An AI lab out of China has ignited panic throughout Silicon Valley after releasing AI models that can outperform America’s best despite being built more cheaply and with less-powerful chips

AI, as in machine learning, has always had uses. Like, real useful additions to human capability. It’s very useful in pattern recognition and statistical analysis of various things.

Our more modern shit connotation comes from capitalists trying replace labor with generative AI, which is a small subset of potential machine learning uses, but by its nature sends massive amounts of shlock at us.

Having dealt with ML engineers in depth before, American tech companies tend to throw blank checks their way which, combined with them not tending to have backgrounds in optimization or infrastructure, means they spin up 8 billion GPU instances in the cloud and use 10% of them ever because engineers are lazy.

They could, without any exaggeration, reduce their energy consumption by a factor of ten with about two weeks of honest engineering work. Yes this bothers the fuck out of me.

Who wants to bet their AI will be used for more useful things too?

Unlike in the West where if Nvidia tanks then the entire US economy goes down with it.

Idk about sustainability. It still requires massive computing infrastructure, which for now requires unsustainable ways of sourcing metals

So AI could be more sustainable this whole time? Interesting…

It's not that unsustainable unless you believe the predicts that your microwave will be building it's own LLM model every month by 2030

The electricity and water usage isn't very high in general or compared to data centre usage more broadly (and is basically nothing compared to crypto)

Llms that run locally are already a thing, and I wager that one of those smaller models can do 99% of anything anyone would want.

It has ridiculous limiters on for me, it refuses to answer when I ask who Xi Jinping is

Plus seeseepee

Deepseek made a mistake with the first query I asked it, so from that sample of 1 I'm treating it with the same caution as any of the current LLMs.

I asked it about testing an electronics part (an Integrated Circuit chip) and it confidently told me how to test an imaginary 16-pin version of the chip.

The IC in question has 8 pins.

When I followed up by asking "why pin 16" it confidently responded with a little lecture about what pin 16 does and just how important pin 16 is.

Once I'd proved to it that the IC has 8 pins, I got this:

"You're absolutely correct that the MN3101 is an 8-pin DIP (Dual Inline Package) chip. My earlier reference to pin 16 was incorrect, and I appreciate your clarification. Let me provide accurate information for the MN3101 (8-pin DIP)."

The thing is that these chips have a unique Id (the name) and publicly available datasheets that explain, amongst other things, how many pins they have.

Why is it based when China does it? It's still bazinga until I hear otherwise, glad they're owning the Yanks tho

China's beating the US at the actual second space race too

seepdeek?

Oh you can be sure that healthy global competition (fuck I can't tell what level of irony I'm on at this point) will increase overall energy expenditure on the slop remixing machines.