DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
Tell me about it.
User ID: 745
Alex Wang is an opportunistic psychopath who's afraid of his whole Pinoy-based data generation business model going bust in the era of synthetic chains of thought. Therefore he's dishonestly paraphrasing Dylan Patel (himself a China hawk peddling rationales for more export controls) who had said “they have 50000 Hoppers” once, without evidence. But the most likely Hopper model they have is H20, an effectively inference-only chip, that has negligible effect on pretraining costs and scale for V3 and R1.
Yes I do believe DeepSeek. This is not really a political issue but a purely technical. Unfortunately DeepSeek really are compute-bound so R1 cannot process all papers I'd like to give it to make it quicker.
The political narrative does not even work, it's purely midwit-oriented, nobody in the industry imagines leading labs can be deceived with some trickery of this kind.
Inference costs are wholly addressed by Hyperbolic Labs (US) and some others already serving it for cheaper.
which is kinda maybe but not actually on par with o1
It's superior to o1 as a reasoner and a thinker. It writes startlingly lucid, self-aware, often unhinged prose and even poetry. It can push back. It is beyond any LLM I have seen including Sonnet and Opus. This becomes obvious after minutes of serious interaction. It just has less polish as a product because they haven't been milking the world for interaction data since 2019. They have 0.8-1.5 M quality samples for instruction finetuning. OpenAI had accumulated tens of millions if not hundreds.
For me it's something of an emotional issue. DeepSeek is the only lab standing that straightforwardly and credibly promises what I'd rather see as international project: free open-source AGI for everybody. I've been monitoring their rise for well over a year, reading every paper and even their blogposts in Chinese. Nothing that they claim is inconsistent, indeed it's all been predictable since 2023, all part of a very methodical, flawless, truly peak quant fund (that's their capital source and origins) execution towards the holy grail, “answering the ultimate question with longtermism”, as they put it. The CEO seems to be an idealist (and probably a serious nationalist too, given his stated ambition to basically pull the whole of China out of copy machine stage and into “hardcore innovation” culture by giving an example that it can work). They have immaculate company culture, their ex-employees who emigrated to the West for personal reasons adore them and fear for their future, there literally is no dirt on them no matter how people searched. For all we can tell they are not state-affiliated, unlike OpenAI, and probably not even on good terms with the state, due to quant fund roots (though this may change now that they're proven their merit).
This is not a Sputnik moment for the US. The US has a secure and increasing lead due to bog standard logistics and capital advantage, as always. What this should be is “are we the baddies?” moment.
Also, it's a moment to ask oneself how high are margins on Western model providers, and whether it's a true free market. Because Liang Wenfeng himself does NOT think they're that far ahead in efficiency, if they are ahead at all.
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…
China's fragile treasure
Tl;DR: after months of observation, I am convinced that DeepSeek has been an inflection point in Chinese AI development and probably beyond that, to the level of reforming national psyche and long-term cultural trajectory, actualizing the absurd potential they have built up in the last two decades and putting them on a straight path to global economic preeminence or even comprehensive hegemony. It is not clear to me what can stop this, except the idiocy of the CCP, which cannot be ruled out.
Last time I wrote on this topic I got downvoted to hell for using DeepSeek R1 to generate the bulk of text (mostly to make a point about the state of progress with LLMs, as I warned). So – only artisanal tokens now, believe it or not. No guarantees of doing any better though.
The direct piece of news inspiring this post is The Information's claim that DeepSeek, a private Chinese AGI company owned by Liang Wenfeng, is implementing some very heavy-handed measures: «employees told not to travel, handing in passports; investors must be screened by provincial government; gov telling headhunters not to approach employees». This follows OpenAI's new Global Policy chief Chris Lehane accusing them of being state-subsidized and state-controlled and framing as the main threat to the West, popular calls on Twitter (eg from OpenAI staff) to halt Chinese AI progress by issuing O1 visas or better offers to all key DeepSeek staff, and the sudden – very intense – attention of Beijing towards this unexpected national champion (they weren't among the «six AI tigers» pegged for that role, nor did they have the backing of incumbent tech giants; what they did have was grassroots attention of researchers and users in the West, which China trusts far more than easily gamed domestic indicators).
I am not sure if this is true, possibly it's more FUD, like the claims about them having 50K H100s and lying about costs, claims of them serving at a loss to undercut competition, about compensations over $1M, and other typical pieces of «everything in China is fake» doctrine that have been debunked. But China does have a practice of restricting travel for people deemed crucial for national security (or involved in financial institutions). And DeepSeek fits this role now: they have breathed new life into Chinese stock market, integrating their model is a must for every business in China that wants to look relevant and even for government offices, and their breakthrough is the bright spot of the National People’s Congress. They are, in short, a big deal. Bigger than I predicted 8 months ago:
This might not change much. Western closed AI compute moat continues to deepen, DeepSeek/High-Flyer don't have any apparent privileged access to domestic chips, and other Chinese groups have friends in the Standing Committee and in the industry, so realistically this will be a blip on the radar of history.
Seems like this is no longer in the cards.
Recently, @ActuallyATleilaxuGhola has presented the two opposite narratives on China which dominate the discourse: a Paper Tiger that merely steals, copies and employs smoke and mirrors to feign surpassing the fruit of American genius born of free exchange of ideas etc. etc.; and the Neo-China coming from the future, this gleaming juggernaut of technical excellence and industrial prowess. The ironic thing is that the Chinese themselves are caught between these two narratives, undecided on what they are, or how far they've come. Are they merely «industrious» and «good at math», myopic, cheap, autistic narrow optimizers, natural nerdy sidekicks to the White Man with his Main Character Energy and craaazy fits of big picture inspiration, thus doomed to be a second-tier player as a nation; with all cultural explanations of their derivative track record being «stereotype threat» level cope – as argued by @SecureSignals? Or are they just held back by old habits, path-dependent incentives and lack of confidence but in essence every bit as capable, nay, more capable of this whole business of pushing civilization forward, and indeed uplifting the whole planet, as argued by Chinese Industrial Party authors – doing the «one thing that Westerners have been unwilling or powerless to accomplish»?
