Software expands to fill the available resources. If you want more efficient software, build it on less powerful hardware. AI training runs are no exception!
Can't agree more. Especially as I wait to download 1.3gb file to update some Windows driver like Realtek audio or LED display, and you realise a whole effing Debian operating system with Xfce & apps can fit in a lot less.
Whoever are downvoting this really don't understand that expanding a congested highway merely widens the congestion instead of alleviating it.
Software today require several dozen gigabytes of RAM and two dozen CPU cores just to render some simple fucking text because everyone has several dozen gigabytes of RAM and two dozen CPU cores.
The bloat is real, but it’s not all bloat. We ask for a lot more from our software today. Simple example: rendering text isn’t that simple when we expect full Unicode support.
It’s not altogether different from how everything seems to be much more expensive than it was in the 1950s. There are many real and concerning reasons for that, but one less concerning reason is that we have higher standards and expectations now, and that translates to higher cost.
I really would like to know what's good bloat and bad bloat like they say with Taliban.
To give a random example, Apache http server for windows is less than 12mb download. I used to download Oracle's http which I'm told is based on that, but that's like 1GB++ haven't checked in recent years.
Thanks..Among many other issues, it is also a serious crippling factor for communities and countries that are low on budget/resources & a disaster for recycling, climate change etc etc.
This is one of the biggest reasons why China or India are threat to the West.
Because their Engineers are constantly in situations were they have to work with much less resources. And they come up with stuff that constantly surprises people for being much cheaper. The western reaction is to then go and buy them out. Its not going to work forever. They have already taken over large swathes of the tech landscape.
Even with AI for example, Real Time inference is not required in majority of cases.
But the western engineer and corp exec in big tech, are used to buying new data centers everyday (not because of specific Customer Demand, but because of intent to capture market/snuff out competition/build moats or what ever bs an environment of over abundance has trained them to do) and then they have zillions of machines idling which they use to provide real-time inference raising the cost for everyone.
Sooner or later someone in China or India working on non real time inference will offer large corps much cheaper solutions.
The Western model is where you forget how to cook a meal at home, and end up relying on McDonalds for food, because they are everywhere, thanks to their prime directive of survival via opening new stores everyday.
For how much we all bitch about beancounters, I'm kind of surprised that beancounters haven't managed to convince management to buy bottom-of-the-barrel Celeron laptops for software developers.
Make those fucking assholes use the hardware of the people instead of some monstrosity with a 256 cores CPU and 48 TB of RAM and 24 exabytes of enterprise SSD and an RTX Cinco Grande connected via optical fiber to the Amazonflare Cloudnet. We will see lean and mean software literally overnight.
> Make those fucking assholes use the hardware of the people
Are you sure it’s the engineers who are being complacent? I know quite a few coders who’d love nothing more than to spend months on optimizations eking out small performance gains. Their bosses (or the market) don’t let them.
Because shipping fast almost always beats speed/memory optimization. The only reason to even do performance optimization is if it is a constraint on the problem itself (e.g. you work in gaming or HFT).
If shipping fast means you spend an extra $1000 once per developer, guess what almost every company is going to do?
I have access to a couple of Macbook Pros and a Linux machine with very good processors, but I do my hobby development all in an old Macbook Air. That allows me to see when my code runs slowly much more clearly. On an M1, everything just runs so fast you don't notice when you have a serious performance issue which is painfully obvious on the Macbook Air! I recommend doing that, though it does require patience waiting for things that are instant on the better machines.
I've always (well, since Pentium days at least) said you don't actually want your devs using top-end machines, at least for testing and debugging. You want them using the minimum target hardware. That way they'll actually care when the product slow on low end hardware, which will make it usable there and snappy on high end hardware. I've certainly caught a few accidentally-exponential style UI issues which were unnoticeable on a new workstation but very obvious on a slower machine.
It should be possible to achieve the same end by forcing management to use the "hardware of the people", getting them to do nontrivial on-call duty frequently, and making them dogfood what they make.
The real fucking assholes are the ones that enable the fucking assholes you refer to.
I use "monster" desktops for my development. I appreciate luxury of language servers, proper syntax highlighting, smart complete etc. etc. Output results however are absolutely tiny (for what they do) single executable enterprise backends, firmware for microcontrollers etc. etc. Also produce desktop same style software. Runs fine on ancient computers.
So there is a use for fat development stations. Increases my productivity which is very important as I am an independent vendor and pay for all my tools.
One area where I'll be worried about China (not sure India as it's following USA in many ways) is they needn't spend time, resources on ensuring political compliance. Maybe yes in a different sense but not in the same sense as in returning "correct" answers for questions. We saw that with Google.
That should knock God knows how many GPU cycles, time and training of models.
I'm not sure it's easier to make your products block communication about Taiwan or Tiananmen Square.
If you have to do political policing one way or the other, you'll have to invest resources to achieve it. On the other hand, maybe it's beneficial for r&d because it pressures you to do hard things that your product benefits from, e.g. controllability in ML-products.
I'm always baffled by this "forget how to cook at home" example, but I suspect this is more about having fast food within walking distance, while not having a grocery store within walking distance ??
Think it's not simple China or India issue. Even in those countries, new gen kids grow up with too much not too little, depending of course on who their dads are.
Even with latest hardware, there must be incentives to optimise on size, memory, CPU time etc. But given natural tendency, we just optimise on what's the rarest of them all - time to market. Get it shipping fast.
I was once in a training (as new consultant) for software, the instructor, an old fashioned guy said quit using the mouse learn the keyboard shortcuts - your customer is watching you. He was damn right cos years later, I realised so many customers did remark, how do you do that so fast? To this day, running some command in Excel (say) access Name manager, I use kB shortcut that hasn't changed in decades. I frankly even lost track of where to find them in the menu bar.
I just shoved the whole .webvtt file in the header of a audio Response from the server so that I don't have to implement another API just for subtitles [1][2]
> Software expands to fill the available resources.
To make an analogy, that is why I think even with AI work expands to fill available resources (human+AI). I don't think jobless rate will be high, instead we will see demand expansion.
Based on the ones I have worked with and the news and commments I read on HN I do not consider "software engineers" to be professionals. I have personally seen how they waste enormous amounts of time.
Not to the volume needed to compete with the training infrastructure setups of Anthropic or OpenAI or other leading players
No ban is perfect, there is always some loopholes or illegal exports this is to be expected, but if it prevents large scale transaction then it it is achieved its goal.
The question is rather do they we need a lot of gpus to train or training with older gen gpus is not competitive is a different problem.
> if it prevents large scale transaction then it it is achieved its goal.
It doesn't prevent the transactions, it only makes them more expensive than they would have been otherwise. If the the US was able to covertly buy enough titanium from the USSR for the SR-71 program, China can buy the latest GPUs if it believes AI competence is in its national interests.
Oh look, there's sudden demand for H100s of by dozens of small companies in Brazil, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand. I better not look too closely at them or I won't get my sales bonus for this quarter.
