The US Economy is pretty vulnerable here. If it turns out that you, in fact, don't need a gazillion GPUs to build SOTA models it destroys a lot of perceived value. I wonder if this was a deliberate move by PRC or really our own fault in falling for the fallacy that more is always better.
How likely is this? Just a cursory probing of deepseek yields all kinds of censoring of topics. Isn't it just as likely Chinese sponsors of this have incentivized and sponsored an undercutting of prices so that a more favorable LLM is preferred on the market? Think about it, this is something they are willing to do with other industries. And, if LLMs are going to be engineering accelerators as the world believes, the…
as DeepSeek wasn't among China's major AI players before the R1 release, having maintained a relatively low profile. In fact, both DeepSeek-V2 and V3 had outperformed many competitors, I've seen some posts about that. However, these achievements received limited mainstream attention prior to their breakthrough release.