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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]

#111
post #50

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 skimmed the doc and my impression is that your second listed interpretation -- DeepSeek is pausing investment because of a leak -- is the more correct one. There's quite a bit of confidential information in the doc about the company and how it's positioning itself going forward to compete with US labs. I'd imagine they're not happy at all with this being leaked and are withholding investment as a punitive measure.…

Maybe because if you need more money to catch up with your competitors than anticipated then your ROIC is lower and your valuation changes?

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

#112
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> U.S. policymakers believe that even if the gap is small—like six months to a year—whoever reaches AGI first... From past experience, AGI was never seriously discussed in these kinds of conversations beyond thought experiments, and was basically humoring SBF, Daniela Amodei, and the other EA types (some deep believers, but some who I felt were cynically using it as a way to preempt competition back when OpenAI and G…

>C4ISR, OffSec, loitering munitions, Disinfo/social media botting Curious what the next highest fruit actually is at this point? Social media botting seems solved and easy to manipulate people. loitering mutions I mean you can probably write something up with openCV right now to automate what the ukranians are doing by hand with their fpv drones. Seems like a lot of the really cool "AI" stuff is actually just old sch…

VLMs are the name of the game now in the UAV space, as well as distilled models that can perform well on edge compute (eg. Processing sat images directly on the sat instead of dealing with C2 latency).

And social media disinfo isn't a solved problem - it's a solved problem in English, Putonghua, French, Russian, and maybe German but most other languages lack direct overlap (this is something that even the then PLASSF start digging into - Vietnamese, Tagalog, Turkish, and Indian languages to Putonghua corpora was noted as an active issue with traditional NMT).

And those hand-driven FPVs - while useful - aren't the bleeding edge UAV work that Ukraine and their private sector partners (including a PortCo of mine) are working on. Ukraine actually cracks down on releasing some of the more bleeding edge work for OpSec reasons and much of what you see on Telegram or Reddit is reviewed and cleared.

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

#113
post #8

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…

Maybe: "Leaked Deepseek transcripts reveal plan to pause fundraising due to compute gap" I don't know what "compute gap" means in this context though and it's not clear that that's why they plan to pause fundraising or if the title is conflating.

yep. the word they use is probably 克制 or self-restraint. no need to raise so much cash if you can't use it.

in his article he talks about the negative aspects of getting everything you want. (all the money, brightest minds, biggest share in AI) etc. he says that these are the things that will cause a company to fail.

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

#114
post #52
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe: "Leaked Deepseek transcripts reveal plan to pause fundraising due to compute gap" I don't know what "compute gap" means in this context though and it's not clear that that's why they plan to pause fundraising or if the title is conflating.

Yeah, wouldn't it makes sense to increase fundraising, so as to acquire more compute to close the gap?

I guess they likely can't right now due to no hardware available, either cause of bans or already all booked.

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

#115
post #47

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…

U.S. policymakers believe that even if the gap is small—like six months to a year—whoever reaches AGI first (whatever that means) could gain such an overwhelming advantage over their perceived adversary that it would effectively kneecap them. (You can look at the kinds of things they mention—cyber, WMDs—to get a sense of what they mean.) Jensen Huang disagrees and has said AI is a marathon.

> Jensen Huang disagrees and has said AI is a marathon.

We have a saying for that in Italy: "Oste, com'e' il vino?", "Innkeeper, how's the wine?", meaning you should take with a grain of salt assertions that clearly benefit whoever's making them.

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

#116

Everything in this transcript reads so very different from what megalomaniacs in charge of Anthropic/OAI have to say

Not sure why people keep lumping OAI and Anthropic together. Really, Anthropic are the evil ones. You can make the case OAI are evil too if you want, but Anthropic are very clearly significantly worse and they aren't even in the same ballpark. Notice how OAI signed the recent open-source/open-weights letter with all of the other big tech companies, but Anthropic are the only ones who didn't? Notice how their employee…

You think OAI are doing all that out of the goodness of their hearts?

OAI was a market leader until anthropic decided to start placing all their bets on coding agents, they became the leader and now OAI is scrambling and doing everything they can to de-throne. Don't forget that it was OAI that started this whole RAM shortage, instead of being sustainable about it, they just up and decided to buy 40% of all memory production. They are all bad mate, all fighting for this virtual crown that no one cares except for them.

In the end, what matters is pricing, whoever offers sonnet 4.6 quality at the cheapest monthly pricing will win.

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

#117
post #47

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…

U.S. policymakers believe that even if the gap is small—like six months to a year—whoever reaches AGI first (whatever that means) could gain such an overwhelming advantage over their perceived adversary that it would effectively kneecap them. (You can look at the kinds of things they mention—cyber, WMDs—to get a sense of what they mean.) Jensen Huang disagrees and has said AI is a marathon.

Reaching AGI would come with so many ethical issues, it feels so absurd that actual adults seem to actually believe it’s something that must be chased as fast as possible

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

#118
post #47

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…

U.S. policymakers believe that even if the gap is small—like six months to a year—whoever reaches AGI first (whatever that means) could gain such an overwhelming advantage over their perceived adversary that it would effectively kneecap them. (You can look at the kinds of things they mention—cyber, WMDs—to get a sense of what they mean.) Jensen Huang disagrees and has said AI is a marathon.

> Jensen Huang disagrees and has said AI is a marathon.

Of course he'd say that; he wants to keep his shovels flying off the shelves.

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

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

amusingly ive been working on ultra sparse llm inference/ training/ model design because nature loaths a dense graph/matrix and cause i think it shoukd be possible. i actually stood up a 20-25 percent faster than sota causal fast attention kernel yesterday, will be standing up cuda/metal/armv8 kernels too and thats gonna be fun. i genuinely think these models should be like 0.1 percent sparse for same capabilities we…

I am not much of a math person, but if we look at the how the brain is wired, we see that the dendrites (the inputs) of a neuron are hundreds of micrometers in length, and the axons (the outputs) are millimeters, and very rarely can stretch to tens of centimeters. So they can sample only a tiny amount of internal state, and affect a much larger, but usually still small output.

In math terms, this means a layer of a network can be represented with a block matrix in the whole 'layer' matrix, which I think means its sparse as you said.

As I said, my math knowledge is rusty, but I remember that a lot of matrix optimization techniques center around decomposing large matrices into these smaller blocks, which are then evaluated, and the output is combined in a final pass. Which leads to a huge reduction on parameter numbers and the time it takes to evaluate the result

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

#120
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't forsee politicians in either country handing over their power to AI They won't see it that way, but also programmers don't see ourselves as having handed over our power to AI, and yet...

Politicians have control over their power. Programmers don't. Compare with how politicians never vote to reduce their income.

Actually history shows that despotism or power in one single figure is a concept that waned with the increasing complexity of the world. One single despot could govern easily over matters of a small tribe or kingdom, but as states became more complex power was delegated to court, bureaucracy and even the bourgeoise. As the sovereign demanded ever more power it eventually needed to distribute power to the people, so it could tap its numbers. Napoleon’s schools for the peasants were so he could have a better and more numerous corps of officers than his rivals, which had a smaller pool of recruitment.

The same way programmers gave power to AI as a tool, so they could be more powerful in effecting automation, politicians that do not give up power to AI will be at a disadvantage to those who use AI to achieve more complex and effective power. The only problem might be the despot no longer shares power with those pesky humans but with a god in a machine, which in theory is in a box and does not have conflicting interests with the despot.

As today is Sunday, God help us.

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