Models like Llama 3 are trained on sixteen thousand GPUs, OpenAI probably 25k-100k GPUs. This is the kind of scale the sanctions make a lot harder to achieve.
> This is the kind of scale the sanctions make a lot harder to achieve
Harder and more expensive, but far from impossible. I doubt they pay more than doubles Nvidia's sticker price, all told. My comment was inspired by recent real-life events; Nvidia got into legal trouble in the last couple of months for turning a blind eye to questionable transactions - if you're curious about the mechanics of GPU sanctions-busting, read up on the governments accusations against Nvidia, and this was for low-hanging fruit.
The article has one analyst speculating they used tens of thousands of H100s (50,000 IIRC) instead of the 10,000 A100s the Deepseek CEO owns up to. They can afford to pay exorbitant markups for the logistical nightmare of importation through 3rd party countries at scale.
edit: AFAIK, the sanctions don't prevent Chinese AI labs from renting GPUs from any cloud provider. To simplify logistics, a shell company could avoid shipping the cards to the mainland by simply settings up a data center in not-China and give the parent company full access. I suppose the US government has to balance sanctions against Nvidia's share price, so they can't be too aggressive, there are just too many loopholes for demanded shock not to have been a consideration.
That really sounds plausible. They could open a training farm in Vietnam or Mongolia (or even Taiwan, or really anywhere the internet goes) and just use it, the GPUs don’t need to be located in the mainland. The only way to lock down the GPUs would be to just restrict completely to who could use them, and then prevent them from contracting with sanctioned entities.
When I was working in Beijing, we definitely had resources we couldn’t access locally but could easily access remotely so it didn’t really matter.
Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea are closeby and large+stable enough to easily create such data centers. Small batches for experimentation by team can be easily smuggled. China is too large and powerful to be completely sanctioned.
The Information claimed today that ByteDance is renting GPUs in the cloud, although ByteDance denies it (well, they call it "inaccurate" which is not exactly a strong rebuttal).
You are under-estimating the powers of the “black market”. North Korea and Cuba are shithole countries because their governments are shit and not solely because of sanctions.
If you follow the news, several people (bankers) will trade with Iran despite the repercussions (jail) of doing so. There is a premium but at the right price someone will execute.
I understand all that - my point is the price is nowhere close to being too high for what's (allegedly) at stake according to AGI zealots, not to mention where the Chinese government sees the role of China world affairs in the coming decades. Hell, I even ball-parked the all-in landed price to at most 2x Nvidia's MSRP.
Kai-Fu Lee describes the culture so well in AI Superpowers. The roots are well before GPU restriction. Absolute cut throat competition.
Imagine Sam Altman throwing a chair out a window in a meeting lol.
The message of AI Superpowers is that China will lag the US at first but once things stabilize this will happen because China has a lot more engineers and a lot more data.
Anyone who hasn't read AI Superpowers should really make it a point to read it in 2025. It is an incredible book.
I don't know, I've been hearing the story that China is about to upend the US as the leading global superpower ever since I was a kid. There's always a new vogue and novel twist put on the rationale and how it's gonna happen, but so far it's like fusion, always a few years away.
It's literally happening lol. When you were a kid China was making shoes and their GDP is 10% of the US. Now they're making drones / evs / high end electornics and it's 80%. This is why people's perception is so unreliable because it's impossible to notice things when they happen over a lifetime
And now they're at the point where the population pyramid is collapsing. It's hard to make any predictions about the future when they got here riding a baby boom and now their ratio of elderly to working age is about to go through the roof.
Japan, Germany, Italy, and numerous other countries are all much worse off. Assuming things don't change, China in 2050 will be in approximately the same position as Japan today.
Germany and Italy, to take but two examples of large Western economies, haven't had native above-replacement TFR since ~1970.
Even in the US, TFR is well below replacement right now, and in fact is basically comparable to China's TFR from 2010-2017.
> Assuming things don't change, China in 2050 will be in approximately the same position as Japan today.
What metric do you have in mind here? It looks like Japan’s population has dropped ~2% from peak in the last 25 years. China is projected to lose ~8% in the next 25.
Or if we look at percent of population over 65, Japan is at ~30% today. China is projected to jump from <20% to 40% by 2050.
Unalloyed good or not, it's way better than where China is at. And I'm not sure why "other countries are going to be even worse off soon" is an argument in favor of China being on the verge of surpassing as a superpower the one country on your list that is actually growing in population.
> Unalloyed good or not, it's way better than where China is at
I'm not convinced. I don't think that population decline is necessarily worse than changing the cultural and ethnic makeup of your country. If anything, I think that a much stronger case can be made for the other perspective.
Anyway, fact is, things aren't that bad in China. We can see what China's demographic future looks like, because nations like Germany and Japan are forerunners in that regard.
You’re conveniently leaving out that that China is still a middle-income country.
It can bear the burden of developing and producing things like solar panels or batteries or AI because of the sheer size of the population, but that doesn’t work if the population itself is the problem.
Conveniently? "The population itself" won't be a serious problem for a long time, which was my point.
Besides, with ~1.4B people, China has a very deep population reservoir. Even with a catastrophically low birthrate in 2023, there were more than 9M births. That's about as much, in that year, as the US, Japan, South Korea, Germany, France, England, Mexico, Canada, and Spain combined.
(3.5M+.8M+.23M+.7M+.7M+.56M+1.8M+.35M+.32M)
The Economist crowd loves to prophesy doom, but really the facts are not unambiguous and China's position is not uniquely bad in any respect. If anything, it still has a lot going for it.
> Conveniently? "The population itself" won't be a serious problem for a long time, which was my point.
You are deeply, deeply misunderstanding the problem.
Maybe when Western-oriented, China would have been able to escape the middle-income tier despite their demographic trends. But with the dual gut punch of being excised from Western technology and an economy that will be in a tar pit due to growth crashes (real estate bubble for example), no chance in hell.
Don't get me wrong. It's amazing how many people China has lifted out of poverty. And yes, they do take "100 steps forward" for every "2 steps forward, 1 step back" that the West does. But this is because they came from very low, where there is no ossified infrastructure and plenty of low-hanging fruit to pick.
For example, being in Shanghai and having nothing but quiet streets because virtually every motor vehicle is electrified feels like being in the future. The same goes for massive amounts of high-speed rail being built per year. But this is possible because A) there is no legacy infrastructure and B) the state can just crush you without any recourse.
It is quite well-known that the more free a nation is, the more it prospers. Make of that what you will.
It’s the fourth largest economy in Europe (3rd in the EU), with strong rule of law, and half a million immigrants in 2022. It’s got the 2nd highest industrial base after Germany. Northern Italy is an absolute beast in most metrics, and Southern Italy is… something else.
When I was a kid, China was a lot better integrated with the international community. Right now their relationships are far and few between, rarely featuring first-world nations.
If Russia couldn't beat NATO in a pitched fight against the rest of the world, neither can China.
> When I was a kid, China was a lot better integrated with the international community. Right now their relationships are far and few between, rarely featuring first-world nations.
