The Inefficiency of Greed: How DeepSeek Exposed Silicon Valley's Tech Bros | Hacker News Reader

The Inefficiency of Greed: How DeepSeek Exposed Silicon Valley's Tech Bros

dowhatmatters.medium.com

36 pointszackmorris12 comments

In a free society, lack of diversity is reflective of what happens when people are free to do what they want. To think otherwise is to believe that (for example) women should be forced into tech whether they like it or not.

Not everybody is free to do what they want in that way. Tech is a pretty hostile place for a lot of people so they make a go of it and then leave. Not wanting to put up with a hostile work environment is not being "free". I know a lot of people who would have preferred to stay in tech but were pushed out or prioritized their mental and physical health.

Not sure about the semi moral judgement being levied here against the bros but certainly feels like SV is about to have a moment here similar to the other fields the Chinese are brute forcing. Solar, EVs etc.

The judgement seems misplaced.

> The U.S. risks falling behind in the AI arms race, not because of a lack of resources but because of a lack of vision and an excess of corruption.

No corruption is needed for this to happen--it's capitalism working as intended.

husband and wife team in San Francisco raised $60 million on "AI in games" with falsified bank statements and confidence meetings.. meanwhile US career engineers are being forced out with transparently self-serving Improvement Orders because "AI".. plan working as intended?

I don't get it, is the objection that because fraud is happening, it's not "plan working as intended"? Does that mean zero fraud is a prerequisite for any "plan working as intended"?

It's like at the end of every bubble. From someone who sees it daily - there are an increasingly large number of obvious sham AI companies. There are articles about it, words we use for them.

The article is exactly right. Tech Bros aren't building communities but the people trying to build communities are being suffocated by the same platforms they attempt to use to build them.

So to make it painfully obvious for everyone here, if your first thought is to make:

A Facebook Group

A Discord server

A Subreddit

(Insert other walled garden here)

You aren't solving the problem and you won't get anywhere close because these platforms will shut down your group for ToS/AUP violations before you even get close to enough people to spur any sort of action. If you cannot self-host, find someone who knows how or take this opportunity to learn how.

And, if you honestly need any further evidence of this censorship taking place, X (Twitter) heavily demotes any posts with links to Bluesky and Facebook was just caught not even a few days ago blocking links to Distrowatch. Now this is just the surface, what other stuff have they blocked and we've not heard of because it wasn't a high profile target like Distrowatch?

From the article:

> Encourage Diversity in Tech Let’s not sugarcoat it: Silicon Valley’s diversity problem is a national embarrassment. By failing to include women, people of color, and other underrepresented groups, the tech industry leaves untapped talent on the table. A more inclusive workforce isn’t just a moral imperative; it’s a competitive advantage.

The author presents zero evidence that DeepSeek staff have the diversity of birth characterstics that she claims is lacking in Silicon Valley.

There are several high profile female engineers and researchers at Google and OpenAI - watch the OpenAI YouTube videos to see them demonstrate their accomplishments.

Have we seen a single female (or non-Chinese) representative of DeepSeek yet?

From the article:

> China’s AI strategy, for example, leverages state-led initiatives and private-sector innovation to great effect.

The Communist Party's influence and coersion is not something I'd celebrate.

Where did DeepSeek's innovation begin? With the US private enterprise and private investment that led to the foundational AI R&D (Transformers, LLMs etc).

DeepSeek then built upon this research, which was shared openly by the West.

The author's complaints about monopolistic hoarding by the West fail to acknowledge how generous US companies like Google were with their research publication.

Both Silicon Valley and DeepSeek should be commended for their contributions. Yes, Silicon Valley does have a lot of speculative VC sloshing about, and that might make it a little less efficient, and more "scatter gun" - but it's Silicon Valley where most big tech innovation originates. Not China. Chinese companies simply keep an eye on any winning formulae originating from the US, which they then replicate.

So please don't lambast Silicon Valley and heap praise on an autocratic, human-rights-abusing regime that is -rightly- sanctioned by the US.

I find it interesting that GPT-3 was available as an API for more than a year without generating this much excitement.

It wasn't until chatgpt was released that we fully grasped the potential of AI, leading to a surge in innovation every week.

Regardless of any criticisms, it's undeniable that OpenAi played a significant role in accelerating the progress and acceptance of AI in our daily lives.

there are reports that some openai employees initially learned about the release of the chatgpt interface via twitter. this move appears to have been orchestrated from on high by sam altman, who, despite his carefully curated public image, is not a scientist or researcher and holds no academic credentials at all, let alone any in the fields of computer science, machine learning, or linguistics. he is a prep-school educated kid who washed out of a comp sci degree at stanford that managed to pawn that off into being a VC who serves on the board of startups. in short, he is the exact kind of business guy this article is critiquing.

the release and viral adoption of chatgpt drove altman's personal profile and the valuation of the company he runs into the stratosphere, but, to many of the more sober/cynical minded of people who have been doing this kind of research for years (myself included), it appears to be at the cost of dropping a poorly understood (by the general public) technology with a high potential for abuse by multitude of different types of bad actors onto the general public with little or no plan for how to manage/mitigate the repercussions on the rest of society.

so yes, did openai play a "a significant role in accelerating the progress and acceptance of AI in our daily lives"... yes, but to many, that is not a good thing. we are only just beginning to scratch the surface of what this tech's impact will be on society as a whole. my guess is that most people with scientific / engineering backgrounds would have preferred a more incremental and controlled release process into broader adoption. instead, it seems like just another cynical move by another silicon valley pencil pusher relentlessly seeking to enrich themselves while accelerating the pace at which the billions of other people on this planet need to deal with downstream consequences of this action.

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