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Notes on DeepSeek

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Re: Notes on DeepSeek

#101

Post by chvid »

Sorry you had to remove this post. As far as I can tell it did not say anything that is not already in the public domain.

The story of DeepSeek is incredibly inspirational: The founder being a phd in computer science, completely bootstrapping his AI efforts by doing quantitative trading, and even as they reached the frontier in the hottest subfield being more open than any other lab about what they were doing.

In general I find the attitude of the Chinese AI labs (and government) to be refreshingly not "AGI-pilled" and focusing on the correct downsides of AI (the effect on youth employment and the messing up of higher education).

Re: Notes on DeepSeek

#102

Post by shimman »

hsuduebc2 wrote: post #51
slaw wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In every market China dominates, Chinese products are still inexpensive. Solar panels, batteries, EVs, drones,..

Because they are subsidized by the Chinese government. This is literally a tactic to destroy global competition. It's a smart move to make everyone dependent on them.

How is this not any different than US corporations only existing do to hundreds of billions worth of corporate welfare? Good grief, why are American corporations such sore players against actual competition? US elites are absolutely pathetic.

Re: Notes on DeepSeek

#103

Post by shimman »

pooploop64 wrote: post #79
pstuart wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's plenty to not like about the CCP, but their strategic investment in the country as a whole is impressive. It would be great to have that on our side as well but with the current state of things that is a non-starter.

We have a lot of propaganda to deprogram regarding it being evil to do that.

Imagine how much better the future could be if we broke away from the American cold war mentality, one that has made the world more dangerous and unstable, versus actual diplomacy and cooperation?

Re: Notes on DeepSeek

#104

Post by [deleted] »

chvid wrote: post #101

Sorry you had to remove this post. As far as I can tell it did not say anything that is not already in the public domain. The story of DeepSeek is incredibly inspirational: The founder being a phd in computer science, completely bootstrapping his AI efforts by doing quantitative trading, and even as they reached the frontier in the hottest subfield being more open than any other lab about what they were doing. In gen…

[deleted]

Re: Notes on DeepSeek

#105

Post by LoganDark »

swyx wrote: post #41
quadruple wrote: post #23

Post appears to have been removed, I caught a copy of it: https://pastebin.com/rcAqEFG1 I assume it will get reposted at some point.

thanks. this really isnt that long, might as well paste in full here since OP deleted. Notes on DeepSeek: We visited the company HQ last Tuesday. It was founded in 2023 by Liang Wenfeng and operated out of his hedge fund, High-Flyer, until somewhat recently. The company released their R1 model in January 2025, so it was interesting to see what they’ve been doing The company is located in an unmarked, 12-story buildin…

I think treating it as just a technology is right. Though there are a lot of things I like about Anthropic, what I don't like is how they scare themselves and hype up how dangerously powerful their models are. It feels so disingenuous even if they seem to actually believe it.

I also don't like how easily manipulated they are. For instance, they should have seen through Persona. They shouldn't have touched Persona with a 10 foot pole. Persona is not the answer to anything.

Re: Notes on DeepSeek

#106

Post by jimbob45 »

deaux wrote: post #96
hsuduebc2 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they are subsidized by the Chinese government. This is literally a tactic to destroy global competition. It's a smart move to make everyone dependent on them.

Yes, they learnt this from the US, who subsidized Uber for _14 years_, Amazon for 9 years and Youtube for many years until they had destroyed global competition and made everyone dependent on them. This is now happening again with Anthropic and OpenAI, of course. China's subsidies are comparatively much shorter.

YouTube has never seriously had competition and AliBaba has been around almost as long as Amazon.

Re: Notes on DeepSeek

#108

Post by edot »

surgical_fire wrote: post #74
toraway wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Deepseek Flash V4 really was a "holy shit" moment and deserves the praise/hype it's been getting from users. I have a multi-tier subscription strategy I've maintained for the last year of: 1. $20-$30 plan from first Claude now Codex for "SOTA" 2. Gemini via the extra $10/mo or so from my Google One plan 3. a cheap fallback plan. Together it gives me plenty of head room/model performance for $40ish/mo, plus letting me…

Man, I decided to try DS with a healthy dose of skepticism. I canceled ChatGPT because I would be on vacations. Codex was pretty great, but I thought "Let me put 10 bucks on Deepseek API and plug it into Claude Code". I was completely blown away. I found it even better than Claude or Codex. And those 10 bucks? It lasted for more than a month. I don't see myself coming back to Claude/OpenAI.

Agreed. I’ve cancelled all plans except OpenCode Go. OpenRouter for API spend. Feels so nice to a) not feel like I have to code when I don’t want to just because I need to make my subscription worth the cost and b) know that this level of performance won’t be yanked away. Super pleased with DeepSeek V4 Pro.

Re: Notes on DeepSeek

#109

Post by verdverm »

chvid wrote: post #101

Sorry you had to remove this post. As far as I can tell it did not say anything that is not already in the public domain. The story of DeepSeek is incredibly inspirational: The founder being a phd in computer science, completely bootstrapping his AI efforts by doing quantitative trading, and even as they reached the frontier in the hottest subfield being more open than any other lab about what they were doing. In gen…

AllenAi seems to the most open lab to me, sharing not just models and even training data, but also the training code and methodologies.

https://allenai.org/olmo

Re: Notes on DeepSeek

#110

Post by SepiaSapient »

FergusArgyll wrote: post #19
boristsr wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's absolutely mind boggling to see claims of model distillation being theft, a class of attack, and all sorts of claims all the while Meta is in court for copyright violation, anthropic has had to settle a case with authors. With distillation "attacks" at least they paid API fees.

There are 2 things worth separating. 1) China distills and is therefore morally bad. As you rightly point out, that's not a great argument. 2) China distills and is therefore possibly not that competent. I think that makes sense. If they only catch up to the frontier through distillation then 1) Their model will never be as good as the model they are distilling from. 2) They will never reach the frontier - they need…

I'm simply a postgrad from a no name university, but I'm not sure that the future frontier will come from the current approach from OpenAI and Anthropic. Distilling just seems like another avenue to collect useful data, like using books or scrapping the human-net, not necessarily copycat behavior. Chucking another 1000 TWh and scaling with already pillaged human-output is having diminishing results.

The next "frontier" as in, an order of magnitude higher model capability, might come from eschewing the bitter lesson and trying to be clever instead of pilling on GPUs. (I'm sure US labs also try clever new architectures) Maybe the plateau is permanent in the medium term. The frontier will be the exercise in taking the 10T monster models into something that can be run locally with minimal degradation.

That jibes a lot more with "AI is just new tech" attitude than the (genuine or otherwise) "we will build the Godhead in our image".

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