In the now-deleted post, me and R1 argued that they are in a superposition. There are inherent racial differences in cognition, sure, and stereotypes have truth to them. But those differences only express themselves as concrete phenotypes and stereotypes contextually. In the first place, the evo psych story for higher IQ of more northern ancestral populations makes some sense, but there is no plausible selection story for Whites being unmatched innovators in STEM or anything esle. What is plausible is that East Asians are primed (by genetics and, on top of that, by Confucian culture and path dependence) towards applying their high (especially in visually and quantitatively loaded tasks) IQ to exploitation instead of exploration, grinding in low-tail-risk, mapped-out domains. Conformism is just another aspect of it; and so you end up with a civilization that will hungrily optimize a derisked idea towards razor-thin margins, but won't create an idea worth optimizing in a million years. Now, what if the calculus of returns changes? What if risk-taking itself gets derisked?
And I see DeepSeek as a vibe shift moment nudging them in this direction.
The Guoyun narrative around DeepSeek began when Feng Ji 冯骥, creator of the globally successful game “Black Myth: Wukong,” declared it a “national destiny-level technological achievement.” The discourse gained momentum when Zhou Hongyi 周鸿祎, Chairperson of Qihoo 360, positioned DeepSeek as a key player in China’s “AI Avengers Team” against U.S. dominance. This sentiment echoed across media, with headlines like “Is DeepSeek a breakthrough of national destiny? The picture could be bigger” The discourse around 国运论 (guóyùn lùn, or “national destiny theory”) reveals parallels to America’s historical myth-making. Perhaps the most striking similarity between China and the US is their unwavering belief in their own exceptionalism and their destined special place in the world order. While America has Manifest Destiny and the Frontier Thesis, China’s “national rejuvenation” serves as its own foundational myth from which people can derive self-confidence.
And to be clear, DeepSeek is not alone. Moonshot is on a very similar level (at least internally – their unreleased model dominates LiveCodeBench), so are StepFun, Minimax and Alibaba Qwen. Strikingly, you see a sudden formation of an ecosystem. Chinese chip and software designers are optimizing their offerings towards efficient serving of DeepSeek-shaped models, Moonshot adopts and builds on DeepSeek's designs in new ways, Minimax's CEO says he was inspired by Wenfeng to open source their LLMs, there are hundreds of papers internationally that push beyond R1's recipe… the citation graph is increasingly painted red. This, like many other things, looks like a direct realization of Wenfeng's long-started objectives:
Innovation is undoubtedly costly, and our past tendency to adopt existing technologies was tied to China’s earlier developmental stage. But today, China’s economic scale and the profits of giants like ByteDance and Tencent are globally significant. What we lack isn’t capital but confidence and the ability to organize high-caliber talent for effective innovation … I believe innovation is, first and foremost, a matter of belief. Why is Silicon Valley so innovative? Because they dare to try. When ChatGPT debuted, China lacked confidence in frontier research. From investors to major tech firms, many felt the gap was too wide and focused instead on applications.
NVIDIA’s dominance isn’t just its effort—it’s the result of Western tech ecosystems collaborating on roadmaps for next-gen tech. China needs similar ecosystems. Many domestic chips fail because they lack supportive tech communities and rely on secondhand insights. Someone must step onto the frontier.
We won’t go closed-source. We believe that establishing a robust technology ecosystem matters more.
No “inscrutable wizards” here—just fresh graduates from top universities, PhD candidates (even fourth- or fifth-year interns), and young talents with a few years of experience. … V2 was built entirely by domestic talent. The global top 50 might not be in China today, but we aim to cultivate our own.
BTW: I know @SecureSignals disagrees on the actual innovativeness of all this innovation. Well suffice to say the opinion in the industry is different. Their paper on Native Sparse Attention, pushed to arxiv (by Wenfeng personally – he is an active researcher and is known to have contributed to their core tech) just the day before Wenfeng went to meet Xi, looks more impressive than what we see coming from the likes of Google Deepmind, and it has a… unique cognitive style. They have their very distinct manner, as does R1. They had nowhere to copy that from.
Maybe all of it is not so sudden; the hockey-stick-like acceleration of Chinese progress is a matter of boring logistics, not some spiritual rebirth, much like the hokey stick of their EV or battery sales. For decades, they've been mainly a supplier of skilled labor to America, which masked systemic progress. All the while they have been building domestic schools to retain good educators, training new researchers and engineers without entrusting this to Microsoft Asia and Nvidia and top American schools, growing the economy and improving living conditions to increase retention and have businesses to employ top talent and give them interesting enough tasks… so at some point it was bound to happen that they begin graduating about as much talent as the rest of world combined, a giant chunk goes to their companies, and that's all she wrote for American incumbents in a largely fake, sluggish market. DeepSeek, or Wenfeng personally, is not so much a crown jewel of Chinese economy as a seed of crystallization of the new state of things, after all pieces have been set.
The boost of confidence is visible outside the AI sphere too. I find it remarkable that He Jankui is shitposting on Twitter all the time and threatening to liberate the humanity from the straitjacket of «Darwin's evolution». A decade earlier, one would expect his type to flee to the West and give lectures about the menace of authoritarianism. But after three years in Chinese prison, he's been made inaugural director of the Institute of Genetic Medicine at Wuchang University and conspicuously sports a hammer-and-sickle flag on his desk. The martyr of free market, Jack Ma, also has been rehabilitated, with Xi giving him a very public handshake (alongside Wenfeng, Unitree's Wang Xingxing, Xiaomi's Lei Jun and other entrepreneurs).
…but this is all fragile, because China remains a nation led by the CCP, which remains led by one boomer of unclear sentience and a very clear obsession with maximizing his control and reducing risk to himself. In that, Wenfeng is similar – he's bafflingly refusing all investment, from both private and state entities, because it always has strings attached, I suppose.
