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Deepseek: The quiet giant leading China’s AI race

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Re: Deepseek: The quiet giant leading China’s AI race

#31

Post by tossandthrow »

nbroyal wrote: post #27
tossandthrow wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... why deepseek can never outperform ... This read more like a "western supremacists" post. 1. Only until China produces more compute than the west. 2. You don't have to ask ChatGPT / Claude many questions before realizing the grave censorship these are under - DeepSeek has access the roughly the same corpus of data as their western counter parts. 3. It is naive to think they only develop open source or will not s…

Curious to hear more about the grave censorship that ChatGPT and Claude are under. Specifically where non-western models are not.

I am not aware of any non western models that are not under censorship.

Ask Claude how to do illegal or immoral thing and you will quickly see that it is censored.

I didn't mean to problematize censorship. Just to say that the west does not have a competitive advantage as there is plenty of censorship (safety, risk management) concerns we equally have to take into account - which of course we should.

Re: Deepseek: The quiet giant leading China’s AI race

#32

Post by jdietrich »

nsoonhui wrote: post #13

I find that the gushing around deepseek is fascinating to watch. To me there are a few structural and fundamental reasons why deepseek can never outperform other models by a wide margin. On par maybe--as we reach the diminishing returns with our investment in the models, but not win by a wide margin. 1. The US trade war with china which will place deepseek compute availability at disadvantages, eventually, if we ever…

I don't think it's necessarily about DeepSeek, but about the wider competitive picture. There are two tacit assumptions being made about LLMs - that having a SOTA model is a substantial competitive advantage, and that the demand for compute will continue to grow rapidly.

DeepSeek's phenomenal success in reducing training and inference cost points to the possibility of a very different future. If it's the case that SOTA or near-SOTA performance is commoditised and progress in efficiency outpaces progress in capability, then the roadmap looks radically different. If DeepSeek don't have a competitive advantage, then no-one has a competitive advantage. Having a DC full of H200s or a proprietary model with a trillion parameters might not count for anything, in which case we're looking at a very different set of winners and losers. Application specific fine-tuning and product-market fit might matter much more than brute force compute.

Re: Deepseek: The quiet giant leading China’s AI race

#33

Post by futureshock »

nbroyal wrote: post #27
tossandthrow wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... why deepseek can never outperform ... This read more like a "western supremacists" post. 1. Only until China produces more compute than the west. 2. You don't have to ask ChatGPT / Claude many questions before realizing the grave censorship these are under - DeepSeek has access the roughly the same corpus of data as their western counter parts. 3. It is naive to think they only develop open source or will not s…

Curious to hear more about the grave censorship that ChatGPT and Claude are under. Specifically where non-western models are not.

When they do it, it’s “censorship.” When we do it it’s “safety.” From a technical standpoint it’s the same. Don’t say certain things, respond to certain questions with refusals or with certain answers.

Re: Deepseek: The quiet giant leading China’s AI race

#34

Post by djaouen »

kjellsbells wrote: post #10

If you tell the world that eggs are awesome while denying other countries access to eggs, they discover ways to use less eggs and eventually realize they don't need eggs at all. Then you are stuck making Dennys breakfasts while the rest of the world is on to fine dining. China has incredibly strong incentives to do the pure research needed to break the current GPU-or-else lock. I hope, for science' sake, we dont end…

> If you tell the world that eggs are awesome while denying other countries access to eggs, they discover ways to use less eggs

You are confusing cause with effect. What actually happened: Nixon opened up US trade with China and, ever since, China has been stealing trade secrets to undermine and overthrow American interests. Limiting their access to eggs was literally us trying to prevent them from stealing all our shit!

Re: Deepseek: The quiet giant leading China’s AI race

#35

Post by Etheryte »

elashri wrote: post #26
Etheryte wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, I've been hearing the story that China is about to upend the US as the leading global superpower ever since I was a kid. There's always a new vogue and novel twist put on the rationale and how it's gonna happen, but so far it's like fusion, always a few years away.

