Comment by skizm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by skizm | Hacker News Reader

I'm wondering if there's a (probably illegal) strategy in the making here:

    - Wait till NVDA rebounds in price.
    - Create an OpenAI "competitor" that is powered by Llama or a similar open weights model.
    - Obscure the fact that the company runs on this open tech and make it seem like you've developed your own models, but don't outright lie.
    - Release an app and whitepaper (whitepaper looks and sounds technical, but is incredibly light on details, you only need to fool some new-grad stock analysts).
    - Pay some shady click farms to get your app to the top of Apples charts (you only need it to be there for like 24 hours tops).
    - Collect profits from your NVDA short positions.

- Fail at the above.

I don’t think this is what happened with DeepSeek. It seems that they’ve genuinely optimized their model for efficiency and used GPUs properly (tiled FP8 trick and FP8 training). And came out on top.

The impact on the NVIDIA stock is ridiculous. DeepSeek took the advantage of flexible GPU architecture (unlike inflexible hardware acceleration).

This is what I still don't understand, how much of what they claim has been actually replicated? From what I understand the "50x cheaper" inference is coming from their pricing page, but is it actually 50x cheaper than the best open source models?

50x cheaper than OpenAI's pricing on an open source model which doesn't require giving that quality level up. The best open source models were much closer in pricing but V3/R1 are that way while being a results topper.

this is exactly what DeepSeek is doing, the only difference is they built the real model, not a fake one.

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