6mo ago

Chinese AI startup DeepSeek overtakes ChatGPT on Apple App Store

www.reuters.com

reuters.com

The milestone highlights how DeepSeek has left a deep impression on Silicon Valley, upending widely held views about U.S. primacy in AI and the effectiveness of Washington's export controls targeting China's advanced chip and AI capabilities.

Mirror: https://archive.is/2025.01.27-062326/https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/chinese-ai-startup-deepseek-overtakes-chatgpt-apple-app-store-2025-01-27/

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has prompted U.S. tech executives to question the effectiveness of tech export controls.
It worked well against Russia and the Soviet Union, but it's been my claim for years now, that this won't work against China anymore. Because China is way more advanced now than the Soviet Union ever was by comparison for the time. And all it does is delay China while they build their own competing supply industries. And the end result will be that China will just dominate the backbone industries too.
The difference is in raw power, China has 10 times the people Russia has, and an economy that in real value more than matches USA now. In short China has all the advantages for long term developments. Except for not being ahead on chip manufacturing already.
China is already competing at top level in almost all key industries, and has absolutely unparalleled manufacturing capacity. but also technologically they are in the top of EV, Batteries, solar panels, and 44 other technology areas.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/mar/02/china-leading-us-in-technology-race-in-all-but-a-few-fields-thinktank-finds
all of the world’s top 10 leading research institutions are based in China and are collectively generating nine times more high-impact research papers than the second-ranked country (most often the US).”
Trying to hold back China is simply not a viable option anymore.
- It's not just people, it's also that China invests heavily in the building blocks of effective industries. They're serious about education and healthcare as public services, they invest heavily in transit. You can't expect life to bloom in a desert, but the US keeps acting like stripping away everything necessary for industries to prosper will somehow make them prosper harder.
  Requisite disclaimer; The CCP are an appalling autocracy with a litany of crimes against humanity to their name. Just because they do some things well doesn't make them worthy of admiration. Yes, I'm looking at you, .ml
  
  sadly "autocracy with litany of crimes against humanity" is rapidly approaching background noise when comparing nations
  
  Maybe not in a vacuum, but compared to pretty much any other government in the world right now, they are still very much worthy of admiration lol
- I think you can effectively compete with China but you would need a giant coalition of democratic countries that would move fast and stay focused.
  With oligarchs completely taking over the US, this is unlikely to happen. But that's hardly the sole roadblock to such a coalition.
  
  I think you can effectively compete with China but you would need a giant coalition of democratic countries that would move fast and stay focused.
  Exactly, like EU and USA working together, but then Americans go ahead and elect Trump!?
  As it's going we were already losing, when China was behind. There is no way we can beat them when they are ahead, unless we dramatically up our game.
  I've been cursing our (Denmark) government for cutting education and reducing taxes for 20 years. Instead of increasing education, and focus and invest in the sectors we are good at.
  That's what made us rich in the past, it's like they think we don't need to invest anymore, because we are economically doing fine cutting taxes and undermining the quality society we built in the past.
  
  With oligarchs completely taking over the US, this is unlikely to happen.
  It could still happen, it’s just that oligarchs will be the only ones to profit and it might require even more coercion than usual.
- I had heard that DeepSeek only took less than a hundredth of the power to train it, so it wasn't them getting their hands on a bunch of new chips or anything.
  
  I assume they don’t care about the ownership of training data. So they can just train these things on all the pirated data they can get ahold of. Whereas US companies might have a slightly harder time with that.
- I dont fundamentally disagree with you, but it should be pointed out that the USSR and its proxies in the Warsaw pact had about 0.4 billion people in 1980 to the PRC's 1 billion. So it wasnt anywhere near 10x the size. The important difference IMO is that china has opened up economically, whereas the USSR stayed closed, and are acting out Lenin's maxim of "the capitalists will sell us the rope to hang them".
  
  I clearly write: "China has 10 times the people Russia has,"
  So why are you arguing a strawman?
How long before deepseek is banned by US gov for being too good—-wait sorry I mean a security risk?
So I'm still on the fence about the AI arms race in general. However, reading up on DeepSeek it feels like they built a model specifically to work well on the benchmarks.
I say this cause it's a Mixture of Experts approach, so only parts of the model are used at any given point. The drawback is generalization.
Additionally, it isn't a multimodal model and the only place I've seen real opportunity for workflows automation is using the multimodal models. I guess you could use a combination of models, but that's definitely a step back from the grand promise of these foundational models.
Overall, I'm just not sure if this is lay people getting caught up in hype or actually a significant change in the landscape.
- they built a model specifically to work well on the benchmarks.
  To be fair, I'm pretty sure that's what everyone is doing. If you're not measuring against something, there's no way to tell if you're doing anything at all.
  
  My point was a mixture of Experts model could suffer from generalization. Although in reading more I'm not sure if it's the newer R model that had the MoE element.
So when are we gonna find out this is just like Amazon’s “AI” markets with no cashiers that was actually just image feeds sent to India to be processed by a low paying human?
- You can use the model yourself on your own hardware, offline, no Indians required.
- Try running it at home and send the packet capture.
- Supposedly, it is open source. So, we will find out IF it is very soon.
  
  I guess we just found out. https://github.com/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V3

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