But more seriously, DeepSeek is a massive boon for AI consumers. It's price/performance cannot be beat, and the model is open source so if you're inclined to run and train your own you now have access to a world-class model and don't have to settle for LLaMA.
No, but the same sort of people certainly told us that we were :-)
Cf. the whole "the GPL is viral and will kill the industry" spiel we got to hear for years.
He has also spoken about world domination ;)
>If you need more than 3 levels of indentation, you're screwed anyway, and should fix your program.
Got me thinking. I might heighten up to 4 or 5 simply because modern code needs 2 indents just to start writing a function in a struct. But the quote wasn't as crazy as I thought, even 30 years later.
you could be a communist if you open source your project
so maybe in that alternative universe, there would be something like close-source-statement instead of open source license, to avoid be accused as a communist
No, because as Stallman had pointed out Linux isn't GNU. One of the differences between the "open source" crowd and the "free software" crowd is that the latter actually does have an explicit goal of denying proprietary software the ability to exist.
If the goal is to erode the moat around powerful US tech companies, by making tech that rivals theirs and releasing it to the public, it's just good for the world. The only way it isn't is if you believe that power should remain in the hands of certain elites.
I have no love for the CCP, and I believe that they are deceptive - but China has 1.4 billion people in it. It is not a monolith, and it is unsurprising that there would be good people doing good research in such a massive population.
Works for me!
This whole llm movement and the insane amounts of money sloshing around aren’t setting off alarm bells for anyone else huh, just me?
It is clear to everyone in the room that recent ML innovations are incredibly powerful and actively being used in many areas to substantial effect. It may be overhyped, but there is clearly real fuel behind it, it's not all hot air.
DeepSeek is proof there isn’t a moat, not a demonstration of Chinese superiority in AI work. When you don’t care if your work makes any business sense, there’s often a lot you can appear to accomplish, until it needs to be sustained.
Not everything that happens in China needs to be about China vs. America.
Well, could be that Wuhan lab co-funded and co-run by the US. That song took two to tango.
(but I believe, there were even more states involved as research often is funded international)
Whereas what's Sam doing? Announcing a non-existing 500 billion dollar investment with the president, while all AI companies in the wesy support a trade ban for Nvidia GPUs in China.
> OpenAI Hails $500 Billion Stargate Plan: 'More Compute Leads to Better Models'
The cynic in me is much more likely to see this as western companies giving up on innovation in favor of grift, and their competition in the east exposing the move for what it is.
This is why competition is good. Let's make this about us (those who would do this in the open) and them (those who wouldn't) and not us (US) and them (China).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Generation_Computer_Syst...
Although it sounds like that project, if successful, would've been pretty fantastic for computing in general. I'm far less interested to see proprietary models secure dominance, whichever country they're in.
The whole thing is no longer a startup being disruptive
The US has been trying to find a "space race" challenge to justify its military spending increases for a while, AI is going to be that, but it's more driven by the US oligarchy than the US MIC this time.
That means that it's going to be driven by financial wealth accumulation instead of power accumulation.
the AI race between China and the US is going to shape the future of our generation. CIA has all the motivations to just eliminate all those core Chinese members as they pose direct national security threat to the US dominance in AI.
you need to be really naive to not being able to see these.
A couple of years ago, it was VR/AR (2nd time around for VR, it had been hyped in the '90s), before that it was "cloud" etc etc.
The CIA is not going to be going around assassinating AI developers, any more than they are going to kill the people working for ASML because they threaten US dominance in chips.
"Ah yes, because comparing AI’s transformative impact to VR’s niche flops or dismissing cloud (now the backbone of modern tech) proves you’ve got the insight of a dial-up modem. Stay salty and irrelevant!"
But for the rest of humanity it doesn't look so bad.
What happened to fighting climate change?
[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
You pay with your data.
This could very well be the long-term plan with DeepSeek, or it could be the AI application of how China deals with other industries: massive state subsidies to companies participating in important markets.
The profit isn't the point, at least not at first. Driving everyone else out is. That's why it's hard to get any real name brands off of Amazon anymore. Cheap goods from China undercut brand-name competition from elsewhere and soon, that competition was finding it unprofitable to compete on Amazon, so they withdrew.
I used to get HEPA filters from Amazon that were from a trusted name brand. I can't find those anymore. What I can find is a bunch of identical offerings for "Colorfullfe", "Der Blue" and "Extolife", all priced similarly. I cannot find any information on those companies online. Given their origin it's safe to assume they all come from the same factory in China and that said factory is at least partially supported by the state.
