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DeepSeek pause fundraise after comments on compute gap to US leaked (transcript) [pdf]

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Re: DeepSeek pause fundraise after comments on compute gap to US leaked (transcript) [pdf]

#11

Post by oliculipolicula »

credit_guy wrote: post #3

I think the way to parse the current title "DeepSeek pause fundraise after comments on compute gap to US leaked (transcript) [pdf]" is that there was a leak that DeepSeek will pause fundraising because they perceive there is a compute gap with the US. I am also guessing that the majority of the people who read this title will think that DeepSeek is pausing this fundraising because some comments they made about the co…

I wanted to post this which explains the wording but I thought the transcript was more interesting. Sorry. Maybe mods can help me to put what follows as auxiliary link. I don't know how.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-25/deepseek-...

Update:

Less-paywalled word-for-word copy it seems at

https://fortune.com/2026/07/25/deepseek-liang-wenfeng-backer...

https://archive.ph/zpIrG

Re: DeepSeek pause fundraise after comments on compute gap to US leaked (transcript) [pdf]

#12

Post by Aboutplants »

cyanydeez wrote: post #6
PeterHolzwarth wrote: post #2

Article grabbed at random that provides some more context (tho could use more): https://www.cyberkendra.com/2026/07/deepseek-pauses-fundrais... "The Hangzhou AI lab has told prospective investors in its second fundraising round that it is suspending the deal, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg on Saturday, days after remarks attributed to founder Liang Wenfeng about US-China AI competition circulated wide…

this bodes well for continuing to refine smaller models and open sourcing them. There's a delusion that what America's AI companies are doing is "best"; the chinese should realize that the forefront is bloated and there's likely hundreds of speed ups viable. Pushing open weights will continue to grind down the bloat.

I was gonna say, this just puts more pressure to deliver ground breaking research with limited resources. And if history teaches us anything it’s that scarcity produces ingenuity.

Re: DeepSeek pause fundraise after comments on compute gap to US leaked (transcript) [pdf]

#13

Post by pinkmuffinere »

culi wrote: post #9

> Objectively speaking, if I can spend two billion this year, it would indicate that our procurement department has achieved outstanding performance. The main gap between us and the United States lies in resources, while the disparity in personnel is minimal—there is virtually no difference, as we are essentially the same team of people, possibly from China. > With the largest models available today, we simply cannot…

Wow, that is fascinating, I didn't realize China was now blocking foreign chips, lol. It's not a definitive indicator, but I feel that doesn't bode well for US dominance in this area -- when your competitor thinks they'd be helping _you_ by using your resources, that's not great.

Re: DeepSeek pause fundraise after comments on compute gap to US leaked (transcript) [pdf]

#14

Post by milkshakes »

Aboutplants wrote: post #12
cyanydeez wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this bodes well for continuing to refine smaller models and open sourcing them. There's a delusion that what America's AI companies are doing is "best"; the chinese should realize that the forefront is bloated and there's likely hundreds of speed ups viable. Pushing open weights will continue to grind down the bloat.

I was gonna say, this just puts more pressure to deliver ground breaking research with limited resources. And if history teaches us anything it’s that scarcity produces ingenuity.

http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html

> One thing that should be learned from the bitter lesson is the great power of general purpose methods, of methods that continue to scale with increased computation even as the available computation becomes very great. The two methods that seem to scale arbitrarily in this way are search and learning.

Re: DeepSeek pause fundraise after comments on compute gap to US leaked (transcript) [pdf]

#16

Post by culi »

pinkmuffinere wrote: post #13
culi wrote: post #9

> Objectively speaking, if I can spend two billion this year, it would indicate that our procurement department has achieved outstanding performance. The main gap between us and the United States lies in resources, while the disparity in personnel is minimal—there is virtually no difference, as we are essentially the same team of people, possibly from China. > With the largest models available today, we simply cannot…

Wow, that is fascinating, I didn't realize China was now blocking foreign chips, lol. It's not a definitive indicator, but I feel that doesn't bode well for US dominance in this area -- when your competitor thinks they'd be helping _you_ by using your resources, that's not great.

They've achieved self-sufficiency in >14nm chips in remarkable timing. Unfortunately for DeepSeek, it's the And even if Huawei's Ascend 910C can compete with NVIDIA's H200, CUDA is still a large moat

Re: DeepSeek pause fundraise after comments on compute gap to US leaked (transcript) [pdf]

#17

Post by SyneRyder »

oliculipolicula wrote: post #11
credit_guy wrote: post #3

I think the way to parse the current title "DeepSeek pause fundraise after comments on compute gap to US leaked (transcript) [pdf]" is that there was a leak that DeepSeek will pause fundraising because they perceive there is a compute gap with the US. I am also guessing that the majority of the people who read this title will think that DeepSeek is pausing this fundraising because some comments they made about the co…

I wanted to post this which explains the wording but I thought the transcript was more interesting. Sorry. Maybe mods can help me to put what follows as auxiliary link. I don't know how. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-25/deepseek-... Update: Less-paywalled word-for-word copy it seems at https://fortune.com/2026/07/25/deepseek-liang-wenfeng-backer... https://archive.ph/zpIrG

Most of that is paywalled, but this one paragraph in the Bloomberg article suggests it might be more to do with investors leaking information:

"The suspension stemmed in part from Liang’s frustration over online reports about his comments to investors during his first financing deal"

The part of the transcript I'd seen floating around online was this part from around 1 hour 26 min:

"With the largest models available today, we simply cannot afford to train them. Even if we spent all five hundred billion yuan, we still wouldn't be able to do so. Even if we could accumulate the resources, we wouldn't have the means to utilize them. The current largest model requires approximately 800 billion activations; domestically, we are still at a scale of several dozen billion activations, and even the largest domestic model may only require several dozen billion activations—a difference of an order of magnitude. To train a model of the same size as an AI system, we would need around 50,000 GB300 GPUs or Huawei 950 GPUs, totaling two hundred thousand cards. This is merely training; research has not yet been considered. Therefore, the biggest gap between us and the United States lies in resources."

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