4w ago

The U.S. just pledged hundreds of billions to protect its AI leadership. A Chinese startup with a ‘joke of a budget‘ may have already undercut those hopes

fortune.com How a Chinese AI startup with a ‘joke of a budget’ won over experts—and spooked investors, the tech sector and the U.S. government

Hangzhou-based DeepSeek has released several open-source AI models that match OpenAI’s performance—with more efficiency and at lower cost.

Paywall removed: https://archive.is/MqHc4

You're viewing a single thread.

113 comments

Again, this is all fucking stupid. China is giving this shit away for free to absolutely own the US for spending money on stupid fucking things like this.
- Its good for the consumer. If companies like deepseek weren't just tossing them out there for anyone to use, Microsoft and Google would currently have a monopoly and it would all be subscription type services.
  It also greatly reduces whatever chance the copyright shills have of legislating against it.
  
  It's not good consumers at all, at least no explicitly. There are already open and free LLM models out there anyone can use that are just as good as OpenAI, for example.
  What this is: a pretty simple deathblow to completely collapse the bullshit AI bubble in the US that was created by a bunch of wealthy idiots trying to fleece people out of money. Plain and simple.
  While I'm happy that this pretty much destroys the business of OpenAI and the others, this bullshit funding by executive order is a bailout for those people, right out in the open. It's a classic Trump scam. Nobody will ever see where the money is going, and it's taxpayer dollars going right back into the banks of millionaires billionaires who were about lose the their asses for investing in this stupid shit in the first place.
  
  I don't really follow. Open source is still a net benefit regardless of the goverments investment in closed source, especially for the consumer.
  I agree it's highly likely there's a scam going on but healthy competition will probably force them to actually use some of the fund. If they had a monopoly, it would be easier to give us a minimal viable product and call it a sound investment. They can't be too blatant about it after all.
- Well to be fair, American companies did that too. They expand their services internationally "for free" and then get other countries hooked on it.
  China is just taking a page from that playbook.
  
  No, China skipped all that bullshit and just said "Well what if we open source this and it's good or better than all the US companies?". Well those companies will wither and die. The transfer of money is a bailout for those companies. I assume Musk plotted this out.
- I mean Meta opened up Llama for free a while ago. But at the end of the day, the AI models posed to actually impact things are those integrated or integrateable into workflows, and those are all still more or less locked down.

113 comments