6d ago

The U.S. just pledged hundreds of billions to protect its AI leadership. A Chinese startup with a ‘joke of a budget‘ may have already undercut those hopes

fortune.com How a Chinese AI startup with a ‘joke of a budget’ won over experts—and spooked investors, the tech sector and the U.S. government

Hangzhou-based DeepSeek has released several open-source AI models that match OpenAI’s performance—with more efficiency and at lower cost.

Paywall removed: https://archive.is/MqHc4

113 comments

Anyone who thinks this was about getting AI working was the idiot from the start, there still isn’t even a real use-case for it. This was always about funneling huge amounts of money from the government budget to a bunch of rich assholes. The outcome doesn’t matter at all here.
- there still isn’t even a real use-case for it
  There are several real use cases for it, it's just that they're worth like ten bucks a month to me all together and OpenAI is running at a loss while charging... checks notes 200 dollars per month for their top tier model?
- Venture capitalists using the US gov as their new marketing platform is a joke in it self.
  What's next? Is the next White House briefing gonna be in a stadium, with laser show, motivational music and some ponce going on stage to hype people up?
  Griftonomics has reached the upper levels, y'all.
- Exactly. Just look at Intel and the CHIPS Act.
- Why is there no real use-case for it? But what about disinformation?
  
  And making starving artists’ lives even more unlivable. And taking human creativity and joy from humans.
  While destroying the environment. It’s so efficient.
- So, basically the military industrial complex (which liberals support!) but with less genocide? Don't get me wrong, I hate Trump and Republicans are clearly the greater evil, but liberals have helped conservatives funnel trillion of dollars in public assets to the 1% for decades. It was under Bill Clinton that the internet, which was publically funded and publicly built, was given to the 1%. So to me, this is just more of the same: capitalist politicians stealing from us to make the 1% wealthier.
  
  How was the Internet given to the 1% under Clinton? And people gave it to the tech companies. Internet was supposed to be a bunch of independent sites. But it is easier to just go to a few.
  
  Taking the insanely massive emissions of the AI industry, it may not be genocide in the traditional sense, but it's contributions alone will lead to people dying
  
  There's an exclusive choice between UBI or genocide. AI/Automation as a tool for prosperity whose profits are shared/redistributed, vs. continued power concentration with extermination of an unnecessary slave class. AI developers finding more profit in assisting military complex for war supremacy, and political power over oppressing people who are made tolerant of war priorities, makes betting on genocide and robocop slums a heavy favorite.
  Trump's focus, with KSA and Massasan investments, is fossil fuel consuming datacenters. It is possible that focus on preventing China access to tech may take a back seat to China helping enrich US tech companies through imports (Taiwan made hardware)/purchases.
  Datacenters in US doesn't stop Chinese ones, or make it a good idea for anyone the US threatens (everyone) to use their data hosting services. Furthermore, US energy policy is shifting more strongly towards extortionist climate terrorism. Energy will be cheaper outside of US, and then so will datacenter costs.
  
  helped conservatives funnel trillion of dollars in public assets to the 1% for decades. It was under Bill Clinton that the internet, which was publically funded and publicly built, was given to the 1%.
  Do you have any proof, or is it just conspiracy theory?
  So you want to say that liberals who oppose wealth inequality themselves support that same billionaires? What a BS.
  P.S. It seems that democratic party in US is more right-wing than "social democratists" as in the EU, looking at their policies.
  
  The internet as a physical entity was created by the telecommunications industry as they owned and laid all the cabling. Why would you think Clinton gave the internet to the 1% when telecoms owned the entirety of the phone and cable network to begin with?

most of that 'hundreds of billions' isn't going to go towards the tech or infrastructure, it's gonna go to people. a very small number of specific individuals.
- correct, US taxpayer is being fleeced so some parasites can live their best lives.
  
  Incorrect. They can already do that without more money.
  
  Project Stargate is funded via private investment, the US hasn't pledged any money
- Well, I suspect that most of the money will be used to acquire or costume natural resources, like water and power.
  Individuals become enriched because their share holdings are worth more.

Deepseek api is down today - probably a result of their viral success recently..
- I heard they are under ddos attack.

It is beautiful how the US is never short on cash for state aid to enrich some owners.
But god forbid plebs ask for a good train, that's communism!
- Socialism for giant corporations: 😎🦅🇺🇸
  Socialism for common people: 😡🚫🤷‍♂️
  
  Socialism for giant corporations: Freedumb™️
  Socialism for common people: communism, thus the devil!
- Explain how good trains will help our precious CEOs?
  Unless you mean a private train line paid with government funds. Now we're talking!
  
  Putting a CEO on a train with unwashed pedons is a crime against humanity.
  