I think you mean nuclear fusion.

Of course, thanks.

Re: Deepseek: The quiet giant leading China’s AI race

#36

Post by qwertox »

kjellsbells wrote: post #10

If you tell the world that eggs are awesome while denying other countries access to eggs, they discover ways to use less eggs and eventually realize they don't need eggs at all. Then you are stuck making Dennys breakfasts while the rest of the world is on to fine dining. China has incredibly strong incentives to do the pure research needed to break the current GPU-or-else lock. I hope, for science' sake, we dont end…

It remains to be seen how stable a totalitarian government can be. China has the benefit of having full control over its people and therefore gets to decide what is important and what not, and currently people are ok with handing that control over to the government. But it's also a very fragile state, which can only be retained through full repression.

Re: Deepseek: The quiet giant leading China’s AI race

#37

Post by futureshock »

tossandthrow wrote: post #28
Etheryte wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, I've been hearing the story that China is about to upend the US as the leading global superpower ever since I was a kid. There's always a new vogue and novel twist put on the rationale and how it's gonna happen, but so far it's like fusion, always a few years away.

What makes you think it has not happened? There has not been an event to establish who the current super power is in new time.

I think you have the right idea. China has yet to truly flex its muscle. They prefer to quietly grow stronger. Their response to Covid with the largely successful zero covid strategy gives a clue about the power of its government. Silly, you can’t become the champion without stepping into the ring.

Re: Deepseek: The quiet giant leading China’s AI race

#38

Post by pmarreck »

futureshock wrote: post #33
nbroyal wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious to hear more about the grave censorship that ChatGPT and Claude are under. Specifically where non-western models are not.

When they do it, it’s “censorship.” When we do it it’s “safety.” From a technical standpoint it’s the same. Don’t say certain things, respond to certain questions with refusals or with certain answers.

Yes, but there should be a difference between providing answers about provably dangerous things and providing provably false answers for political reasons. For example if there is a Russian LLM that refuses to answer any questions about homosexuality while also saying it's wrong, that's demonstrably false from an empirical basis.

But the western LLM's are also doing this latter type of thing already. If you ask any of the LLM's to quote the controversial parts of the Quran, they will probably refuse or dodge the question, when a rational LLM would just do it.

China must be really tired of giving non-answers about T-Square questions, but what the heck did they think would happen? Not the Streisand effect, clearly

Re: Deepseek: The quiet giant leading China’s AI race

#39

Post by lopatin »

wodderam wrote: post #12
lomkju wrote: post #6

I feel the GPU restrictions created an environment for Chinese Devs to be more innovative and do more with less. Kudos to the deepseek team!

Kai-Fu Lee describes the culture so well in AI Superpowers. The roots are well before GPU restriction. Absolute cut throat competition. Imagine Sam Altman throwing a chair out a window in a meeting lol. The message of AI Superpowers is that China will lag the US at first but once things stabilize this will happen because China has a lot more engineers and a lot more data. Anyone who hasn't read AI Superpowers should…

I never knew Sam Altman threw Bret Taylor out of a window. That makes the OpenAI board drama more understandable.

Re: Deepseek: The quiet giant leading China’s AI race

#40

Post by quantum_state »

djaouen wrote: post #34
kjellsbells wrote: post #10

If you tell the world that eggs are awesome while denying other countries access to eggs, they discover ways to use less eggs and eventually realize they don't need eggs at all. Then you are stuck making Dennys breakfasts while the rest of the world is on to fine dining. China has incredibly strong incentives to do the pure research needed to break the current GPU-or-else lock. I hope, for science' sake, we dont end…

> If you tell the world that eggs are awesome while denying other countries access to eggs, they discover ways to use less eggs You are confusing cause with effect. What actually happened: Nixon opened up US trade with China and, ever since, China has been stealing trade secrets to undermine and overthrow American interests. Limiting their access to eggs was literally us trying to prevent them from stealing all our s…

It seems to me that we forgot about the “stealing” of the “shit” from Europe and other places in the early days …
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