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Comment by thelastgallon | Hacker News Reader

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The issue here is not that DeepSeek exists as a competitor to GPT, Claude, Gemini,...

The issue is that DeepSeek have shown that you don't need that much raw computing power to run an AI, which means that companies including OpenAI may focus more on efficiency than on throwing more GPUs at the problem, which is not good news for those in the business of making GPUs. At least according to the market.

One of the questions about this is that of the US’s human capital, i.e. does the US (still) have enough capable tech people in order to make that happen?

Lol, yes. The US is still very much at the forefront of this stuff. DeepSeek have presented some neat optimizations, but there have been many such papers and optimizations get implemented quickly once someone has proven them out.

> The US is still very much at the forefront of this stuff

Doesn't look like it, because the some of the biggest US tech companies now active (including Meta and Alphabet) couldn't come up with what this much-smaller Chinese company has. Which begs the question, what is that companies like Meta, Alphabet and the like do with the (already) hundreds of billions of dollars that they invested in this space?

Best guess is that they were all caught up in the arms race to try and make a better model, at whatever the cost. And if you work in this space you were probably getting thrown fistfuls of money to join in on it. I read somewhere on reddit that anyone trying to push for efficiency at these places was getting ignored or pushed aside. DeepSeek had an incentive to focus on efficiency because of the chip embargo. So I don't think this is necessarily a knock on US AI capabilities. It is just that the incentives were different and when stock prices are going to the moon regardless of how much capex was getting spent, it was easy for everyone to just go along with it.

With that said, I think all of these companies are capable of learning from this and implementing these efficiency improvement. And I think the arms race is still on. The goal is to achieve super human level of intelligence, and they have a ways to go to get there. It is possible that these new efficiency improvements might even help them take the next step as they can now do a lot more with a lot less.

I see no reason to believe they couldn't have done so. Rather, this is the typical pattern we see across industry: the west focuses on working out what the next big thing is, and China is in a fast-follow-and-optimize mode.

You can ban the company but are you going to ban any US company from using the open model and running it on their own hardware [1]?

The cat is out of the bag and there is no going back.

[1] https://apxml.com/posts/gpu-requirements-deepseek-r1

> You can ban the company but are you going to ban any US company from using the open model and running it on their own hardware [1]?

Just for the people who might not have been around the last time, this has precedent :) US government (and others) have been trying to outlaw (open source) cryptography, for various reasons, for decades at this point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_Wars

That statement is, at best, misleading.

The vast majority of what the US government has tried to ban was export of cryptography tools. However, as your own link makes clear, they stopped doing that in 2000.

Furthermore, what was restricted was not "open source cryptography"; it was cryptography that they could not break. The only way that open source comes into it is that that is what made it abundantly clear that the cat was out of the bag and there was no going back.

Hm. Kind of like this situation.

Please try to at least attempt to consider nuance. Do you seriously think that would happen? What is your point here? Do you think people in favor of restricting one thing are in favor of restricting everything?

People are trying to spur up “we shouldn’t use Chinese AI because our data is going to be stolen” discussions. But after TikTok debacle, no serious person is willing to bite. It’s just a big coping strategy for everyone who’s been saying how western AI is years ahead.

> Please try to at least attempt to consider nuance. Do you seriously think that would happen? What is your point here? Do you think people in favor of restricting one thing are in favor of restricting everything?

The restriction on TikTok was blatantly because it's a Chinese product outcompeting American products, everything else was the thinnest of smokescreens. Yes, I think people in favour of it are in favour of slapping whatever tariffs or bans they can get away with on everything that China makes.

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