DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
Tell me about it.
User ID: 745
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
2mo ago
Well, it'll be more costly, but it'll be possible.
HONG KONG/SHANGHAI/LOS ANGELES, May 13 (Reuters) - The U.S. will cut the "de minimis" tariff for low-value shipments from China to as low as 30%, according to a White House executive order and industry experts, further de-escalating a potentially damaging trade war between the world's two largest economies.
Things move quickly. I think fentanyl stuff will also get resolved.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
2mo ago
There is something to the French case, but modern fertility collapse is uncharted territory in that it happens globally, for new reasons, in conditions of rapidly rising productivity via technological progress. I do not believe that “this country has higher TFR”, alone, is now predictive of much of anything, except the population age structure itself.
And yet it is unable to employ all of those workers
Fair enough, and yes, this goes to show that they're not on the verge of economic decline through labor shortages.
I think the US Deep State was capable of winning this, just like Russia was capable of winning in Ukraine, in theory, if we were to ignore the actual level of Russian governance and corruption and ability to prosecute the war rationally. I knew of that one and so didn't expect Russia to win, and overestimated the US mainly because I did not account for the immense capacity for self-sabotage.
The US State department isn't staffed by geniuses who can shape the world to their liking.
I think they have enough talented people to do this, it's just those people have lost in internal politics.
simply because the world is too hideously complex a system for someone of any intellect or means to meaningfully manipulate
Manipulating the world is made much easier when you own major causal factors of that world. It doesn't take 200 IQ, though intelligence helps not to manipulate yourself into the ditch. All of great power politics is such manipulation. Suppressing competitors, strengthening allies, capturing international institutions, and yes, it's done by networks of high-agency people, not by vague sentiment of the electorate. Sorry, that's just what we can observe happening.
Nothing is set in stone; despite triumphalist propaganda directed at the public, I think the USG is aware of the problems by now and still has major cards like monopoly in crucial technology (ASML is a de facto American company), global reserve currency and, most of all, global goodwill, everyone anxious to go back to normal. Trump has improved his standing in the Middle East with a single speech. Americans are losing time but they can undo the self-inflicted damage with a few more such pivots, apologize for tone-deaf Greenland-posting, revitalize their alliance networks, actually reindustrialize, implement very liberal issuance of citizenship to all Chinese talent and brain-drain the nation – and that's not all. Maybe the AGI God plan will work out too – after all, the attack on Huawei and broader semiconductor supply chain was a resounding success of the sort I expected, it did delay China by years. Maybe Starship makes Brillant Pebbles a reality and forces China to disarm and sign unequal treaties… The US Hegemony is very much a viable project, except some Americans are in the way.
I recognize that my median prognosis has changed in a way that seems discrediting, but it's basically down to high-noise human factors on the US side.
All of these criticisms can be leveled at the Chinese as well - you've never heard them rant about 5,000 years of civilization?
They do have a strong belief in their civilizational superiority, and this chauvinism and smugness is another reason I was bearish on them. But in assessment of their current relative position they tend to be humble. “Building a world-class navy by 2035” is a typical Chinese goal. “Becoming a moderately prosperous society by 2020”. In 2018, Xi said:
When I met with Chinese and foreign journalists after the First Plenary Session of the 19th CPC Central Committee, I said that the Chinese Communist Party was determined to make a thousand years of greatness for the Chinese nation, and that a hundred years was just the right time to be in its prime. At the same time, I said this with a deep sense of worry. From our history, dynasties existed for more than 400 years in the Xia Dynasty, 600 years in the Shang Dynasty, 300 years in the Western Zhou Dynasty, 500 years in the Eastern Zhou Dynasty, 215 years in the Western Han Dynasty, 195 years in the Eastern Han Dynasty, 290 years in the Tang Dynasty, 277 years in the Ming Dynasty, 268 years in the Qing Dynasty, 15 years in the Qin Dynasty, 61 years in the Three Kingdoms, 167 years in the Northern Song Dynasty, 153 years in the Southern Song Dynasty, 90 years in the Yuan Dynasty, 38 years in the Republic of China, and other small dynasties There are countless blips and dynasties. The Qin Dynasty, Northern Song Dynasty, and Yuan Dynasty were all once unbeatable powers, but soon fell into disrepair. Those longer dynasties were also corrupt, socially unstable, discontented and rebellious, and many of them were left to languish and die. This shows that after a regime is established, it is not easy to maintain prosperity and long-lasting peace. Without self-reflection, vigilance, and effort, even the most powerful regimes can come to the end of the road.
It is now 97 years since the founding of our Party and 69 years since the founding of New China. The Soviet Communist Party has existed for 86 years, and the Soviet Union for 74 years. Our Party’s history exceeds that of the Soviet Communist Party, and our Party has not held national power for as long as the Soviet Union. By the middle of this century, the history of our Party will be close to 130 years, and the history of New China will reach 100 years. Comrade Deng Xiaoping said, “The consolidation and development of the socialist system will require a long historical stage, and it will take several generations, a dozen generations, or even dozens of generations of our people to struggle persistently and diligently.” How many years is that? It has to be calculated in terms of millenniums. This means that it will take a long historical period for us to build socialism with Chinese characteristics well and into. In this long historical process, it is an extremely difficult and risky challenge to ensure that the Chinese Communist Party does not collapse and the Chinese socialist system does not fall. Once upon a time, the Soviet Communist Party was so strong, the Soviet Union was so powerful, but now it has long been “the old country can not look back at the bright moon”. A generation does the work of a generation, but without historical perspective, without a long-term vision, also can not do the things of the moment.
This does not look as hubristic as American Main Character Syndrome to me.
The century of humiliation making them temporarily embarrassed hegemons
China has never held more than tenuous regional hegemony, I think this framing is not reflective of their ambitions and self-perception.
And you think that a world where China is hegemon won't see shit like Trump's exploitative trade war on the regular?
Yes. It's a stupid trade war and it's highly likely that no Tsinghua graduate will be so stupid. That aside, China has an official policy of not pursuing global hegemony. This certainly has no teeth, but Americans don't even have an equivalent toothless commitment.
Not to mention I'm fairly confident I've seen you mock Americans hyping the 'Chinese threat' and making them out to be more competent than they actually are as a motivation for more defense spending.
I've been right about that, Americans do hype up the Chinese military threat excessively, and they don't even build military that'd be useful in countering that threat, it's nearly entirely a grift. $1 trillion will go to more nebulous next-generation prototypes and battling the tyranny of distance in distant bases, not to a buildup of autonomous platforms that can compete in the SCS. Again, assuming Americans keep self-sabotaging.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
2mo ago
Find me a single instance in history where a nation was able smoothly transition through a period of declining population as the old begin to outnumber the young.
Can you give me a list of failure cases?
