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Is NeZha 2 any good ?
NeZha2 is China's first big blockbuster. It's being heralded as a 'Deepseek moment' for Chinese cinema and I'm confused.
I saw NeZha 1 with my Chinese roommates and I didn't like it. The animation was expensive, but had a stock footage-ness to all of it. The jokes were Minions-esque slapstick and the core story was straight out a children's book. The movie felt miles behind nuanced works like InsideOut or Up. Ghibli is on a whole another planet. Minions is probably the analogy I would go for. Note - I saw it in Mandarin with subtitles, with a PRC Chinese person explaining any nuance I might've lost.
Now, the Minions movies made a ton of money and the west's block busters have been especially bad post-covid. I get it, it's kettle calling the pot black. Normies have terrible taste, so I'm going to avoid equating commercial success with quality. My comment is from the perspective of taste.
And I am a China optimist. My best friends are PRC Chinese and they're smart. I don't doubt that Chinese companies can compete in global entertainment or automobile markets. But why is everything that comes out of PRC China so tasteless ? There is clear absence of nuance, craft and love in every industrialized piece of crap that comes out of there. Deepseek is special because it feels inspired. DJI & Nothing also have a spark within them. But elsewhere it feels competently executed but empty. Nezha is no different. Great execution, no soul.
Is this hype organic ? Am I just a hater ?
By who? What is this supposed to mean?
With a few weeks of space between the initial marketing hype and observation, and Deepseek seems to be most notable for (a) claiming to have taken less money to develop (which is unclear given the nature of China subsidies), (b) being built off of other tech (which helps explain (a), and (c) being relatively cheap (which is partially explained by (a).
If someone feels it's inspired, okay- the vibe war for propaganda is what it is and anyone in a different set of contraints is liable to feel it's novel rather than just different- and it's not like it's impossible for good cinema to come out of a state censorship apparatus. But is 'Deepseek for cinema' supposed to imply 'Chinese government constraints, but cheaper'?
It implies - a discipline that the west was thought to dominate, but PRC China created a premier alternative out of nowhere.
Black Myth Wukong & Xiaomi SU7 are other examples.
The 'deepseek' moment is twitter sheeps trying to find a contrived analogy. But it gets the point across.
Deep Seek had its mainstream moment last month. But, it has been on the radar since early 2024 and the release of Deep Seek coder. While China has been competitive in the LLM space, their major players are massive organizations like Alibaba, Huawei or BAAI. Deep Seek was special because it reflects a cultural appetite for ambitious risk taking paired with technical excellence, all within a small upstart. It's a combination that has been missing from non-US startups, and for a long time was credited for China's inability to execute moonshots.
That aside, you're right. It is more that people are suddenly noticing what were well-funded efforts that were a long time coming. The outcomes themselves weren't sudden at all.
I generally agree with you. I deleted the above post because I realized that you were characterizing a view rather than advancing a claim, which upon realizing my mistake made my skepticism a non-helpful response that might have come off more aggressive than intended.
I have my doubts on the characterization of Deep Seek, since to me its corporate history reads less like a moonshot and more like a planned / choreographed emergence, but we agree on the general point that the change is people suddenly noticing pre-existing efforts.
Ayy no worries. I'm so used to people on TheMotte being skeptical, that the bar for aggressiveness is usually high.
The rate at which they're producing papers has me convinced that DeepSeek is operating at a much much larger scale than than the west realizes. (not taking anything away from them ofc. Deepmind is much larger, and seems to barely be keeping up with Deepseek)
Just today they released a sparse attention paper that makes some pretty bonkers claims - https://x.com/deepseek_ai/status/1891745487071609327
What gives them away is the especially mature way in which they write papers. There is maturity that only comes from writing a lot of them. These are the best ML PhDs China has. Not some trading geniuses who picked up LLMs on the side.
Conspiracy theories around DeepSeek are pretty funny, people twist themselves into pretzels to not acknowledge the most parsimonious hypothesis. Because it feels too wild, I guess. Maybe too scary as well, because it suggests that China can birth like a hundred more such companies if it finds a hundred such CEOs. I collect these stories. They've used all of Singapore's compute! They pay $1.3M to top researchers! It's a «choreographed emergence» to deceive the oh-so-important Dean (but he knows better than to trust ChiComs)! The scale is much bigger, there are hidden disciples in cloistered cultivation! It's all so very creative.
In any case I have the direct opposite impression about papers. They are kids, overwhelmingly under 30 and often 20, and they write very naturally and not academically. It's just raw intelligence and curiosity, not experience. It is known that roughly everyone at DeepSeek speaks fluent English – not normal for Chinese labs; they pay extreme attention to culture fit and aptitude in recruiting, and are severely ageist. Many core innovations come from undergrad interns; the first author on the NSA paper is an intern with anime pfp too. We have reports from competitors' employees who had rejected their offer because they perceived the company as too small and weak for the declared ambition. I don't know how to break it to you, but there's no Iron Curtain, things are fairly transparent.
Maybe. I'm not sure if DeepSeek has even 50 Ph.Ds though, and ByteDance has thousands.
If your hypothesis is correct, they will not significantly accelerate, now that they're acknowledged as national champions and are offered OOMs more resources than they had before. I think they will.
I see them as the Chinese equivalent to Mistral. They came out of no where, but they definitely weren't upstarts. Post that, they had sufficient resources that it couldn't be called a 'rag tag group of nobodies'. For a while, the media portrayed mistral as a bunch of nobodies fighting against the giants. That characterization was just as incorrect.
Same for Deepseek. None of this takes away from their achievement. They are all cracked, no doubt.
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