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.