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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]

#41

Post by testaburger »

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…

there's a lot of propganda from these state backed enterprises. I think the fraction of the cost label is debatable given the evidence of mass gpu smuggling through third parties like Singapore which China can't exactly openly admit to. Unless of course we're talking about distilling, which is probably a lot cheaper than training a model from scratch (there's also the fact that labour is still relatively cheap in China compared to the US which may or may not matter e.g. Anthropic claim against Alibaba > The campaign allegedly used nearly 25,000 fraudulent accounts to run 28.8 million exchanges with Claude between April and June 2026 (although their campaign could have been in part or all automated via agents, not sure)

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

#42

Post by [deleted] »

fspeech wrote: post #32
culi wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#43

Post by cmrdporcupine »

pinkmuffinere wrote: post #13
culi wrote: post #9

> Objectively speaking, if I can spend two billion this year, it would indicate that our procurement department has achieved outstanding performance. The main gap between us and the United States lies in resources, while the disparity in personnel is minimal—there is virtually no difference, as we are essentially the same team of people, possibly from China. > With the largest models available today, we simply cannot…

Wow, that is fascinating, I didn't realize China was now blocking foreign chips, lol. It's not a definitive indicator, but I feel that doesn't bode well for US dominance in this area -- when your competitor thinks they'd be helping _you_ by using your resources, that's not great.

I think the point is more than by banning the NVIDIA hardware they are forcing local development of potentially competitive hardware, basically giving Huawei a subsidy or leg-up.

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

#44

Post by 3eb7988a1663 »

strictnein wrote: post #33
cyanydeez wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 act…

They can't get hardware because the US has put restrictions on how much can be sold to China. There is not a technical or know-how limitation, but political. Deepseek could otherwise write some checks to NVidia for what they want.

Thanks to the import restrictions, I expect Chinese GPU hardware to be competitive within a few years.

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

#45

Post by seanmcdirmid »

zmmmmm wrote: post #39

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?

Their yields on high performance chips that could do training is really bad, and they aren’t getting more of the outdated ASML machines that they could use to scale up even with bad yields. It will still take China a few years or a decade to build out the tech needed to fab high performance chips economically on their own.

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

#46

Post by IncreasePosts »

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…

Eventually you'll have a model you can't distill, at which point the frontier labs will take off.

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

#47

Post by WiSaGaN »

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…

U.S. policymakers believe that even if the gap is small—like six months to a year—whoever reaches AGI first (whatever that means) could gain such an overwhelming advantage over their perceived adversary that it would effectively kneecap them. (You can look at the kinds of things they mention—cyber, WMDs—to get a sense of what they mean.) Jensen Huang disagrees and has said AI is a marathon.

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

#48

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#49

Post by revetkn »

josh_p wrote: post #38
kburman wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It's understood that LLMs have limitations and people are working on "the next thing" to try and make it to real AGI, e.g. Yann LeCun.

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

#50

Post by ansk »

credit_guy wrote: post #3

I think the way to parse the current title "DeepSeek pause fundraise after comments on compute gap to US leaked (transcript) [pdf]" is that there was a leak that DeepSeek will pause fundraising because they perceive there is a compute gap with the US. I am also guessing that the majority of the people who read this title will think that DeepSeek is pausing this fundraising because some comments they made about the co…

I skimmed the doc and my impression is that your second listed interpretation -- DeepSeek is pausing investment because of a leak -- is the more correct one.

There's quite a bit of confidential information in the doc about the company and how it's positioning itself going forward to compete with US labs. I'd imagine they're not happy at all with this being leaked and are withholding investment as a punitive measure.

Not to mention the other interpretation seems illogical -- why would you pause fundraising if your perception was that you lacked resources compared to your competitors?

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