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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   4277 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 23, 2024

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Preface: I'm not the most technically knowledgeable AI person in the world.

Does the recent release of Deepseek v2 mean that China is at parity with the US on AI models?

https://github.com/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-Coder-V2?tab=readme-ov-file#2-model-downloads

According to the stats they give, it's comparable to GPT4o in most things (slightly behind) but ahead on some coding questions. I know benchmarks can be gamed and/or deceptive but it's an open-source project, I don't know why you'd go to the effort of lying. They also give extremely low API prices, which suggests that it's quite cheap to run or they somehow have more money than the US tech juggernauts.

I know that US labs might not have released everything they have for the public and the new Claude Sonnet is also getting a lot of attention. But new Claude seems roughly on-par with GPT-4o too, maybe a little bit ahead. And why would Deepseek be the best AI model in China? Isn't the general rule that open-source is behind closed-source? I get the sense that China is quite secretive and their biggest tech companies aren't exactly eager to have another volley of sanctions hitting them, wouldn't they stay under the limelight. "This isn't even my final model" should roughly apply to both sides.

Theories:

  1. US labs are still well ahead because Deepseek v2 is gaming metrics or otherwise bad in various ways compared to top models
  2. US labs are ahead because they're sitting on GPT-5 (which is dangerous since it puts millions of people out of work tomorrow and starts a giga-arms race) or racing for superintelligence
  3. China has closed the gap

Related: https://x.com/teortaxesTex/status/1804571746550366264

Maybe the Chinese dumped political 'alignment' and are pulling ahead? I've heard various praise for pre-RLHF'd GPT-4s cognitive abilities.

Are you scarequoting ‘alignment’ because you don’t believe in the concept, or because you don’t think the DS2 prompt is an example?

I would expect misguided RLHF to hamper the capabilities of a model. I’d also believe that having a political officer signing off on all press releases could suppress benchmarks. What I doubt is that such tampering would be obvious from a line in the prompt; that tweet is jumping to conclusions.

I don’t understand the economics of open source. Who owns the servers handling those cheap API calls? Could they be explained by a government subsidy?

I was thinking exactly that, government subsidy. Or a desperate attempt for market share.

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