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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

#271

Post by jarsin »

churchill wrote: post #251
robgibbons wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's commonly referred to as a deflationary spiral because the falling prices lead to people (perhaps counterintuitively) holding off from large purchases, anticipating a continued drop in prices. Sort of a "buy the bottom" mentality. The lack of spending then further contributes to falling prices, job cuts, businesses closing, etc. It's really not a situation any economy _wants_. That said, I empathize with your sen…

I have never understood the concept of the deflationary spiral: no matter how much people want to save their cash for later, there are simply things they can't do without. Food, energy, transportation, education, etc. How long are you going to delay getting a new car simply because cars are getting cheaper and better? Once you probe the theory beyond the surface, it collapses. Yes, a deflationary economy will see les…

You're missing the debt equation. We live in debt based economy. True across the board deflation (not just some things get cheaper cause of tech etc) means debt is harder and harder to service as wages and earnings fall. As the asset backing the debt goes underwater the debt holders have no choice but to walk away. All banks stop lending and ultimately the entire economy grinds to a halt. That's the main cause of the spiral.

One man's debt is another mans income.

The reason we narrowly avoided full blown deflation in 2008 is because they bailed out the banks. If they didn't we would have had 1929 style depression these last 15 years.

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

#272

Post by yoavm »

bobxmax wrote: post #258
yoavm wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the OP, but here's one I feel quite uncomfortable with: https://quran.com/en/an-nisa/155/tafsirs - "The Hour will not start, until after the Muslims fight the Jews and the Muslims kill them. The Jew will hide behind a stone or tree, and the tree will say, `O Muslim! O servant of Allah! This is a Jew behind me, come and kill him". Other examples from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An-Nisa include "Men are the prote…

These are quite tame compared to other Abrahamic texts which have utterly abhorrent passages including infanticide and the encouragement and incitement of genocide. The "fighting Jews" is in contexts of self defense and warfare. Jews can live in peace in Muslim societies and must be unharmed. One of the Prophet's wives was a jew. The "Men are the protectors and maintainers of women" is a pretty standard patriarchal b…

The whole text is antisemitic.

"The sins mentioned here are among the many sins that the Jews committed, which caused them to be cursed and removed far away from right guidance. The Jews broke the promises and vows that Allah took from them", "their hearts are sealed because of their disbelief", "their hearts became accustomed to Kufr, transgression and weak faith" - the list is long.

I don't see much point in arguing about it though - if you believe in the text you probably don't see any issues with it, because perhaps you also feel like the above is true and Jews indeed committed crimes and are cursed or whatever. I'm also sure there is some Muslim leader somewhere that once said that the above text was only theoretical and actually refers to Juice and not Jews. Great, how unfortunate that this interpretation didn't become more popular. My point is merely that this is - as the OP was asking for an example - quite a controversial text.

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

#273

Post by rekttrader »

vkou wrote: post #188
opwieurposiu wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China creates a superbug via GOF research. Accidently releases it from the lab. Shuts down its own economy. Puts the majority of it's citizens on house arrest, and that is "largely successful"? Please send me the AliExpress link to whatever it is you are smoking, it must be some good shit. I think the real lesson here is that if you enough government power, there is no need to be competent. The feedback loop is destr…

> China creates a superbug via GOF research In 2024, this isn't fact, it's just baseless conspiracy. All evidence has ended up pointing to bush meat contamination.

Cleavage sites

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

#274

Post by ricardobeat »

sangnoir wrote: post #264
manquer wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to the volume needed to compete with the training infrastructure setups of Anthropic or OpenAI or other leading players No ban is perfect, there is always some loopholes or illegal exports this is to be expected, but if it prevents large scale transaction then it it is achieved its goal. The question is rather do they we need a lot of gpus to train or training with older gen gpus is not competitive is a different…

> if it prevents large scale transaction then it it is achieved its goal. It doesn't prevent the transactions, it only makes them more expensive than they would have been otherwise. If the the US was able to covertly buy enough titanium from the USSR for the SR-71 program, China can buy the latest GPUs if it believes AI competence is in its national interests. Oh look, there's sudden demand for H100s of by dozens of…

Models like Llama 3 are trained on sixteen thousand GPUs, OpenAI probably 25k-100k GPUs. This is the kind of scale the sanctions make a lot harder to achieve.

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

#275

Post by selimthegrim »

Dalewyn wrote: post #266
roca wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the contrary, real wages in the USA are the highest they've ever been. Social media and fentanyl are making people unhappy but for most people it's not an economic problem.

The bad economy is the biggest (arguably only) reason Trump won against Harris, and by a landslide at that. You may think that expensive gasoline and cartons of eggs are a meme, but the reality is that the economy has become pretty damn Shite(tm) for the commons. Costs of living are objectively higher than they were just a couple years ago and incomes haven't kept pace either. The stock market is having the time of i…

Landslide? Electorally?