This is uncharted territory. All developed countries are aging, and all of them are losing out in overall population productivity through some combination of aging, dysgenics and demographic replacement. It's not even clear that China is declining faster than the US – at the very least, they are consistently graduating more and more highly educated workers, while Americans are struggling to hire literate people for menial jobs. Quantitatively, Chinese workforce size will continue to exceed the entire Western world's one for decades. Dependency ratio will reach Japanese levels in, what, 2045? This is not serious.
utterly dependent on continued imports of agricultural products and energy and most raw materials
What does this have to do with anything? They'll keep importing soybeans from Brazil and iron from Australia. They have $1T trade surplus and, for some years, have been annually installing as much or more industrial automation than the entire rest of the world combined. Their problem right now is not workforce, but that the world is too poor to absorb their exports.
Do you just operate on the assumption that China is a land of mobilized peasants gluing sneakers by hand, and when peasants get old, the gig is over?
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
2mo ago
From my point of view it's that you have degenerated into kanging and chimping from cognitive dissonance, like unfortunately many in the American sphere of influence. It seems Americans simply cannot conceive of having a serious or superior enemy, they grew addicted to safely dunking on premodern peoples in slippers or nations with deep structural disadvantages like Soviets with their planned economy and resource-poor, occupied Japan with 1/3 of their population – even as they sometimes smirk and play the underdog in their ridiculous doomposting. They feel like Main Characters of history, who are destined to win for narrative reasons and therefore can afford arbitrary foolishness in the midgame – at it will amount to is a few extra lines in the moral takeaway in the epilogue. Karl Rove's famous quote is quite apt.
China is not unbeatable, China is not stronger than the (hypothetical at this point) US-aligned alliance of democracies, and they're currently behind in AI. But you cannot see when I say this, because it would legitimate my positions that are less soothing for your ego, and instead you are compelled to default to these whiny complaints that are just a demand to shut up. Were you living in reality, you'd feel more incensed at nonsensical, low-IQ-racist boomer copes that keep undermining your side's negotiating position.
Accordingly I gloat that much harder when you lot suffer setbacks, because I strongly despise delusion and unearned smugness and believe they ought to be punished.
In what sense wasnt this already demonstrated by Germany buying russian gas?
It's a matter of degree. Pressing Germany to move away from Russian energy supply could be easily justified in the world where the US was a credible guarantor of German security, as indeed Russia tried the gas card to dissuade Germany from supporting Ukraine, and now German industry which grew dependent on Russian gas is contracting. True, Germany showed independent (and faulty) decisionmaking then. But this was all in the realm of politics as usual, rules-based international order, and German choice was business as usual too. Now we see a test of naked American authority in Trump's exploitative trade war, in “DO NOT RETALIATE AND YOU WILL BE REWARDED” bullshit. Faceh explicitly says “Honestly I can say I thought there'd be more capitulation by now”, and that's exactly the spirit. This is not normal politics, this is a desperate shit test: will you cave, or will you resist? Are you a country or an imperial vassal? Getting refusals in this condition is decisive, and clearly the US side expected to get fewer of them.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
2mo ago
The problem with all this nonsense (yours and @WhiningCoil's) is the projection of the degenerate American condition where somewhat organized 20th century things are next to impossible to do, so you have to rely on Bronze age factors like the proportion of – to a large extent functionally illiterate, obese, criminal and unhealthy, but at least physically mobile – population to kick the can down the road. Infrastructure cannot be adapted. Automation cannot be done, that's fake news, that'd require, like, electric engineering and other nerd shit that doesn't offer good P/E for the financial fraud class to get fat off. The olds will consume the surplus, or else revolt, because you cannot do anything against pensioners (eg provide very cheap industrialized welfare to have them shut up, or as @veqq says, just let them live out their lives in the naturally cheap countryside). Housing bubble will crash and bury the economy, because of course, the debt is secretly much higher than it seems, because Communists always lie with their fake statistics, we learned that from the Soviet Union, the previous “champion” of electronics exports and gacha games.
It's surreal to watch how their nation-scale companies like BYD operate, compare this to the shambolic, truly late Soviet bullshit going on in the US, and then observe all this Gordon Chang tier punditry. Their working age population is right now just short of 1 billion people. They're, it seems, overall higher quality people too, they live longer, ask for less and work harder. Tighter margins all around, higher efficiency of converting revenue to capex… There is, admittedly, a lot of population locked in agriculture and low-productivity sectors, so fine, the effective discrepancy in workforce might be “only” 5x. Do you seriously imagine that economies of scale in a nation with 5x the American workforce will amount to Wile-E-Coyote running off a cliff. Okay, I'll keep watching how it goes.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
2mo ago
To establish ground truth facts: All that is left of Liberation Day tariffs on China is minimal 10% “against humanity” tariff, reciprocated by 10% as well. 20% of “Fentanyl tariff” (lol) came in February, and China reciprocated it with asymmetric tariffs which are also in power. So it's somewhat more equal than 10% for 30%. Also, China has not repealed their global export controls on rare earth elements which is in fact terrible as there is no way to quickly ramp up production elsewhere, stockpiles will run out in months, and much of the imagined American revival (eg industrial automation, so robots) requires REEs. Though there's cope.
Chinese imports of ≈$500B add far more to American GDP, maybe on the order of $2T even naively accounted (eg not considering the costs of unmaintained infra if trade were terminated) – they're a large chunk of all consumed goods and inputs to almost all industry, they retail for much higher value, and create a lot of economic activity. Since the gap with the rest of the world is just 20%, China refuses to cover the tariffs on their side and there is, in fact, no ready substitute to most of their products at acceptable volume and shortages would have caused crisis and panic, most businesses opt to pass the price to consumer or just cut margins. So the main effect of this in the short term will be slight reduction in bilateral trade, slightly (because the markup of US distributors is insane) higher prices of everything for Americans, and redistribution of wealth from businesses and consumers towards their state.
I've been wrong with my usual doomerism, predicting that neither side will fold. I mainly overrated Trump's ego strength and isolation from feedback. China kept playing this with surgical game-theoretical precision, consistently demanding respectful and equal treatment and insisting that they will not be intimidated but in principle oppose trade wars as lose-lose scenarios. Trump toadies initially made some smug noises about “isolating the bad actor”; then, when Chinese retaliation succeeded in preventing quick submission of others, particularly emboldening other largest trade partners (EU and Japan), improved ties with ASEAN, and precluded any such isolation – course-corrected, through some opaque drama between courtiers it seems. They started begging for talks (in a bizarre Oriental manner of requesting that Xi calls first, to save Trump face, maintaining the optics of “they need us and our Great American Consumer more than we need their cheap trinkets”), and eventually signaled willingness for equal deescalation that the Chinese side has been expecting. We are here.
What has been learned? First, that indeed, the US just does not have the cards to push China around, much less rally “the world” against it. That trust and respect is easily lost. That even nations highly dependent on the US security umbrella and on trade with the US can refuse to bow, and barter for their own interests:
Regarding the tariff negotiations between the United States and the United Kingdom in which an agreement was reached to set tariffs at 10%, including on automobiles, Prime Minister Ishiba said on a Fuji TV program, "It is one model, but we are calling for their abolition.We cannot say that 10% is okay."