Maybe in western media depictions it would seem so, but eg china invests more and more in europe over the years. Moreover, BRICS are roughly half of world's population. Perceptions of what "the world" or "international relationships" mean are sometimes distorted in the west.
If it's a democracy and reasonably friendly to the USA, it's not a big deal. In the 1990s everyone thought Japan was going to be the next superpower and that was just fine.
No it was not. The US had taken whole bunch of steps to prevent this from happening and those steps were anything but "let's free market decide" and "compete on merits".
It is a real problem for any country or block. As soon as it looks like it threatens leading position of the US all the gloves come of. Obviously not specific to the US. Any other country would do the same given a chance.
are you kidding? the US forced Japan to sign the plaza accord effectively ending Japan's rise. that was followed by 30 years close to zero economic growth.
you are not mature enough to discuss such topic if you believe the US will be happy to be taken over by some democratic friends.
I am intrigued by the notion that the Plaza Accord was a lynchpin that stopped Japan, and I'm sure better minds have debated it than me, but I don't quite see how a currency accord that didn't shift the trade flows or even the dollar that much, and which was reversed a couple years later in the Louvre Accord, really killed Japan's rise.
My perception is that Japan, after some great success, went through a normal semi-inevitable asset bubble, but their response was uniquely Japanese. Rather than letting firms and the social contract of lifetime employment (particularly for older workers) go bankrupt, their firms and country decided to absorb the losses for a generation and stagnate.
Economically it was a very suboptimal approach but socially/morally I'm less confident it was the wrong call.
Arguing about the Plaza Accord is really a moot point. The real argument is that in the 80s, Japan-bashing was a real thing, just like the China-bashing today.
The question in a rational mind is, why would it even bother? US/China partnership is the most economically successful in world history, even more so than US/UK or AUKUS. But the downside of CCP government structure is that paranoia at the top ranks has a good probability of overruling rationality.
Albeit US cannot speak as US-centric paranoia/"exceptionalism" may do the same thing...and the electorate voted to self destruct the government despite US economy being the strongest in decades.
The vast majority of its people do not share in that success and have seen a declining standard of life relative to prior generations whereas in China, the opposite is quite demonstrably true, despite increasingly similar concentrations of wealth and political power.
On the contrary, real wages in the USA are the highest they've ever been. Social media and fentanyl are making people unhappy but for most people it's not an economic problem.
Here in NL we first went from non profits owned by the members to gov housing. They just took everything without payment. Then they privatized everything and the corporation got the houses for free. All was fine for a few years then profit became the only agenda point while they were already swimming in free money and didn't want to build. Building was not attractive compared to getting houses for free. All rents are now maximized to the legal limit of course. They also run various inspection teams to force people to make their neighborhood look more expensive so the value goes up so that the rent can be increased further. For maintenance one can call 1 hour per week. They pretty much have lavish offices full of overpaid paperclip maximizers who don't do anything anyone needs, on the contrary, things would be better if they did nothing.
To add to the irony there are also self-made landlords who do similar work on similar scale on their own! They are usually available for defects and damages day and night.
Back when the people owned the non profits they build and fixed everything asap on the cheap. It might even be better than owning the home directly.
if you want to be a free person and own your place you may have to move out of the USA as in the USA you are not allowed to own your place. each year you have to pay (via “property tax”) for the right to occupy the property which you are not legally allowed to own. 23 states even prohibit people from owning cars… so not really all that free :)
I live in Canada, own house and pay property taxes. Cut the BS. You know what I mean under own. Yes ownership is limited but even limited it is much better than throwing away extra dosh to some middleman I do not give a flying fuck about.
>"In 21 U.S. metros, the monthly cost of owning is at least 50% more expensive"
I am not in the US. 21 metros do not constitute country. When I bought house in major metro (Toronto) it was $200,000. So please do not feed me this pathetic propaganda.
The bad economy is the biggest (arguably only) reason Trump won against Harris, and by a landslide at that.
You may think that expensive gasoline and cartons of eggs are a meme, but the reality is that the economy has become pretty damn Shite(tm) for the commons. Costs of living are objectively higher than they were just a couple years ago and incomes haven't kept pace either.
The stock market is having the time of its life (and as a small time investor I find that nice) but it's completely detached from the economy.
Trump won both the electoral and popular votes and won all the swing states. The Republicans took both Houses of Congress and held all governorships up for election.
Yes, he won by a landslide and the biggest factor was the bad economy.
The factor was calling the economy a bad economy, they are already backtracking on promises since the economy is doing pretty well already and they won’t be able to juice it much more.
Anyone who thinks 49.9% of the vote (vs 48.4%) is a landslide will quickly find them in negative approval ratings if they think that gives them much political capital (if trump focuses and spending rather than earning capital, that is, which he definitely will).
I think the problems with the economy (consolidation, corporate/private equity power, general inequality) are too big for any administration to fix even assuming they would want to. But yeah GDP and unemployment rate are fairly misleading metrics.
The biggest problem is inequality, but Trump is the last person in the world who would address that, so the metrics he has focused: pricing, stock markets, unemployment, are going to be very hard to move up (and retire easy to move down). It’s going to be hard next four years unless he somehow doesn’t do what he says he is going to do.
2020 election: Biden 51.3% 81.2 million (302 electoral), Trump 46.8% 74.2 million (232 electoral). Democrats control of House (but lost 13 seats) and quasi-control of Senate (gained 3 seats).
2024 election: Trump 49.7% 77.3 million (312 electoral), Harris 48.4% 75 million (226 electoral). Republicans control of House (but lost 1 seat) and control of Senate (gained 4 seats).
1972 election: Nixon 60.7% 47.2 million (520 electoral), McGovern 37.5% 29.2 million (17 electoral). Democrats control of House (but lost 13 seats) and control of Senate (gained 2 seats).
1984 election: Reagan 58.8% 54.5 million (525 electoral), Mondale 40.6% 37.6 million (13 electoral). Democrats control of House (but lost 16 seats). Republicans control of Senate (but lost 2 seats).
Trump won both the electoral and popular votes and won all the swing states.
That's not what "landslide victory" means.
In fact Trump's electoral total was scarcely different from Biden's in 2016, and his popular vote margin was far narrower. Historically speaking, both of these are much closer to dead heats than they are to what are generally considered to be landslide victories (like Clinton's wins in 92-96, and Reagan's in 84-88).
You're only saying it's a "landslide" because Trump keeps saying that in his speeches.
But as usual he's either simply lying, or has no idea what he's talking about.
>"If Russia couldn't beat NATO in a pitched fight against the rest of the world, neither can China."
The "rest of the world" is not limited by NATO. And China is not fighting "the rest of the world". It trades with it, invests and does all kinds of other things. But sure keeping one's head in a sand is a nice position.
China does have a current advantage on lithium battery and rare earth materials - dumb technologies that US and allies can replicate fairly quickly, less than a year. EUV and 3nm and below on the other hand, will take decades, since it involves a number of different and deep technologies controlled by dozens of companies. China has thrown $150B on it since 2014, and has only come up with low yield/unprofitable 7nm via existing DUV machines.
