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To continue the drama around the stunning Chinese DeepSeek-r1 accomplishment, the ScaleAI CEO claims DeepSeek is being coy about their 50,000 H100 GPUs.
I realize now that DeepSeek is pretty much the perfect Chinese game theory move: let the US believe a small AI lab full of cunning Chinese matched OpenAI, with a tiny fraction of the compute budget, with no ability to get SOTA GPUs. Let the US believe the export regime works, but that it doesn't matter, because Chinese brilliance is superior, demoralizing efforts to strengthen it. Additionally, it would make the US skeptical of big investment in OpenAI capital infrastructure because there's no moat.
Is it true? I have no idea. I'm not really qualified to do the analysis on the DeepSeek results to confirm it's really the run of a small scrappy team on a shoestring budget end-to-end. Also what we don't see are the potentially 100-1000 other labs (or previous iterations) that have tried and failed.
The results we have now are that -r1 b14 and b32 are fairly capable on commodity hardware, and it seems one could potentially run the 671b model which is kinda maybe but not actually on par with o1 on a something that costs as much as a tinybox ($15k). That's a remarkable achievement, but at what total development cost? $5 million in compute + 100 Chinese worth of researchers would be stunningly impressive. But if the true cost is actually a few more OOMs, it would mean the script has not been completely flipped.
I maintain that a lot of OpenAI's current position is derivative of a period of time where they published their research. You even have Andrej Karpathy teaching you in a lecture series how to build GPT from scratch on YouTube, and he walks you through the series of papers that led to it. It's not a surprise that competitors can catch up quickly if they know what's possible and what the target is. Given that they're more like ClosedAI these days, would any novel breakthroughs be as easy to catch up on? They've certainly got room to explore them with a $500b commitment to play with.
Anyway, do you believe DeepSeek?
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.
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.
As a minor audiophile I think a lot about how great ChiFi is. My desk setup is Sennheiser 650s and a Monoprice DAC/AMP but when I'm on the go, I use earbuds. Recently after somewhat being forced to swap to a phone with no aux I trialed AirPods and being thoroughly unimpressed I just bought a dongle and figured might as well grab some new wired KZs. $20 and they blow past $100 earbuds, and I have $50 Linsoul TIN T2s with quality you'd have to spend >$200 to get from a western brand. It's location, location, location. Shenzhen, so many components made there, easy to get everything needed for high-quality IEMs and sell them for very low margin but at very high volume. It's one of the areas where China has been killing it, and I'll be very eager when a ChiFi brand I know as well and regard as highly as KZ starts putting out high-end competitive headphones without the massive luxury tax.
I also know the bad side of business in China. Though now as I think about it, the environment that allows DeepSeek as you claim it, or better, allows KZ and ChiFi, will also have the worst of the examples. There's a lot of shitty Chinese manufacturing, but it's not the rule. We might earnestly say "Circumstantial and correctable socioeconomic factors."
I regularly use OpenAI products, ChatGPT and DALL-E and now Sora. There I often have to frame things so I don't trip the censors. What content restrictions does DeepThink have, if any? You say it pushes back. Is it going to chastise me for wrongthink? Is it going to misgender someone to stop a nuke? Will it call me the N-word? I remember charts from however many months back about the measurable "increase in stupidity" of western LLMs, and I've assumed that has everything to do with the combination of beating it senseless to condition it against wrongthink, and then compounding that by forcing it to phrase everything in lawyerspeak so they can't be sued. A capable team that isn't devoting significant manhours to forcing their pattern-recognition machine to not recognize patterns would surely blow past the ones who do.
The prose you linked is decent, it has consistent tone and content. It's not quality yet, it would be impressive if written by a high schooler. But it's not a high schooler, it's what they have today, and will only get better.
As someone deep in the chifi hole let me tell you that the impressive thing about chifi isn't the quality.
It's the competition and speed of improvement. The in-ear market is evolving at light speed, with brands releasing a new model every couple of months. They also went from a complete non-understanding of branding to throwing together bespoke packaging and cases, cables, tips and cleaning, and now even replaceable screw-on tuning nozzles.
And that's to say nothing about the panning-for-gold approach to tuning they used to have. Now the market is maturing and the west has found themselves not non-competitive, but at a complete loss when it comes to making the margins they used to make. They're lucky audio stuff tends to last a while and the really good stuff tends to hold its value.
The best IEM in the world would have cost you a couple thousand five years ago. Now you can get something with equivalent performance and detail, without accounting for personal preference in tuning, for less than half the price.
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