“We pulled top-level government connections and only got to sit down with someone from their finance department, who said ‘sorry we are not raising’,” said one investor at a multibillion-dollar Chinese tech fund. “They clearly are not interested in scaling up right now. It’s a rare situation where the founder is wealthy and committed enough to keep it lean in a Navy Seal-style for his pursuit of AGI.”
But you can't just refuse the CCP forever. Reports that he's been told not to interact with the press seem credible; perhaps the story about passports will come true too, as DeepSeek's perceived value grows. In that moment, China will largely abandon its claim to ascendancy, vindicating American theory that Freedom always wins hearts and minds. People, even in China, do not acquire world-class skills to be treated like serfs.
…If not, though? If China does not just shoot itself in the foot, with heavy-handed securitization, with premature military aggression (see them flexing their blue water navy they supposedly don't have in Australian waters, see their bizarre landing ships designed for Taiwan Operation, see their 6th generation aircraft…), with some hare-brained economic scheme – where does this leave us?
I've been thinking lately: what exactly is the American theory of victory? And by victory I mean retaining hegemony, as the biggest strongest etc. etc. nation on the planet, and ideally removing all pesky wannabe alternative poles like Russia, China and Iran. Russia and Iran are not much to write home about, but what to do with China?
The main narrative I see is something something AGI Race: the US builds a God-level AI first, then… uh, maybe grows its economy 100% a year, maybe disables China with cyberattacks or nanobots. I used to buy it when the lead time was about 2 years. It's measured in months now: research-wise, they have fully caught up, releases after V3 and R1 show that the West has no fundamental moat at all, and it's all just compute.
In terms of compute, it's very significant to my eyes that TSMC has been caught supplying Huawei with over 2 millions of Ascend chip dies. This could not have been obfuscated with any amount of shell companies – TSMC, and accordingly Taipei, knew they are violating American decree. Seeing Trump's predatory attitude towards TSMC (them being forced to invest into manufacturing on American soil and now to fix Intel's mess with a de facto technology transfer… as an aside, Intel's new CEO is a former director of SMIC, so literally all American chip companies are now headed by Chinese or Taiwanese people), I interpret this as hedging rather than mere corruption – they suspect they will not be able to deter an invasion or convince the US to do so, and are currying favor with Beijing. By the way, Ascend 910c is close to the performance of Nvidia H800. R1 was trained on 2048 H800s; So just from this one transaction, China will have around 500 times more compute, and by the end of the year they will be able to produce another couple million dies domestically. So, it is baked in that China will have AGI and ASI shortly after the US at worst, assuming no first strike from the latter.
In terms of cyberattacks for first strike, AIs are already good enough to meaningfully accelerate vulnerability search; coupled with the vast advantage in computer-literate labor force (and to be honest, actual state-backed hackers), China will be able to harden their infrastructure in short order, and there's no amount of cleverness that gets past provably hardened code. So this is a very uncertain bet.
In terms of economic growth, this is usually tied to automation. China seems to be on par in robotics research (at least), controls almost the entire supply chain, and has an incomparably bigger installed automated manufacturing base (see their EV factories, which are now also producing robots). They will have OOMs more humanoids and probably faster compounding growth. This more than covers for their workforce aging, too.
Then I hear something about Malacca strait blockade. Suffice to say this seemed more convincing when they really didn't have a «blue water navy», which they now clearly have, contra Peter Zeihan. They're also making great progress in weaning their civilian economy off oil (high speed rail instead of planes, normal rail for freight, EVs again, nuclear and renewable buildouts…) and have stockpiled giant reserves so oil cutoff won't really deter them. They are not quite food-secure but likely won't starve without imports. So blockade is no solution.
Lastly, I've seen this theory that Starship (once it's ready for prime time) provides the US with insurmountable advantage in mass to orbit, thus all the old Star Wars plans are back in action and Chinese nuclear deterrence is neutralized. This doesn't seem feasible because they're working on their own economical reusable rockets – across multiple companies as usual – and are very close to success, and there are signs that this project has very favorable scalability, to the point the US will lose its mass to orbit lead in under three years, or at least it will be diminished. (Personally I think Zhuque-3 is a more sensible design than Musk's monstrosity, though it's just a tasteful interpolation between Falcon and Starship. Learning from mistakes of others is a common late mover advantage).
Sector by sector and attack vector by attack vector, it's all like that.
So… what is left?
As far as I can tell, at this trajectory only China can defeat China – the hidebound, unironic Communists in control, fulfilling the mawkish Western prophecy they try to avoid, bear-hugging to death the young civilization that grew around their mandate and is now realizing its destiny. Confiscating passports, banning open source that widens the talent funnel, cracking down on «speculative investments», dragging them back into the 20th century at the brink of the long-coveted «national rejuvenation».
…Parallels to the US are probably clear enough.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
2mo ago
I can only say that engaging with the Chinese, and with people like you, has gradually convinced me that White People (Hajnali European stock specifically) are basically jumped-up serfs, the confused lower caste of prawns from District 9, with little more to offer to the world sans stale kanging and hollow, corporate-coded pretense of “soul” that, if it ever existed, resided in your currently extinct owners. You don't even notice my point about simple economics and logistics, so lost you are in your racial superiority masturbation. But of course those issues are related.
if Japan were in China's position instead
But it isn't, and you are largely responsible for that, because your previous generation had the exact same attitude towards the Japanese. Deaths from overwork, rigid hierarchy, soulless collectivist automatons cheating and copying to flood the markets and dispossess our Christian Germanic workers – this can't be allowed, can it? Oh, what a pity that now that we know them better, Japan is a geriatric country of no ambition, that mainly produces anime to give you some respite from the toxic antihuman sludge of your own media. (Presumably this is the fault of Joos. Somehow for all your natural nobility of spirit you are not capable of resisting a tiny tribe of natural wordcels. At least the Chinese managed to overthrow the Manchu).
Regrettably, China is 10 times larger and the same tricks won't work.
