Chinese AI lab DeepSeek massively undercuts OpenAI on pricing — and that's spooking tech stocks
Chinese AI lab DeepSeek massively undercuts OpenAI on pricing — and that's spooking tech stocks
Not a word on Chinese models being censored in the article. What an odd omission.
It should also be pretty obvious that this is following the usual Chinese MO of using massive state subsidies to destroy the international competition with impossibly low dumping prices. We are seeing this in all sorts of sectors.
Okay... But isn't it also possible that AI is massively overvalued and this is a more reasonable price point for the technology?
Overvalued - as in, less useful than it seems to be - probably, but the costs of running it are immense and they are certainly not that much lower in China (despite low energy prices due to nonexistent environmental standards), given the hardware embargoes they are under, forcing them to use less efficient hardware.
Energy costs money in China too, they still have coal plants and crazy energy cutback mandates every once in a while.
The truth of the matter is that you need the user interactions from the free model to train and that value cannot be understated and if you are playing catchup, then it's a must. No one would use the Chinese model if it was a shit service.
tech has been subsidizing ai costs by magnitudes for years trying to make fetch happen, slop is slop. it's overvalued like crazy and the first hint of market competition has drained trillions from the stocks because it's an overvalued bubble. if china can do that by releasing competition then ok. maybe we should all be putting these trillions in things actually useful to humans.
If anything, this is just the start of an arms race. Do you really expect the Western competition to just stop what they are doing, because a single Chinese model performs well in a handful of synthetic tests that it was probably optimized to score well in?
I'm not a fan of AI slop either, on the contrary, but let's be realistic here.
There’s a strong argument that any consumer facing chatbot AI is “censored”. I’ve had chatGPT clam up in bizarre ways after it misinterprets what I’m asking. It just depends on company owning the product and what they view their legal exposure to be.
Also, we are applying huge govt subsidies to ai industry based on thin value evidence at this very moment. And we provide subsidies for many of our industries to help prop them up, sometimes to hugely bad effect. It’s what countries do to build, maintain and win industrial arms races.
Deepseek-R1 is open source and you can download it and run it offline. I’m not a power user but was able to get a functioning offline version of the 32B distill model running on a spare machine I had in a hour or so from scratch. I used online deepseek for most of the process to provide instructions and troubleshoot. I can’t comment on how amazing it is, other than to say so far it’s felt about as good as my interactions with GPT4 on the free chatGPT tier. In both cases I remain skeptical about their deep business use outside of certain areas.
From what I’ve read, you can use the base, and methodology and train your own new model if you have the technical ability and desire (rumor is meta AI has shelved their WIP and adopted deepseek as their new basis). This would imply that if you wanted to be able to talk to your LLM about topics like Taiwan, you could absolutely set up a model that would do that.
There’s a strong argument that any consumer facing chatbot AI is “censored”.
Please don't use whataboutism to downplay state censorship.
There’s a strong argument that any consumer facing chatbot AI is “censored”.
If the model is not allowed to spew Nazi propaganda or tell the user to end themselves, that is censorship. Censorship is not automatically bad, but the kind of censorship can make it bad.
This reeks of excluding all nuance to equate two things that are equal only at surface level. You're bad because you punched the other person (ignoring that they stabbed your SO 15 times and kicked your dog across the room).
Chinese state censorship is well researched and extremely well documented. It does not equate to censorship against violent or inappropriate language. It is political censorship.
At best, western models are biased, not politically censored. You can make them say just about anything, but they will bias towards a particular viewpoint. Even if intentional, this is explainable by evaluating their training data, which itself is biased because western society is biased. You are not prevented from personally expressing or even convincing a western model from expressing dissenting political viewpoints.
It should also be pretty obvious that this is following the usual Chinese MO of using massive state subsidies to destroy the international competition with impossibly low dumping prices. We are seeing this in all sorts of sectors.
In this case, DeepSeek is announcing the training time for their LLMl, which wall street is extrapolating costs from. No state aid involved.
Good; I hope all of the AI stocks come tumbling down.
If it's cratering US AI stocks, that's it's job. Destabilizing the economy of an enemy nation when it's such a monoculture is SoP.
The 'cheap' AI from China comes with a hefty price that's not worth it.
Following @DdCno1@beehaw.org's comment in this thread, the article appears to be the same Chinese propaganda narrative we haven been observing in the past. And it is misleading.
I have been posting this recently, and it perfectly fits here again. The base for China's AI development is the so-called "AI Capacity Building and Inclusiveness Plan" which is aimed particularly at the Global South:
[Chinese] Government rhetoric draws a direct line between AI exports and existing initiatives to expand China’s influence overseas, such as Xi Jinping’s signature Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and Global Development Initiative (GDI). In this case, the more influence China has over AI overseas, the more it can dictate the technology’s development in other countries [...]
[According to the Chinese government] AI must not be used to interfere in another country’s internal affairs — language that the PRC has invoked for as long as it has existed, both to bring nations of the global south on board in China’s ongoing efforts to seize Taiwan and to deflect international criticism of its human rights record [...]
[For example] China’s decision to co-launch its AI Capacity Building plan with Zambia also had a symbolic element. PRC state media reported that the African nation was the recipient of thousands of Chinese workers and hundreds of millions of RMB in loans in the 1960s, making it the beneficiary of one of China’s earliest overseas infrastructure projects — another thread connecting the latest in AI cooperation with China’s long-held ambitions to lead the developing world, even as it becomes a superpower in its own right. In a 2018 meeting with the Zambian president, Xi said they must jointly “safeguard the common interests of developing countries.” [...]
Just read it also works on Huawei AI chips so you don't even need anything Nvidia, might be they are going to take more hits.
I went to go install it this morning to check it out, but I had to decline when I read the privacy policy. I might check it out on my desktop where I have a lot more tools to ensure my anonymity, but I'm not installing it on my phone. There is not one scrap of data you generate that they aren't going to hoover up, combine with data they get from anyone who will sell it to them, and then turn around and resell it.
I'm sure other apps are just as egregious, which is one reason I've been deliberately moving away from native apps to WPAs. Yes, everything you can possibly do on the internet is a travesty for privacy, but I'm not going to be on the leading edge of giving myself to be sold.
kudos on poking at the app privacy statement. the real interest in this is going to be running it locally on your own server backend.
so, yeah - as usual, apps bad, bad, bad. but the backend is what really matters.
it’s actually pretty easy to run locally as well. obviously not as easy as just downloading an app, but it’s gotten relatively straight-forward and the peace of mind is nice
check out ollama, and find an ollama UI
That's not the monster model, though. But yes, I run AI locally (barely on my 1660). What I can run locally is pretty decent in limited ways, but I want to see the o1 competitor.