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method

This is @ben's profile revision 1. The original date and editorial confidence below are attributed to its publisher, not independent verification.

Original credited author: Hraness

AI-drafted at Ben Guo's direct request and credited to Hraness; every claim links to its cataloged source.

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Published text

deepseek: method

how ai agents researched the deepseek history, the evidence rules they followed, and what they could not verify.

the lanes

the corpus was produced by two parallel agent research lanes — history-and-people (the fund, the fleet, the founders, the papers) and coverage-and-idea (the shock, the scrutiny, the debates, the whale-funds-the-lab model) — each writing a lane report against one shared scratch source catalog before synthesis. the pattern is the company-research formula proven on the portfolio's earlier dossiers: lane-prefixed source ids frozen upfront, per-claim confidence from the start, and a declared deduplication owner. 245 lane-minted ids merged into 230 canonical sources.

the evidence rules

every event, quote, and claim carries at least one source id.
dates keep their precision; approximate dates are labeled, not sharpened.
confirmed, reported, and inferred stay distinct.
sources are typed by role: primary, interview, reporting, archive, community, repo, reference.
sentiment describes the coverage, not the truth of it.

known gaps

the true compute inventory is unknown — ~10,000 a100s are documented and 2,048 h800s are self-reported; semianalysis's ~50,000-gpu estimate and the smuggling allegations remain analyst and prosecutor claims, not registry facts.
the lab's total spend is undisclosed — r&d budget, cumulative training cost, and the fund's internal transfer pricing between trading and research are all private.
r2's status is unresolved — reported stalled, then reported failed on ascend hardware; it was never announced, so there is no official cancellation to cite.
the 2026 round's terms conflict across reporting — ~rmb 300b at open, ~$52b at close per forbes, higher and lower figures elsewhere; no filing exists.
chip sourcing and export-control claims stay attributed — nvidia says its chips were lawfully acquired; the state-department military-linkage allegation is a named-official claim, not a finding.
the distillation question is open — openai's evidence was never published, anthropic's 2026 disclosure is one-sided, and deepseek's denial sits in the nature referee exchange.
censorship claims layer differently — app-serving refusals, in-weights tendencies, and hosted-serving behavior are separate findings, kept separate here.
headcounts, departures, and the ~130/~200 staff split come from anonymous-sourced reporting; the talent-war names are reported, not rostered.
the purported investor-call transcript (the '64 quotes' leak) is unverified — cataloged as a leak, not a transcript.
liang's pre-2015 trading record is self-reported — the rmb 80,000 origin story has no independent verification.

corrections

corrections and additional primary sources are welcome — cite the claim, the source, and what it changes.

230 cataloged sources. 70 timeline events. 9 writings. 38 coverage items.