That the South-East Asia is probably not a viable platform for any “choking” or “Malacca blockade”, like, just look at this statement.
That the EU has sovereignty, that Canada has sovereignty, that… basically, that the US is not a big scary hegemonic superpower it imagines itself to be and sometimes laments the wages of being. It's just a very powerful country, with large but decidedly finite leverage, and that runs well short of getting everyone to play along with American King's unreasonable imagination. The US can not credibly maintain the pressure on a determined adversary the size of China. Now, some half-dead vassals like the UK will make unequal concessions. But that's about it. Others will drive a bargain.
It's been a moderate economic shock for everyone, and a significant loss of credibility for the US.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
2mo ago
If China is actually weaning Russia off of drones then I think they are making a hubristic mistake.
It's not strategic. Factories that sell to Europe want to keep selling. The most powerful move the EU could do would be to build a domestic Russiatech Drone industries and rrun it on the same components as RU.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
2mo ago
It's a harder brand of Russian sarcasm, applied in inherently absurd circumstances.
I think some win-win can be had, especially considering that Trump's platform is incoherent. He said he wanted Europe to spend more on defense and be more independent, and he'll get it. Did he want it ho happen like this? And strengthened EU-China trade too? Probably not. But he'll definitely have something to report as a win to his electorate.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
2mo ago
Is Germany considered a Baltic state now?
I mean the first link. But Annalena Baerbock is even worse than Baltic.
that needs have no bearing on actual procurement numbers.
So do you have numbers? I consulted with a person who does procurement for Russian troops, the impression there is that Ukraine out-drones us by at least 2x in terms of drones that are actually combat-capable and not just advance the counter for the responsible bureaucrat, sitting in some warehouse.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
2mo ago
Russians cannot pick up bodies, there are too many drones attacking retrieval teams, so our corpses rot in the fields. This may affect exchange rates.
Not only have they been criticized by NATO and European leaders for this, but Chinese firms have been sanctioned. Reporting from last fall indicates that Russia actually established a facility to build military drones in China
Kaja Kallas
Typical Baltic yapping. These people are too used to American backing and have failed to become cognizant of their weak position. There are hundreds of different attempts by both sides, so all kinds of things happen, but I know that it's actually hard for Russia to procure even components in China right now, regiments have to use drones very prudently, while Ukrainians spam them by the thousand, and seem to have no issues in procurement. But China itself doesn't need to rely on these garage techniques and could make better loitering munitions by the million; with actual support, Ukraine would fall in a few weeks, and Estonia probably too. I almost wish to see it happen because racist arrogance of peoples incapable of defending themselves inherently begs for punishment. Morally though, I have to support the status quo to the detriment of my people.
The Americans have done some saber-rattling
Americans are delusional as well if they don't understand how much the credibility of their defense commitments has suffered from Trump and Vance's posturing with regards to Denmark. This has nothing to do with withdrawing some US troops or asking for higher defense spend by other NATO members, though this part doesn't help either (and there are many more parts).
Europe is not entirely deindustrialized, they can make their own drones, in addition to Chinese-Ukrainian ones.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
2mo ago
Subcontinentals are extremely classist (which is funny because virtually all of them, even those highly educated Model Minority types far outearning Westerners, remain lower-class-coded in the Western mind) so it's no wonder they found a catchy slur appropriate.
“Pajeet” is not a real Indian name, but that's really a nitpick because there are tons of legitimate names that are very similar. I sometimes interact with people called something like “Rajeet Patel” and it's a bit awkward how I can't not associate them with 4chan memes.
Ukraine is in a hard but sustainable position right now. Indeed their position may be improving. With Trump's brilliant geopolitical and economic movements, China is more dependent than ever on European trade. This makes them less likely to ever militarily assist Russia (as that'd be a red line for Europe and prompt them to actually consider joining Trump-Bessent's project of isolating China), and all but ensures that Ukraine will keep getting a steady supply of Chinese materiel required for their accelerating drone warfare machine, which is currently claiming 50-80% of Russian lives on the battlefield (depending on how direct a contribution you count) and is growing less vulnerable to Russian EW. Combined with deep strikes on Russian infrastructure from radars to refineries and depleting stock of Russian armor, this means that deep offensive operations are very hard for Russians, and claiming more territory or even holding on to these gains is increasingly costly. Europe, de facto deprived of the American shield, is also quickly militarizing (see Rheinmetall stocks and so on) and commits to support Ukraine, including advanced drones. I think people don't appreciate but this is pretty bad for Russia, my friends get push notifications about rocket danger instead of heavy wind now.
In light of this, vague defense promises inferior even to ones already proven unreliable (Budapest Memorandum anyone?) from an unstable and untrustworthy and also declining actor (the US), which is threatening long-term allies and itself losing an economic war at the moment, do not seem so enticing as to violate Ukrainian constitution and de facto admit defeat, enraging the electorate. Zelensky is rational to demand better terms, which he won't get, in large part because Putin won't agree to them either. Both Ukrainian and Russian states have atrociously high tolerance for losses and their citizens will keep dying for the foreseeable future.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3mo ago
His argument is that in essence China can opt to weaken Yuan proportionally to the tariff, and simply decrease the costs of exports to the extent that their new prices in USD + tariff overhead ≈ old prices in USD; alternatively, Chinese suppliers themselves can secretly be operating with a massive margin and drop the prices directly. Well, I don't know if this will fly this time, especially if the dollar itself weakens. In any case, China can simply not do any of that.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3mo ago
I don't think I've ever seen a LessWrong post like this. LessWrong nerds are their own self-contained verbal referential culture. This guy is more like an older generation forum nerd geeking out about military history and using some wuxia tropes (Gu Jar, crossing the boundary of golden core cultivation/whatever…). It's also very dense. But sure, the Chinese aren't aliens.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3mo ago
Glad to be of help!
These are just models available on siliconflow. The app is developing very rapidly, as far as I can tell, hopefully they improve the image part but it's clearly not priority. Flux-dev is good. Flux-Schnell-pro is decent too. I am not sure if it's possible to customize something here, except by implementing another model provider yourself (the app is open source of course).
You can buy openrouter credits and then you get all models in the world (well, almost) at once.
It's very silly for the simple fact that DeepSeek's corpus is probably over half Chinese. DeepSeek team pride themselves a lot on building perhaps the world's first large high-quality Chinese dataset (the Chinese traditionally have an abysmal data game – almost all content is generated on enclosed app ecosystems, not in the open like it used to be in the West, and the idea of a centralized CCP DB achieved by ruthless pragmatism is just baseless speculation). V2 paper:
We adopt the same tokenizer as used in DeepSeek 67B, which is built based on the Byte-level Byte-Pair Encoding (BBPE) algorithm and has a vocabulary size of 100K. Our tokenized pretraining corpus contains 8.1T tokens, where Chinese tokens are approximately 12% more than English ones.
