DEEPSEEK: new hot-shot on the block

A storm in a teapot by Flux1 dev AI

DeepSeek rocked Silicon Valley. Sent tech titans into a tizzy. Sam Altman, OpenAI boss is dead sure DeepSeek used OPEAI data. Nvidia, chip-maker , darling of investors, lost 500 bn.  The brouhaha ain’t over yet.

DeepSeek, a small hedge fund, used cheaper chips and less machinery to come  up with a super AI app. 

It cost approx. 6 m. Just after OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle had signed a 500 bn contract with Trump’s blessing. Oy very, have they got a headache.

Governments worry that the DeepSeek is tapping data - Tik Tok* was blocked by the US Supreme Court for that reason.  Researchers claim DeepSeek is peppered with propaganda. The Chinese Top Dogs worry DeepSeek’s  bite is bigger than theirs. Users don’t seem to give a rat’s ass. What comes next?  EKI! 

*Trump gave Tik Tok  a 75 day reprieve

Source:s: Economist, New York Times, Washington Post

Next week: SCAMLAND where you get PIG-BUTCHERED

Note: The DeepSeek storm in a teapot lasted a few days. It turns out, it's a pretty decent model, somewhat censored - but so are the US models, just on different topics. DeepSeek does not want to talk about Tianamen square, ChatGPT does not want to talk about sex. Both reflect the norms of the originating society.

The alleged low training cost of DeepSeek came with an asterisk. Yes, the final training run was cheap. No, that is not the cost of the development of the model, but rather just a small fraction of it. Anyway, the AI community has moved on, the brouhaha is pretty much history.

Today (18. of February - it is necessary to give exact date, not just a vague description like mid-feb, as the progress is so fast) X-Ai released Grok 3, the king of the hill for as-of-now. Last week it was Google's Gemini 2.0. That is unless you consider the reasoning models, where OpenAI:s o3-mini(high) was on top. DeepSeek belongs in the bubbling under category, together with another Chinese LLM, Qwen.

It looks like we're still at an exponential curve of progress. No-one knows how long that will last. Interesting times.

PS: I would not be surprised, if stiffling competition rather than real security concerns were behind the TikTok ban. Oh, and Trump had pretty much nothing at all to do with that 500 bn investment. The way i see it, this was a cheap way to buy influence into Trump administration for the companies involved - they did not really need to do anything more than tolerate being in the same room with Trump for a few minutes, while he took the credit for the investment that would have happened with or without him.

CU

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Eki