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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   1632 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for July 31, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Yes? That is not in conflict with anything I've said.

You've quite literally got the CEO of DeepSeek complaining that they can't get the GPUs necessary to reach the frontier:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49052912

https://www.cyberkendra.com/2026/07/deepseek-pauses-fundraising-amid.html?m=1

In it, Liang reportedly framed China's disadvantage as an arithmetic problem rather than a talent one: "The biggest gap between us and the US is in resources."

The specifics were unusually candid. Liang is said to have told investors he needed 200,000 Huawei 950 chips to train a frontier model but received 16,000, adding that "Huawei's problem is still insufficient capacity" and expecting the crunch to last at least three years. He also floated narrowing the gap with US labs to three to six months using a fraction of their computing.

You can do remarkable things with grit, determination, the willingness to eat unsalted rice (and by distilling Claude), but that won't get you to the frontier before the frontier moves on.

Liang laments not having enough compute, you know. It is a handicap.

Of course he's going to complain. More helps more. They are, however, at the (pareto) frontier.

The pareto frontier is not the same as being at the frontier. Making a capable, well priced and adequate midranger is not what anyone wants to settle for when the best of the best are solving maths and dangling the promise of RSI. You want to be at the bleeding edge.

It's not about mid-range anymore. K3 is quite close on the index to the absolute top of the line. Some say Chinese models are still six months behind, some say the gap is closing, but nobody thinks it's increasing. It's also quite clear that they don't have the compute that the US had six months ago. Seems you don't need it to reach that level of performance.

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