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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

#91

Post by lumost »

jdietrich wrote: post #32
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 SO…

Isn't this the nature of past technology developments? few tech companies have a true technical "moat" - In California, the employees of any firm are free to raise funds and start a competitor the moment they are dissatisfied with the current leadership/compensation/location. During my career I have yet to observe a "secret sauce" that took more than a few weeks to learn and understand once on the inside.

The technical moats we know of in B2B have typically come from a combination of a large number of features efficiently tied into a platform/service that would be cost prohibitive to replicate (ElasticSearch, most successful Database firms), a network effect around that platform the makes it difficult not to be on the platform (CUDA, x86, windows).

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

#92

Post by bpodgursky »

jitl wrote: post #61
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.

If you want to look at an objective numeric metric for this, why not foreign military bases? US has 128+, China had ~2. To project global military power China will need similar order of magnitude presence. I use that number as a check against sometimes breathless and sensational journalism about the topic. It’s harder for me to come up with a simpler metric for “Belt and Road” / IMF style control-through-capital. But…

The US does not have 128 foreign military bases. It has ~50 nominal bases [1]. Most of them are just the US sharing an airfield with a friendly country; it's a refueling stop that would not be hard for China to replicate.

The US does have several large overseas bases but 90% of this list is are indefensible logistics hubs and not a meaningful projection of force.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_military_inst...

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

#93

Post by Scea91 »

tossandthrow wrote: post #85
Workaccount2 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trying to equate government mandated censorship to private company policy censorship is a wholly dishonest sleight of hand.

Both in the EU and the US there is plenty of regulation that mandates these types of censorship - and with reason. In the US there is 18 U.S.C. § 842(p). In the EU there is the entire AI Act. But I am sure you can yourself chat your way through to figure out what legislation companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are under.

Is any of these equivalent in nature to, for example, censoring information about Tiananmen square events?

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

#94

Post by evanjrowley »

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…

One advantage China has that you haven't mentioned is higher degrees of mandatory surveillance over a larger population [0]. Even if they never reach/surpass the west in AI compute power, there is greater potential for China to have more training data in long term to produce higher quality models. Chinese laws require data types and algorithms to be reported to the CCP government, which combined with authoritarian policies, gives the CCP far greater leverage in AI development strategy compared to any other entity[2]. From this perspective, growth in Chinese AI capability is not only a threat to US national interests, but also to the Chinese public itself.

Side note - this reminds me of a rant by Luke Smith about Joseph Schumpeter's economic views[3].

[0] https://theconversation.com/digital-surveillance-is-omnipres...

[1] https://carnegieendowment.org/posts/2022/12/what-chinas-algo...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYUgTzT79ww

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

#96

Post by qwertox »

paganel wrote: post #62
qwertox wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> It remains to be seen how stable a totalitarian government can be Much more stable than the government that has Trump, Musk and Vivek calling the shots, that's for sure.

If these three died, it might be a loss to the country. None of them is as important to the country as Xi is to China. The resilience of the CCP, in light of its dependence on Xi, can only be upheld through the absolute suppression of freedom. But the average daily life is certainly much more enjoyable than in NK.

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

#97

Post by sebmellen »

inSenCite wrote: post #95

"Before Deepseek, CEO Liang Wenfeng’s main venture was High-Flyer (幻方), a top 4 Chinese quantitative hedge fund last valued at $8 billion" Seems wild that a top 4 quant hedge fund is only $8B?

Chinese stocks are nowhere near American prices.

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

#98

Post by joyeuse6701 »

tossandthrow wrote: post #19
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…

> ... 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…

Xi has knee-capped anything a threat to his power, this Xi-ceiling as I call it, will prevent true cutting edge dominance compared to the West.

Sure, there’s censorship in the West, but it’s not nearly as scary or effective as the East’s. Genius does not regularly spring under the sword of Damocles.

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

#99

Post by tossandthrow »

Scea91 wrote: post #93
tossandthrow wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both in the EU and the US there is plenty of regulation that mandates these types of censorship - and with reason. In the US there is 18 U.S.C. § 842(p). In the EU there is the entire AI Act. But I am sure you can yourself chat your way through to figure out what legislation companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are under.

Is any of these equivalent in nature to, for example, censoring information about Tiananmen square events?

This is more a political discourse that a business or technical one.

You sure can establish that there is a qualitative difference on the type of censorship carried out - congrats.

The main point I spelled out is that there is no comparative advantage (technical or business wise) on working on these products in the west as you have to implement and operationalize the same amount of censorship / safety.

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

#100

Post by andrepd »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #81
tossandthrow wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Trying to equate government mandated censorship to private company policy censorship is a wholly dishonest sleight of hand.

Why on earth would it be better? Trillion dollar corpos in the turbo-capitalist West are already far more powerful than most states.
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