I don't buy this, simply because if the Chinese government were to back an effort, it wouldn't be Deepseek.
Alibaba has Qwen. Baidu, Huawei, Tencent, etc all have their own AI models. The Chinese government would most likely push one of these forward with their backing, not an unknown small company.
Unless of course, they want to sell the "small underdog" story.
I don't claim it is all staged. The researchers seem genuine. But they can be good researchers and still said yes at some point to big government help, if smart chinese government employes recognized their potential.