Over time this has the net effect of draining the rest of the world of the ability to create useful technology and products without at least some Chinese component to the design or manufacture of the same. That of course becomes leverage.
Same here. If I'm an investor in an AI startup, I'm not looking at the American offerings, because long-term geopolitical stability isn't my concern. Getting the most value for my investment is, so I'm telling them to use the Chinese models and training techniques for now, and boom: it just became a little less profitable for Sam Altman to do what he does. And that's the point.
In this case it's open source, and with papers published. So any US company can (way more cheaply than ChatGPT and co iiuc) train their own model based on this and offer it as well.
Similarly the EU of 2025, has nothing to do with WW2-era starvation, that has been over half a century in the past.
And of course there was literal starvation in China as well after WWII, and much more poverty there than in the EU 30 years ago (even including Eastern Europe).
Secondly, China also has extremely high bureaucracy, and extreme levels of government regulation - a classic problem for dictatorial regimes, especially ones spanning huge spaces (where direct control is physically impossible, even in the information age).
The big difference is that EU governments have drunk the coolaid on modern economical theories, and don't generally pick winners and losers in the market (beyond few key companies with deep ties to the ruling elites, mostly in banking), don't invest massive amounts to prop up companies doing price dumping, and generally play within the rules of world trade.
Of course, those rules are made up specifically to prevent any state from using its power to out-compete incumbent companies, many of which are US owned, but also German, French, Spanish etc owned.
Also, there is little appetite for EU level strategic decisions, EU member countries are far too divided. For example, Finland probably didn't have the power to prop up Nokia's phone division when Apple and Samsung started eating its lunch with smartphones, and France or Germany wouldn't have wanted to invest EU resources into doing it either. France is likely not going to be ok with propping up a German rival to BYD using massive funds, or vice versa for a French company.
So, while collectively the EU easily rivals China on money antld the USA on population, it is far too divided to pool those powers together, and the EU population mirrors this sentiment - there is not a strong EU identity that would see a Belgian person deeply proud of a major tech company based in Slovenia, or a Czech person cheering for a massive new investment in Portugal.
Give it ten years.
The biggest purchaser of technology and goods and services is the US Government. It spends over $760 billion annually on products and services.
But if any other country does the same it would classify as "massive state subsidies".
I would take it a step further and say that the biggest employer in US is the US Federal Government.
So American investors dumped a metric crapload of money into the Chinese economy for things like manufacturing. The labor was cheap, and anyone who wanted better outside of the status quo was going to be turned into hamburger under the treads of a tank. No longer would they have to deal with the labor unions of the Midwest and Great Lakes regions, or have to deal with American environmental, corruption, and labor laws. The investment was the seed money for the startup we know as modern China.
They extract the very same data from paying users. And even with data factors in, they give products away at loss explicitly to undercut the competition.
I get side eyes from Americans when I bring this up as a key factor when they try to shit on Europe for "lack of innovation", it's more a lack of bottomless stacks of cash enabling undercutting competition on price until they fold, then jacking up prices for VC ROI.
I actually praise that offensive move, if AI companies can lost so much value from DeepSeek's open research then it's well deserved, they shouldn't be valued as much.
which is fine and dandy to do. In fact, i wish deepseek success. The US tech industry needs disruption.
You are replying to a thread with the DeepSeek CEO saying the opposite (e.g., DeepSeek built upon transformers, Llama, PyTorch, etc.)
The USA has never once had friendly relationships with a large power, perhaps with the very special case of the USSR alliance during WWII (and not a second after it). The European powers and Canada are extremely US friendly and support US policies (at the head of state level) in almost everything. Relations with China were good while China was a weak and poor state, acting as almost slave labor for the USA - not great now that they are rising up. Relations with Russia were good for a brief window after the fall of the USSR, while Eltsyn seemed to be "our guy", but quickly soured when it became clear he would not dance to their tune (not to sya that he was a good man or that his disputes with US intentions were good - Russia would have probably been in a better state if it had allied itself more with the USA, rather than becoming the belligerent territorial authoritarian oligarchy that it has).
“Our principle is that we don’t subsidize nor make exorbitant profits. This price point gives us just a small profit margin above costs.”
So, sadly, even something that seems noble and refreshing like open-sourcing their AI advancements will be treated with suspicion.
What gets me is when people present it like it's bad to play that game. Like "it's ok when we do it".
It's not bad. But the western superpowers, however flawed, are at least familiar. For the past 75 years we've avoided world war under this power balance. A new power balance could turn out better in that regard, but that doesn't mean it won't be scary, especially for those who value individual liberty.