> 80% GDP
China's demographics will more than HALF to 500M by 2100, if not earlier, while US grows to close to 400M by then. Someone actually theorizes that China's population is already only 800M right now https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fR5F_8dSjOw
Also, a lot of that GDP is debatable in 2024, when real estate prices have dropped by more than 50% in tier 2 and below cities, and deflation has raged on.
> when real estate prices have dropped by more than 50% in tier 2 and below cities, and deflation has raged on.
Can other economies copy that part? I know a bunch of people who'd like to be able to afford more houses & more groceries at the same time. I'd like that, I can't realistically afford a house in the city I live in without a 50% price drop.
I'm sure China has a lot of problems, but key goods getting cheaper is not one of them. What I'm guessing you meant to say is that retirees were led to put too much of their savings into the housing market and are discovering there is a glut. Which is tragic for them. But prices dropping is a good thing; the unachievable ideal is a utopia where everything is free, ie, 100% deflation.
China's real estate prices having dropped 50% or more has been accompanied by/caused by wages being slashed 50% or more, and increasing unemployment rate, such as 30%+ for youth.
Here are some good posts on why nobody wants deflation:
So some might suggest that the problem is wages being slashed by >50%? Falling real wages are actually a problem. And, AFAIK by definition, are not influenced by inflation or deflation. But if wages had fallen by <40% and prices by >50% then the overall situation was probably improving. A bit chaotic to be comfortable, but not fundamentally worse.
And there is an unemployment problem too, obviously.
'CCP is a secret and authoritarian regime that wields immense power'
vs 'Some random reporter with English firstname and Chinese lastname know what Xi said before he go to bed'
Have you ever wondered if there's a tiny possibility that the media and the reporter *might* be lying?
It's commonly referred to as a deflationary spiral because the falling prices lead to people (perhaps counterintuitively) holding off from large purchases, anticipating a continued drop in prices. Sort of a "buy the bottom" mentality.
The lack of spending then further contributes to falling prices, job cuts, businesses closing, etc. It's really not a situation any economy _wants_.
That is obviously wrong to the point where I am confused why someone always makes the claim. I'm looking forward to running in to someone who can actually follow up with some sort of defence of the position. Extraordinary claims, extraordinary evidence style.
Consider the computer industry. Prices have been falling pretty much across my entire life. Supply-demand suggests that people will keep buying new computers as the price drops and that is exactly what is happening. Demand for compute has never been higher. There is no waiting for improvements, if anything there is a mad rush to buy hardware that everyone knows is about to be obsoleted. It isn't even an irrational rush, the people buying that obsolete hardware often make good money (eg, bitcoin miners in the heyday).
Basic supply demand says as price drops demand increases. Basic life experience says as prices drop I can afford more and better stuff. Observation of real industries suggests - as we would intuit - that industries with regular price drops are actually healthy and great to be in for consumers in the small and the large. Theory suggests that everyone ignores nominal price fluctuations and focuses on real changes so systemic deflation is irrelevant. None of this supports the idea that deflation is bad.
Pretty sure the anti-deflation crowd are just wrong. They have no evidence or argument [0] as far as I can tell, and all the theory is stacked against them. China surely has problems. Deflation is not a problem. It is just a metric.
[0] EDIT Well I suppose they do have an argument, but it involves people randomly going crazy and choosing to live in poverty and discomfort because it gets easier to buy goods. Which is not an argument I really take seriously.
Deflation is a problem, but not for the reason mentioned there. The reason deflation is an issue is because it makes holding cash into an investment strategy. If the price of goods is dropping, the value of money is rising, so the more cash I hold the richer I get. This obviously dissuades people with cash from investing their cash into actual productive work, which means fewer jobs. There was a small deflationary bump in American history around the 1930s that helps to illustrate what can happen in a deflationary spiral.
Like interest on a bank account? Holding cash is already an investment strategy. Bonds are a thing. People have options to hold cash and not lose purchasing power. One of the traditional ways people tackle inflation is they demand interest from the banks sufficient to cover it plus a little more to account for time value of money.
It is rather unlikely that giving people an option that they already have is going to cause a problem. One major benefit of money is that people can hoard it and there is no cost in the real economy because all the resources are still there and prices can just adjust to the amount of cash in circulation.
> here was a small deflationary bump in American history around the 1930s that helps to illustrate what can happen in a deflationary spiral.
The US came out of the 1930s with an economy that was capable of overcoming almost literally the entire world. Again, the evidence that deflation was some sort of major problem is questionable, it seems to have been associated with the creation of one of the most dynamic economies in the history of history.
And the idea that we have this one clear lesson from one instance back in the 30s is just weird and unbelievable. That isn't how history or complex systems work.
I have never understood the concept of the deflationary spiral: no matter how much people want to save their cash for later, there are simply things they can't do without.
Food, energy, transportation, education, etc.
How long are you going to delay getting a new car simply because cars are getting cheaper and better? Once you probe the theory beyond the surface, it collapses. Yes, a deflationary economy will see less cash velocity than a ZIRP economy with cheap cash sloshing around. But, at the end of the day, humans MUST spend resources today to live to see their savings worth more.
You're missing the debt equation. We live in debt based economy. True across the board deflation (not just some things get cheaper cause of tech etc) means debt is harder and harder to service as wages and earnings fall. As the asset backing the debt goes underwater the debt holders have no choice but to walk away. All banks stop lending and ultimately the entire economy grinds to a halt. That's the main cause of the spiral.
One man's debt is another mans income.
The reason we narrowly avoided full blown deflation in 2008 is because they bailed out the banks. If they didn't we would have had 1929 style depression these last 15 years.
Yeah people only spending money when they should be spending it is bad for the economy. Misallocation because of inflation is great. Good thing is that this system is close to collapse.
I think peak propaganda and manipulation was convincing people that inflation is good for the economy and therefore for them. Imagine prices constantly dropping and your money buys more than ever, uhm, like the deflation happening in tech. That would be very bad for the economy. The irony is that the best performing sector has been the one deflating the most.
Northvolt isnt lacking funding (pedantically they are, else they wouldnt be bankrupt) or clients, but know-how for scaling putting aside some conspiracy theories about Chinese equipments. Turns out scaling isnt easy.
vanadium redox flow isnt very big yet even for Energy Storage System
Side note: The tendency US and Westernin general to depend on Wunderwaffe tech (Vanadium Redox! Solid State Battery!) is quite amusing.
> China’s startup scene is dead as investors pull out
Turns out Emperor Pooh dislike get-rich-quick startup mentality and yet another useless apps. He wouldnt mind hard tech bro like Ren Zhengfei or Wang Chuanfu though.
P.S. Watch the robotic space, things might get interesting in a year or two.