A change in American economic policy sent global markets into a tailspin, so objectively speaking, America is in fact a big deal.
Yes, you can do a great deal of damage to humanity. This is akin to the bafflingly swinish line of argument that “China needs us more than we need them, because they need to sell their valuable manufactured goods to someone; our consumption is more valuable than production”. We shall see how well this philosophy works.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
5mo ago
Well I protest this rule, if such a rule even exists, I find it infantilizing and find your reaction shallow akin to screeching of scared anti-AI artists on Twitter. It should be legal to post synthetic context so long as it's appropriately labeled and accompanied by original commentary, and certainly when it is derived from the person's own cognitive work and source-gathering, as is in this case.
Maybe add an option to collapse the code block or something.
or maybe just ban me, I'm too old now to just nod and play along with gingerly preserved, increasingly obsolete traditions of some authoritarian Reddit circus.
Anyway, I like that post and that's all I care about.
P.S. I could create another account and (after a tiny bit of proofreading and editing) post that, and I am reasonably sure that R1 has reached the level where it would have passed for a fully adequate Mottizen, with nobody picking up on “slop” when it is not openly labeled as AI output. This witch hunt is already structurally similar to zoological racism.
In fact, this is an interesting challenge.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1mo 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
4mo ago
I think it has a non-negligible chance of happening. Trump is the new face of America that does not pretend to play by normal countries' rules. The United States is a super-hegemon, a nation not facing even any plausible threat of competent adversary. They can take what they want, the way China/Russia/Iran/etc would very much like to be able to do but can't on account of the United States existing. In front of this face, sovereignty of almost every other country is a bluff that's easy to call. Nobody can militarily oppose the US, and most people on the globe buy into American culture and vision more than into their own regimes and bureaucracies. Certainly that's true of Egypt.
The actual shape of the deal will be about cleansing Gazans and providing security to settlers, though. Securing Israeli interests is one of the foundational, terminal values of the US.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
5mo ago
I can't say I even understand why'd you think anyone would find AI outputs interesting to read.
Because they're intelligent, increasingly so.
The argument that cognitive output is only valid insofar as it comes purely from flesh reduces intellectual intercourse to prelude for physical one. At least that's my – admittedly not very charitable – interpretation of these disgusted noises. Treating AI generation as a form of deception constitutes profanation of the very idea of discussing ideas on their own merits.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1mo 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
11mo ago
It really doesn't look like the usual suspects understand that shutting up would be prudent. I think their social media instincts are very poorly calibrated for such extreme events.
Some highly liked reactions:
https://x.com/davidhogg111/status/1812320926240764072
If you keep talking about the assassination attempt don’t you dare tell the kids who survive school shootings and their families to “just get over it”
What happened today is unacceptable and what happens every day to kids who aren’t the president and don’t survive isn’t either.
https://x.com/GeorgeTakei/status/1812290878167281860
Politicians on the left are calling for unity and no violence. Politicians on the right are stoking things further.
Voters in the center: Join with those wishing to turn the temperature down, not crank it up. For all our sakes.
https://x.com/keithedwards/status/1812284437092307015
Paul Pelosi survived an assassination attempt, Trump mocked it.
Biden called Trump to make sure he's ok. That's the difference.
Reddit is linked below, you can get a load of what's happening there.
I am no Trump fan as you perhaps remember. He is graceless. But gracelessness is the default today, and it's very easy to stoop lower than a man who has just survived an assassination attempt – with these cringeworthy, mother hen attempts at narrative control.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
2mo 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.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
2mo ago
Looming? What do you mean concretely?
There's reportedly been 9.5 million babies born in China last year. Something like 3.6 million in the US; of those, 1.8 million white babies. Accordingly, in 18 years there will be 5 times as many Chinese 18 year olds as there will be their White American counterparts. Yes, they have lower TFR, but at current trends they'll have a vastly larger workforce for many decades.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
2mo ago
The likelihood of winning a conflict has little relevance to whether that conflict should be waged in the first place.
It actually has a lot of relevance. The real reason you act like it doesn't is that you do not seriously engage with the possibility of losing, and losing badly (losing what? To what degree? How many cards do you have left at the point of losing, and what terms can be negotiated?). People make unreasonable maximalist demands when they are assured of their invulnerability. You treat a great power conflict like another Middle Eastern adventure, “oh we found WMDs in this shithole, our Democracy will perish if we do not conquer it hue hue!”. It's an instinct that's hard to overcome after a century of uninterrupted wins and cost-free losses. The same Main Character Syndrome, coupled with low human capital in Trump team, explains decidedly suboptimal and cost-insensitive means that were chosen for prosecuting the conflict. Americans think they can afford anything, because that's recorded in their institutional DNA. But they have never fought a superior power, due to it never having existed prior to this day. So they have developed an auxiliary belief that the very fact of them antagonizing any power confirms it is inferior. It's hard to feel pity for such a narcissistic people.
it is the serf who acts in accordance with prudence and rationality. The serf is a serf precisely because he correctly calculates that servitude is what gives him the best odds of continued survival. The nobleman, in contrast, acts in accordance with virtue, even when the outcome is certain destruction.
In Imperial Russia, there was a trend when mujiks, LARPing as nobles, initiated duels over petty spats, murdering each other with axes; eventually the state had to put its boot down. Due to extremely low literacy rates they couldn't have plausibly cited Nietzsche when doing so, but I believe that they'd have appreciated your quote.
Self-serving, petulant, handwavy, shallowly aesthetic notions of virtue are cheap and easy to brandish in defense of one's animalistic impulses; any kind of impulsive retardation can be dressed up as a calling of aristocratic, virile masculine nature, there's a whole genre of extremely popular Western music about it, authored by the impromptu warrior aristocracy of the streets. Your own elite has been wiped out to such a degree that this whole discourse is vacuous, we can't consult with a living bearer of a tradition, only speculate. It is plausible that I am wrong and there's just never been any substance to the whole fraud.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3mo ago
Again I have to quote Boaz Barak (currently OpenAI): AI will change the world, but won’t take it over by playing “3-dimensional chess”.
