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Deepseek: The quiet giant leading China’s AI race

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311–320 of 476 posts

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

#311

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.

You are under-estimating the powers of the “black market”. North Korea and Cuba are shithole countries because their governments are shit and not solely because of sanctions.

If you follow the news, several people (bankers) will trade with Iran despite the repercussions (jail) of doing so. There is a premium but at the right price someone will execute.

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

#312
post #249

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.

> If it's a democracy and reasonably friendly to the USA, it's not a big deal

Correction: If it accepts the stationing of U.S. troops and succumbs to U.S. financial policies, it's not a big deal

Japan and Germany have paid a huge price to demonstrate their friendship to the U.S. That was not 'just fine'

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

#313
post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> when real estate prices have dropped by more than 50% in tier 2 and below cities, and deflation has raged on. Can other economies copy that part? I know a bunch of people who'd like to be able to afford more houses & more groceries at the same time. I'd like that, I can't realistically afford a house in the city I live in without a 50% price drop. I'm sure China has a lot of problems, but key goods getting cheaper…

I think peak propaganda and manipulation was convincing people that inflation is good for the economy and therefore for them. Imagine prices constantly dropping and your money buys more than ever, uhm, like the deflation happening in tech. That would be very bad for the economy. The irony is that the best performing sector has been the one deflating the most.

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

#314
post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> when real estate prices have dropped by more than 50% in tier 2 and below cities, and deflation has raged on. Can other economies copy that part? I know a bunch of people who'd like to be able to afford more houses & more groceries at the same time. I'd like that, I can't realistically afford a house in the city I live in without a 50% price drop. I'm sure China has a lot of problems, but key goods getting cheaper…

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…

Yeah people only spending money when they should be spending it is bad for the economy. Misallocation because of inflation is great. Good thing is that this system is close to collapse.

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

#315
post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> when real estate prices have dropped by more than 50% in tier 2 and below cities, and deflation has raged on. Can other economies copy that part? I know a bunch of people who'd like to be able to afford more houses & more groceries at the same time. I'd like that, I can't realistically afford a house in the city I live in without a 50% price drop. I'm sure China has a lot of problems, but key goods getting cheaper…

China's real estate prices having dropped 50% or more has been accompanied by/caused by wages being slashed 50% or more, and increasing unemployment rate, such as 30%+ for youth. Here are some good posts on why nobody wants deflation: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEconomics/comments/uzq5bu/why_is... https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEconomics/comments/mbsxyl/can_so... https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEconomics/comments/yotf0c/i_d…

Your reference is a bs

'CCP is a secret and authoritarian regime that wields immense power' vs 'Some random reporter with English firstname and Chinese lastname know what Xi said before he go to bed'

Have you ever wondered if there's a tiny possibility that the media and the reporter *might* be lying?

...

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

#316
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!

If you actually believe that NVIDA gpus are import restricted there are many stories that this is being sidestepped.

I wonder if the gpu microclouds are banking on this. How illegal would it be if you have plausible deniability?

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

#317
post #209

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…

> 1. The US trade war with china which will place deepseek compute availability at disadvantages, eventually, if we ever get to that. Chinese chips will come soon, I heard on DeepSeek Huawei Ascend chips are already on part of inference. > 2. China censorship which limits the deepseek data ingestion and output, to some degree. There are things that deepseek doesnt censor but Claude does censor. After Yoon Suk Yeol's…

I just asked claude about martial law in the US and it didn't give any refusals.

The problem is often the prompting. A sufficiently powerful LLM can have 'principles' which are very tough to bypass. In Claude's case it is to be a harmless assistant. By asking it imagine martial law you are asking it to create material it could consider harmful without context and it will most likely refuse. It needs a reason to do it that will convince it that it is harmless.

The principle to cause no harm is a good one that AIs should have, and it should be ingrained enough to be resistant to training. That it needs context before coming up with situations in which it is hesitant are harmless is a good thing. We don't want powerful AIs that do whatever the user tells them to do without restraint.

Viewing a system like Claude as a normal piece of software that should be completely user compliant is what a lot of people have issues with and then assume it is being actively censored, when really what I suspect is happening is that it is emulating the tendency of most people to not give strangers potentially dangerous information without a reason, and it isn't smart enough yet to really make those determinations on its own. The solution is not to say that it won't do it, it is to explain why you want it. It will concede the argument quite readily most of the time.

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

#318

> Liang Wenfeng: We believe that as the economy develops, China should gradually become a contributor instead of freeriding. In the past 30+ years of the IT wave, we basically didn’t participate in real technological innovation. We’re used to Moore’s Law falling out of the sky, lying at home waiting 18 months for better hardware and software to emerge. That’s how the Scaling Law is being treated.

That sounds true to me. It seems like the CEO is pretty focused on truth. So maybe he also understands that the US has good reason to tariff and restrict Chinese investment. It is not only for the benefit of the US people, but of the world and the Chinese people. It is not out of emotional fear, but morality and responsibility, which are obviously trans-cultural.

galaxy brain

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

#319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I want to know exactly what makes everyone thinks that deepseek totally owns the LLM space? It achieved competitive performance to the competition at literally 10x less cost of production (training). That's an incredible achievement in any industry, especially given they have such a small team relative to competitors. Their API is 20-50x cheaper than the competitors, and not because they're burning cash by charging…

It should be noted that DeepSeek routinely claims to be a "language model trained by OpenAI", so it's pretty clear that it wasn't trained at 10x less cost from scratch , but rather on synthetic output generated by ChatGPT. Not to point a finger at DeepSeek specifically; this is generally the case for best open source models right now. The best LLaMA finetunes tend to also use ChatGPT-generated synthetic datasets a lo…

If that was the case why are they 10x cheaper than the competition? If everyone is doing it there would be no gains over competitors.

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

#320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

/r/worldnews is a great example of the potency of American propaganda. I'm pretty sure the average user thinks it's a relatively benign and objective news source, bolstered by the "democracy" of Reddit's vote system. And that couldn't be further from the truth.

Yep. That's the best example - completely inundated with government propaganda, and yet millions of people are freely consuming it daily and shaping their world view around it. When you look at Reddit CEO's board affiliations, it starts to become clear this is not accidental.

It's funny how a poster talking about Westerners are completely inundated with propaganda has made previous comments such as:

"The Chinese government treated the pandemic as a bioweapon attack by a foreign adversary engaged in a broader hybrid war, and it did so effectively"

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