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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]

#31

Post by Waterluvian »

throw101010 wrote: post #27
grim_io wrote: post #19

One has to be careful when pointing out problems in China, lest such criticism be confused with criticism of the Party's policies.

It's funny that you mention this because with the current US administration it works in a similar fashion... see Anthropic not cooperating with the US military and getting their new shiny model "paused" few weeks later (and officials like Hegseth being pretty open about it beforehand, signalling to them that criticizing the US admin/not cooperating will hurt their business: https://xcancel.com/SecWar/status/202750771…

And it’s not even reading between the lines and being a conspiracy theorist. The current U.S. regime has made it abundantly clear that they will gladly operate in bad faith.

Being rational and predictable is likely a more important quality than ideology now that the Americans are threatening everyone and forcing us all to pick sides.

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

#32

Post by fspeech »

culi wrote: post #10
toomuchtodo wrote: post #5

Perhaps there is an opportunity for China to close the compute gap by renting compute from hyperscalers through a complex web of shell entities similarly to how the US procured titanium for the SR-71 during the Cold War. https://theaviationgeekclub.com/in-1960s-russia-sold-titaniu... https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/titanium-russia-was-s...

Trump reversed course on the NVIDIA ban. It's now China that is blocking their companies from buying NVIDIA chips. So the shell entities would be to get around Chinese, not USian restrictions

That's not true. First there is still a licensing and quota scheme on the US side for the H200s. Secondly China blocked them for use in inferencing. Thirdly Chinese companies don't want them for training because newer chips are more cost effective.

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

#33

Post by strictnein »

cyanydeez wrote: post #6
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…

this bodes well for continuing to refine smaller models and open sourcing them. There's a delusion that what America's AI companies are doing is "best"; the chinese should realize that the forefront is bloated and there's likely hundreds of speed ups viable. Pushing open weights will continue to grind down the bloat.

> "There's a delusion that what America's AI companies are doing is "best""

Not sure if the word "delusion" is the correct word here? It has not been proven in either direction. We can all see lots of possible issues with it, but it is also possible that it could be what is needed to unlock key capabilities.

We can see that the Chinese models have been getting better, but OpenAI is out there supporting 10 million active users with their frontier models, and now we know that Deepseek can't even get what they need to properly train models.

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

#34

Post by sd2ff »

kburman wrote: post #22
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…

They want to achieve AGI first because, once it is achieved, no one knows what the world will look like.

Who actually believes this nonsense?

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

#35

Post by hedora »

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…

AI's already commoditized, but the fundraising plans for the US labs assumes a winner take all endgame where one lab will pull arbitrarily ahead of everyone else. I have no idea why DeepSeek is making that bad assumption now too. Maybe the investors have drunk the Kool-Aid.

Maybe if "AGI" is some sort of fundamentally different approach than the general purpose AI ("GAI"?) tools that we currently have, it will be a winner-takes-all technology, but now we're speculating about the market structure of a fictional technology that's significantly less thought-through than, say, stuff from the original Star Trek. ("The Ultimate Computer" aged ridiculously well. If it was produced in 2026, it would be a satire targeting LLMs. I digress.)

If we don't assume some sort of unknown technological step function in the next fundraising cycle, then what we'll get is a commodity industry. It takes a few dozen people to make a frontier model, plus a giant pile of minerals and electricity. This looks more like a steel mill than a software company.

If there were one steel mill on earth they could demand infinite margins. This is why most countries treat steel production as a national security issue and subsidize competition. LLMs will be the same, or we'll end up with some conglomerate named OpenAnthropicMicrappleGrokGoogXidiazon that acquires literally every other business. That will be the end of capitalism.

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

#36

Post by twothreeone »

If this is true it almost sounds like DeepSeek is following the Anthropic playbook of trying to pressure the local government into aligning with their corporate agenda through scare tactics. So I wouldn't be surprised if Liang Wenfeng "disappears" for a little while from the public eye in a few weeks.

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

#37

Post by whatever1 »

kburman wrote: post #22
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…

They want to achieve AGI first because, once it is achieved, no one knows what the world will look like.

But this will not be a singular event. And like humans it does not mean that the smartest makes the best decisions.

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

#38

Post by josh_p »

kburman wrote: post #22
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…

They want to achieve AGI first because, once it is achieved, no one knows what the world will look like.

I doubt this is the case. It should be common knowledge at least among the people building these things that a true AGI isn’t possible with LLMs.

Unless I’ve missed some advancement?

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

#39

Post by zmmmmm »

Curious what the fundamental limit on Huawei's capacity is. China has shown if nothing else they know how to scale when they want to. If it came down to just building more of what they know how to do, it would be happening. Is there more to it?

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

#40

Post by janalsncm »

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…

Deepseek is funded by their hedge fund, high flyer. They intentionally cap their token prices to basically recoup server costs. The meeting transcript describes it as a moral commitment, that they don’t care about trends like image and video generation, and world model “hype”. They only care about reasoning, chain of thought and continuous learning.
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