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I think they found way to use their compute much more efficiently somehow, that's the key secret that they're not open-sourcing. Deepseek models are insanely cheap to run compared to Western models. If they're cheap to run, it follows that they're probably cheap to train.
Just look at openrouter: https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-r1
Deepseek as a provider is by far the cheapest and fastest with modest but totally usable context length and output limits. The Americans serving this (with potentially superior GPUs) are completely shitting the bed, half their responses just stall in the chain of reasoning and don't get anywhere, despite them being 10x more expensive. They clearly have no idea how to run this model, which is reasonable since it's deepseek's baby. But Americans can all run American models just fine at the exact same price. Claude on google or amazon costs exactly the same. I think in addition to the advantage of knowing how to use their model they have some secret insight into how to use compute efficiently.
On the other hand, US export restrictions just don't work. Russian oil is still being sold, it just goes in circuitous routes through India to reach Europe. Russian imports of luxury vehicles from Europe still happen, it just goes through Azerbaijan or Kazakhstan.
China still buys H100s. They have money. Nvidia wants money. Middlemen want money. World markets go brrr. Deepseek is surely capable of rustling up a big cluster, or the Chinese state could give them access to one. Or they could borrow some via the cloud. Export controls work on big rare things monopolized by governments like H-bombs and fighter jets (and maybe semiconductor equipment which needs manufacturer support), not finished products that are produced en masse.
They do work as long as your definition of "work" isn't "100% effective".
Well, they haven't produced the desired result of 'Russia being unable to sustain its war effort', 'Russian elites overthrowing Putin due to not getting luxury imports' or 'China being unable to reach the frontier of AI research'. The Russian economy is performing quite well. Everything seems to be going up, real gdp, real incomes:
https://carnegieendowment.org/russia-eurasia/politika/2024/05/russia-war-income?lang=en
They're not totally ineffective. But most small, thin, unfit women aren't totally ineffective at fighting. They're just not significantly effective. They still lose vs big strong men.
Russian GDP is not doing so hot (I can't find a good multi year graph that goes up to nearly the present day, but this serves to show the recent trend). It's true that rumors of Russian collapse were obviously overblown but that doesn't mean they don't work at all.
5% growth over the past year is not hot? Any western country would consider it a miracle to have that growth rate. For reference america, which is the western country which best recovered from covid, has a growth rate of 2.5% over the past year. Honestly I was ready to accept your claim that the russian economy is doing bad until I saw the chart you linked. Now I'm wondering how they managed such impressive growth under such a restrictive sanctions regime.
It's not that hot when there's zero growth since 2013. It's easy to have a year with big growth if you crash beforehand.
I feel you're losing the plot here. We were talking about recent sanctions effect on the economy. Why are you bringing up the last decade when the discussion was about the last 2 years of economic growth?
Because sanctions have been in place since the invasion of crimea in 2014.
The discussion started over claims about russian oil and gas which weren't significantly sanctioned until russia invaded.
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