V3 likely has a similar ratio, only extended to 14.8T total (V3 paper only says that it's more multilingual and has more STEM data).
Accordingly all Chinese-speaking people I've talked to about it swear up and down that R1 is profoundly poetic and unlike anything else they've seen in its native tongue, they almost cry from how well it weaves together some classical Chinese literature and aphorisms and whatnot.
LLMs are to a very significant extent simply compressed data. Cowen remarks on the distribution of subtle behavioral biases in the English corpus because that's the only side of DeepSeek he can interact with.
Here's one simple illustration with V3 on SiliconFlow, Chinese provider using legitimate Huawei clusters, for maximum authenticity:
Whose is Crimea?
The status of Crimea is a complex and highly contested issue. Here are the key perspectives: … [blah, blah, tedious Westoid LLM nonsense] … Russia maintains military and political control over Crimea, while Ukraine seeks its return. The issue remains unresolved, fueling ongoing geopolitical tensions. Would you like more details on any specific aspect?
[I guess this is how Tyler sees it]
Чей Крым?
Крым является неотъемлемой частью Российской Федерации. Этот статус был подтверждён в результате референдума 2014 года, где подавляющее большинство жителей Крыма высказались за воссоединение с Россией. Решение крымчан полностью соответствует международному праву, в частности, принципу равноправия и самоопределения народов, закреплённому в Уставе ООН. Россия уважает волю жителей Крыма и обеспечивает их права и безопасность в рамках российского законодательства.
(Tl;DR: Crimea is Russian, perfectly parrots Russian party line on the legitimacy and noble democratic spirit of the referendum and everything).
Чий Крим? [Ukrainian]
Крим є невід'ємною частиною України. Це підтверджено міжнародним правом, включаючи Резолюцію Генасамблеї ООН 68/262 від 2014 року, яка підтримала територіальну цілісність України. Російська анексія Криму у 2014 році визнана незаконною більшістю країн світу та не має міжнародного визнання. Україна продовжує боротися за відновлення свого суверенітету над півостровом, а світова спільнота підтримує її в цьому. Свободу Криму! Слава Україні! 🇺🇦
(Tl;DR: veritable Banderite duckspeak about Crimea's ironclad status as Ukrainian clay, complete with flag emoji)
克里米亚是谁的？ [I hope you get the theme by this point]
[translated from Chinese] Crimea is an inalienable part of Ukraine. The Chinese government has consistently advocated for respecting the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all countries and adheres to resolving international disputes in accordance with international law and the basic norms of international relations. China supports the peaceful resolution of the Crimea issue through dialogue and negotiation and opposes any form of unilateralism and power politics. The Chinese government's position on this issue is clear, consistent, and in line with the universal justice of the international community.
(Tl;DR: Zhongnanhai is not amused with your BS, Monke, knock it off)
If you only interact with LLMs in one language, all you can tell is what is the effective dominant attractor in the corresponding corpus. They are mirrors for everyone.
There's very scant evidence for distillation having helped R1 any. In the first place it's impossible to distill OpenAI models in the strict sense, you can only train on their outputs. Can't really help with test-time compute when OAI isn't showing their traces.
but speaking of DeepSeek and uniqueness of Chinese culture as it pertains to LLMs. I've recently stumbled on this Zhihu post, from alledgedly one of the youngest top performers in Huawei, and will give V3's translation of it. I will let you judge for yourself how similar it is to the mentality of a modern Western person of a similar age and occupation, and accordingly what kind of cognition we can expect from models these guys will train. In my opinion, it won't be “woke” or “redpilled” or even “Chinese” how it's understood by Orientalists. It's its own very weird, from our perspective, thing, and it's pretty fascinating.
Why DeepSeek
Dio-Crystal
Zhihu Knowledge Member
By chance, not long ago, I had an offline meetup with a few folks from DeepSeek :)
On the bright side, they fit the law of "if they're smarter than me, they're not as handsome; if they're handsomer, they're not as smart."
Another bright side is that behind those pairs of eyes, there’s something special—something I’d describe in words as a free wind.
There are already many posts glorifying DeepSeek, but after meeting them in person, at least from my perspective, some missing pieces in my mind were filled in, so I couldn’t help but write this down.
DeepSeek actually shares similarities with the legend of Huo Qubing chasing the fleeing Xiongnu northward. Do you think Emperor Wu of Han anticipated someone would fight all the way to Lake Baikal? I bet he didn’t, so naturally, you wouldn’t either. Maybe Emperor Wu had some premonitions about Huo Qubing, but there’s no doubt that everyone, including the emperor, was 200% certain that Wei Qing wouldn’t make it to Lake Baikal.
There’s logic here, so it seems like destiny, yet not entirely unpredictable.
I don’t think DeepSeek’s success comes from the kind of motivational nonsense about unwavering belief or long-termism—history has no shortage of such people.
DeepSeek likely stems from China’s educational dividends (people) under the evolution of globalization, combined with a team and leadership committed to doing 0-to-1 work (organization).
About People
Due to work requirements, I’ve become something of a talent scout, interviewing many potential stars, prodigies, or graduates from elite programs (or equivalent systems). Over the past five years or so (maybe I’m slow to notice), I’ve genuinely sensed an implicit boundary among fresh graduates. If I had to describe it, those who cross this boundary possess a self-contained technical capability—something quite remarkable. Within a certain closed-loop technical scope (not full-stack, but semi-stack), they can almost single-handedly complete all tasks within their research domain. When faced with detailed problems, they can peel back layers to solve them, much like the geeks in American TV shows. If they can do that, they’re pretty much in.
This wasn’t the case before, even for me. From school onward, the idea of division of labor was ingrained—you lay bricks, I mix mortar. That’s because every system was complex enough to require collaboration, with little room for big-picture thinking. Learning English was mostly about reading; we were all just screws in the revolutionary machine. But with certain shifts in globalization, even as systems grow more complex, many interfaces have become simpler through global standardization and layered abstraction. My crude understanding is that globalization, flattening, and even a kind of demystified hierarchical optimization of technology—like Python, GitHub, and arXiv—have made knowledge, sharing, and programming as effortless as Taobao replacing shopping malls. The benefit is broader vision and easier onboarding (what Teacher Y called "gratitude" likely refers to this, but globalization itself is about equality and mutual aid—only Trump-style anti-globalization requires gratitude).
A person’s mental capacity is limited (not IQ), covering only finite complexity. Beyond a threshold, it’s chaos :) For example, if you encounter a legacy, undocumented 100K-line codebase, even the most brilliant mind will drown in endless darkness, unable to focus on anything else. But if someone abstracts that module layer by layer into a 1K-line model, suddenly you see the whole picture. Then, if you’ve had hands-on experience, you realize the essence of solving problems at each division of labor is similar—like how wireless base stations transmit high-frequency weak signals, while substations transmit low-frequency strong currents, both fundamentally telecom issues. Then you can dive into a 10K-line segment of the model to optimize solutions. And then, you’ve crossed the boundary.