  Well taken care citizens are more productive (yet can revolt better) https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs

"Necessity is the mother of invention."
What you're likely seeing here is innovation similar to the early tech sector. The hardware limitation (no Nvidia chips) means different (usually more complex) solutions are needed.
These solutions usually require a deep understanding of a specific area of mathematics, and expertise in coding. The person making it normally has to be heavily invested, since it still eats a lot of hours.
I often joke, the mathematician who finds a faster algorithm for matrix operations is sitting on a billion dollar idea.
- And that mathematician won't see the profits for that faster algorithm and you will never hear their name - shits been happening in tech for decades
  
  As a mathematician who has worked in tech, this I am very much aware of XD

Guys listen up, every deepseek model comes with a dedicated chinese spy, who will log all your data and send it back to CCP who will use it to plot the destruction of the western civilization.
Instead we should use Freedom© models from OpenAI (side note if deepseek is so "open" how come they don't have open in their name huh?) even if OpenAI don't show their reasoning, they only do this cuz they want to protect us and they stand for our values.
They cost 100x more only because they are fighting for our Freedom and Freedom doesn't come cheap, Freedom doesn't have a price, Freedom requires our sacrifice.
- use it to plot the destruction of the western civilization
  Peaks around at the state of Western Civilization
  Boots up another copy of DeepSeek
  
  I'm oll for the destruction / reorganisation of Western civilization but not at the hands of the Chinese because I don't think they'll do much to improve things.
- First paragraph is something I believe some people will say unironically.
  
  Well, that first paragraph is likely to be unironically very close to the truth.
- every deepseek model comes with a dedicated chinese spy, who will log all your data and send it back to CCP who will use it to plot the destruction of the western civilization
  there's no need, western civilization is collapsing by itself
- Freedom costs a buck oh five.
- Please!!! Come and take your money!

Yeah obviously we've completely lost the plot a long time ago. Nobody even remembers when tech was bands of ragtag nerds making something out of nothing. Now they are the rich whose only purpose to is extract more wealth. Tech what? Who even knows anymore.
That includes the average tech workers. If that angers you then you're lost too.
Nobody has noticed that there's more bragging about compensation than accomplishments. It used to be the other way around. Nerds eagerly showing off to anyone who will listen about whatever thing they cooked up. It's been this way for the past long time long before this LLM AI era.
- Yeah, give me a /technology/ sub that speaks about technology (have you heard about the esp-8266? Did you know a A4988 can steer a NEMA from a Raspberry pi? And even The 6 gen SSD can move X GB/s, what is the fastest quad core under 100$?) and not about funding and drama.
  Or am I out of touch with reality :-) ?
  
  Shameless self promotion:
  !hardware@lemmy.world
  We of course focus on hardware and do include tech-adjacent business/public policy news, but we do cover ESP8266, PCI-E 6 development and that recently released ~$100 AMD CPU.
- It's because this wave of tech overlords rode in on the coattails of the actual smart group. No one in this new group has actual built/coded/designed anything good. Everything they actual get involved with is garbage. Musk Cyber truck and Zuck metaverse as two examples. Bezos isn't even the CEO of Amazon anymore, and he had pretty much be letting Andy Jassy run AWS/Amazon for close to 2 decades anyway.

The US is getting owned by China left and right, but sure lets focus on abusing minorities, women, LGBTQ+, and the poor instead of investing on actually making America great. Whatever.
- "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored [gay, trans, Hispanic, etc ] man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."
  
  LBJ
- Maybe they try to imitate china on those topics?

Of course it's faster & cheaper when it's being censored & can't access half of human history because the fucking ccp finds it offensive.
- As opposed to reddit censoring Israel genociding Palestine and Luigi ?
  
  Reddit is total trash too.
- The model itself is probably not censored. The censorship comes on top. Preliminary tests already show how this can be circumvented.
- If censorship would make it cheaper then surely it wouldn't be that much cheaper than OpenAI. Different things are being censored and blocked but surely, your suggestion is a bit silly.
  
  Your comment is a bit silly. The CCP engages in currency manipulation amongst other nefarious actions to prop up its interests. It was likely created from stolen data & heavily propped up by the government, just like various other projects that were supposedly Chinese "innovations" but looks remarkably like their western competitors.

Again, this is all fucking stupid. China is giving this shit away for free to absolutely own the US for spending money on stupid fucking things like this.
- Its good for the consumer. If companies like deepseek weren't just tossing them out there for anyone to use, Microsoft and Google would currently have a monopoly and it would all be subscription type services.
  It also greatly reduces whatever chance the copyright shills have of legislating against it.
  
  It's not good consumers at all, at least no explicitly. There are already open and free LLM models out there anyone can use that are just as good as OpenAI, for example.
  What this is: a pretty simple deathblow to completely collapse the bullshit AI bubble in the US that was created by a bunch of wealthy idiots trying to fleece people out of money. Plain and simple.
  While I'm happy that this pretty much destroys the business of OpenAI and the others, this bullshit funding by executive order is a bailout for those people, right out in the open. It's a classic Trump scam. Nobody will ever see where the money is going, and it's taxpayer dollars going right back into the banks of millionaires billionaires who were about lose the their asses for investing in this stupid shit in the first place.
- I mean Meta opened up Llama for free a while ago. But at the end of the day, the AI models posed to actually impact things are those integrated or integrateable into workflows, and those are all still more or less locked down.
- Well to be fair, American companies did that too. They expand their services internationally "for free" and then get other countries hooked on it.
  China is just taking a page from that playbook.
  