I agree that the CCP's view of the world and population control is negative. But don't let that poison your opinion of all Chinese people. We're all people on Earth, and we need to be forging bonds with our intelligent and good-hearted international kin that break down the walls that those in power create to keep themselves there.
It would mean having to eschew the neoliberal ideals that impede research and development in favour of the old that made America and to some extent the rest of the West the dominant superpower in R&D for many decades. We should be familiar with it, even if we have lived all or most of ours lives in the former.
Or it would be hard to convert back and we'd have a war first.
I suspect "we westerners" think of "we westerners" and do not give a flying fuck about "the rest of the world". Well, as long as they keep trading exclusively in our currency etc. etc.
All I heard from OpenAI was that we need regulation which maybe happen to fit their business interest.
If that's a problem for the West now, it's a problem of our own creation.
> "For many years, Chinese companies are used to others doing technological innovation, while we focused on application monetization..."
> “But in fact, this is something that has been created through the tireless efforts of generations of Western-led tech communities. It’s just because we weren’t previously involved in this process that we’ve ignored its existence.”
you don't know cpc
you don't know china
and you don't know chinese
you just imagine cpc and chinese as characters in some shit comics
every chinese could possibly said that, and cpc say this a lot everyday, and cpc made national strategy base on that, you can find these words in many gov documents
so you guys are right about one thing: china is a threat, because from cpc to normal chinese, there're tons of people in china think like this, and many of them eager to challenge this
just like what deepseek is doing right now
you are very perceptive, if someone who use CPC rather than CCP, they're either chinese, or pro-china, or worse, communists
i just say that mindset (like what deepseek ceo said) is super common in China, not something hard to say or forbiddened
Generally speaking, I assume CCP is involved with anything of strategic significance. They would even chase random benign influencers.
Microsoft apply censorship to Bing search results in China. It doesn't mean they are controlled by CCP. They just got impacted by law and they want to keep operate in China.
I don't care that deepseek's own service has censorship. I would care, if they have this censored weights but haven't revealed it was (aka, fraud by omission).
Until now.
https://www.pekingnology.com/p/ceo-of-deepseeks-parent-high-...
Interesting tidbit:
>So far, there are perhaps only two first-person accounts from DeepSeek, in two separate interviews given by the company’s founder.
I knew DeepSeek was lowkey but I didn't expect this much stealthmode. They were likely off CCP boomer radar until last week when Liang met with PRC premiere after R1 exploded. Finance quants turned AI powerhouse validates CCP strategy to crush finance compensation to redirect top talent to strategic soft/hardware. I assume they're going to get a lot more state support now, especially if US decides to entity list DeepSeek for succeeding / making the market bleed.
Create an ecosystem and all tides rise.
It's really a shame that in the current world, the art of hardware is dying out, where hardware people are not properly compensated and appreciated [1].
Liang Wenfeng belongs to this breed of engineers with hybrid hardware and software background that have money and at the same time founding and leading and companies (similar to two Steves of Apple), they're a force to reckon with with even with severe limitations, in case of Chinese companies computing resources sanctions CPU/RAM/GPU/FPGA/etc. But unlike two Steves these new hybrid engineers that raised in Linux era are the big believers of open source, as Google rightly predicted in case of LLM none of the proprietary LLM solutions has the moat [2],[3].
[1] UK's hardware talent is being wasted (1131 comments):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42763386
[2] Google “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI” (1039 comments):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35813322
[3] Google "We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI" (2023) (42 comments):
That's alway the issue with outsourcing. You rely exclusively on middlemen, middlemen will realize they can cut out their middlemen and just go directly to the customers.
These claims are quite hard to square with the long waits for H1B visas, extremely high salaries in the technology sector and net immigration to the US from China.
I’m not aware of any Americans or Europeans in my network who have gone the other direction to China.
Perhaps you have different data about the demand for tech worker visas in China.
EE as a US career is night and day from Software centered engineers. Night and day from 20 years ago as well.
http://www.talentsquare.info/blog/fall-engineering-jobs-elec...
I don't think it's much of a controversial take to suggest that China is kicking the US's butt in silicon chip production. EE's are one of the primary fields traditionally seeked to work with this.
That will be controversial until mainland China produces modern process chips economically (they can do one or the other so far). Rather Taiwan and South Korea are not the EE powerhouses. China though pays better than Taiwan (a lot of the hardware researchers in my Beijing lab were from Taiwan and Korea).
I think the plan was to have it built by 2027, but who knows now. Meanwhile, Trump called the CHIPS act "ridiculous" (very optimistic future, clearly) and just imposed tariffs on Taiwan.
