Welcome to episode 291 of The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Jonathan, and Ryan have battled through the various plagues and have come together to bring you all the latest in cloud news, including Kro, DeepSeek, and CoPilot.

Titles we almost went with this week:* In Shocking News China Steals US IP * The Cloud Pod is Now Supported in Gov Cloud * Microsoft Goes Open Source No SQL… and Hell Hasn’t Frozen Over * Zombie Buckets Receive How Much Traffic?!? * AWS, GCP and Azure eat KRO * Github Copilot for Free, so You Can Win at Coding Interviews * Customized Best Practices… I don’t think you know what best practices are * TheCloudPod Leverages Deep Understanding to Make a Nuanced Decision on adopting Copilot

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:We’re sponsorless! Want to get your brand, company, or service in front of a very enthusiastic group of cloud news seekers? You’ve come to the right place! Send us an email or hit us up on our slack channel for more info. Follow Up01:23 Is DeepSeek really sending data to China? Let’s decode

• One of the early concerns about DeepSeek was its privacy implications, starting with their privacy policy.
• Allegations are significant but reality is if the open source model is hosted locally or orchestrated via GPUs in the US the data does not go to China.
• But if you’re using the DeepSeek app it clearly states in the privacy policy that the data will be stored in China. Data hosted on Chinese servers can be seized by the Government at any time.
• Maybe rethink using the native DeepSeek websites and mobile apps and just host them locally in LM studio.

02:21 Jonathan – “They’re collecting some weird data. I get collecting conversational data, because that is the business they’re in, but they’re also doing some weird stuff, like they fingerprint users by looking at the patterns of the way that they type. Not just what they type, but how they type, like the timing between hitting different letters – things like that.”

8:06 OpenAI Believes DeepSeek Was Developed Using OpenAI Models

• Listener Note: paywall article
• OpenAI says they have found evidence that the Chinese firm behind DeepSeek developed the AI using information generated by OpenAI’s models.
• This is prohibited by the OpenAI terms of service, and is a practice known as AI model distillation.
• With distillation, the developer asks existing AI models lots of questions and uses the answers to develop new models that mimic their performance.
• This shortcut results in models that roughly approximate state-of-the-art models but don’t cost a lot to