  No, China skipped all that bullshit and just said "Well what if we open source this and it's good or better than all the US companies?". Well those companies will wither and die. The transfer of money is a bailout for those companies. I assume Musk plotted this out.

Late stage capitalism has now created mega corporations that no longer profit off their innovation and quality, but merely off manipulation and exploitation of their mind-boggling amounts of capital. They now must crush all competition using authoritarian means because competition is now their biggest weakness.
Capitalism is well and truely dead, and corporations and conservatives are the ones who killed it. They want to remove the ladder of success that got them there.
- Capitalism has never been healthier. This IS Capitalism, not an anomaly.
  
  I very much see what is happening in the US as the groundwork for them becoming an authoritarian state just like China and Russia. They still have "capitalism" and "democracy" too!
  My only hope is that the people of the US realize what is happening before it's too late, and that the rest of the world can hold out in the mean time.
  
  Can’t have a corporate oligarchy without capitalism.
  
  You must not have read the wealth of nations

We're Fiscally RESPOSIBLE!

well I mean the USA's president is a scammer so I am not surprised he is involved in stuff where scammers are abundant nowadays like crypto and AI

The Chinese model has chain of thought that u can see. The model when asked to talk about chinas atrocities will go through a chain of though process outlining all the atrocities then conclude its not allowed to tell u. Cool technology tho I'm just waiting for a dolphin fine tuning.
- Yeah all the info is there and something switches it over to the generic response.
  So fucked.
- If you run it locally, there's no filtering on the outputs. I asked it what happened in 1989 and it jumped straight into explaining the Tiananmen Square Massacre.
  
  That contradicts this experience:
  https://sherwood.news/tech/a-free-powerful-chinese-ai-model-just-dropped-but-dont-ask-it-about/
  
  I've seen some censoring on the 8b Llama variant, but it is hit and miss. Can't wait till a decensored fine tuning.
- I've been playing around with the offline version of the model. It's interesting, but I think we'll have to wait for people to tinker with the open source base for awhile before we get something really great.
- I'm using the 8b model and it's having no problem telling me about China's atrocities.

There's also notable vitality in FOSS big data tools from China (Apache Doris, Kylin, Kyuubi etc.) that reminds of Hadoop in the USA 15 years ago while the USA data engineering now mostly turned to closed source cloud solutions.

China has a huge advantage in AI models because of how lax they are on intellectual property rights. US companies are fighting over API licensing costs, while china is just going to scrape everything and use it for free.
The US has a lead now, but I don't think they can maintain it without giving up on ethical training. Then again it may not matter if the US models are ethical if everyone will eventually just uses the superior unethically trained chinese models instead.
- China has a huge advantage in AI models because of how lax they are on intellectual property rights. US companies are fighting over API licensing costs, while china is just going to scrape everything and use it for free.
  lolwat
  did corporate provide you with these talking points?
  
  I mean, they are right. Asside the question of whether we can even make meaningfully better models by just using LLMs and more data and what the future of AI will look like, and whether it's ethical or not to steal the data, it is quite possible that OpenAI and the like will get into legal trouble because of the methods they use for acquiring data, but Chinese companies won't have to worry about that. If more data = better models then China has an obvious advantage.
- The US companies already scraped the data while they could. If anything, data scraping is far far more difficult now for everyone due to technical reasons.
  Most of the new models are trained on synthetic data or higher quality of data or with RLHF. The reason deepseek is able to perform is likely because LLMs are very very new things, there are many low hanging fruits. Its no longer just about the data we already hit that limit for quite some time.
  
  Honestly, even from the beginning it's pretty obvious scraped data is going to have a ton of issues. There's too much nonsense out there, both from misinformation and people just not able to communicate.
  That's before you get into the ethical aspects of stealing other people's content and the way these things are being misused.

“Earlier this week, DeepSeek unveiled its R1 model, which, the startup claims, meets, if not exceeds, performance from OpenAI’s o1 model released last year. (o1 is designed to tackle reasoning and math problems.)” — Oh, so China built their for math and we built ours for garbage. Interesting approach.
- Building garbage and convincing people it is absolutely necessary to pay someone for it is the American way.
  
  Almost as if one culture values education and actual problem solving while the other values spectical and sleight of hand.

It kinda sucks it is very repetitive if you use it to craft a story
- Yeah but why you even using AI for stuff like that? If we got to have AI then we should use it for actually useful stuff and not pointless activities that no one will care about in 10 years.
  Remember when Bluetooth came out and they had to stick Bluetooth in everything, even if it was completely pointless, currently AI is being treated like that.
  
  It is great to spark ideas if you're writing
- This is going to sound wild, but why not use your brain for creativity, and use the the machine for crunching numbers?

People here forgot that Xi personally writes for Fortune
- proof?
- And? China is ahead of us in a lot of areas, especially military drone tech. They got shit we’re still trying to get to work, and they just launched their first drone aircraft carrier. As an added bonus, when the US Navy tried war games against drone swarms, they found they were only able to stop the attack from destroying ships half the time.
  People need to start taking China seriously when it comes to tech, because they haven’t been fooling around. When it finally comes around to us fighting them, we’re gonna have a lot of nasty surprises to deal with.

113 comments