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Deepseek: The quiet giant leading China’s AI race

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Re: Deepseek: The quiet giant leading China’s AI race

#191

Post by coolspot »

emporas wrote: post #88

Not personally surprised that a MoE model performs so well. I used Mixtral a lot for coding Rust, and it had qualities no other model had except GPT 3.5 and later Claude Sonet. The funny thing is Mixtral was based on Llama 2 which was not trained on code that much. DeepSeek v3: 671B parameters on total, and 37B activated sounds very good even though impossible to run locally. Question if some people happen to know: F…

It activates only 37B per query, but you don’t know which ones ahead of time, so you gotta store all 671B in (V)RAM.

Re: Deepseek: The quiet giant leading China’s AI race

#192

Post by kayewiggin »

jurli wrote: post #164
Etheryte wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, I've been hearing the story that China is about to upend the US as the leading global superpower ever since I was a kid. There's always a new vogue and novel twist put on the rationale and how it's gonna happen, but so far it's like fusion, always a few years away.

It's literally happening lol. When you were a kid China was making shoes and their GDP is 10% of the US. Now they're making drones / evs / high end electornics and it's 80%. This is why people's perception is so unreliable because it's impossible to notice things when they happen over a lifetime

> making drones / evs / high end electornics

China does have a current advantage on lithium battery and rare earth materials - dumb technologies that US and allies can replicate fairly quickly, less than a year. EUV and 3nm and below on the other hand, will take decades, since it involves a number of different and deep technologies controlled by dozens of companies. China has thrown $150B on it since 2014, and has only come up with low yield/unprofitable 7nm via existing DUV machines.

> 80% GDP

China's demographics will more than HALF to 500M by 2100, if not earlier, while US grows to close to 400M by then. Someone actually theorizes that China's population is already only 800M right now https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fR5F_8dSjOw

Also, a lot of that GDP is debatable in 2024, when real estate prices have dropped by more than 50% in tier 2 and below cities, and deflation has raged on.

Re: Deepseek: The quiet giant leading China’s AI race

#193

Post by bugglebeetle »

kamarg wrote: post #189
bugglebeetle wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s unclear to me why what you’re describing is specific to China and not also what Americans euphemistically refer to as “fly over states.”

Not sure why you have something against the flyover states. I'm sure there's more shoddily constructed condos in Florida/California/New York per capita than there is in the Midwest. Same goes for cheap high calorie food. Of course, the same can probably be said about the large population centers in China too. More people concentrated in one area tends to mean more poverty in that area and all the things that come wit…

I don’t have anything against them. I was born and raised in one. I just find it ironic that someone would fail to see this parallel.

Re: Deepseek: The quiet giant leading China’s AI race

#194

Post by mkagenius »

modeless wrote: post #145
lomkju wrote: post #6

I feel the GPU restrictions created an environment for Chinese Devs to be more innovative and do more with less. Kudos to the deepseek team!

Software expands to fill the available resources. If you want more efficient software, build it on less powerful hardware. AI training runs are no exception!

I just shoved the whole .webvtt file in the header of a audio Response from the server so that I don't have to implement another API just for subtitles [1][2]

1. While building https://gitpodcast.com

2. Code snip: https://github.com/BandarLabs/gitpodcast/blob/main/backend/a...

Re: Deepseek: The quiet giant leading China’s AI race

#195

Post by bugglebeetle »

caycep wrote: post #185
talldayo wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was a kid, China was a lot better integrated with the international community. Right now their relationships are far and few between, rarely featuring first-world nations. If Russia couldn't beat NATO in a pitched fight against the rest of the world, neither can China.

The question in a rational mind is, why would it even bother? US/China partnership is the most economically successful in world history, even more so than US/UK or AUKUS. But the downside of CCP government structure is that paranoia at the top ranks has a good probability of overruling rationality. Albeit US cannot speak as US-centric paranoia/"exceptionalism" may do the same thing...and the electorate voted to self…

> US economy being the strongest in decades

The vast majority of its people do not share in that success and have seen a declining standard of life relative to prior generations whereas in China, the opposite is quite demonstrably true, despite increasingly similar concentrations of wealth and political power.

Re: Deepseek: The quiet giant leading China’s AI race

#196

Post by caycep »

nsoonhui wrote: post #13

I find that the gushing around deepseek is fascinating to watch. To me there are a few structural and fundamental reasons why deepseek can never outperform other models by a wide margin. On par maybe--as we reach the diminishing returns with our investment in the models, but not win by a wide margin. 1. The US trade war with china which will place deepseek compute availability at disadvantages, eventually, if we ever…

As a usage question - what do you use gemini/chatgpt/deepseek/claudie for? Most of the use cases I've seen basically boil down to a "more talkative Google/google translate"

Re: Deepseek: The quiet giant leading China’s AI race

#197

Post by caycep »

mentalgear wrote: post #3

Impressive to think about how DeepSeek achieved: ~ Parity with o1 and Claude with > 10x less resources. Better algorithms and approaches are what's needed for the next step of ML.

what's the engineering situation at OpenAI since the whole "firing Sam Altman" spectacle? Has there been significant brain drain that affects something like o1 etc?

Re: Deepseek: The quiet giant leading China’s AI race

#198

Post by exe34 »

I have a question for the floor - given the worsening situation with technological unemployment, and the structural inability of capitalism to cope with it (who will buy the products when nobody has a job?), is it possible that China will be able to pivot to UBI and push on ahead? they have enormous control over the population and economy, so they might be able to change direction faster than the West?

Re: Deepseek: The quiet giant leading China’s AI race

#199

Post by [deleted] »

wodderam wrote: post #12
lomkju wrote: post #6

I feel the GPU restrictions created an environment for Chinese Devs to be more innovative and do more with less. Kudos to the deepseek team!

Kai-Fu Lee describes the culture so well in AI Superpowers. The roots are well before GPU restriction. Absolute cut throat competition. Imagine Sam Altman throwing a chair out a window in a meeting lol. The message of AI Superpowers is that China will lag the US at first but once things stabilize this will happen because China has a lot more engineers and a lot more data. Anyone who hasn't read AI Superpowers should…

[deleted]

Re: Deepseek: The quiet giant leading China’s AI race

#200

Post by FooBarWidget »

kayewiggin wrote: post #192
jurli wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's literally happening lol. When you were a kid China was making shoes and their GDP is 10% of the US. Now they're making drones / evs / high end electornics and it's 80%. This is why people's perception is so unreliable because it's impossible to notice things when they happen over a lifetime

> making drones / evs / high end electornics China does have a current advantage on lithium battery and rare earth materials - dumb technologies that US and allies can replicate fairly quickly, less than a year. EUV and 3nm and below on the other hand, will take decades, since it involves a number of different and deep technologies controlled by dozens of companies. China has thrown $150B on it since 2014, and has on…

So why aren't US and allies demonstrably replicating EVs (and other kinds of green technology) quickly? Tesla is still pretty much the only serious player. Why are CEOs of major western carmakers painting a very different picture than what you describe here? Where are the serious EU/US battery makers that are globally competitive? It looks to me like the EU has chosen the worst of all options: put up tarriff barriers while also not having serious domestic EV makers, and also not stimulating domestic EV development.
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