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Comment by swingboy | Hacker News Reader

Is there a lab more innovative than DeepSeek? Imagine if they had the same compute resources that Anthropic and OpenAI have.

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Food for thought: Constraints are the source of creativity.

Yeah if they had the resources of an OpenAI or anthropic they’d be OpenAI or Anthropic. Scrappy underdogs have to be nimble and innovative.

They are as “underdog” as Linux is to Windows.

Not really, they are underdogs in the true sense of the word.

Let's wait a bit and see how your US frontrunners will age with their operating costs above revenue, model pricing collapsing faster than compute efficiency improvements and cost pressure from DeepSeek and friends.

Possibly relevant: 突破技术壁垒, "break the technical barricade" -> overcome an obstacle through innovation (in this case, sub SOTA GPUs at least).

Native Chinese speakers to confirm....

your translation is correct, I would say Chinese labs may be able to figure out the current capability of latest frontier models in 3-6 months, but then Anthropic and OpenAI may have already been ASI in that time already. China's main problem is still lack of (good) chips, and that is a hardware issue that is unlikely to be solved for a while. and more effort for efficiency means less effort for actual capability improvements. we have already seen what anthropic can do if they focus on efficiency with opus 5.5

This isn’t a law.

Bell Labs would be a good counter example. All the resources in the world and no demands.

General Magic failed with all the talent and all the resources. Cautionary Tales podcast featured General Magic in a recent episode; the basic argument was no constraints led to no focus.

You don't need a counter example to a counter example.

It's not that I think the opposite of the original statement is true, I'm suggesting that's it's just all noise as there are both successes and failures at both extremes.

Short term they might have less compute, but long term they will most definitely have more compute. They don't have to worry about energy, they don't have to worry about people blocking them building data centers the only thing stopping them is there no Chinese manufacturer that can produce a chip as good as Nvidia but I would bet that solved in a year or so.

They don't have to worry about people blocking DC construction in the US either. All new AI datacenters are designated "dual-use" so the federal government is already letting local councils know to fuck off.

they can also put them in better places, vs trying to arbitrage expensive electricity costs and various US corruption thats built more around paying people off than getting things done

Yeah, but that brings up another problem that China doesn't have. Their federal government is always on the same page. The US federal government changes every two years and it doesn't seem like one side is going to be allowing building of AI data centers anymore and in fact might just ban AI in general.

It's hard enough to build them in the US that multiple companies are unironically spending 10s of millions of dollars to try to build them in space

Which cynics could say is marketing hype, but I tend to believe it's extremely difficult to build anything land/energy intensive in the modern United States

Or some people have more money than sense. Building data centers on earth is trivial compared to getting the same amount of compute to space.

There are places that aren’t in the US that also aren’t in space. I still don’t get why it makes any sense to put this stuff in space, but if it does, it’s not the political difficulty of building stuff on earth. So it’s hard in the US. You’re telling me Mexico wouldn’t allow it? Argentina? Mongolia? Build a data center on a French nuclear test site in the Algerian desert and it’s still easier than space.

10s of millions isn't even a rounding error in the context of AI-related spending.

Just because other companies don't write papers about what they do doesn't mean they aren't innovative...

Sure, but we’ll never know what they do or if it is innovate because we won’t know what they do.

Well we do know the results. They’ve been at the frontier constantly, including developing the entire field and set of capabilities. In the beginning every OpenAI paper was basically a landmark.

They were at the frontier early since they allegedly “stole” the internets data first. Now they’re just lame ducks trying to ensure they stay at the top by legislation and ensuring open source doesn’t get its say. Also OpenAI trying to adopt any other product (legal tooling, healthcare, latex replacement, etc…).

They were at the frontier because they invented many of the techniques. Google already had the internet’s data well beforehand. Anthropic and OpenAI are still at the frontier today, independent of legislation.

Oh no I agree, they were among the first to be popular in the llm frontier with their techniques. Today they are only holding on to the frontier because of that lead.

They want the legislature to keep their lead from other competitors.

I'm actually the most innovative, I've written thousands of papers advancing the state of human knowledge. They're just in my basement and I don't show anyone.

This is literally just a scheduler over firecracker man what

"Necessity is the mother of invention."

Not sure they'd be the same without the constraints.

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