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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]

#121

Post by homarp »

alephnerd wrote: post #85
WiSaGaN wrote: post #47

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 (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.

> 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…

>notice the recent shift towards identification on social media

i think this is more about control. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49036433 (The Home Ministry’s cybercrime arm, the Indian Cybercrime Coordination Centre, has ordered Microsoft subsidiary GitHub to remove Bluetooth-based messaging application Bitchat)

"The notice comes after several users participating in the Jantar Mantar protest were observed using Bluetooth-based messaging apps after the government imposed temporary restrictions on internet services"

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

#122

Post by MagicMoonlight »

dgellow wrote: post #117
WiSaGaN wrote: post #47

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 (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

[dead]

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

#123

Post by carterschonwald »

blagie wrote: post #98
carterschonwald wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Curiosity: For most of the past five years, I've known ways to do better than Anthropic, OpenAI, and friends in many ways, at least on paper. I know I was right about many of them since many would show up 6-24 months later tools from the major providers, or otherwise become standard practice. A central problem is the Mythical Man-Month. True, I could do those, beating then-state-of-the-art, but only given 2-5 years.…

thx for the kind response!

at the very least i have tools that let me easily hit better perf for fancy dense memory layouts, and the same tooling lets me experiment with frankly wildly wacky sparse and structured memory formats. the performance claims at least on the dense side are solid so far!

the sparsity angle is because i want magic in the world. like anyone with a really chunky computer like any of those mac mini pros or serious workstation / server tier compute should be able to train from scratch their one 31b equivalent model in a week or so tops is the goal post i have in mind

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

#124

Post by p1necone »

WiSaGaN wrote: post #47
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…

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.

I feel like if you showed current frontier models to someone 10 years ago, they'd probably call it AGI. Does AGI have a clear definition or is it just a pair of goalposts on wheels?

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

#125

Post by andai »

choonway wrote: post #113
culi wrote: 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.

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.

I shouldn't win too hard, because then I'll lose?

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

#126

Post by andai »

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.

The implication here is that the only gains left to be had are from scale. That we are already maximally efficient. If that's true, then how has OpenAI repeatedly bragged about reducing the cost of their models by orders of magnitude? (And DeepSeek Flash even more so, of course.)

But we have not been maximally efficient, we keep gaining efficiency. If we keep gaining efficiency, why should we assume it is impossible to gain more?

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

#128

Post by desterothx »

ranguna wrote: post #116
nullbio wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pro…

no, my company that wants a 1T$ IPO is more ethical than your company that wants a 1T$ IPO!!!!

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

#129

Post by antiford2049 »

choonway wrote: post #113
culi wrote: 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.

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.

is this similar to Meta starting to rent out own compute as they cant seem to do much with it and monetising it is much better ROI?...

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

#130

Post by torginus »

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…

I wonder if it would be viable for the Chinese to pursue a huge buildout of less sophisticated logic fabs. My experience with GPGPU is that it seems to intensely skew towards memory bandwidth, and has a much lower compute intensity than graphics (by which I mean rasterization and shaders).

This seems to be holding true for AI as well. I'm sure if you have an excess of compute and a dearth of bandwidth, you can trade the former for the latter, but still, this is a fundamenta property.

A lot of talk has been said about how companies are doing 'financial tricks' to extend the useful life of GPUs by showing lower depreciation - but what if these are not tricks at all - new GPUs don't really have that much more bandwidth, and while they might be clever in some other ways, they are limited in how much they can improve fundamentals.

This has been reflected in how memory vendors' stock price has exploded, but NVIDIA stayed stagnant.

Since the Chinese are far closer to the US in building SOTA memory chips, it's possible that their disadvantages are far overstated.

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