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An analysis of DeepSeek's R1-Zero and R1

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Re: An analysis of DeepSeek's R1-Zero and R1

#22
> But now with reasoning systems and verifiers, we can create brand new legitimate data to train on. This can either be done offline where the developer pays to create the data or at inference time where the end user pays!

> This is a fascinating shift in economics and suggests there could be a runaway power concentrating moment for AI system developers who have the largest number of paying customers. Those customers are footing the bill to create new high quality data … which improves the model … which becomes better and more preferred by users … you get the idea.

While I think this is an interesting hypothesis, I'm skeptical. You might be lowering the cost of your training corpus by a few million dollars, but I highly doubt you are getting novel, high quality data.

We are currently in a world where SOTA base model seems to be capped at around GPT4o levels. I have no doubt that in 2-3 years our base models will compete with o1 or even o3... just it remains to be seen what innovations/optimizations get us there.

The most promising idea is to use reasoning models to generate data, and then train our non-reasoning models with the reasoning-embedded data. But... it remains to be seen how much of the chain of thought reasoning you can really capture into model weights. I'm guessing some, but I wonder if there is a cap to multi-head attention architecture. If reasoning can be transferred from reasoning models to base models, OpenAI should have already trained a new model with o3 training data, right?

Another thought is maybe we don't need to improve our base models much. It's sufficient to have them be generalists, and to improve reasoning models (lowering price, improving quality) going forward.

Re: An analysis of DeepSeek's R1-Zero and R1

#23
post #8

The idea that a lot of compute is moving towards inference has a huge consequence for the current "AI investments". This is bad news for NVDA particularly. The inference focused solutions have better economics than paying NVDA those huge margins (e.g. Grog)

Nvidia can actually charge larger margins if inference compute goes down. It would enable them to manufacture more units of smaller GPUs using inferior and cheaper silicon, all of which would increase the profits per unit sold as well as the number of units they can manufacture. The industry has to find a way to separate itself from Nvidia's GPGPU technology if they want to stop being gouged. The issue is that nobody…

>The issue is that nobody, not Apple, not AMD, not Intel, has been treating Nvidia's hardware as a serious threat

Google has and they've built a much more cost efficient (for them) system: the TPU. They even rent them out, and in terms of cost per unit compute TPUs are significantly cheaper than renting GPUs from the big cloud providers. Amazon's also tried to do something similar with Trainium chips, however they're usefulness is more limited due to software issues (Amazon's much weaker at compiler development than Google, so Trainium software is quite slow and buggy).

Re: An analysis of DeepSeek's R1-Zero and R1

#24

The claim is that this removes the human bottleneck (aka SFT or supervised fine tuning) on domains with a verifiable reward. Critically, this verifiable reward is extremely hard to pin down in nearly all domains besides mathematics and computer science.

Reasoning transfers across domains.

Re: An analysis of DeepSeek's R1-Zero and R1

#26
post #8

The idea that a lot of compute is moving towards inference has a huge consequence for the current "AI investments". This is bad news for NVDA particularly. The inference focused solutions have better economics than paying NVDA those huge margins (e.g. Grog)

Nvidia can actually charge larger margins if inference compute goes down. It would enable them to manufacture more units of smaller GPUs using inferior and cheaper silicon, all of which would increase the profits per unit sold as well as the number of units they can manufacture. The industry has to find a way to separate itself from Nvidia's GPGPU technology if they want to stop being gouged. The issue is that nobody…

For inference Nvidia has more significant competition than for training. See Groq, Google's TPU's etc.

Re: An analysis of DeepSeek's R1-Zero and R1

#27

The claim is that this removes the human bottleneck (aka SFT or supervised fine tuning) on domains with a verifiable reward. Critically, this verifiable reward is extremely hard to pin down in nearly all domains besides mathematics and computer science.

IMHO, there are strategies that could extend this approach to many other domains.

I was discussing this idea (along with a small prototype) with a prominent symbolic AI researcher who also agrees, and thinks that with the emergence of RL as a viable training method for LLMs, it might be possible to pursue neuro-symbolic learning at a large scale.

Current systems are impressive, but reasoning is too fragile to trust them. They fall into obvious logical and statistical fallacies that are evident to a layperson.

Re: An analysis of DeepSeek's R1-Zero and R1

#28
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As in there's an objective truth that can be determined by a computer. E.g. whether code compiles, whether a unit test passes, whether the answer given to a mathematical question like 3+5 is correct. Many other fields have no objective truth (like art or creative writing), or objective truth requires measurement of the physical world (although if the world can be simulated accurately enough for the problem class at h…

Isn't "code compiles" an insufficient criteria? e.g you would need to prove that for all inputs the code produces the correct output which would in turn make the problem way more complex

Not if the problem as written is "does this code compile", which is still a useful stepping stone for some workflows. Yours is certainly a more useful query in most cases but repositioning or re-scoping the original question can still lead to a net win.

Re: An analysis of DeepSeek's R1-Zero and R1

#29
post #17

Mike from Baseten here We're super proud to support this work. If you're thinking of running deepseek in production, give us a shout!

We currently evaluate DeepSeek-R1 for our production system. We aren't done yet, but I think it's a match.

Awesome - we'd love to have our CEO/CTO chat with you and your team if you're interested. Shoot me a note at mike.bilodeau @ baseten.co and I'll make it happen!

Re: An analysis of DeepSeek's R1-Zero and R1

#30

Mike from Baseten here We're super proud to support this work. If you're thinking of running deepseek in production, give us a shout!

Earlier today I read a reddit comment[1] about a guy who tried running the quantized version from unsloth[2] on 4xH100 and the results was underwhelming (it ended up costing $137 per 1 million tokens).

Any idea of what they're doing wrong?

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1icphqa/how_to_...

[2]: https://unsloth.ai/blog/deepseekr1-dynamic

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