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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 20, 2025

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I saw that too but I'm not a technical guy, daseindustries would probably be the one who can speak most knowledgeably on the details. Apparently they did some unnerfing of the Nvidia chips they had and optimized the model to fit their cluster but I don't really understand how they're so efficient. This is a trillion-dollar question after all.

My general belief was that Chinese made GPUs were OK for inference but still behind H100s and H100s are a last-generation product. And the H-series is much better in training. I think there are also all kinds of complexities in the software stack that make Nvidia. Like an Ascend 910 might be cheaper to produce but they're probably a bit more finnicky to work with and you need lots of talent to get a good bug-free experience. But Deepseek obviously has overflowing talent. H100s are more expensive in China since they need to be smuggled into the country...

I think they are playing games regarding prices. The prices of running a GPU once it's set up and serving a given model vs the price of installing a cluster and paying off that capital cost are very different. I think that's got a lot to do with the $5.5 million pricetag everyone is talking about.

I notice, as of a few hours ago, a new provider called "DeepInfra" appears with similar rates to DeepSeek. Despite the name they don't appear related to DeepSeek.

Looks like it's gotten so cheap that people are now making it free and just harvesting the info: https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-r1:free

I feel like such a cuck paying for Deepinfra or Together or the others, even more of a cuck paying for Claude subscription.