Great article, thanks for writing it! Really great summary of the current state of the AI industry for someone like me who's outside of it (but tangential, given that I work with GPUs for graphics).
The one thing from the article that sticks out to me is that the author/people are assuming that deepseek needing 1/45th the amount of hardware means that the other 44/45ths large tech companies have invested were wasteful.
Does software not scale to meet hardware? I don't see this as 44/45ths wasted hardware, but as a free increase in the amount of hardware people have. Software needing less hardware means you can run even _more_ software without spending more money, not that you need less hardware, right? (for the top-end, non-embedded use cases).
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As an aside, the state of the "AI" industry really freaks me out sometimes. Ignoring any sort of short or long term effects on society, jobs, people, etc, just the sheer amount of money and time invested into this one thing is, insane?
Tons of custom processing chips, interconnects, compilers, algorithms, _press releases!_, etc all for one specific field. It's like someone taking the last decade of advances in computers, software, etc, and shoving it in the space of a year. For comparison, Rust 1.0 is 10 years old - I vividly remember the release. And even then it took years to propagate out as a "thing" that people were interested in and invested significant time into. Meanwhile deepseek releases a new model (complete with a customer-facing product name and chat interface, instead of something boring and technical), and in 5 days it's being replicated (to at least some degree) and copied by competitors. Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc are all making custom chips and investing insane amounts of money into different compilers, programming languages, hardware, and research.
It's just, kind of disquieting? Like everyone involved in AI lives in another world operating at breakneck speed, with billions of dollars involved, and the rest of us are just watching from the sidelines. Most of it (LLMs specifically) is no longer exciting to me. It's like, what's the point of spending time on a non-AI related project? We can spend some time writing a nice API and working on a cool feature or making a UI prettier and that's great, and maybe with a good amount of contributors and solid, sustained effort, we can make a cool project that's useful and people enjoy, and earns money to support people if it's commercial. But then for AI, github repos with shiny well-written readmes pop up overnight, tons of text is being written, thought, effort, and billions of dollars get burned or speculated on in an instant on new things, as soon as the next marketing release is posted.
How can the next advancement in graphics, databases, cryptography, etc compete with the sheer amount of societal attention AI receives?
Where does that leave writing software for the rest of us?