# 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.

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

Canonical page: https://hraness.com/deepseek/method


Published by @ben in profile revision 1.
Original document: https://hraness.com/deepseek/method
Original credited author: Hraness
AI-drafted at Ben Guo's direct request and credited to Hraness; every claim links to its cataloged source.

## Structured source and record data

````json
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````