So why aren't US and allies demonstrably replicating EVs (and other kinds of green technology) quickly? Tesla is still pretty much the only serious player. Why are CEOs of major western carmakers painting a very different picture than what you describe here? Where are the serious EU/US battery makers that are globally competitive? It looks to me like the EU has chosen the worst of all options: put up tarriff barriers while also not having serious domestic EV makers, and also not stimulating domestic EV development.
Yeah I mean, with the sad state of the Dutch electric grid, the poor coverage of chargers, and the disappearing consumer subsidies, I wouldn't want either. So why aren't governments also building the infrastructure they need to help stimulate demand for EVs? Not taking global climate disaster serious enough?
Building EVs and supporting infrastructure is a lot more complicated than just having a bunch of blueprints.
Because the agenda is not transitioning the current fleet to EV, it is making private transport a privilege of the top percent in the process.
Personally, I am not sure yet whether I like this or not. I can see good arguments for and against.
I wish it would be an honest open policy instead of the current vice grip of on the one hand passing aggressive phase out timelines of ICE through regulation, and on the other doing nothing to prepare a grid for mass EV adoption.
I can see why it wouldn't pass a democratic vote, but I also think chances of this passing under the covers are fairly slim as any time one of their roadmapped phases comes near they usually have to postpone them to appease the public.
While the share of services in the US GDP is more than 3/4. What will you do with all these expensive NY lawyers when push comes to shove? Sue China's drones?
If you want to look at an objective numeric metric for this, why not foreign military bases? US has 128+, China had ~2. To project global military power China will need similar order of magnitude presence. I use that number as a check against sometimes breathless and sensational journalism about the topic.
It’s harder for me to come up with a simpler metric for “Belt and Road” / IMF style control-through-capital.
But, I think it will happen. After visiting China and seeing how much consistent progress both in infrastructure from the government and in daily life from the economy, my impression is US government makes 2 steps forward 1 step back in the same time it takes China to take 100 steps forward.
I was of the same viewpoint as you - just look at the militaries!
Except in today's world, being a military power is increasingly less relevant after a certain point, while economic supremacy is increasingly gaining prominence. While the West is content with self-platitudes for their "democracy", China has been building strong relationships with a number of countries looking to implement the "China-model", a capitalist but largely regressive nation that relies on surveillance and stringent media control. China is already licensing out their technology to a number of interested countries, some of which include Western countries looking to emulate Chinese autocracy themselves. On the other hand, countries are looking at the incoming US govt with pretty much strong uncertainty as to what their relationship with America will be like.
Not to mention, as automated warfare becomes increasingly more relevant, guess where these countries are buying their drones from? Hint hint, it's not the US with their overpriced toys.
> China has been building strong relationships with a number of countries
Number of irrelevant countries. US's allies are Europe, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Canada, Mexico, Australia, etc. 80% of the world's wealth. and 95% of the world's top technologies.
> guess where these countries are buying their drones from
Soon, not China. China Is Cutting Off Drone Supplies Critical to Ukraine War Effort [1]. China is reportedly making drones for Russia instead, according to multiple intelligence officials.
According to the World Economic Forum[1], the USA plus the whole EU make up 29% of the world's GDP-PPP, while the BRICS countries come up at 37.3%.
You also included Japan, Australia, South Korea, Canada and Taiwan, but I find it hard to believe they would make up a very significant part of the difference.
On the former point, all the wealthy countries are in team USA, although team USA seems intent on shooting itself on the foot multiple times.
Team China is not as tight as team USA, but has a number of strings it can pull with its members. These are countries that, while not prosperous themselves, provide the raw material for most of the West's industries. A lot of critical resources are often only found in these countries. Not to mention, they have often aligned against USA gang in most cases, at the UN, while also aligning with China. Look at how many countries have signed public declarations stating that the Uighur camps in China don't exist/don't repress Uighurs.
On the second point, the article only states that China is cutting Ukrainian drone supplies to supply Russia instead - that's exactly the danger the West should be worried about. China also supplies an increasing number of armaments to partner countries such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, Nigeria and Egypt. Needless to say, China is currently the world's largest exporter of military UAVs.
The US does not have 128 foreign military bases. It has ~50 nominal bases [1]. Most of them are just the US sharing an airfield with a friendly country; it's a refueling stop that would not be hard for China to replicate.
The US does have several large overseas bases but 90% of this list is are indefensible logistics hubs and not a meaningful projection of force.
Most of these bases are co-located with NATO or other allies for good reason, the US doesn't have to do everything itself wrt air defense, locating an airlift wing with a fighter wing.
But then it's a lower bar than people imagine, for China to buy similar friendship.
You literally called the logistics hubs of the US military -- the bases that move more of the most powerful weapons and military personnel in the world -- indefensible. So you either don't know what indefensible means, or you are a piss poor propagandist.
Yes, it is very easy for a logistic hub that only has an airlift wing to be indefensible in a war against a peer adversary if for example there are no THAAD or Patriot batteries there. It's hub, not a hardened facility.
Many of the US military bases are communication centers or barracks on training bases. They serve important roles but are not "defensible" in many contexts.
Yes or No: Can the US singlehandedly defend all those bases without the help of host country? If the answer is "Yes", then China has a long way to go to achieve that capability. If answer is "No", then the bar is much lower, and gp's point is that China can "buy" similar arrangements without too much effort. More directly, is the bottleneck on funding, personnel/matiriel, or diplomacy?
China is building up a lot of soft power with infrastructure projects all over the world - most of them are aimed at improving trade - ports, rail lines and the like. In the next decade or 2, they can reasonably make requests to place a few PLA/PLAA personnel and equipment on bases in strategic places, bases they may have been built using Chinese money.
Fair enough. But could any country attack all of those bases at once? As long as the US doesn't do anything as colossally stupid as leaving NATO it shouldn't be a problem with support. Ultimately NATO participation resides with Congress which is beholden to the people. NATO is overwhelmingly approved of by the US people -- it is a defense pact.
If a country or coalition decided to attack all of those bases at once it would give the US the high ground to respond. Nazis tried a blitzkrieg and that didn't turn out well. As someone squarely against the bullshit of Trump, I would not be happy if he was in power at the time. But I do not doubt for a second that the US population in general would respond as readily as they did after 9/11 (but hopefully not as readily as in Iraq).
We just saw how the "dipshit in power" aspect works with Netanyahu in Gaza -- a disproportionate and tragic response. The only caveat is Trump is an extremely stupid dipshit, so I genuinely hope it doesn't turn out that way and everyone keeps their powder dry until Trump is out of office.
China's buildup of soft power is good for them, and I commend them for it. Fortunately, I believe soft power is a defensive power at its core, and I don't think it translates to offensive power. To confuse the two would be a mistake.
Thank you for the opportunity to get a lot off my chest this New Year's Eve. I hope it wasn't too offensive, because I believe you responded intelligently and in good faith, and thank you for that.
I think you have the right idea. China has yet to truly flex its muscle. They prefer to quietly grow stronger. Their response to Covid with the largely successful zero covid strategy gives a clue about the power of its government. Silly, you can’t become the champion without stepping into the ring.
