DeepSeek is legitimately impressive, but the level of hysteria is an indictment of so many.
The $5M number is bogus. It is pushed by a Chinese hedge fund to slow investment in American AI startups, service their own shorts against American titans like Nvidia, and hide sanction evasion. America is a fertile bed for psyops like this because our media apparatus hates our technology companies and wants to see President Trump fail.
We have so many useful idiots uncritically reporting Chinese propaganda as fact because on some level, they want it to be true. They love seeing hundreds of billions of dollars wiped off the market cap off our largest companies.
OTOH, Marc Andreessen–who certainly doesn’t hate American technology companies and doesn’t want to see President Trump fail–said:
“Deepseek R1 is one of the most amazing and impressive breakthroughs I’ve ever seen — and as open source, a profound gift to the world”
https://x.com/pmarca/status/1882719769851474108
Looks to me that Deepseek really did do a good job of optimizing the way the system works in order to reduce resource consumption. And yes, they did apparently did have the advantage of having output from earlier models to build on, and maybe they did have more high-end processors than advertised…but still, if the processing requirement to do equivalent work has been reduced by, say, 5:1 or even 2:1, that’s pretty significant in view of all the real estate, electricity, and money that has been envisaged as being required to support AI.
More generally, It’s one thing to be impressed by legitimate Chinese accomplishments, something else entirely to promote the idea we’re hopelessly behind them (and I”ve seen quite a bit of that in recent months) Analogy with Charles Lindbergh arguing that the Luftwaffe was so far ahead of the US & other Western powers that we would definitely lose in any war. (Lindbergh was a great aviator, but he clearly didn’t understand the power of mass production manufacturing)
David F: “It’s one thing to be impressed by legitimate Chinese accomplishments, something else entirely to promote the idea we’re hopelessly behind them”
We in the US (and more generally in the West) are definitely behind the Chinese in many, perhaps most, areas. The question is — are we “hopelessly behind”?
Clearly, China now leads the world in traditional manufacturing — steel, shipbuilding, automobile manufacturing, consumer goods — replacing the US in that role. And when the West develops a “new” idea such as PhotoVoltaics or wind turbines or Electric Vehicles, the West soon loses its lead and next thing we know China has dominated the manufacturing in those areas too. Ah! But we lead in cutting edge non-manufacturing service industries, such as creating software. That is the real impact of something like Deepseek — maybe we have to face the possibility (reality?) that we are losing our lead in those areas as well.
Will Deepseek come to be seen as a “Sputnik moment”, when the US realizes that we need to reform ourselves and rebuild a productive economy … or face a decline into a rather poor natural resources backwater begging for Chinese investment? If on the other hand the Deepseek phenomenon is seen as simply another opportunity for the West to speculate on stock prices in our over-financialized economy, then “hopeless” might be an accurate assessment of our position.
Analogy someone came up with: there was a growing problem with horse manure in large cities..solved by the introduction of a different technology, the motor vehicle.
But there are different analogies that could be used. James Watt’s engine greatly improved the efficiency of the coal-hungry Newcomen engine…but the effect was not to reduce the demand for coal, quite the contrary. Something similar happened when microprocessors greatly reduced the cost and energy consumption of computing.
So which analogy applies in the case of AI?
This is fascinating on several levels.
I agree with David that a critical part of AI is the physical infrastructure that backs it and a critical advantage is to minimize that, the power and the chips. In procurement you can buy anything you want if you are willing to pay, but the trick is to balance what you need against the dollars you have to spend.
As to American press being susceptible to psyops, I think American and the British press has always been susceptible to such things and that’s what I good public relations dept does is manipulate the narrative, know how a given paper, editor works. Have the right people on the Rolodex to get a story going. Even before its descent in ideological decrepitude, the press loved a sensational story – if it bleeds it leads – and as an agent just have to know how to feed it
Jumping to the political arena for a minute, early in the first Trump Admin when Comey was still FBI director he got the Russian Collusion hoax out in the larger public ecosystem where it took off like a wildfire. How? He first gave a private briefing to Trump that there was nothing to the Russian rumors and then leaked to his contacts that he had briefed Trump on the matter; just that spark in the public ecosystem was all that was needed. Really the modern media, and the old press, still works on the same principle as the mean girls high school gossip machine and just about smart.
Then there’s the classic from Ben Rhodes and the Obama WH:
”But Rhodes makes it clear that selling this lie to the press was easy. ‘The average reporters is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. … They literally know nothing.’
One of Rhodes’s assistants, Ned Price, adds still more to this demeaning picture. He actually calls reporters ‘force multipliers,’ going on to describe how “we have our compadres, I will reach out to a couple people … and I’ll give them some color, and the next thing I know … they’ll be putting the message out on their own…
Rhodes even talks about how the White House enlisted various arms control “experts” to create “an echo chamber.” They were, he said, “saying things that validated what we had given them to say.” They even had, as Rhodes put it, “test drivers to know who was going to be able to carry our message effectively”
https://www.investors.com/politics/commentary/why-is-ben-rhodes-apologizing-for-insulting-the-press/
Rhodes would know because he used the media not just to burnish the WH’s rep but to make himself look 10 feet tall
The Chinese understand the same principle and also understand, both from a historical and cultural perspective, the advantage of appearing 10-foot tall supermen – that’s worth a post another day The story may fall apart somewhat in another week or two for the reasons Luckey (who is an interesting guy) mentioned but by that time the mission would be accomplished of creating those first impressions .
The Chinese are simply using the press the same way the Obama WH did and in reality everyone does, but with much more strategic intent. I’ll speculate as well and given the wild west of the Internet as far as media and the fact that many traditional outlets are suffering financially I’m sure there is a lot of Chinese money floating around.
There are also a lot of “personalities” out there, and not just lefties, who look for both clickbait and parades to get in front of.
First: What’s the evidence that any of the claims are true?
Second: What’s the evidence that this is not simply piping the queries to one of the established models and returning the answers?
As with all Chinese claims, impressive if true but unlikely from known conditions and resources.
DeepSeek doesn’t know what happened in Tiananmen Square in 1989.