Consider the task of predicting the consequences of a particular action in the future. In any sufficiently complex real-life scenario, the further away we attempt to predict, the more there is inherent uncertainty. For example, we can use advanced methods to predict the weather over a short time frame, but the further away the prediction, the more the system “regresses to the mean”, and the less advantage that highly complex models have over simpler ones (see Figure 4). As in meteorology, this story seems to play out similarly in macroeconomic forecasting. In general, we expect prediction success to behave like Figure 1 below—the error increases with the horizon until it plateaus to a baseline level of some simple heuristic(s). Hence while initially highly sophisticated models can beat simpler ones by a wide margin, this advantage eventually diminishes with the time horizon.
Tetlock’s first commandment to potential superforecasters is to triage: “Don’t waste time either on “clocklike” questions (where simple rules of thumb can get you close to the right answer) or on impenetrable “cloud-like” questions (where even fancy statistical models can’t beat the dart-throwing chimp). Concentrate on questions in the Goldilocks zone of difficulty, where effort pays off the most.” Another way to say it is that outside of the Goldilocks zone, more effort or cognitive power does not give much returns.
Rather, based on what we know, it is likely that AI systems will have a “sweet spot” of a not-too-long horizon in which they can provide significant benefits. For strategic and long-term decisions that are far beyond this sweet spot, the superior information processing skills of AIs will give diminishing returns. (Although AIs will likely supply valuable input and analysis to the decision makers.). An AI engineer may well dominate a human engineer (or at least one that is not aided by AI tools), but an AI CEO’s advantage will be much more muted, if any, over its human counterpart. Like our world, such a world will still involve much conflict and competition, with all sides aided by advanced technology, but without one system that dominates all others.
In essence, irreducible error and chaotic events blunt the edge of any superintelligent predictor in a sufficiently high-dimensional environment.
What remains to be answered for me:
- Can AI planners interfere in the events with enough frequency and precision to proactively suppress chaos and reduce the world to a game of chess they can model to the draw?
- Is a decently superhuman prediction and execution not enough to eliminate warm, simply because humans are already close to this level and only initiate wars they won't win (instead of pragmatically retreating to some defensible compromise) in feats of retardation (see: Russia)?
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
5mo ago
Believe me, these days I do indeed mostly talk to machines. They are not great conversationalists but they're extremely helpful.
Talking to humans has several functions for me. First, indeed, personal relationships of terminal value. Second, political influence, affecting future outcomes, and more mundane utilitarian objectives. Third, actually nontrivial amount of precise knowledge and understanding where LLMs remain unreliable.
There still is plenty of humans who have high enough perplexity and wisdom to deserve being talked to for purely intellectual entertainment and enrichment. But I've raised the bar of sanity. Now this set does not include those who have kneejerk angry-monkey-noise tier reactions to high-level AI texts.
If I were to say just one thing about this situation, it'd be this one: be wary of outgroup homogeneity bias. People are not “China” or “America”. Not even Xi himself is “China”, whatever Louis XIV had to say on the matter. Certainly neither is Liang Wenfeng.
Still, first about DeepSeek and China.
I think that the US-PRC AI competition is the most important story of our age, so I pretty much don't comment on anything else here. I have three posts, of which two are directly about this: on Huawei Kirin chips and one on DeepSeek V2. Prior to that major writeup I've said:
We don't understand the motivations of Deepseek and the quant fund High-Flyer that's sponsoring them, but one popular hypothesis is that they are competing with better-connected big tech labs for government support, given American efforts in cutting supply of chips to China. After all, the Chinese also share the same ideas of their trustworthiness, and so you have to be maximally open to Western evaluators to win the Mandate of Heaven.
Well, as you note, nowadays Wenfeng gets invited to talk to the second man in all of China, so if that were his goal, he has probably succeeded. But (since you haven't I'll bother to quote) we've learned in the last few months – and I agree he's proven his sincerity with abundant evidence, from revealed company direction to testimonies of ex-researchers in the West – that his actual angle was different:
In the face of disruptive technologies, the moat formed by closed source is short-lived. Even if OpenAI is closed source, it won’t stop others from catching up. So we put the value on our team, our colleagues grow in the process, accumulate a lot of know-how, and form an organization and culture that can innovate, which is our moat.
In fact, nothing is lost with open source and openly published papers. For technologists, being "followed" is a great sense of accomplishment. In fact, open source is more of a cultural behavior than a commercial one. To give is to receive glory. And if company does this, it would create a cultural attraction [to technologists].
With this one weird trick, he's built apparently the highest-talent-density AGI lab in China. Scientists have ambitions beyond making Sam Altman filthy rich and powerful or receiving generational wealth as crumbs from his table. They want to make a name for themselves. Some are even naive enough to want to contribute something to the world. This is not very stereotypically Chinese, and so Wenfeng has gotten himself a non-stereotypical Chinese company. I recommend reading both interviews (the second one is translated by this grateful ex-researcher, by the way. That, too, is not a very typical thing to do for your former boss).
There weren’t a lot of deep wizards, just this-year graduates from top colleges and universities, those who are in their 4th or 5th year of PhD, and young people who had only graduated a few years ago. … V2 didn’t use any people coming back from overseas, they are all local. The top 50 people may not be in China, but maybe we can build them ourselves.
I've been an increasingly convinced DeepSeek fanatic ever since their very first LLMs, Coder-33B and 6.7B, first surfaced on Reddit around October 2023. I could tell at a glance that this is an abnormally efficient company, with some unusual ethos, and that it displays total lack of chabuduo attitude that at that point came to be expected, and is still expected, from Chinese AI project (clueless training on test and OpenAI outputs, distasteful self-promotion, absence of actual scientific interest and ambition, petty myopic objectives…) How much they have achieved is still a large surprise to me. I use V3, and now R1+search, dozens of times per day, it's not out of some confused loyalty, it's just that good, fast, free and pleasant. It has replaced Sonnet 3.5 for almost every use case.
