Hands-on with DeepSeek's free chatbot: the R1 model is powerful, but suffers from rampant hallucinations and lacks some ChatGPT tools like the memory feature

DeekSeek's chatbot with the R1 model is a stunning release from the Chinese startup. While it's an innovation in training efficiency, hallucinations still run rampant.

Wired 2025-01-28 Reece Rogers

Context & Ripple Effects

DeepSeek entered this moment amid questions about model provenance, after DeepSeek-V3 sometimes identified itself as ChatGPT. Its R1 chatbot makes the company’s training-efficiency claims tangible to users, while exposing the practical limits of the product experience.

The release also reinforced the lack of lock-in among chatbot providers: a capable free alternative can attract experimentation even before it matches the established assistant feature set. Subsequent coverage makes the reliability concern more concrete, including poor performance on news-related prompts.

First-order effects

Users gain free access to a capable R1-based assistant, but must verify its answers because the review finds frequent hallucinations.
DeepSeek’s product is immediately disadvantaged for ongoing, personalized use by the absence of a memory feature available in some rival chatbots.

Second-order effects

Chatbot rivals face added pressure to distinguish their products through reliability and durable user features, not model capability alone.
For research and news-oriented use cases, DeepSeek’s hallucination record raises the cost of adoption: users and organizations must add verification before relying on outputs.

Third-order effects

If highly capable models continue to reach users through free, interchangeable chatbots, product differentiation is likely to shift toward trust, persistent context, and workflow integration.
The pattern suggests a split between models that are compelling to test and assistants trusted for consequential work; closing that gap depends on reliability rather than raw model power.

The trend: The chatbot market is moving from a contest over access to powerful models toward competition over dependable, personalized assistant experiences.

Discussion

@daniel_nguyenx Daniel Nguyen on x
Looks like DeepSeek is only censored if you ask in English. Switched to Vietnamese and it tells everything about the Tiananmen Square. [image]
@emollick Ethan Mollick on x
Running DeepSeek r1 32B locally is kind of depressing. You get the reasoning, but the model is not *smart* enough to actually use it so it keeps getting tripped up in its own ideas & is full of doubt. 3 minutes on a limerick that a small non-reasoning model could do instantly. [i…
@awnihannun Awni Hannun on x
The DeepSeek V3 model file is ~450 lines of code in MLX LM. Includes pipeline-parallelism and all. Good way to see how it all works. [image]
@isaacstonefish Isaac Stone Fish on x
The censorship and propaganda in DeepSeek is so pervasive and so pro-Communist Party that it makes TikTok look like a Pentagon press conference. [image]
@bindureddy Bindu Reddy on x
IF Deepseek R1 WASN'T Open Source No one would have used, trusted, or believed them, given their location. FWIW, there is still something VERY OFF.... Their API, the only money-making product, is severely throttled, while their free app seems to be serving traffic fine -
@mathewi Mathew Ingram on x
Elon reads this and smiles as he looks over the 6,000-person war room he built to hack DeepSeek
r/cybersecurity r on reddit
DeepSeek halts new signups amid “large-scale” cyberattack

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