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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

#131

Post by pphysch »

bobxmax wrote: post #120
cced wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Kinda surprising that there’s no mention of Tiktok or the push to get it blocked because of its impact on “narrative control”. Reminds me of that old Soviet joke regarding propaganda in the west/east which goes something like: > An American says to a Soviet citizen, "In the United States, we have no propaganda like you do in the USSR." > The Soviet citizen responds, "Exactly! In the USSR, we know it's propag…

This is so bang on. What's so insiduous about the West is how inundated everybody is with propaganda, but there's plausible deniability built into the system that everybody believes they're a free thinker. Reddit is a good example - one of the biggest aggregators and disseminators of information for tens of millions of people, primarily in the West. People who see themselves as above-average intelligence. Yet massive…

/r/worldnews is a great example of the potency of American propaganda.

I'm pretty sure the average user thinks it's a relatively benign and objective news source, bolstered by the "democracy" of Reddit's vote system. And that couldn't be further from the truth.

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

#132

Post by AndyNemmity »

tossandthrow wrote: post #31
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.

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.

I asked an LLM to implement a gender guessing library for python, and it outright refused saying it was a safety issue.

It's not just an illegal or immoral thing, it's broad strokes to potentially catch illegal or immoral things, by certain people who decide what those morals are.

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

#133

Post by kayewiggin »

solaarphunk wrote: post #67
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.

Economic superpower perhaps - just take a look at their relative GDP over time.

China has 900M people making less than $400/month, and 600M people making less than $100/month. relative GDP is a joke, go to China to see what most of them are eating (hint: it's unsafe food filled with chemicals, or its mostly carbs) and where these people are living (hint: it's shoddy constructed condos or run down farm houses)

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

#134

Post by Mistletoe »

qwertox wrote: post #96
paganel wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I am absolutely certain that those three dying would be a gain of function for the world.

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

#135

Post by rfoo »

nsoonhui wrote: post #17
logicchains wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I want to know exactly what makes everyone thinks that deepseek totally owns the LLM space? It achieved competitive performance to the competition at literally 10x less cost of production (training). That's an incredible achievement in any industry, especially given they have such a small team relative to competitors. Their API is 20-50x cheaper than the competitors, and not because they're burning cash by charging…

But like I said, deepseek is open source so why can't the competitors copy whatever source that makes the cost of production 10x cheaper ?

It is not open source, it's just open weight (which is an artifact instead of source) and open "recipe". They do not make their training / serving code available.

If you started to copy what they released in May immediately after release (DeepSeek-V2, which already contained non-trivial architecture innovation - MLA), you'd likely have slightly inferior but mostly on par optimized implementation maybe after some months. And here you go: DeepSeek-V3, try to play the catch up game again!

If you don't replicate their engineering work then your cost would be 10x~20x higher, which renders the entire point moot.

As long as the team can continue this trend there is no hope for copycats. And they are trying to "hijack" the mind of chip designers, too, see the "suggestions to chip manufactures" section. If they succeed you need to beat them in their own game.

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

#136

Post by daedrdev »

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…

The thing is Bejing undercuts this completly by allowing local governments to perform rampant shakedown of investors and ceos through disappearances for bogus charges, even in other provinces.

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

#137

Post by kayewiggin »

fakedang wrote: post #129
jitl wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I was of the same viewpoint as you - just look at the militaries! Except in today's world, being a military power is increasingly less relevant after a certain point, while economic supremacy is increasingly gaining prominence. While the West is content with self-platitudes for their "democracy", China has been building strong relationships with a number of countries looking to implement the "China-model", a capitali…

> China has been building strong relationships with a number of countries

Number of irrelevant countries. US's allies are Europe, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Canada, Mexico, Australia, etc. 80% of the world's wealth. and 95% of the world's top technologies.

> guess where these countries are buying their drones from

Soon, not China. China Is Cutting Off Drone Supplies Critical to Ukraine War Effort [1]. China is reportedly making drones for Russia instead, according to multiple intelligence officials.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-12-09/china-is-...

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

#138

Post by x_may »

timtom123 wrote: post #102

So much spam around this model. LocalLLaMA is stuffed with spam posts and even hacker news is getting spammed. Who has actually ran this model and verified performance? Does anyone know of a decent review from a trustworthy source?

The LMSYS leaderboards are crowdsourced and would be hard to fake, it showing a pretty strong performance in terms of human preference.

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

#139

Post by zitterbewegung »

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!

If you actually believe that NVIDA gpus are import restricted there are many stories that this is being sidestepped.

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

#140

Post by rfoo »

csomar wrote: post #111
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?

I think that's the value of the fund not AUM. BlackRock has 11trillion of AUM but only 39bn of equity.

幻方's peak AUM was just between $15-$20bn (more than 1e11 CNY but not that much) though.
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