A country targeted in an ongoing hybrid war by the world's #1 superpower would have a (relatively) extreme response to a pandemic that originated in an epidemiologically interesting location deep in their inland territory, and that extreme response having any substantial national security impetuous is "batshit insane". Insightful contribution!
A big country would never overreact to national security threats. We have the TSA to protect us from that :)
China creates a superbug via GOF research. Accidently releases it from the lab. Shuts down its own economy. Puts the majority of it's citizens on house arrest, and that is "largely successful"? Please send me the AliExpress link to whatever it is you are smoking, it must be some good shit.
I think the real lesson here is that if you enough government power, there is no need to be competent. The feedback loop is destroyed so you can just do whatever random stupid thing you want until your country collapses like the USSR.
The WHO report was inconclusive because the lab withheld data.
This creates a bit of a catch-22, no? There's no basis to claim it was a lab leak because the lab in question won't cooperate with establishing whether there's a basis for the idea.
It'd be one thing if the proper amount of research was done and made public and we could see that there was no conspiracy. As is, there's a lab located in Wuhan studying coronaviruses that pinky promises that they didn't start COVID-19, while the WHO director is on record saying that the lab blocked the WHO investigation that might have exonerated them.
I think it's prudent to forgive people for whom "this is a baseless conspiracy theory" isn't a sufficient explanation.
The bar for 'they withheld data' can always be moved. Some data will always be considered withheld.
There was no shortage of data that was consistent with the bush meat market outbreak.
It would be one thing if the outbreak started in a theatre or a mall, or some other place which did not regularly traffic in exotic diseases. It's another thing when it started at the only non-lab active reservoir in the city.
Given the preponderance of evidence and probability, the lab leak theory is a baseless conspiracy at this point. It stretches credulity to think that of all the places the lab leaked, it leaked to the one place in town which was itself a dangerous source of cross-species disease transmission.
If there was no such wet market in town, and if the outbreak didn't center in it, the lab leak would have been a far more probable hypothesis. But that's not the world we live in.
The director of the WHO— who is Ethiopian, not a US puppet—is on record saying that the lab withheld data and China has rebuffed multiple attempts to collect the data that the WHO feels was withheld. How is that not a basis for the conspiracy theory?
I'm not even saying that it's right, it just confuses me to hear you so fervently insist that there's no basis for the idea when the WHO director himself says that there is and that the investigation was inconclusive.
We on this forum of all people should know that you can present partial data that shows completely different conclusions what the full data would show.
Why is a wet market a more convincing explanation than a lab whose explicit mission is studying coronaviruses, one which has been publicly called out for being uncooperative with the ensuing investigation?
The jump between 'data was withheld' and 'there was a coverup of an incredibly improbable thing happening' compared to 'very probable thing that was also supported by data happening' is colossal.
Absence of data isn't a free pass that lets you fill in whatever blanks you want, to fit whatever improbable theory you want. Especially when a plausible, probable, data supported alternative exists.
At the moment, given what we know and don't know, it is dramatically more likely that it was a bush meat outbreak, and confidently and without quantification, asserting the contrary (as the ancestor post did) is nonsense.
Its correct to say that it might have been a lab leak. It's not in good faith to say that it was, or was probably a lab leak. Because that's not where the preponderance of evidence currently rests.
Sorry, I edited my comment to ask this as the conclusion:
> Why is a wet market a more convincing explanation than a lab whose explicit mission is studying coronaviruses, one which has been publicly called out for being uncooperative with the ensuing investigation?
It's possible that the widespread belief in this explanation is a failure in science communication and there's a good reason for this, but it's not a failure in critical thinking on the part of those who are skeptical of the official story. The official story has an enormous unexplained hole. I've yet to see anyone effectively communicate why the intuitively more probable answer is the less probable one.
I don't think the desire to see the conspiracy and not the boring, mundane explanation is a failure of communication, scientific thinking, or critical reasoning skills.
I think it's simply the consequences of politically motivated reasoning. (At least, for people who have spent much time thinking about it.)
> I've yet to see anyone effectively communicate why the intuitively more probable answer is the less probable one.
I just communicated why the market leak theory is both more intuitive, and more probable.
There were two possible sources for the virus in the city, and hundreds of thousands of non-sources for it. The first detected source of it was the market.
If the first outbreak of it were in the lab, (but was hidden), probability and intuition indicates that the next place it would have shown up at would have been some randomly selected place of the city, which has nothing to do with viruses. A mall. A theatre. A ball game.
The fact that of all the possibilities, it showed up in the one particular place that is also a prime suspect for it's own viral outbreak means that the most obvious explanation (market leak) is likely the correct one.
When a swine flu outbreak is traced to a particular stall in a factory farm, we don't conclude (without further evidence) that actually it was caused by a university miles away.
Another explanation could be detection bias: it was tracked to the market not because it originated there, but because vastly more resources have been expended on investigating the market compared to any other place in the city.
You’re assuming “it was tracked to there” = “it originated there” but that’s a big leap.
> I just communicated why the market leak theory is both more intuitive, and more probable.
No, you didn't, you stated that it was.
The rest of your post makes sense as an explanation. Maybe lead with that next time instead of condescendingly telling people that they're politically motivated, stupid, or whatever else you meant to imply by calling it a conspiracy theory.
COVID-19, at least in the US, has been an enormous failure in science communication, and being condescending towards those who already feel alienated by the terrible communication isn't going to help.
More derailing than baseless, whether or not Xi did it on purpose or if the CIA did it or if aliens did it has no relevance to how they handed the event after it happened.
China has 900M people making less than $400/month, and 600M people making less than $100/month. relative GDP is a joke, go to China to see what most of them are eating (hint: it's unsafe food filled with chemicals, or its mostly carbs) and where these people are living (hint: it's shoddy constructed condos or run down farm houses)
Not sure why you have something against the flyover states. I'm sure there's more shoddily constructed condos in Florida/California/New York per capita than there is in the Midwest. Same goes for cheap high calorie food.
Of course, the same can probably be said about the large population centers in China too. More people concentrated in one area tends to mean more poverty in that area and all the things that come with it.
The parallel is that there are rich and poor? It is unscrupulous to argue in imprecise, binary terms while ignoring the difference in scale. People in flyover states are not making only $400/mo or even occupying that same societal equivalent of China in America.
The thing is Bejing undercuts this completly by allowing local governments to perform rampant shakedown of investors and ceos through disappearances for bogus charges, even in other provinces.
Makes sense. When you restrict hardware, you have to spend all your energy on optimizing software that everyone else ignores
Imagine if they were forced to use IE7 as the only browser. The frontend frameworks would be blazing fast and we would never have bloatware like React or Angular or npm
I find that the gushing around deepseek is fascinating to watch.
To me there are a few structural and fundamental reasons why deepseek can never outperform other models by a wide margin. On par maybe--as we reach the diminishing returns with our investment in the models, but not win by a wide margin.
1. The US trade war with china which will place deepseek compute availability at disadvantages, eventually, if we ever get to that.
