Skip Navigation

Local govt departments in China deploy DeepSeek models to aid govt work

39 comments
  • I think people here haven't been keeping up with how much progress and how thoroughly AI has already been integrated within Chinese society: https://xcancel.com/wrenevans217208/status/1846550898635637024

    Some more points to add:

    • China is completely dominant in AI research. There is the joke that AI research papers are either written by scientists where half the scientists are Chinese or written by scientists where all the scientists are Chinese. And I can assure you, the best and brightest Chinese minds aren't figuring out ways to develop a better chatbot.
    • China has already pushed out self-driving cars and busses in tier 1 cities. Self-driving busses have been a thing in Guangzhou for at least half a decade at this point. I've also seen videos of people boarding self-driving taxis, but they largely didn't like it lol.
    • China is beginning to experiment with dark factories. There was that hype clip by Xiaomi a while back about how they're going to open a dark factory for their smartphones. Even if you're skeptical about how this particular factory would pan out, I've seen another Chinese company trying to do the same except they're trying to open a mine that's completely run by robots. China is obviously interested in dark factories and are going to put their best minds to crack this nut.
    • AI development and integration within Chinese society is one of the reasons why China is trying so hard to develop a viable fusion reactor. AI means massive energy consumption, and the ultimate plan is for that massive energy consumption to be fulfilled by nuclear fusion. The only real argument against AI goes out the window if Chinese nuclear scientists can find the holy grail.
    • Exactly, people keep thinking AI is basically just hallucinating chat bots because that's largely what we see in the west. Meanwhile in China, this tech is actually being applied productively because there's actual planning being done at state level to nudge its development towards socially useful directions.

  • Are these models able to run locally with better efficiency than the server farms?

    • Depends on the size. I'm running a distilled version locally and it's pretty snappy, but output isn't quite as good as the full sized on. My expectation is that we'll see a lot more optimization happening in the coming years. It's also worth noting that the incentive for the government would be to reduce cost which creates further incentive to make this stuff more efficient.

39 comments