DeepSeek’s founder is threatening US dominance in AI race

It would mean some harsh years at first, but it’s a good time to hit the market.

I remember being told I’d never be successful, or make as much money as my parents.

I only wish I hadn’t listened to those people so long.

A good market helps you become a bog standard boring wage slave, maybe get a mortgage, etc.

The outsized success folks will go out and get what they need regardless, they aren’t waiting for it to come to them.

That said, Deepseek is a decent model and was the forcing function needed to give a reality check to a number of AI Startups (and has had the positive effect of making it easier for startups I've helped incubate make the case for their own domain specific foundation model strategy). It's impact shouldn't be understated.

The field is really moving too quickly to talk too certainly about "dominance" or "ahead". My observation is projects I care about on GitHub come with a Chinese README and many interesting talkers at conferences have strong Chinese accents. But I know a good researcher personally and it isn't so apparent to me if these are Chinese Chinese people or Americans of recent Chinese descent.

It’s been 6 months? Geminis big upgrade was 2 months ago and o3 even more recent.

It’s just funny that US companies just barely got ahead the last couple months and already it’s a “drawn out narrative” that they aren’t ahead.

For all we know R2 drops tomorrow? If it’s ahead or even how are we supposed to think about the narrative?

IMO it’s not really that much of a stretch to say they’re fairly close together. I’d want to wait 6 more months where the US stayed significantly ahead before I’d be complaining about narratives. I know things move fast but that’s all the more reason to wait and see.

It makes for interesting television.

For that reason, it probably won't stop anytime soon.

(But I use it for actual work, not for chatting with imaginary friends. Maybe you really do need a "frontier model" if you want to monetize imaginary friends. I woun't know or care.)

However, on cost, R1 beats the Western models by miles.

"DeepSeek-V3 costs only 2.788M GPU hours for its full training. Assuming the rental price of the H800 GPU is $2 per GPU hour, our total training costs amount to only $5.576M. Note that the aforementioned costs include only the official training of DeepSeek-V3, excluding the costs associated with prior research and ablation experiments on architectures, algorithms, or data." https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.19437

They don't even claim to have spent $5M (since they own their GPUs instead of renting them by the hour), it's a purely notional figure suitable for an academic paper. But when R1 got released and started generating hype, it was the only dollar figure anyone had to go on, so it got interpreted as more significant than it is.

I see no downside here. Force US to innovate beyond “it costs a lot of money and we conveniently had that upfront” while also undercutting the law makers and people trying to enforce regulatory capture on a new thing like they’ve done on all the old things.

As a person interested in tech and tools and America, I have no issues with Deepseek and Hunyuan and Wan being effectively CCP funded. Keep it up. Accelerate. Push.