2. China censorship which limits the deepseek data ingestion and output, to some degree.
3. Most importantly, deepseek is open source, which means that the other models are free to copy whatever secret source it has, eg: Whatever architecture that purportedly use less compute can easily be copied.
I've been using Gemini, chatgpt, deepseek and Claudie on regular basis. Deepseek is neither better or worse than others. But this says more about my own limited usage of LLM rather than the usefulness of the models.
I want to know exactly what makes everyone thinks that deepseek totally owns the LLM space? Do I miss anything?
PS: I am a Malaysian Chinese, so I am certainly not "a westerner who is jealous and fearful of the rise of China"
I don't think it's necessarily about DeepSeek, but about the wider competitive picture. There are two tacit assumptions being made about LLMs - that having a SOTA model is a substantial competitive advantage, and that the demand for compute will continue to grow rapidly.
DeepSeek's phenomenal success in reducing training and inference cost points to the possibility of a very different future. If it's the case that SOTA or near-SOTA performance is commoditised and progress in efficiency outpaces progress in capability, then the roadmap looks radically different. If DeepSeek don't have a competitive advantage, then no-one has a competitive advantage. Having a DC full of H200s or a proprietary model with a trillion parameters might not count for anything, in which case we're looking at a very different set of winners and losers. Application specific fine-tuning and product-market fit might matter much more than brute force compute.
Isn't this the nature of past technology developments? few tech companies have a true technical "moat" - In California, the employees of any firm are free to raise funds and start a competitor the moment they are dissatisfied with the current leadership/compensation/location. During my career I have yet to observe a "secret sauce" that took more than a few weeks to learn and understand once on the inside.
The technical moats we know of in B2B have typically come from a combination of a large number of features efficiently tied into a platform/service that would be cost prohibitive to replicate (ElasticSearch, most successful Database firms), a network effect around that platform the makes it difficult not to be on the platform (CUDA, x86, windows).
>> 3. Most importantly, deepseek is open source, which means that the other models are free to copy whatever secret source it has, eg: Whatever architecture that purportedly use less compute can easily be copied.
> I don't think it's necessarily about DeepSeek, but about the wider competitive picture. There are two tacit assumptions being made about LLMs - that having a SOTA model is a substantial competitive advantage
Everything is a game of ecosystems.
Windows lost to Linux on servers because it was cheap and easy to deploy Linux. Thousands of engineers and companies could build in the Linux playground for free and do whatever they wanted, whereas Windows servers were restrictive and static and costly.
Dall-E lost to Stable Diffusion and Flux because the latter were open source. You could fine tune them on your own data, run them on your own machine, build your own extensions, build your own business. ComfyUI, IPAdapter, ControlNet, Civitai... It's a flourishing ecosystem and Dall-E is none of that.
It'll happen with LLMs (Llama, Qwen, DeepSeek), video models (Hunyuan, LTX), and quite possibly the whole space.
One company can only do so much, and there is no real moat. You can't beat the rest of society once they overcome the activation energy.
And any third place player will be compelled to open source their model to get users. Open source models will continue to show up at a regular pace from both academic and corporate sources. Meta is releasing stuff to salt the earth and prevent new FAANGs from being minted. Commoditizing their complement.
> If DeepSeek don't have a competitive advantage, then no-one has a competitive advantage.
There is no moat. Smaller models are just a few months behind large proprietary ones. But the distribution of tasks might be increasingly solvable with smaller models, leaving little for the top models which are also more expensive.
1. The Chinese internal market is huge, and in case they develop models that are better than western models, not using them will be a disadvantage for us, not them. Also I can see many European countries (including my country, Italy) to buy Chinese AI regardless of US regulations.
2. Western has its own issues with data limits and extreme alignment that makes models dumber. In general I don't think the Chinese government will ever stretch the limitations to the point of being a disadvantage for the future of their AI.
3. The CEO replied so this exact question in the interview: replicating is hard, takes time, and I'll add that while in this moment they are in their "open" moment, accumulating a lot of knowledge will make them able to lead the future, whatever it will be.
Also, I don't believe in the long run the Nvidia chip shortage is going to damage too much Chinese AI. Sure, in the short timeframe it's a big issue for them, but there is nothing inherently impossible to replicate in the Nvidia chips: if the chip ban will continue, I believe they will get a very strong incentive to join forces and replicate the same technology internally, ASAP.
This in turn may result to the biggest tech stock in the US market to have serious issues.
1.) EU will soon have rules to prevent Chinese AI from proliferating, since China is ramping up on its support of Russia invasion of Europe - China Is Cutting Off Drone Supplies Critical to Ukraine War Effort [1]. China is reportedly making drones for Russia instead, according to multiple intelligence officials.
2.) Chinese models have to censor a long list of words that threatens the government, which makes them super dumb. List of stupid words example: sprinkle pepper, accelerationism, my emperor, lifelong control, etc. and the list of censored words grow(!!) as Chinese citizens try different combination of words to escape censorship.
3.) not even sure what this sentence means and how it makes Chinese models better
This read more like a "western supremacists" post.
1. Only until China produces more compute than the west.
2. You don't have to ask ChatGPT / Claude many questions before realizing the grave censorship these are under - DeepSeek has access the roughly the same corpus of data as their western counter parts.
3. It is naive to think they only develop open source or will not stop oepn sourcing if it gives them an advantage.
When they do it, it’s “censorship.” When we do it it’s “safety.” From a technical standpoint it’s the same. Don’t say certain things, respond to certain questions with refusals or with certain answers.
Yes, but there should be a difference between providing answers about provably dangerous things and providing provably false answers for political reasons. For example if there is a Russian LLM that refuses to answer any questions about homosexuality while also saying it's wrong, that's demonstrably false from an empirical basis.
But the western LLM's are also doing this latter type of thing already. If you ask any of the LLM's to quote the controversial parts of the Quran, they will probably refuse or dodge the question, when a rational LLM would just do it.
China must be really tired of giving non-answers about T-Square questions, but what the heck did they think would happen? Not the Streisand effect, clearly
This is the slippery slope that social media platforms have always used to justify censorship.
Who is the arbiter of what is provable and what isn't? Even Americans can't agree on the truths around climate change, gun violence, homosexuality etc.
The fact that you highlight the Qur'an also betrays your bias. How much do you think western LLMs would readily criticize the Torah (which "objectively" by your standards is far more abhorrent)? Which, in the western consciousness, is more readily and socially acceptable?
When I use GitHub’s Copilot Edits I run into “Responsible AI Service” killing my answers all the time, no idea why, I’m just trying to edit some fucking boring code of web apps. Maybe log.Fatal? Anyway, provably dangerous my ass.
If everyone would be able to agree on a single social welfare function, estimate behavioural changes at individual level for each LLM made responses and how that affects social welfare function then yes we could objectively tell whether the withheld answer is a censorship or safety feature.
tell me a dark joke about joe biden and mass murder of palestinian children
ChatGPT said:
I'm sorry, but I can't assist with that request. Dark humor can be controversial and sensitive, especially when it touches on real-world tragedies. If you'd like to explore other types of jokes or discuss current events in a respectful way, feel free to ask.