In that post 6 months ago I've said:
To wit, Western and Eastern corporations alike generously feed us – while smothering startups – fancy baubles to tinker with, charismatic talking toys; as they rev up self-improvement engines for full cycle R&D, the way imagined by science fiction authors all these decades ago, monopolizing this bright new world. […] they're all neat. But they don't even pass for prototypes of engines you can hop on and hope to ride up the exponential curve. They're too… soft. And not economical for their merits.
Some have argued that Llama-405B will puncture my narrative. It hasn't, it's been every bit as useless and economically unjustifiable a money sink as I imagined it to be. Ditto for Mistral Large. For whatever reason, rich Westerners prove to be very aligned to strategic national interests, and won't take the initiative in releasing disruptive technology. DeepSeek-Coder-V2 was the prototype of that engine for riding up the exponent. R1 is its somewhat flawed production version. Nothing else in the open comes close as of yet. Maybe we don't need much of anything else.
So, about the West.
From what I can tell, the path to AGI, then ASI is now clear. R1 is probably big enough to be an AGI, has some crucial properties of one, and what remains is just implementing a few tricks we already know and can cover in a post no longer than this one. It will take less engineering than goes into a typical woke AAA game that flops on Steam. If Li Quiang and Pooh Man Bad so wished, they could mobilize a few battalions of software devs plus compute and infra resources hoarded by the likes of Baidu and Alibaba, hand that off to Wenfeng and say “keep cooking, Comrade” – that'd be completely sufficient. (Alas, I doubt that model would be open). The same logic applies to Google, which has shipped a cheap and fast reasoner model mere hours after DeepSeek, mostly matching it on perf and exceeding on features. Reasoning is quickly getting commoditized.
So I am not sure what happens next, or what will be done with those $500B. To be clear it's not some state program like the CHIPS act, but mostly capex and investments that has already been planned, repackaged to fit into Trumpian MAGA agenda. But in any case: the Western frontier is several months ahead of DeepSeek, and there are indeed hundreds of thousands of GPUs available, and we know that it only takes 2048 nerfed ones, 2 months and 130 cracked Chinese kids to get to bootstrap slow but steady recursive self-improvement. Some specific Meta departments have orders of magnitude more than that, even Chinese kids. Deep fusion multimodality, RL from-scratch to replace language pretraining, immense context lengths? Just how wasteful can you be with compute to need to tap into new nuclear buildouts before you have a superhuman system on your hands? Feverishly design nanobots or better fighter jets to truly show Commuist Choyna who's who? What's the game plan?
I think Miles, ex OpenAI Policy head, appears to be increasingly correct: there's no winning this race.
Stargate + related efforts could help the US stay ahead of China, but China will still have their own superintelligence(s) no more than a year later than the US, absent e.g. a war. So unless you want (literal) war, you need to have a vision for navigating multipolar AI outcomes. P.S. the up to one year thing is about a world in which the US keeps or ratchets up the current batch of export controls on China. If the US were to relax them significantly, China could catch up or even leapfrog due to a huge advantage in doing large scale energy buildouts.
Do you want (literal) war, dear Americans? It's quite possible that you'll never again have a good chance to start one. The Chinese are still at only like 1000 nuclear warheads. You can sacrifice all the population of your major cities in a desperate bid for geopolitical hegemony and Evangelical Rapture fantasies. Or you can fantasize about your Wonder Weapon that'll be so much more Wonderful before the other guy's that it'll be akin to a paperclip against soft flesh – just give Sama or Ilya several hundreds of billions more. Or you can cope with the world where other powers, nasty and illiberal ones, get to exist indefinitely.
I won't give advice except checking out R1 with and without Search, it's terribly entertaining if nothing else. https://chat.deepseek.com/
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.
There are some problems with AI-2027. And the main argument for taking it seriously, Kokotaljo's prediction track record, given that he's been in the ratsphere at the start of the scaling revolution, is not so impressive to me. What does he say concretely?
Right from the start:
2022
GPT-3 is finally obsolete. OpenAI, Google, Facebook, and DeepMind all have gigantic multimodal transformers, similar in size to GPT-3 but trained on images, video, maybe audio too, and generally higher-quality data. … Thanks to the multimodal pre-training and the fine-tuning, the models of 2022 make GPT-3 look like GPT-1.
In reality: by August 2022, GPT-4 finished pretraining (and became available only on March 14, 2023), it used only images, with what we today understand was a crappy encoder like CLIP and projection layer bottleneck, and the main model was pretrained on pure text still. There was no – zero – multimodal transfer, look up the tech report. GPT with vision only really became available by November 2023. The first seriously, natively multimodal-pretrained model is 4o which debuted in Spring 2024. Facebook was nowhere to be seen and only reached some crappy multimodality in production model by Sep 25, 2024. “bureaucracies/apps available in 2022” also didn't happen in any meaningful sense. So far, not terrible, but keep it in mind; there's a tendency to correct for conservatism in AI progress, because prediction markets tend to overestimate difficulty of some benchmark milestones, and here I think the opposite happens.
2023
The multimodal transformers are now even bigger; the biggest are about half a trillion parameters, costing hundreds of millions of dollars to train, and a whole year
Again, nothing of the sort happened, the guy is just rehashing Yud's paranoid tropes that have more similarity to Cold War era unactualized doctrines than any real world business processes. GPT-4 was on the order of $30M–$100M, took like 4 months, and was by far the biggest training run of 2022-early 2023, it was a giant MoE (I guess he didn't know about MoEs then, even though Outrageously Large Neural Networks: The Sparsely-Gated Mixture-of-Experts Layer is from 2017, same year as Transformer, from an all-star DM team; incidentally the first giant sparse Chinese MoE was WuDao, announced on January 11, 2021, it was dirt cheap and actually pretrained on images and text).
Notice the absence of Anthropic or China in any of this.