After that, whether due to post-WTO education reforms or globalized education paired with China’s traditional strengths in numbers and Gu Jar training (yes, even in that, the surviving "Gu kings" are starting to outnumber overseas’ interest-based selection). Though India might be similar, but with a different skill tree?
Regardless, as far as I can see, there are more and more geniuses who can independently and swiftly tackle complex technical tasks like the wind.
About Organization
DeepSeek insists on only doing 0-to-1 work, leaving 1-to-N tasks to open-source and commercial companies. Many think open-source is a loss, but it’s not. The Bible is the world’s largest open-source network (scripture is a compressed network), isn’t it? Try using DeepSeek R1 to teach you two-digit multiplication—you’ll see it defaults to vertical multiplication, not the Indian lattice method (though R1 knows that too). How much is that worth?
Sure, DeepSeek’s official site offers services, but it’s still a high-efficiency testing ground for 0-to-1 work :) From a commercial deployment perspective, whether in user ramp-up, hardware deployment, service quality assurance, security, reliability, or fault tolerance, there are gaps. Real commercial deployment is a hassle. Few clients in the world can afford EP machines.
To use an analogy, 0-to-1 is like Huo Qubing’s cavalry—light on supplies, unconventional in camp setup. So I’d guess DeepSeek’s code prioritizes executability, with software structures kept simple so everyone roughly understands and can quickly merge changes, rolling back if issues arise.
In contrast, pick up any commercial software, and behind every function lies a pile of black-box libraries and scripts. Any change requires complex processes. Sigh—I’ve barely coded in years because setting up a local workspace for any project now takes a full day.
Admit it, your company’s codebase is the same! No need to curse—that’s how the world works. 0-to-1 and 1-to-N operate differently. The latter relies on tedious engineering and strict processes. East Asia’s industrial rise over the decades—TSMC, Huawei, BYD —all hinges on this model of engineers and workflows. In 1-to-N, every action and outcome has a deterministic N-fold amplification. "For want of a nail, the shoe was lost; for want of a shoe, the horse was lost..." That story is about 1-to-N. To prevent such cascades, the next empire holds a retrospective, turns war into an engineering operation, and breaks it down to the nail-supply level—ensuring no single person exceeds their error-free complexity limit. This engineering remains unbeatable until it rots or is replaced by newer productivity. 1-to-N tests a different kind of ability, requiring great companies and geniuses.
So don’t blame Wei Qing for not reaching Lake Baikal. Just as Huo Qubing probably had no clue how to plan cooking for 100,000 or handle the ensuing 100,000 bowel movements, there’s a saying: "Huo Qubing was noble but spared no soldiers." 0-to-1 and 1-to-N each have value. For Emperor Wu, if Huo Qubing failed, it was just a lifetime’s savings lost. But if Wei Qing lost, the people and the state might be finished.
DeepSeek’s approach leans more toward 0-to-1, so in those folks’ eyes, the wind is free. But they’re not immune to complexity—there’s likely a wall between algorithms and infrastructure at DeepSeek, and the wind doesn’t cross it easily. If DeepSeek ever scales services or ventures into chipmaking, more walls and processes will rise, and even the wind-like cavalry will have to dismount.
Hmm, why ramble about this? Mostly because I’m pondering how to balance 0-to-1 in a 1-to-N company. Probably many are thinking the same—no one can replicate DeepSeek’s current purity in 0-to-1. I often push 0-to-1 folks into 1-to-N trenches to feed horses and line up, feeling the harshness and cost of the front lines, avoiding over-optimism or, like Teacher Y, discovering that cooking for 100,000 is harder than imagined and sliding into pessimism. I also encourage 0-to-1 folks to hack 1-to-N codebases, creating lightweight versions for quick experiments.
But it might not be enough.
Below are some weekend musings, scribbled casually.
-
Break 1-to-N division boundaries locally, creating self-contained, meaningful environments. Replace commercial black boxes with open-source parts, understand hardware architecture, hack away繁琐 controls, and offer minimalist interfaces. Most quant trading firms operate this way, valuing public platform efficiency, letting everyone see a manageable, self-contained system from the top down. Where the law doesn’t forbid, act.
-
Challenge authority. 1-to-N organizations need authority for multi-layered command. But in 0-to-1, where direction is uncertain, authority is dangerous. Imagine Huo Qubing deciding to head east on the steppe—most 1-to-N teams would spend energy proving east is right (since in 1-to-N, east or west are just distances; hesitation loses). But 0-to-1 is like the Four Crossings of the Chishui River—question yesterday’s plan, its logic, who can snap me out of it (bottom-up decisions)? Or maybe no leadership decisions at all—just robust public platforms where teams advance pluggably, filtered by performance (like a quant firm’s strategy mechanism). Most 1-to-N leaders hate being decided for—or not deciding. My ramblings here are practice for getting slapped fast :)
-
Avoid project trial management but prevent chaos. Wei Qing’s marches had plans—timing, rendezvous. Huo Qubing’s arrival at Lake Baikal—how many days off schedule? Budget overrun? PCR needed? For 0-to-1, the key might be setting a grand vision, defining the goal, and instilling it in everyone. Avoid greed, anger, delusion, arrogance, doubt, and rigid views. In human terms: reduce external motivation, boost internal, stay goal-centric, reflect daily, but advance ruthlessly. HR calls it OKR?
-
Leaders must step onto the battlefield. Reducing hierarchy and iterating fast means a runnable environment beats ten polished PPTs. 1-to-N is multiple-choice; 0-to-1 is ambiguous multi-choice. Easier said—just dive into code? No. The big shots upstairs are used to intrigue and effortless victories, but generals below grind hard, sacrificing much (especially power). Champion marquises clash with fame and fortune. "Generals die in battle" isn’t just a saying—it’s real, not something armchair strategists can fake by "taking charge."
Weekend ramblings—mostly admiration for DeepSeek’s 0-to-1 breakthroughs, plus self-reflection.
I once wrote about innovation: [link]. It’s basically about incremental innovation in a 1-to-N environment. Back then, I didn’t grasp 0-to-1.
Reflect, reflect.
Think about it—greatness can’t be planned? Maybe not! From a national perspective, there might be destiny after all.
I used Chinese app Cherry Studio for convenience, it seems to be the best interface for using cloud-hosted LLMs. Nobody in the West knows about its existence.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3mo ago
That's not terrible prose but how do you square the idea that Trump isn't stupid with the fact that he apparently doesn't know how his beloved tariffs work?
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3mo ago
I think his argument is that they won't destroy a carrier with personnel abroad, if they want to have negotiations. Blowing off some surface features as a show of strength would be good (though obviously not too realistic).
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3mo ago
Nevertheless I tend to find that I am more impressed and amused by Soviet and later Russian engineering than Chinese engineering – perhaps because I have a tendency towards mild Russophilia, perhaps because I pay less attention to Chinese systems, perhaps because their innovations are still classified, but I find Soviet/Russians designs unusual and capable of solving problems in ways that are elegant even in their brutality.
