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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]

#21

Post by nsoonhui »

Here's something I really don't understand: If as alleged Chinese open weight models are catching up with US anyway, and the performance is near US frontier model level but Chinese can do it with a fraction of cost, and eventually AI model will be commodified, wouldn't that means that the billion or even trillion dollars that US labs spend have only diminishing returns and the lead is only temporary?

So why Deepseek also want to go down that route? Is having the absolute frontier really that important, given that the performance difference is just transient and costly?

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

#22

Post by kburman »

nsoonhui wrote: post #21

Here's something I really don't understand: If as alleged Chinese open weight models are catching up with US anyway, and the performance is near US frontier model level but Chinese can do it with a fraction of cost, and eventually AI model will be commodified, wouldn't that means that the billion or even trillion dollars that US labs spend have only diminishing returns and the lead is only temporary? So why Deepseek…

They want to achieve AGI first because, once it is achieved, no one knows what the world will look like.

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

#23

Post by motoboi »

nsoonhui wrote: post #21

Here's something I really don't understand: If as alleged Chinese open weight models are catching up with US anyway, and the performance is near US frontier model level but Chinese can do it with a fraction of cost, and eventually AI model will be commodified, wouldn't that means that the billion or even trillion dollars that US labs spend have only diminishing returns and the lead is only temporary? So why Deepseek…

There is an immense pot of gold at the end of this rainbow and if the theories about ASI are in the general correct direction, only one winner will get it.

It makes no difference if the pot do actually exist, because the prospect of it being real make not getting it the end of your company.

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

#24

Post by anon373839 »

milkshakes wrote: post #14
Aboutplants wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So what? There are physical and economic ceilings on dumb computation scaling.

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

#25

Post by saghm »

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.

I don't know that it's clear that the motivation is that it's "helping" their competitors directly. Maybe the motivation is "if we rely on these, then the next time a US president arbitrarily decides to block us from buying them, we won't have the infrastructure already in place to be able to work around it". It seems more betting on a shorter-term cost with less uncertainty in the long term rather than a shorter-term win with a lot harder to quantify risks in the long term.

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

#26

Post by usaar333 »

nsoonhui wrote: post #21

Here's something I really don't understand: If as alleged Chinese open weight models are catching up with US anyway, and the performance is near US frontier model level but Chinese can do it with a fraction of cost, and eventually AI model will be commodified, wouldn't that means that the billion or even trillion dollars that US labs spend have only diminishing returns and the lead is only temporary? So why Deepseek…

> and eventually AI model will be commodified

This axiom not being true (and I'd bet against it) means your overall conclusion is false.

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

#27

Post by throw101010 »

grim_io wrote: post #19

One has to be careful when pointing out problems in China, lest such criticism be confused with criticism of the Party's policies.

It's funny that you mention this because with the current US administration it works in a similar fashion... see Anthropic not cooperating with the US military and getting their new shiny model "paused" few weeks later (and officials like Hegseth being pretty open about it beforehand, signalling to them that criticizing the US admin/not cooperating will hurt their business: https://xcancel.com/SecWar/status/2027507717469049070 )

I'm not defending China at all, just noticing a detestable trend.

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

#28

Post by seewhydee »

culi wrote: post #16
pinkmuffinere wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Bypassing the CUDA moat is, in fact, one of the major tasks Deepseek set for itself. Their efforts in this area are likely one of the main reasons for their slow release cadence, culminating in their v4 inference setup that runs on Huawei Ascend chips.

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

#29

Post by jimbob45 »

throw101010 wrote: post #27
grim_io wrote: post #19

One has to be careful when pointing out problems in China, lest such criticism be confused with criticism of the Party's policies.

It's funny that you mention this because with the current US administration it works in a similar fashion... see Anthropic not cooperating with the US military and getting their new shiny model "paused" few weeks later (and officials like Hegseth being pretty open about it beforehand, signalling to them that criticizing the US admin/not cooperating will hurt their business: https://xcancel.com/SecWar/status/202750771…

This seems like when Indians were super excited about China having castes too. Then, it turned out that they were egregiously incomparable.

US incumbent party criticism is nothing like CCP criticism.

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

#30

Post by 8organicbits »

motoboi wrote: post #23
nsoonhui wrote: post #21

Here's something I really don't understand: If as alleged Chinese open weight models are catching up with US anyway, and the performance is near US frontier model level but Chinese can do it with a fraction of cost, and eventually AI model will be commodified, wouldn't that means that the billion or even trillion dollars that US labs spend have only diminishing returns and the lead is only temporary? So why Deepseek…

There is an immense pot of gold at the end of this rainbow and if the theories about ASI are in the general correct direction, only one winner will get it. It makes no difference if the pot do actually exist, because the prospect of it being real make not getting it the end of your company.

I think that statement is vacuous true for all magical thinking.
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