Deepseek / Grok / LlaMA
Capable models — some of them genuinely impressive — but with serious data concerns that make them unsuitable for professional services deployment.
DeepSeek made headlines for good reason — the model capability is genuinely impressive relative to its training cost, and the benchmarks were enough to move markets. Grok has real compute and is improving. LlaMA's open-source approach has created an ecosystem of derivative tools. The professional concern across all three is consistent: data handling practices have raised significant red flags for anyone with client confidentiality obligations, and the provenance and governance of training data is sufficiently unclear that I would not use any of them with client materials or proprietary creative. DeepSeek in particular has raised specific concerns around data routing to infrastructure outside jurisdictions with adequate privacy protections. The capability is real; the professional risk is too high for agency deployment without very specific mitigation that most teams will not have in place.
- →Personal technical exploration only — not for professional or client-facing deployment