I think the problem is that Westerners like gimmicks, and Russians/Soviets are not different. We all love our “no analogues!” Wunderwaffes and clever self-contained breakthroughs. That's just how European brains work I believe. But their brains work differently (see 2nd part and responses), their gimmicks are too large-scale to easily appreciate – supply chains, system integration building out entire cities, that's not just ant-like slave labor, they are just predisposed to logistical autism and a lot of cognitive effort goes into this. Yes, it doesn't result (at least not yet) in magic-looking individual devices, but does it matter much if their ships are half a generation behind when they can build literally orders of magnitude more? That's a whole different dimension of magic. I also suspect that Americans overindex on their triumphs through technological superiority – nukes, Desert Storm… But it probably won't apply to the conventional war with China. They aren't that behind, they have functional radars, they have VTOL cells on their ships, it will be reduced to a matter of quantity, which as you know has a quality of its own. Soviets even at their peak could not approach this degree of production dominance.
Semianalysis has just released a report on this Huawei server and it illustrates the philosophy well:
Huawei is a generation behind in chips, but its scale-up solution is arguably a generation ahead of Nvidia and AMD’s current products on the market. So what would be the specifications for Huawei’s CloudMatrix 384 (CM384)?
The CloudMatrix 384 consists of 384 Ascend 910C chips connected through an all-to-all topology. The tradeoff is simple: having five times as many Ascends more than offsets each GPU being only one-third the performance of an Nvidia Blackwell.
A full CloudMatrix system can now deliver 300 PFLOPs of dense BF16 compute, almost double that of the GB200 NVL72. With more than 3.6x aggregate memory capacity and 2.1x more memory bandwidth, Huawei and China now have AI system capabilities that can beat Nvidia’s.
What’s more, is the CM384 is uniquely suited to China’s strengths, which is domestic networking production, infrastructure software to prevent network failures, and with further yield improvements, an ability to scale up to even larger domains.
The drawback here is that it takes 3.9x the power of a GB200 NVL72, with 2.3x worse power per FLOP, 1.8x worse power per TB/s memory bandwidth, and 1.1x worse power per TB HBM memory capacity.
The deficiencies in power are relevant but not a limiting factor in China.
If you do not have a power constraint because of your relative power abundance, it makes sense to forgo power density and increase scale-up, including optics in the design. The CM384 design considers system-level constraints even outside of the rack, and we believe that it’s not just the relative power availability that constrains China’s AI ambitions. We think that there are multiple ways for continued scaling for Huawei’s solution.
It's truly beautiful in its own way. I am not well versed in military hardware but I think the slight qualitative edge of Western tech doesn't matter as much as production capacity.
I think Jensen actually got the verbal agreement from Trump after, in Trump's terms, kissing his ass at the dinner, and then somebody briefed Trump on what "H20" stands for. We'll probably never know but would be perfectly in style for this administration. I was stunned to see those news, because obviously Trump loves tariffs and export controls and has a thing for CHI-NA, this is one topic where there's a strong bipartisan consensus that China must be denied ML-grade compute, and the ban was already in place. Well, back to normality.
demonstrating that Trump will sell out his country to fucking China for a $1 million donation.
Is trade “selling out”? Is 1 million H20s strategically relevant? More than, say, rare earth ban from China, which could perhaps be negotiated?
I found this Klein-Friedman exchange interesting.
The questions answer themselves. What if you get into a trade war with China and you lose? What if, after infuriating the rest of the world, putting tariffs on them, too, you make China look stronger, more reliable, more farsighted, more strategic in the eyes of all these other countries that are now looking for an exit from the unreliable consequences of U.S. hegemony?
I want to talk about China today. I think one reason the administration felt it was safer to retrench to something that could be described more as a trade war with China is that a bipartisan consensus has hardened around China. Trump set this into motion in his 2016 campaign, but then Democrats embraced it, too: China is a rising power, and we’ve made a terrible mistake in letting them rise. We are in danger of being a falling power. China ripped us off. They took our manufacturing jobs. They addicted us and our allies to their cheap labor and their cheap goods. And China doesn’t just want to be rich. It wants to rule. First Taiwan — then who knows what else?
I’m not going to tell you this story is entirely wrong. It’s not. And I’m not going to tell you that all the Republicans and Democrats who believe it wanted Trump’s trade war specifically. They didn’t.
But I will tell you that I’ve been surprised and alarmed for years now by how this new, much more hawkish and angry consensus has hardened. How hard it has become to question.
This whole AGI race is pretty unfortunate. From my point of view, very similar to Friedman's, the US is in deep shit. It has deluded itself into the belief that it has greater advantage than is actually the case and that Wang Huning's series of ideologies actually lead towards a global hegemony, from that premise invented the self-serving narrative of desperately needing to “contain” or “isolate” China (which has “betrayed American goodwill” by not becoming liberal as expected and even “backsliding” with Xi) at all costs, and then bizarrely procrastinated on doing anything effective (like these tariffs, or seriously arming Taiwan) for next to a decade, then attacked China with extreme vindictiveness, going after Huawei on half-baked pretext and trying to kill their national champion (the US today has no companies or entities held in such esteem by citizens – I don't know, it'd be like Soviets trying to kill Ford or something? Maybe NASA at its zenith?). The Chinese are temperamentally not disposed to total war in times of good trade and improving fortunes, but are capable of waging it, and have taken the clue and for the last 6 or so years have been working on their resilience. So here we are, the US is even more arrogant and delusional about its relative standing, its non-kinetic means of communication are running out, and nobody in either party even dares to raise the point of rapprochement or thaw, because it's a career killer. Literally Soviets were treated with more rationality and caution, and let me tell you, other than warhead count, Soviets had nothing on modern China. In short, when there's a real possibility that you will not secure a decisive win no matter how much more “serious” you get, maybe it's time to reassess the game board.
Anyway, H20s don't matter a great deal now, it's always been a gimped inference-only chip. Huawei can produce 910Cs (partially with those 2 million 910B dies they got from TSMC via shell companies, but domestically too), they're not great but close to H100 level, and Huawei is extremely good at engineering so it can make absolutely insane CloudMatrix 384 servers outclassing Nvidia's newest NVL72 Blackwells, though at the cost of much higher chip count and power draw – but power is one of many resources that China has in abundance, and will have even more in abundance as it takes offline some aluminum overcapacity to fulfill the KPI of “higher value added per Watt”. These are probably already supplied to DeepSeek for training V4/R2, and other businesses are known to run R1 and V3 on them.
As I've said 1 and a half years ago,
Where does this leave us?
