It's certainly better than "Open"AI being completely closed and secretive with their models. But as people have discovered in the last 24 hours, DeepSeek is pretty strongly trained to be protective of the Chinese government policy on, uh, truth. If this was a truly Open Source model, someone could "fork" it and remake it without those limitations. That's the spirit of "Open Source" even if the actual term "source" is a bit misapplied here.

As it is, without the original training data, an attempt to remake the model would have the issues DeepSeek themselves had with their "zero" release where it would frequently respond in a gibberish mix of English, Mandarin and programming code. They had to supply specific data to make it not do this, which we don't have access to.