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“Chinese artificial intelligence startup company DeepSeek stunned markets and AI experts with its claim that it built its immensely popular chatbot at a fraction of the cost of those made by American tech titans… DeepSeek’s app competes well with other leading AI models. It can compose software code, solve math problems and address other questions that take multiple steps of planning. It’s attracted attention for its ability to explain its reasoning in the process of answering questions…
“Leading analysts have been poring through the startup’s public research papers about its new model, R1, and its precursors. Among the details that stood out was DeepSeek’s assertion that the cost to train the flagship v3 model behind its AI assistant was only $5.6 million, a stunningly low number compared to the multiple billions of dollars spent to build ChatGPT and other well-known systems.” AP News
The left argues that DeepSeek calls into question the efficacy of American AI companies.
“The R1 breakthrough calls into question the whole approach to improving performance by building out ever-larger and more expensive data centers for training — an approach that has dominated work on A.I. in America for years and explains, among other eye-popping recent pledges, the announcement at the White House last week of up to $500 billion in investment in A.I. infrastructure by a new consortium called Stargate…
“The basic gamble is that the returns to best-in-class A.I. will be so enormous that they will justify whatever it takes to cross that threshold — in terms of energy demand and water use, in terms of intellectual property and, particularly and most mercenarily, in terms of sheer spend. Even before the DeepSeek breakthrough, there were growing questions about that.”
David Wallace-Wells, New York Times
“Unlike top American AI labs—OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind—which keep their research almost entirely under wraps, DeepSeek has made the program’s final code, as well as an in-depth technical explanation of the program, free to view, download, and modify. In other words, anybody from any country, including the U.S., can use, adapt, and even improve upon the program…
“Preventing AI computer chips and code from spreading to China evidently has not tamped the ability of researchers and companies located there to innovate. And the relatively transparent, publicly available version of DeepSeek could mean that Chinese programs and approaches, rather than leading American programs, become global technological standards for AI—akin to how the open-source Linux operating system is now standard for major web servers and supercomputers.”
Matteo Wong, The Atlantic
“[AI companies in the US] see the problem through the lens of grabbing control of all innovative technology, and holding it for ransom behind a high wall of market power. It’s basically the opposite of Silicon Valley’s origin stories of two guys in a garage outwitting the majors. In their hearts, the incumbents know that they aren’t set up to deliver; better products are not the way to win in modern American capitalism…
“You can grumble that DeepSeek’s story is dubious, and it probably is; I certainly don’t buy that it was built for $5.6 million. You can also be creeped out by DeepSeek saving your keystrokes, or any other nexus of surveillance and machine learning. [But] China has allowed competition to dictate success in its technology sector rather than finance. The leap forward in AI, to the extent that this is one, mirrors similar leaps in social media algorithms and electric vehicles. The absence of such competition here may be driving our meager results.”
David Dayen, American Prospect
The right is optimistic that DeepSeek can spur innovation among American companies, and skeptical of China.
The right is optimistic that DeepSeek can spur innovation among American companies, and skeptical of China.
“Biden issued an executive order which sought to constrain compute under an arbitrary threshold, bar open source as an alleged threat to national security, and effectively allow regulatory capture by the biggest players. The administration and its enablers wanted to limit math, and in turn, limit code—but ended up just limiting America’s lead…
“The apparent concern with an American open-source model was that the Chinese would copy it. DeepSeek has flipped the bit, so to speak: It’s the Chinese who have released something open source that now every American company is seeking to use or replicate, because of its incredible performance. In that ironic sense, DeepSeek is an incredible gift to the American people… [that] could align our policy goals with reality and light a fire under both government and private-sector actors alike.”
Alex Rampell, Free Press
“If [DeepSeek] really is more attractive than the current models, the Chinese will get yet another way into the information sphere and control it. If you think our Big Tech companies use their AIs to promote propaganda, you ain't seen anything yet. China's censorship on the platform is everywhere, and the way that it is programmed, it can manipulate all your data at its whim…
“DeepSeek isn't going to kill American tech companies, which have unlimited resources. DeepSeek claims they produced their model for about $6 million, which is the coffee budget for Google or Microsoft. I'm more worried about China getting even more control over the flow of information outside its borders. If they can provide a competent information tool at a lower price — even if the Chinese government is secretly subsidizing the effort and it is much less efficient than claimed — that could have a major impact on the political world.”
David Strom, Hot Air
“When something seems too good to be true, it probably is, and that does double for any good news coming out of China. (‘No human-to-human transmission of Covid-19!’) Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang — the youngest self-made billionaire in the world — told CNBC’s Squawk Box on Thursday that DeepSeek probably used tens of thousands of under the table Nvidia chips to create it…
“Back in July, the Wall Street Journal did an investigative report about the booming AI chip-smuggling business, going through Singapore to China… In a world where nefarious actors can smuggle whole tankers full of oil in defiance of trade sanctions, it’s not that hard to smuggle small flat computer equipment. How do we know that DeepSeek is running on a bunch of lower-rated Nvidia H-800 chips and not some of these advanced H-100s?”
Jim Geraghty, National Review
Two New Giant Pandas Debut at Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute.
Smithsonian National Zoo