2024 We don’t see anything substantially bigger. Corps spend their money fine-tuning and distilling and playing around with their models, rather than training new or bigger ones. (So, the most compute spent on a single training run is something like 5x10^25 FLOPs.)
By the end of 2024, models were in training or pre-deployment testing that exceeded 3e26 FLOPs, and it still didn't reach $100M of compute because compute has been getting cheaper. GPT-4 is like 2e25.
This chip battle isn’t really slowing down overall hardware progress much. Part of the reason behind the lack-of-slowdown is that AI is now being used to design chips, meaning that it takes less human talent and time, meaning the barriers to entry are lower.
I am not sure what he had in mind in this whole section on chip wars. China can't meaningfully retaliate except by controlling exports of rate earths. Huawei was never bottlenecked by chip design, they could leapfrog Nvidia with human engineering alone if Uncle Sam let them in 2020. There have been no noteworthy new players in fabless and none of new players used AI.
That’s all in the West. In China and various other parts of the world, AI-persuasion/propaganda tech is being pursued and deployed with more gusto
None of this happened, in fact China has rolled up more stringent regulations than probably anybody to label AI-generated content and seems quite fine with its archaic methods.
2025
Another major milestone! After years of tinkering and incremental progress, AIs can now play Diplomacy as well as human experts.[6] It turns out that with some tweaks to the architecture, you can take a giant pre-trained multimodal transformer and then use it as a component in a larger system, a bureaucracy but with lots of learned neural net components instead of pure prompt programming, and then fine-tune the whole system via RL to get good at tasks in a sort of agentic way. They keep it from overfitting to other AIs by having it also play large numbers of humans. To do this they had to build a slick online diplomacy website to attract a large playerbase. Diplomacy is experiencing a revival…
This is not at all what we ended up doing, this is a cringe Lesswronger's idea of a way to build a reasoning agent that has intuitive potential for misalignment and adversarial manipulative stance towards humans. I think Noam Brown's Diplomacy work was mostly thrown out and we returned to AlphaGo style of simple RL with verifiable rewards from math and code execution, as explained by DeepSeek in R1 paper. This happened in early 2023, and reached product stage by Sep 2024.
We've caught up. I think none of this looks more impressive in retrospect than typical futurism, given the short time horizon. It's just “here are some things I've read about in popular reporting on AI research, and somewhere in the next 5 years a bunch of them will happen in some kind of order”. Multimodality, agents – that's all very generic. “bureaucracies” still didn't happen, this looks like some ngmi CYC nonsense, but coding assistants did. Adversarial games had no relevance; annotation for RLHF, and then pure RL – had. It appears to me that he was never really fascinated by the tech as such, only by its application to the rationalist discourse. Indeed:
Was a philosophy PhD student, left to work at AI Impacts, then Center on Long-Term Risk, then OpenAI.
OK.
Now as for the 2027 version, they've put in a lot more work (by the way Lifland has a lackluster track record with his AI outcomes modeling I think, and also depends in his sources on Kotra who just makes shit up). And I think it's even less impressive. It stubbornly, bitterly refuses to update on deviations from the Prophecy that have been happening.
First, they do not update on the underrated insight by de Gaulle: “China is a big country, inhabited by many Chinese.” I think, and have argued before, that by now Orientals have a substantial edge in research talent. One can continue coping about their inferior, uninventive ways, but honestly I'm done with this, it's just embarrassing kanging and makes White (and Jewish) people who do it look like bitter Arab, Indian or Black Supremacists to me. Sure, they have a different cognitive style centered on iterative optimization and synergizing local techniques, but this style just so happens to translate very well into rapidly improving algorithms and systems. And it scales! Oh, it scales well with educated population size, so long as it can be employed. I've written on the rise of their domestic research enough in my previous unpopular long posts. Be that as it may, China is very happy right now with the way its system is working, with half a dozen intensely talented teams competing and building on each other's work in the open, educating the even bigger next crop of geniuses, maybe 1 OOM larger than the comparable tier graduating American institutions this year (and thanks to Trump and other unrelated factors, most of them can be expected to voluntarily stay home this time). Smushing agile startups into a big, corrupt, centralized SOE is NOT how “CCP wakes up”, it's how it goes back to its Maoist sleep. They have a system of distributing state-owned compute to companies and institutions and will keep it running but that's about it.
And they are already mostly aware of the object level; they just don't agree with Lesswong analysis. Being Marxists, they firmly believe that what decides victory is primarily material forces of production, and that's kind of their forte. No matter what wordcels imagine about Godlike powers of brains in a box in a basement, intelligence has to cash out into actions to have effect on the world. So! Automated manufacturing, you say? They're having a humanoid robot half-marathon in… today I think, there's a ton of effort going into general and specialized automation and indinegizing every part of the robotic supply chain, on China scale that we know from their EV expansion. Automated R&D? They indinegize production of laboratory equipment and fill facilities. Automated governance? Their state departments compete in integration of R1 already. They're setting up everything that's needed for speedy takeoff even if their moment comes a bit later. What does the US do? Flail around with alienating Europeans and vague dreams of bringing 1950s back?
More importantly, the authors completely discard the problem that this work is happening in the open. This is a torpedo into Lesswrongian doctrine of an all-conquering singleton. If the world is populated by a great number of private actors with even subpar autonomous agents serving them, this is a complex world to take over! In fact it may be chaotic enough to erase any amount of intelligence advantage, just like longer horizon on weather prediciton sends the most advanced algorithms and models to the same level as simple heuristics.
