Bypass DeepSeek censorship by speaking in hex

Part of the blog is hypothesizing that the censorship is in a separate filtering stage rather than the model itself. But, the example of hex encoding doesn't prove or disprove that at all, does it? Can't you just check on a version running open-source weights?

I ran the distilled models locally some of the censorships are there.

But on their chat (hosted), deepseek has some keyword based filters - like the moment it generates Chinese president name or other controversial keywords - the "thinking" stops abruptly!

The open source model seems to be uncensored, lending weight to the separate filter concept. Plus, any filter needs to be revised as new workarounds emerge - if it is baked in to the model that requires retraining, whereas it's reasonably light work for a frontend filter.

The distilled versions I've run through Ollama are absolutely censored and don't even populate the <think></think> section for some of those questions.