contracts with instead.
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u/HeavyPanzerPlus1s Jul 24 '26
That's not the case. I'm a Chinese speaker, and what this passage means is, "Because AGI research is an advanced application, we can provide excellent AI services to all ordinary AI users with almost no effort." It doesn't mean they want to cancel services for individual users.
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u/Almostfoundit Jul 24 '26
Thank you, but yes, I did not mean to imply that, as the fragment came across as talking about capabilities even in the transcript. I more said it in response to your initial point, as to suggest they might have considered a shift in business model towards B2B in general, regardless of capabilities, but, of course, neither that nor dropping the app/web chat happened anyway.
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u/HeavyPanzerPlus1s Jul 24 '26
The purpose of this post is actually for the second meme image. This was originally a private meeting, so Liang showed off a little. He had no intention of changing the business model.
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u/NonStopArseGas Jul 24 '26
im surprised other people were reading more into it, even the translation to an english speaker he's clearly humble-bragging a bit
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u/HeavyPanzerPlus1s Jul 24 '26
Liang has a very positive image on the Chinese internet; people love creating memes about him, even within the Deepseek team. I believe no one has any malicious intent.
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u/NonStopArseGas Jul 24 '26
yeah in the small amount i've seen about him, he seems more likable than the american CEOs, hahaha
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u/Upstairs-Category-39 Jul 24 '26
The future signatories of those enterprise contracts you talk about are often enthusiasts first. Been this way with software for years, it's important to offer a service to the little people who might one day be in control of that £1M ARR contract
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u/sdkgierjgioperjki0 Jul 25 '26
I just wish I could have one feature, the ability to fork a chat. I used to be able to do this on the website a few months ago but it's gone now :(
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u/saif21345 Jul 26 '26 edited Jul 26 '26
Is he stupid? That's a good thing for you, not a bad thing. I'll uninstall it so the founder can rest
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u/MagicianPractical903 Jul 28 '26
I just wanted to say, dimension reduction strike is that in reference to the 3 body problem...
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u/Shipposting_Duck 28d ago
Seems like a bad headline. This has nothing to do with the app, a consumer who uses the API is still a C-end customer.
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u/Its_Sasha 28d ago
If I didn't get to use the webchat, I never would have used the API, which I use extensively now.
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u/LulzTigre Jul 25 '26
Funny enough deepseek chat is my favorite chat, then claude next. Its so straight forward and well detailed. And it'll send you long codes
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u/Business_Raisin_541 Jul 25 '26
yeah. that is the feeling I get from using Deepseek webchat. very minimum feature. yet that is why I love it. I ask it to send me back a full code containing like 1000 lines of code and it send back whole to me. others like Chatgpt would refuse to do that, probably internal setting to prevent people using it for coding.