I remember reading a similar tweet explaining DeepSeek breaks the insane Chinese work culture. They are against 996 and brutally grinding employees. They feel like a big family and that is their hedge against poaching by Chinese Big Tech with bigger salaries. Liang Wenfeng seems to be the only AI CEO down to earth. I want to believe.
Notes on DeepSeek
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Re: Notes on DeepSeek
#32It seems the OP has removed the tweet somehow.
Re: Notes on DeepSeek
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are 2 things worth separating. 1) China distills and is therefore morally bad. As you rightly point out, that's not a great argument. 2) China distills and is therefore possibly not that competent. I think that makes sense. If they only catch up to the frontier through distillation then 1) Their model will never be as good as the model they are distilling from. 2) They will never reach the frontier - they need…
> 2) China distills and is therefore possibly not that competent. I think deepseek at least has done enough innovative work that you could grant them a baseline of competency. In general, there are enough papers coming out of China to suggest that there are quite a few people there who know what they are doing.
You're correct and I shouldn't have used the word competent. Perhaps "and is therefore not elite enough to be state of the art"?
I also have a soft spot for deepseek because they write such readable papers. I don't have a degree in anything but with a little work I can understand their papers - which I really appreciate.
But I still think my point stands - if you need distillation you won't be SOTA
Re: Notes on DeepSeek
#34From the notes, they seem humble and empathic. We're lucky to have China imposing competiton to the western AI megacorps. If it wasn't for China, I would probably have to spend $100/mo on AI instead of $10 like I do currently while using DeepSeek and MiMo (opencode Go plan). And while I could do so comfortably, I feel for those who can't. It must feel incredibly isolating to only watch others have access to expensive…
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Re: Notes on DeepSeek
#35US AI is almost a religious cult. It's devastating that they are treating it as a petty commodity
Altman used to talk about making a religion and Dario Amodei constantly talks about "building a God" and meets with religious leaders including the Vatican.
> It got me thinking, though--the most successful founders do not set out to create companies. They are on a mission to create something closer to a religion, and at some point it turns out that forming a company is the easiest way to do so. [1]
Re: Notes on DeepSeek
#36Not sure what I read, but sounded like a lunch meeting description; felt void of actual information, with the restaurant replaced by the office. I am in China and can tell it is either Kimi, DeepSeek or Claude (proxied or actually deepseek/fake). The bigger push for the general public died down a lot since last year; kids were pushed to use AI for homework, now it is disallowed and frowned upon. In short mixed messag…
> kids were pushed to use AI for homework, now it is disallowed and frowned upon. In short mixed messaging. in the early 2000s in california universities you'd get marked down for citing wikipedia. so the good souls told everyone "see the number in brackets[2] after what you're trying to cite the article for? just click that then click the archive.org or whatever link there, then cite that ." Now? i think wiki is con…
It's not that it's unreliable, it's just lazy research. Wikipedia, like all encyclopedias, is a tertiary source, but ideally your essay should be a mix of primary and secondary sources, while Wikipedia discourages original research and prefers only secondary sources. Wikipedia itself recommends against citing it as research[0] for this reason.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citing_Wikipedia
Re: Notes on DeepSeek
#37"Their Head of Infrastructure, in particular, was young; maybe 30 years old and apparently one of the best AI buildout and energy experts in the country" Expert in buildout or expert in distillation?
Tell me, where did OpenAI and Anthropic got their training data? From public sources using legitimate means? Don't make me laugh.
Re: Notes on DeepSeek
#38"As a whole, China seems to treat AI as just another technology, rather than as some kind of singularity moment." This is a refreshing perspective.
"National attention is still on basic needs and infrastructure buildouts, and on providing more medicines for people. The “dreams of singularity" seem like a luxury or distant consideration."
Further on. Refreshing indeed.
Re: Notes on DeepSeek
#39From the notes, they seem humble and empathic. We're lucky to have China imposing competiton to the western AI megacorps. If it wasn't for China, I would probably have to spend $100/mo on AI instead of $10 like I do currently while using DeepSeek and MiMo (opencode Go plan). And while I could do so comfortably, I feel for those who can't. It must feel incredibly isolating to only watch others have access to expensive…
> We're lucky to have China imposing competiton to the western AI megacorps. The second they get a hold of the market, Chinese Big Tech will be as bad or worse than US Big Tech. We're lucky to have DeepSeek.
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Re: Notes on DeepSeek
#40From the notes, they seem humble and empathic. We're lucky to have China imposing competiton to the western AI megacorps. If it wasn't for China, I would probably have to spend $100/mo on AI instead of $10 like I do currently while using DeepSeek and MiMo (opencode Go plan). And while I could do so comfortably, I feel for those who can't. It must feel incredibly isolating to only watch others have access to expensive…
> We're lucky to have China imposing competiton to the western AI megacorps. The second they get a hold of the market, Chinese Big Tech will be as bad or worse than US Big Tech. We're lucky to have DeepSeek.
In every market China dominates, Chinese products are still inexpensive. Solar panels, batteries, EVs, drones,..