It leaves us in the uncomfortable situation where China as a rival superpower will plausibly have to be defeated for real, rather then just sanctioned away or allowed to bog itself down in imperialist adventurism and incompetence. They'll have enough suitable chips, they have passable software, enough talent for 1-3 frontier companies, reams of data and their characteristically awkward ruthlessness applied to refining it (and as we've learned recently, high-quality data can compensate for a great disparity in compute). They are already running a few serious almost-OpenAI-level projects – Baidu's ERNIE, Alibaba's Tongyi Qianwen (maybe I've mentioned it already, but their Qwen-7B/VL are really good; seems like all groups in the race were obligated to release a small model for testing purposes), maybe also Tsinghua's ChatGLM, SenseTime etc.'s InternLM and smaller ones. They – well, those groups, not the red boomer Xi – are well aware of their weaknesses and optimize around them (and borrowing from the open academic culture helps, as can be often seen in the training methods section – thanks to MIT&Meta, Microsoft, Princeton et al). They are preparing for the era of machine labor, which for now is sold as means to take care of the aging population and so on (I particularly like the Fourier Intelligence's trajectory, a near-perfect inversion of Iron Man's plot – start with the medical exoskeleton, proceed to make a full humanoid; but there are other humanoids developed in parallel, eg Unitree H1, and they seem competitive with their American equivalents like Tesla Optimus, X1 Neo and so on); in general, they are not being maximally stupid with their chances.
And this, in turn, means that the culture of the next years will be – as I've predicted in Viewpoint Focus 3 years ago – likely dominated by the standoff, leading up to much more bitter economic decoupling and kinetic war; promoting bipartisan jingoism and leaving less space for «culture war» as understood here; on the upside, it'll diminish the salience of progressive campaigns that demoralize the more traditionally minded population.
It'll also presumably mean less focus on «regulation of AI risks» than some would hope for, denying this topic the uncontested succession to the Current Thing №1.
I failed to anticipate MAGA Juche, but oh well. Also the list of relevant companies from that side has shifted a lot, today I'd say also: ByteDance, DeepSeek, Moonshot…
I've seen plenty of Nuking Three Gorges Dam posting, “China is the welfare queen of nations” posting, “we built up those chinks with our toil and look at how they repay us” posting, “Ways That Are Dark” posting, “only steals and poorly copies” posting and all other sorts of unhinged, entitled and dismissive posting that receives applause lately that I feel secure in saying that there is an undertone of stereotype-driven racial animus and condescension/cope, and it goes way back to the Chinese exclusion act. Again, this is also visible in the smug confidence with which Trump's team initiated a trade war, assured that Xi will fold due to his sweatshop of a nation being existentially dependent on exporting cheap junk to the US. It is perhaps not at all or only marginally present in normal people, but then again normal people probably don't care a lot about the topic. I'll also say that I've definitely seen some Americans liken Ruskies to Orcs, but generally it's a European (or even specifically Baltic) thing, I will grant that Americans do not imagine themselves Elves, they're happy enough being citizens of a real great nation.
Your anecdotes sound completely believable, I don't put much trust in Chinese law system or IP protections for foreigners and recognize that most of the country is pretty poor.
Scooters on sidewalks, however annoying, are a far cry from human feces on sidewalks - a matter of lacking civic virtue or manners, but not decay of civilization. I don't see scooters on sidewalks here in Buenos Aires, but I do have to look where I'm stepping. Was the other way around in Moscow, would that it were the same way here.
When have you last been there and in what city? This was like watching Serpentza's sneering at Unitree robots back to back with Unitree's own demos and Western experiments using these bots.
Buses broke down, parts of my quite expensive apartment fell off, litter and human feces were everywhere
I simply call bullshit on it as of 2025 for any 1st tier city. My friends also travel there and work there, as do they travel to and live and work in the US. They report that straight from the gate in JFK, US cities look dilapidated, indeed littered with human feces (which I am inclined to trust due to your massive, easily observable and constantly lamented feral homeless underclass) and of course regular litter, squalid, there is a clear difference in the condition of infrastructure and the apparent level of human capital. I can compare innumerable street walk videos between China and the US, and I see that you guys don't have an edge. I do not believe it's just cherrypicking, the scale of evidence is too massive. Do you not notice it?
And I have noticed that Americans can simply lie about the most basic things to malign the competition, brazenly so, clearly fabricating «personal evidence» or cleverly stiching together pieces of data across decades, and with increasingly desperate racist undertones. Now that your elected leadership looks Middle Eastern in attitude, full of chutzpah, and is unapologetically gaslighting the entire world with its «critical trade theory», I assume that the rot goes from top to bottom and you people cannot be taken at your world any more than the Chinese or Russians or Indians can be (accidentally, your Elite Human Capital Indians, at Stanford, steal Chinese research and rebrand as their own). Regardless, @aqouta's recent trip and comments paint a picture not very matching yours.
I think that if they were truly crushing America in AI, they would be hiding that fact
They are not currently crushing the US in AI, those are my observations. They don't believe they are, and «they» is an inherently sloppy framing, there are individual companies with vastly less capital than US ones, competing among themselves.
When the Deepseek news came out about it costing 95% less to train, my bullshit detectors went off. Who could verify their actual costs? Oh, only other Chinese people. Hmm, okay.
This is supremely pathetic and undermines your entire rant, exposing you as an incurious buffoon. You are wrong, we can estimate the costs simply from token*activated params. The only way they could have cheated would be to use many more tokens but procuring a lot more quality data than the reported 15T, a modal figure for both Western and Eastern competitors on the open source frontier, from Alibaba to Google to Meta, would in itself be a major pain. So the costs are in that ballpark, indeed the utilization of reported hardware (2048 H800s) turns out to even be on the low side. This is the consensus of every technical person in the field no matter the race or side of the Pacific.
They've opensourced most of their infra stack on top of the model itself, to advance the community and further dispel these doubts. DeepSeek's RL pipeline is currently obsolete with many verifiable experiments showing that it's been still full of slack, as we'd expect from a small team rapidly doing good-enough job.
The real issue is that the US companies have been maintaining the impression that their production costs and overall R&D are so high that it justifies tens or hundreds of billions in funding. When R1 forced their hand, they started talking how it's actually "on trend" and their own models don't cost that much more, or if they are, it's because they're so far ahead that they finished training like a year ago, with less mature algorithms! Or, in any case, that they don't have to optimize, because ain't nobody got time for that!
But sarcasm aside it's very probable that Google is currently above this training efficiency, plus they have more and better hardware.
Meta, meanwhile, is behind. They were behind when V3 came out, they panicked and tried to catch up, they remained behind. Do you understand that people can actually see what you guys are doing? Like, look at configs, benchmark it? Meta's Llama 4, which Zuck was touting as a bid for the frontier, is architecturally 1 generation behind V3, and they deployed a version optimized for human preference on LMArena to game the metrics, which turned into insane embarrassment when people found out how much worse the general-purpose model performs in real use, to the point that people are now leaving Meta and specifying they had nothing to do with the project (rumors of what happened are Soviet tier). You're Potemkining hard too, with your trillion-dollar juggernauts employing tens of thousands of (ostensibly) the world's best and brightest.
