"China is building for the future, " Meanwhile, the USA is paying for its past excesses, with interest on its debt being the number two most expensive line item in the budget. https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...
In the last 40 years, China has been building while the US has been wasting money and lives fighting wars. Can we learn to really put America first for once?
40?? America has been messing with other countries during most of its life.
Sure, taking out the Tunisian pirates was a good thing for most of the world, but it's a bad precedent...
China may be subsidizing this for now in a way that US companies can't or won't - but if they keep building power infrastructure and the US doesn't, then it will no longer require subsidy from them. It will simply be absolutely cheaper (including profit margin) to serve tokens in China. China is building for the future, while Western Democracies are afraid of the future, and of their own shadow.
I'm not sure how much of it is subsidies. If the open weight models are anything to judge by, China is taking price performance seriously, and the US model vendors are looking for performance at any cost. Like any other Pareto optimization, we end up paying 10x more for the last few percent improvement on benchmark scores. Of course, like literally every other time this has played out in computing history, the compan…
> Of course, like literally every other time this has played out in computing history, the companies focused on price performance will end up with more economic resources, and get to turn the upgrade crank more often and for longer.
Eh? The entire CPU & GPU wars for the last 30 years consistently rewarded the top performer above all else. Price/performance has always been the consolation prize of the loser of any given generation, and sitting in the price/performance pit for several generations in a row results in being essentially out of money in a fringe position. Like, for example, AMD's GPU division currently but also AMD's CPU division before Athlon 64 and also Phenom up through Ryzen.
It feels like the US for years has operated under the assumption that homeostasis for the global economy would always be “designed in California, assembled in China.” Like there was something in the American DNA that was lacking in China and innovation would always need to happen here. But China it seems doesn’t need the US to produce great cars, devices, robotics, or AI. We absolutely need China to help us build all…
The one major area they are still behind in is CPU tech, but they are hungry and thus moving quick. Looking at Loongsons processors for instance. About 15 years ago they coudl barely compete with a Pentium 2. Now they are about 4-5 years behind Intel/AMD. Further behind on some more specific work loads (SSL decoding for example) Not great but that is a decent jump. The jumps between generations are pretty decent. LA4…
> Now they are about 4-5 years behind Intel/AMD. [..] the LA664 almost entirely fixed that issue. I think a big part of performance issues is that they are working domestic 5 to 7nm processes, so a good 5-7 years behind.
So is deepseek essentially China's answer to Claude or ChatGpt? Ngl, I haven't really heard of any other AI out of China that is as dominant as deepseek.
I'm not sure how much of it is subsidies. If the open weight models are anything to judge by, China is taking price performance seriously, and the US model vendors are looking for performance at any cost. Like any other Pareto optimization, we end up paying 10x more for the last few percent improvement on benchmark scores. Of course, like literally every other time this has played out in computing history, the compan…
not just renewables, also massive nuclear capacity and huge modern coal plants. They can really crank up capacity if they want to. How long will it take to get a new nuclear power plant operational in the US?
I agree with that too. Whilst we here in the "Land Down Under" (Australia) seem to have a fixation on NOT wanting to go down the nuclear energy route and we seem rather keen on tearing down our last remaining coal-fired power stations and 'trying' to rely on so-called renewables. From direct experience, our energy costs have gone through the roof and regardless of what our 'wonderful' politicians tell us, that is not going to change any time soon. We seem to want to just give our uranium to USA, Japan, France, and South Korea so they can make cheap energy, whilst we send our best coal to Japan, China & India. Go figure...
I've been using V4 flash consistently with Claude. Pretty great fast and darn cheap. I use it about 3h/day and so far haven't crossed $1 USD/week. FWIW, I this is what I have in my settings.json "env": { "ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN":"sk-nope_not_real", "ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL": "https://api.deepseek.com/anthropic", "ANTHROPIC_MODEL": "deepseek-v4-flash", "ANTHROPIC_DEFAULT_OPUS_MODEL": "deepseek-v4-flash", "ANTHROPIC_DEFAULT_S…
3h/day and how many parallel agents? 1/3/10? I think out tokens would be a better metric.
I've been using V4 flash consistently with Claude. Pretty great fast and darn cheap. I use it about 3h/day and so far haven't crossed $1 USD/week. FWIW, I this is what I have in my settings.json "env": { "ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN":"sk-nope_not_real", "ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL": "https://api.deepseek.com/anthropic", "ANTHROPIC_MODEL": "deepseek-v4-flash", "ANTHROPIC_DEFAULT_OPUS_MODEL": "deepseek-v4-flash", "ANTHROPIC_DEFAULT_S…
Why not use higher thinking effort?
Just cause that level seems to be working fine for me and it's usually faster.
Lol it was not ip theft it was American and European companies building factories in China themselves teaching them how to manufacture use their cheap labour. Well they learned and as they were the dong the manufacturing got better at it. I believe the current aerospace industry which the US leads in is also result of IP theft from the British then out innovating them.
> I believe the current aerospace industry which the US leads in is also result of IP theft from the British then out innovating them. Jet engines, proximity fuzes, radar, how to make a nuclear weapon, etc. are all examples of British / Commonwealth technology "gifted" or "traded" to the USofA during the WWII years in exchange for production. So, not IP theft .. but absolutely foreign ideas taken in by the US and bui…
If you have not tried DeepdeekV4 you're missing out. The pricing makes it unbelievably good. The chains of thought for Deepseek are very very interesting reads. Open code won't show them but do read them and you'll be surprised at how underrated the model is. My model usage is very low but I still do pay directly to Deepseek regularly as my tribute and contribution to them open sourcing their models as my gratitude a…
OpenCode does show them when you select so in the settings - at least I’ve been getting very long traces so I’d be surprised to learn they are summaries.
Why do you need them to provide a coding agent? Just use their model with any off the shelf coding agent. I happen to prefer Pi, but use whatever works for you.
What's the best way to use it with Pi, OpenRouter?
OpenCode Go is hard to beat, $10/mo ($5 first month) for up to $60 worth of tokens if used regularly. And no, you don't need to use opencode, they allow any software to use it.