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Interview with DeepSeek Founder: We're Done Following. It's Time to Lead

thechinaacademy.org

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Re: Interview with DeepSeek Founder: We're Done Following. It's Time to Lead

#21

Post by ben30 »

alecco wrote: post #9
ben30 wrote: post #5

Its success stems from a refreshingly unconventional approach to innovation. Liang Wenfeng's philosophy of maintaining a flat organizational structure where researchers have unrestricted access to computing resources and can collaborate freely. What's particularly striking is their deliberate choice to stay lean and problem-focused, avoiding the bureaucratic bloat that often plagues AI departments at larger companies…

I don't buy that. Allegedly Google lost to OpenAI because the compute resources were allocated evenly and then each team shared to other teams. So it became a popularity contest instead of meritocratic allocation. And then Pichai tried to merge all the different AI teams making it even worse. From rumors by connected people on podcasts. There has to be some structure to put the best ones first. The key problem is how…

DeepSeek's results speak for themselves - they've built a competitive AI model with millions that matches capabilities of systems costing billions.

While debates about resource allocation and organisational structure are interesting, what matters is their demonstrated ability to innovate efficiently.

The proof is in their technical achievement.

Re: Interview with DeepSeek Founder: We're Done Following. It's Time to Lead

#22

Post by mythz »

Didn't expect to be cheering for Chinese AI companies and Facebook over mega funded US tech corps, but here we are.

Were fortunate that not all SOTA AI models are controlled by US Tech corps. Right now they're in the "maximum marketshare at all costs" stage, but they'll be looking for their ROI after achieving a dominant share. I trust OpenAI the least, it's still early on in the AI age and they look like the company that they were formed to prevent.

Can only hope that DeepSeek, Facebook, Qwen and Mistral continue to release open models. Unfortunately if a companies motivation is ROI from cloud hosting then they're going to be incentivised to stop releasing their models as OSS to prevent competition which we've seen with Mistral's best models although in their latest model released today under Apache 2.0 the CEO is saying they’re renewing their commitment to Open Source [1], so we’ll have to see how long that holds. We're also starting to see that from Alibaba whose latest Qwen2.5-Max model is only available through their Alibaba Cloud. Luckily Facebook business model isn't reliant on cloud hosting so we should continue to expect Open models from them. So far efficiency seems to be DeepSeek's competitive advantage as despite being OSS they're still the cheapest hosting provider [2] despite other hosting providers not having to recoup any R&D and training costs.

[1] https://x.com/arthurmensch/status/1884972984202338450

[2] https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-r1

Re: Interview with DeepSeek Founder: We're Done Following. It's Time to Lead

#23

Post by falcor84 »

mjburgess wrote: post #12
alecco wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't buy that. Allegedly Google lost to OpenAI because the compute resources were allocated evenly and then each team shared to other teams. So it became a popularity contest instead of meritocratic allocation. And then Pichai tried to merge all the different AI teams making it even worse. From rumors by connected people on podcasts. There has to be some structure to put the best ones first. The key problem is how…

"teams" are a clue to there being an underlying hierarchy and division which may not exist at deepseek. If its a smaller self-organising team of people, there would be no such effect. It is also common knowledge that google's internal team and advancement politics are already pathological -- against a background of a winner-takes-all, cooperation does not work.

While I agree that Google's advancement politics are concerning, it's far fetched to say that there's a winner-takes-all aspect - there's still a lot of remuneration/power/recognition to go around for everyone, just not unevenly distributed.