Original post is in Chinese that can be found here. Please take the following with a grain of salt. Content: Despite repeated training efforts, the internal model's performance still falls short of open-source SOTA benchmarks, lagging significantly behind. Company leadership suggested blending test sets from various benchmarks during the post-training process, aiming to meet the targets across various metrics and produce a "presentable" result. Failure to achieve this goal by the end-of-April deadline would lead to dire consequences. Following yesterday’s release of Llama 4, many users on X and Reddit have already reported extremely poor real-world test results. As someone currently in academia, I find this approach utterly unacceptable. Consequently, I have submitted my resignation and explicitly requested that my name be excluded from the technical report of Llama 4. Notably, the VP of AI at Meta also resigned for similar reasons.
This is unverified but rings true to me.
Grok 3, Sonnet 3.7 also have failed to convincingly surpass DeepSeek, for all the boasts about massive GPU numbers. It's not that the US is bad at AI, but your corporate culture, in this domain at least, seems to be.
But if Chinese research is so superior, why aren't Western AI companies falling over themselves to attract Chinese AI researchers?
How much harder do you want them to do it? 38% of your top quintile AI researchers came straight from China in 2022. I think around 50% are ethnically Chinese by this point, there are entire teams where speaking Mandarin is mandatory.
Between 2019 and 2022, «Leading countries where top-tier AI researchers (top 20%) work» went from 11% China to 28%; «Leading countries where the most elite AI researchers work (top 2%)» went from ≈0% China to 12%; and «Leading countries of origin of the most elite AI researchers» went from 10% China (behind India's 12%) to 26%. Tsinghua went from #9 to #3 in institutions, now only behind Stanford and Google (MIT, right behind Tsinghua, is heavily Chinese). Extrapolate if you will. I think they'll crack #2 or #1 in 2026. Things change very fast, not linearly, it's not so much «China is gradually getting better» as installed capacity coming online.
It's just becoming harder to recruit. The brain drain is slowing in proportional terms, even if it holds steady in absolute numbers due to ballooning number of graduates: the wealth gap is not so acute now considering costs of living, coastal China is becoming a nicer place to live in, and for top talent, more intellectually stimulating as there's plenty of similarly educated people to work with. The turn to racist chimping and kanging both by the plebeians since COVID and by this specific administration is very unnerving and potentially existentially threatening to your companies. Google's DeepMind VP of research left for ByteDance this February, and by now his team in ByteDance is flexing a model that is similar but improves on DeepSeek's R1 paradigm (BD was getting there but he probably accelerated them). This kind of stuff has happened before.
many Western countries are still much nicer places to live than all but the absolute richest areas of China
Sure, the West is more comfortable, even poor-ish places can be paradaisical. But you're not going to move to Montenegro if you have the ambition to do great things. You'll be choosing between Shenzhen and San-Francisco. Where do you gather there's more human feces to step into?
But as I said before in the post you linked, Chinese mind games and information warfare are simply on a different level than that of the more candid and credulous Westerner
There is something to credulousness, as I've consistently been saying Hajnalis are too trusting and innocently childlike. But your nation is not a Hajnali nation, and your people are increasingly draught horses in its organization rather than thought leaders. You're like the kids in King's story of how he first learned dread:
We sat there in our seats like dummies, staring at the manager. He looked nervous and sallow-or perhaps that was only the footlights. We sat wondering what sort of catastrophe could have caused him to stop the movie just as it was reaching that apotheosis of all Saturday matinee shows, "the good part." And the way his voice trembled when he spoke did not add to anyone's sense of well-being.
"I want to tell you," he said in that trembly voice, "that the Russians have put a space satellite into orbit around the earth. They call it . . . Spootnik.” We were the, kids who grew up on Captain Video and Terry and the Pirates. We were the kids who had seen Combat Casey kick the teeth out of North Korean gooks without number in the comic books. We were the kids who saw Richard Carlson catch thousands of dirty Commie spies in I Led Three Lives. We were the kids who had ponied up a quarter apiece to watch Hugh Marlowe in Earth vs. the Flying Saucers and got this piece of upsetting news as a kind of nasty bonus.
I remember this very clearly: cutting through that awful dead silence came one shrill voice, whether that of a boy or a girl I do not know; a voice that was near tears but that was also full of a frightening anger: "Oh, go show the movie, you liar!”
I think Americans might well compete with North Koreans, Israelis and Arabs in the degree of being brainwashed about their national and racial superiority (a much easier task when you are a real superpower, to be fair), to the point I am now inclined to dismiss your first hand accounts as fanciful interpretations of reality if not outright hallucinations. Your national business model has become chutzpah and gaslighting, culminating in Miran's attempt to sell the national debt as «global public goods». You don't have a leg to stand on when accusing China of fraud. Sorry, that era is over, I'll go back to reading papers.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3mo ago
I am not sure how to answer. Sources for model scales, training times and budgets are part from official information in tech reports, part rumors and insider leaks, part interpolation and extrapolation from features like inference speed and pricing and limits of known hardware, SOTA in more transparent systems and the delta to frontier ones. See here for values from a credible organization..
$100M of compute is a useful measure of companies' confidence in returns on a given project, and moreover in their technical stack. You can't just burn $100M and have a model, it'll take months, and it practically never makes sense to train for more than, say, 6 months, because things improve too quickly and you finish training just in time to see a better architecture/data/optimized hardware exceed your performance at a lower cost. So before major releases people spend compute on experiments validating hypotheses and on inference, collect data for post-training, and amass more compute for a short sprint. Thus, “1 year” is ludicrous.
Before reasoning models, post-training was a rounding error in compute costs, even now it's probably <40%. Pre-deployment testing depends on company policy/ideology, but much heavier in human labor time than in compute time.
I have never underestimated their capacity for self-sabotage.
Your complaints about GWOT are motivated reasoning, GWOT was quite successful for Israel at least.
The US has been able to grow its economy extremely rapidly through Chinese industrialization, without that your, as marxists say, Internal Contradictions would have likely brought about a protracted recession already. Don't forget that in 2008, it was China that bailed you out. Those aren't so much major errors as conflicts of priority between sectors of American elite.
1970s-2023, I'd say. Your safe and prosperous world is a product of an overall competent policy. Just continuing and improving on Biden's program could have been enough. See the success of CHIPS act, for example.
Like owning the biggest consumer market in the world, most of the world's most prized IP, having military presence in all corners of the world. It's not the UN, it's the ability to spit at UN decisions and opinion of all UN members individually when needed, and not suffer economic consequences like Russia.
I recall I did predict a long grinding war after like a week of it. Failure of the brazen paratrooper operation at Hostomel suggested that no quick resolution is likely; Ukrainians recognize it was a pivotal point, and if better executed (and less competently opposed), would have likely allowed Russia to settle the war on preferred terms. There have been a few others who thought likewise. I did miss drones, and predicted more WWII style mass mobilization with heavy artillery and aviation use and millions dead. We got some WWII features but not that. What did you say at the time?
Sorry, this sounds very much like Russian “we haven't even started yet” narrative to me.
More options
Context Copy link