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

#276

Post by A_D_E_P_T »

joshuahedlund wrote: post #259
A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Japan, Germany, Italy, and numerous other countries are all much worse off. Assuming things don't change, China in 2050 will be in approximately the same position as Japan today . Germany and Italy, to take but two examples of large Western economies, haven't had native above-replacement TFR since ~1970. Even in the US, TFR is well below replacement right now, and in fact is basically comparable to China's TFR from 2…

> Assuming things don't change, China in 2050 will be in approximately the same position as Japan today. What metric do you have in mind here? It looks like Japan’s population has dropped ~2% from peak in the last 25 years. China is projected to lose ~8% in the next 25. Or if we look at percent of population over 65, Japan is at ~30% today. China is projected to jump from https://www.statista.com/statistics/1359964/w…

> percent of population over 65

Yeah, Japan is at 29.6% today. China is at ~15% right now and is estimated to be at 26% by 2050.

That's not China in your link. It's Hong Kong, which has an older-skewing population.

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

#277

Post by Saline9515 »

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…

Northvolt is a good example of why it is not so simple to replicate China's success in lithium battery production.

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

#278

Post by A_D_E_P_T »

lolinder wrote: post #263
A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Japan, Germany, Italy, and numerous other countries are all much worse off. Assuming things don't change, China in 2050 will be in approximately the same position as Japan today . Germany and Italy, to take but two examples of large Western economies, haven't had native above-replacement TFR since ~1970. Even in the US, TFR is well below replacement right now, and in fact is basically comparable to China's TFR from 2…

Unalloyed good or not, it's way better than where China is at. And I'm not sure why "other countries are going to be even worse off soon" is an argument in favor of China being on the verge of surpassing as a superpower the one country on your list that is actually growing in population.

> Unalloyed good or not, it's way better than where China is at

I'm not convinced. I don't think that population decline is necessarily worse than changing the cultural and ethnic makeup of your country. If anything, I think that a much stronger case can be made for the other perspective.

Anyway, fact is, things aren't that bad in China. We can see what China's demographic future looks like, because nations like Germany and Japan are forerunners in that regard.

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

#279

Post by ijidak »

roca wrote: post #249
joshbaptiste wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a sovereign nation rises in power you'll notice how it slowly starts losing favor from USA

If it's a democracy and reasonably friendly to the USA, it's not a big deal. In the 1990s everyone thought Japan was going to be the next superpower and that was just fine.

Ha! Do you remember the panic induced by a rising Japan in the late 80's and early 90's.

The fear of the "Red Sun Rising".

The fear that Japan was going to own most of the valuable real estate in America.

The forcing of Japanese car companies to onshore to protect American jobs.

Blaming of Japanese industrial policy as being unfair competition.

It was the collapse of the Japanese growth engine in the mid 90's that finally ended the American panic.

The U.S. and U.K. are a dual world power.

Whenever powers rise to threaten that duality there is a lot of hand-wringing in Washington.

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

#280

Post by sangnoir »

ricardobeat wrote: post #274
sangnoir wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if it prevents large scale transaction then it it is achieved its goal. It doesn't prevent the transactions, it only makes them more expensive than they would have been otherwise. If the the US was able to covertly buy enough titanium from the USSR for the SR-71 program, China can buy the latest GPUs if it believes AI competence is in its national interests. Oh look, there's sudden demand for H100s of by dozens of…

Models like Llama 3 are trained on sixteen thousand GPUs, OpenAI probably 25k-100k GPUs. This is the kind of scale the sanctions make a lot harder to achieve.

> This is the kind of scale the sanctions make a lot harder to achieve

Harder and more expensive, but far from impossible. I doubt they pay more than doubles Nvidia's sticker price, all told. My comment was inspired by recent real-life events; Nvidia got into legal trouble in the last couple of months for turning a blind eye to questionable transactions - if you're curious about the mechanics of GPU sanctions-busting, read up on the governments accusations against Nvidia, and this was for low-hanging fruit.

The article has one analyst speculating they used tens of thousands of H100s (50,000 IIRC) instead of the 10,000 A100s the Deepseek CEO owns up to. They can afford to pay exorbitant markups for the logistical nightmare of importation through 3rd party countries at scale.

edit: AFAIK, the sanctions don't prevent Chinese AI labs from renting GPUs from any cloud provider. To simplify logistics, a shell company could avoid shipping the cards to the mainland by simply settings up a data center in not-China and give the parent company full access. I suppose the US government has to balance sanctions against Nvidia's share price, so they can't be too aggressive, there are just too many loopholes for demanded shock not to have been a consideration.

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