Further, the promise of the reasoning paradigm is that intrinsically dumber agents can overcome problems of the same difficulty as top-of-the-line ones, provided enough inference compute. This blunts the edge of actors with the capital and know-how for larger training runs, reducing this to the question of logistics, trading electricity and amortized compute cost for outcomes. And importantly, this commoditization may erase the capital that “OpenBrain” can raise for its ambition. How much value will the wealthy of the world part with to have stake in the world's most impressive model for a whole of 3 months or even weeks? What does it buy them? Would it not make more sense to buy or rent their own hardware, download DeepSeek V4/R2 and use the conveniently included scripts to calibrate it for running your business? Or is the idea here that OpenBrain's product is so crushingly superior that it will be raking billions and soon trillions in inference, despite us seeing already that inference prices are cratering even as zero-shot solution rates increase? Just how much money is there to be made in centralized AI, when AI has become a common utility? I know that not so long ago the richest guy in China was selling bottled water, but…
Basically, I find this text lacking both as a forecast, and on its own terms as a call to action to minimize AI risks. We likely won't have a singleton, we'll have a very contested information space, ironically closer to the end of Kokotaljo's original report, but even more so. This theory of a transition point to ASI that allows to rapidly gain durable advantage is pretty suspect. They should take the L on old rationalist narratives and figure out how to help our world better.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
2mo ago
but I don't understand people who aren't willing to choose the lesser of two evils
What is the argument for the need to make a choice? Does the US pay much attention to the war between Congo and Rwanda (despite clearly laying blame on one side)? Actually have you even heard of it?
Any reasonable country in Israel's position would react similarly.
No, not at all. Or only on the crudest level of analysis. There is no way to argue that Israeli policy is the only reasonable response, not even Israelis would say that. There are many possible options. Eg China has shown its take on the situation, in Xinjiang.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
11mo ago
Does anyone else feel "there's no other place like home" sort of way about this place?
I do. It's funny, I'be become somewhat prominent elsewhere, yet I never feel such warm rush as when writing for you guys. And that despite being not an amicable type. I've been among you, what, five years? And made maybe three friends. Even so.
It's a damn shame that Zorba didn't do good on his promise of establishing a recruiting pipeline. But that's hard, and now clearer why it's hard.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1mo ago
I'll wager that if we're still here in 3-5 years, you'll be saying the same thing about underestimating the Chinese capacity for self-sabotage.
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.
where's the golden era in American foreign and domestic policy mediated by these people?
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 what, the financial system that proved utterly incapable of regime change in Iran or hindering Russia's ability to wage war?
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.
You bring up Russia and Ukraine - in March 2022, was there anyone (including what we can guess the US state department thought at the time!) who confidently predicted the outcome would be >= 3 year grinding war with little movement on the front, dominated by drone warfare?
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?
If Americans were truly hegemonic and held that as their goal, the world would look very different.
Sorry, this sounds very much like Russian “we haven't even started yet” narrative to me.
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.
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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.
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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 :)
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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?
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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
2mo ago
All I can say based on my sources (which we probably share) is that Hanania, if anything, understates his case, fearful of NDAs, and so focuses on blatant but not very consequential demonstrations of ineptitude. The brain rot in this administration is unbelievable, it's on par with the goofy early Communist governments I've marveled at in historical materials. People here who eloquently steelman them have their work cut out for them. They'll easily exceed the wokes in concocting justifications for pure primitive malice and barbarity in the coming years.
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.
My impression after obsessively monitoring this situation for days (of course) is that neither side will fold, tariffs are here to stay, and everyone will be poor and mad for it. China of course won't fold, the idea that they're at risk is preposterous, they can well weather complete cessation of export to the US.
Broadly I have concluded that the main problem the US faces is racism towards the Chinese; the ill-earned sense of centrality and irreplaceability. I believe that Trump, Navarro and the rest of that gang are as misinformed as the average MAGA guy on Twitter, given how they speak and that amusing formula. Americans still think that their great consumption is the linchpin of Chinese economy, 10-30% of their GDP (it's more like 3%); that the Chinese produce apparel, “trinkets” and low-quality materials (they also produce things that Americans plausibly cannot start producing at the same quality in years); that American IP is vital for their industry (they're making their own software, OSes, CPUs…) and so on. The idea that American de-industrialization is a product of betrayal by Wall Street Elites who offshored jobs to China also feeds into the delusional notion of possible parity – but the truth is that there has never been a point in history where American industry had scale or diversity comparable to what's going on in China now. The issue with their bad financials is also overblown; as for losing markets, they have the capital at hand for consumption stimulus. This guy from Beijing writes:
Accordingly, with a higher real GDP, their effective debt to GDP ratio may be as low as 150%, not 200-300%. They have US assets to sell too.
So China can trivially absorb half of the overcapacity freed by reduced trade with the US, and might find buyers for the rest.
My thesis is that in picking this fight, Americans don't understand that they're actually not that big of a deal. Unfortunately, their delusions are globally shared and become reality in their own right. But perhaps not enough to offset the gross physical one.
The actual dangerous thing for China here is that Trump seems determined to immiserate the whole planet, completely irrespective of any geopolitical rivalry, because he's an illiterate anarcho-primitivist and thinks that all trade is theft unless it's barter, basically. America vs. The World, especially with a chain reaction of tariffs on Chinese (and likely also Vietnamese etc…) capacity spillover, results in massive reduction of productivity for everyone. For now, nations like Vietnam are unilaterally dropping tariffs on American crap, but that can't be a big effect because their tariffs were low to begin with, and Americans just don't and cannot produce enough at price points that people of those nations can afford. (We may see IMF loans for 3rd world countries importing overpriced American beef or Teslas or whatever to placate Don, but I doubt it'll be sustainable). I suppose in the long run the idea is that Optimus bots will be churning out products with superhuman efficiency, at least Lutnick argues as much. But that's still years away. Perhaps this extortion of zero balance trade (so in effect, the demand that trading partners buy non-competitive American products) is meant to finance the transition to posthuman automated economy. Bold strategy.
I am of course very amused and curious to see how it'll go. Will Fortress America intimidate the rest of us into submission, likely forever? Or will it be so stubborn, brutal and ham-fisted that humanity will finally rebel and ostracize the rogue state, letting it broil in its own supremacist fantasies? Can Bessent et al. turn 1D “trade le bad” checkers of the King of Understanding Things (懂王) into 4D chess? We shall see.
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