Re: Interview with DeepSeek Founder: We're Done Following. It's Time to Lead

#25

Post by yieldcrv »

mythz wrote: post #22

Didn't expect to be cheering for Chinese AI companies and Facebook over mega funded US tech corps, but here we are. Were fortunate that not all SOTA AI models are controlled by US Tech corps. Right now they're in the "maximum marketshare at all costs" stage, but they'll be looking for their ROI after achieving a dominant share. I trust OpenAI the least, it's still early on in the AI age and they look like the company…

Its open source vs closed source, not China vs US

but this new dimension of geopolitical competition is now sidelining the cautionary anti-AGI populace, which was honestly probably saving us a few years

Re: Interview with DeepSeek Founder: We're Done Following. It's Time to Lead

#26

Post by 9283409232 »

CyberMacGyver wrote: post #15
ben30 wrote: post #5

Its success stems from a refreshingly unconventional approach to innovation. Liang Wenfeng's philosophy of maintaining a flat organizational structure where researchers have unrestricted access to computing resources and can collaborate freely. What's particularly striking is their deliberate choice to stay lean and problem-focused, avoiding the bureaucratic bloat that often plagues AI departments at larger companies…

Ah yes, classic staying lean and exposing your database[0] https://www.wiz.io/blog/wiz-research-uncovers-exposed-deepse...

A faux pas for sure but we can't pretend Google, Meta, and OpenAI all haven't had similar issues even with their much larger team sizes.

Re: Interview with DeepSeek Founder: We're Done Following. It's Time to Lead

#27

Post by CharlieDigital »

dundarious wrote: post #18
CharlieDigital wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The model you described probably works great (not just in AI) as long as it's not your primary and direct source of revenue with which you must pay back investors. Once it becomes your primary and direct source of revenue and you must generate some returns for investors or meet some revenue targets, then whatever you're doing somehow has to align with that revenue stream (often ruining the fun).

Have you seen the "returns" for OpenAI, etc.? All cutting edge research is subsidized by government or megacorps in USA.

They are not profitable. The problem is that they have to find their way to profitability because investors and shareholders need to be paid back. And because they have to do that, you could say that it "compromises" on objectives that would more rapidly advance the field like openly sharing their reasoning architecture.

Re: Interview with DeepSeek Founder: We're Done Following. It's Time to Lead

#28

Post by falcor84 »

wouldbecouldbe wrote: post #16

They are nice words, ironically though their product is an exact clone of a US product (apart from the data stealing discussion). You could argue the cheaper aspect is innovating, but that's what China has been doing for many products.

To the best of my knowledge, there's nothing quite like R1-Zero released by OpenAI or others, they seem to really be pushing innovation.

Relevant ARC-Prize post and discussion from yesterday: https://arcprize.org/blog/r1-zero-r1-results-analysis https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42868390

Re: Interview with DeepSeek Founder: We're Done Following. It's Time to Lead

#29

Post by bko »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #7
ben30 wrote: post #5

Its success stems from a refreshingly unconventional approach to innovation. Liang Wenfeng's philosophy of maintaining a flat organizational structure where researchers have unrestricted access to computing resources and can collaborate freely. What's particularly striking is their deliberate choice to stay lean and problem-focused, avoiding the bureaucratic bloat that often plagues AI departments at larger companies…

The model you described probably works great (not just in AI) as long as it's not your primary and direct source of revenue with which you must pay back investors. Once it becomes your primary and direct source of revenue and you must generate some returns for investors or meet some revenue targets, then whatever you're doing somehow has to align with that revenue stream (often ruining the fun).

You're describing a lot of tech companies like Google that had all these different orgs that were money sinks not related to a direct source of revenue and funded by dominance in search and high margins. And these programs didn't necessarily yield great creative products. Quite the opposite.

Whereas if you have some objective measure that's driving your decisions, like revenue or customer engagement (proxy for usefulness), you can drive great results.

I think either method can work if you have the right culture.

Re: Interview with DeepSeek Founder: We're Done Following. It's Time to Lead

#30

Post by worldsayshi »

ben30 wrote: post #5

Its success stems from a refreshingly unconventional approach to innovation. Liang Wenfeng's philosophy of maintaining a flat organizational structure where researchers have unrestricted access to computing resources and can collaborate freely. What's particularly striking is their deliberate choice to stay lean and problem-focused, avoiding the bureaucratic bloat that often plagues AI departments at larger companies…

Either you give people a clear idea what you will build and they will organize accordingly or you organize and they will guess what they are supposed to build according to the org structure.
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