I just bought a new laptop last night just in case. A refurbished M3 Max with enough memory to run DeepSeek 70b :).
A bit of irony was that this researcher (from Europe) used to work in the same lab as me in Beijing. But these days the talent doesn’t flow so easily as it did a decade+ ago (but maybe it will again? Researchers aren’t very nationalistic and will look for the best toys to play with).
Maybe you're thinking of 1-bit DACs with oversampling and noise shaping: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta-sigma_modulation
Because America offshored almost all its manufacturing to China. No wonder China has a booming hardware industry and we don't.
Lucky things seem to be changing. Even Biden continued Trump China trade polices. And now Trump is back in power.
I agree with everything you said but this part is "broken clock will be right twice a day". It is what Google would have said regardless. A moat is never impossible to cross, it's just a passive superpower making the "enemy's" job that much more difficult. By Google's suggested interpretation of a moat, moats simply do not exist. They can all be crossed eventually, when ingenuity catches up to big budgets, so it's like they were never there?
I don't buy it that they knew or predicted anything. If Google knew something about hidden optimization available to everyone or had more reason to suspect this is the case beyond "every technology progresses", they'd already be built into their models by now (it's been 2 years since the "prediction") but there's no evidence they were even close. And there's still a HW moat. The amount of high performance HW BigAI has or affords can still make a huge difference everything else being equal, after building in all those "free" optimizations.
At the least the big companies have the ability to widen the moat when they feel pressure of the small competitors closing in. It's clear now that more money can do that. If ingenuity can replace money, then money can replace ingenuity, even if via buying out startups, paying for the best people, and so on. They've shown it again and again.
Compare this to the interviews of Altman or Musk, talking vaguely about elevating the level consciousness, saving humanity from existential threats, understand the nature of the universe and other such nonsense they pander to investors.
Obviously it’s a power play as China seeks influence beyond money now that’s secured. I think people should receive it on its merits.
The strategy of open sourcing to eliminate the competitive mode of those with proprietary designs is a bit of a desperate play, favored by the weaker competitor, lacking access to the desired market.
You can also perceive it as hostile and in line with dumping practices, where a high volume of product is dumped into a market at cheap prices.
But besides these tactical aspects, which are no doubt being utilized, there’s a inescapable technological reality that obviously efficiency of AI will improve, and the most efficient designs would seem to rise to the top. This utilization of and guiding of inevitable historical trends for their own advantage is a very Chinese communist dialectical materialist approach to take, and I think we can expect to see more of these types of ‘surprising’ moves by entities out of China in the decades ahead as these kind of competitions heat up. The Chinese have a very deep and a very different ideological background that would justify these types of moves as making perfect sense to them, although they simultaneously appear as nonsensical to people from other backgrounds.
I feel like the reaction of the west is protecting him from a reaction from Chinese authorities
If that is the game they're playing, I'm all for it. Maybe it's not the result that the sanctions were intended to have, but motivating China to share their research rather than keep it proprietary is certainly a win. Making AI more efficient doesn't reduce the value of compute infrastructure; it means we can generate that much more value from the same hardware.
“Because we believe the most important thing now is to participate in the global innovation wave. For many years, Chinese companies are used to others doing technological innovation, while we focused on application monetization — but this isn’t inevitable. In this wave, our starting point is not to take advantage of the opportunity to make a quick profit, but rather to reach the technical frontier and drive the development of the entire ecosystem.”
“We believe that as the economy develops, China should gradually become a contributor instead of freeriding. In the past 30+ years of the IT wave, we basically didn’t participate in real technological innovation. We’re used to Moore’s Law falling out of the sky, lying at home waiting 18 months for better hardware and software to emerge. That’s how the Scaling Law is being treated.
“But in fact, this is something that has been created through the tireless efforts of generations of Western-led tech communities. It’s just because we weren’t previously involved in this process that we’ve ignored its existence.”
“We do not have financing plans in the short term. Money has never been the problem for us; bans on shipments of advanced chips are the problem.”
“In the face of disruptive technologies, moats created by closed source are temporary. Even OpenAI’s closed source approach can’t prevent others from catching up. So we anchor our value in our team — our colleagues grow through this process, accumulate know-how, and form an organization and culture capable of innovation. That’s our moat.
“Open source, publishing papers, in fact, do not cost us anything. For technical talent, having others follow your innovation gives a great sense of accomplishment. In fact, open source is more of a cultural behavior than a commercial one, and contributing to it earns us respect. There is also a cultural attraction for a company to do this.”