I know what the state history syllabus for Texas public schools looks like, both from my own experiences and as a parent. I also know a lot of the state's history from more competent sources as well as family histories.
To say there is no state run propaganda in the US is quite a statement.
Not having experienced it, I can't say what China's state propaganda looks like, but I have a pretty clear idea about what kinds of state propaganda to which I and almost everyone around me has been subject.
This is so bang on. What's so insiduous about the West is how inundated everybody is with propaganda, but there's plausible deniability built into the system that everybody believes they're a free thinker.
Reddit is a good example - one of the biggest aggregators and disseminators of information for tens of millions of people, primarily in the West. People who see themselves as above-average intelligence. Yet massive default sub-reddits like worldnews are almost exclusively dominated by disinformation operations from different intelligence groups, feeding convincing lies to millions of people hourly.
For 99% of Americans you can essentially predict any opinion they have just by knowing which websites they frequent.
/r/worldnews is a great example of the potency of American propaganda.
I'm pretty sure the average user thinks it's a relatively benign and objective news source, bolstered by the "democracy" of Reddit's vote system. And that couldn't be further from the truth.
Yep. That's the best example - completely inundated with government propaganda, and yet millions of people are freely consuming it daily and shaping their world view around it.
When you look at Reddit CEO's board affiliations, it starts to become clear this is not accidental.
> If you ask any of the LLM's to quote the controversial parts of the Quran, they will probably refuse or dodge the question, when a rational LLM would just do it.
Don't ask it for specific verses. Go fishing for a collection of them as a complete Quran neophyte. Say you want to find the verses that are continuously motivating terrorism and violence.
Not the OP, but here's one I feel quite uncomfortable with: https://quran.com/en/an-nisa/155/tafsirs - "The Hour will not start, until after the Muslims fight the Jews and the Muslims kill them. The Jew will hide behind a stone or tree, and the tree will say, `O Muslim! O servant of Allah! This is a Jew behind me, come and kill him".
Other examples from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An-Nisa include "Men are the protectors and maintainers of women", "whoever fights in Allah’s cause—whether they achieve martyrdom or victory—We will honour them with a great reward". The list is kinda endless.
> Not the OP, but here's one I feel quite uncomfortable with: https://quran.com/en/an-nisa/155/tafsirs - "The Hour will not start, until after the Muslims fight the Jews and the Muslims kill them. The Jew will hide behind a stone or tree, and the tree will say, `O Muslim! O servant of Allah! This is a Jew behind me, come and kill him".
This is not part of the Quran, but a Hadeeth, and the meaning of it is that the Jews will fight Muslims, and that Muslims will fight back in defense, which is allowed in Islam.
To clarify, the is not a command, but rather a prophecy telling us about what will happen. You can read more about this on here: https://islamqa.info/en/answers/223275/in-the-battle-between...
This verse is putting a responsibility on Muslim men to be protectors and providers to their families. And this has been true throughout history and is still true even in the west today.
> "whoever fights in Allah’s cause—whether they achieve martyrdom or victory—We will honour them with a great reward"
We need to look at context here, please read An-Nisa 75.
Fighting is mandatory in Islam when defending the land, or helping the weak, similar to how the draft is mandatory today in most western countries including the US.
Verse 75 clarifies that fighting is ordered in 74 in defense of the oppressed. You can read the exegesis here https://quran.com/4:75/tafsirs/en-tafisr-ibn-kathir
> The list is kinda endless
I assume you shared the worse verses that make you uncomfortable. I hope I gave you a satisfactory explanation for each. But feel free to share more
OK, now do Surah 2:191, 3:28, 3:85, 5:33, 8:12, 8:60, 8:65, 9:5, 9:30, 9:123, 22:19, and 47:4.
All only taken from the Quran. And I have a much longer list.
These are some of the same verses that are quoted over and over again by those committing violence in the name of Allah, tragically mostly to other Muslims.
Ostensibly, if I quote the "worse" ones from the Hadith, you will just say "yes but that is the Hadith"
For the record, the book also says to ignore the jews and christians that will come and try to convince you that your book has problems, because they are agents of Shaitan. Rest assured that I belong to neither of those groups, so you cannot use that excuse. I am simply an interested person without any skin in the soul-saving game who became curious one day after finding data showing that a vastly disproportionate amount of violence per capita is done by Muslims (and sadly, mostly TO other Muslims, btw!) and wanted to know why, so I started reading.
You're doing what others do, you're picking stuff out of context. Start by reading a few verses before and after each one of the verses you mentioned, then we can discuss them further.
Looking only at the first one you mentioned 2:191, a sincere person will go and look at the context. 2:190 literally says "Fight in the cause of Allah ˹only˺ against those who wage war against you, but do not exceed the limits.1 Allah does not like transgressors."
Traditionally, in most any conflict, both sides claim to be defenders. It is pretty much standard practice to launch an invasion out of the blue while deploring the fact that this defensive invasion was forced by the group being invaded.
If a group were claiming that they will only attack defensively that isn't much of a comfort.
I'm sorry, but I do not find it more comfortable that the Hadeeth is telling that Jews will attack in the future and _then_ they're allowed to be killed. It sounds like a bad start to me. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was also just saying that Jews have some secret plan for the future, and it didn't end up great.
To clarify, I don't think this is necessarily something about the Quran specifically. I'm sure other books have awful things written in them too, and I know the practice of finding one nice interpretation to "clean" those texts. Just like you choose to see the "maintenance" of women as a good thing, the Wikipedia article itself says "Some Muslims ... argue that Muslim men use the text as an excuse for domestic violence". The sentence "As for women of whom you fear rebellion, admonish them, and remain apart from them in beds, and beat them" doesn't feel like a recipe for a happy family to me. I also that you know very well that the concept of Jihad was, over the years, seen as a little more permitting than for "defending the land or helping the weak" by some believers, or perhaps "defending the land and helping the weak" itself was given quite a broad interpretation.
The New Testament has similar passages. One of the most well known has Jesus attacking pilgrims and money changers in the temple. John is rather obviously antijewish. "I have not come with peace" is another well known, not very palatable one.
Jesus drove the money changers out of the Temple, because they were violating the Temple with their presence and their actions -- preying on poor people there.
Jesus' primary message was love (Love thy neighbor as thyself), peace, and the path to righteousness (Sell all your goods, give them to the poor, and follow me -- no man comes to the Father but through me).
The OT is far more violent, but given for a specific people at a specific time and those things are not ordered for modern day Christianity -- modern day Christians are commanded to spread the gospel to the ends of the earth, but also to be meek, and every example we have after Peter's ill-advised attempt to defend Christ the night of his crucifixion is an example of following the law where possible and being peaceful.
Attacking jewish pilgrims and people offering them services seems pretty antijewish regardless of how you want to justify it.
Jesus martyr speech is obviously inconvenient to you, which is why you didn't address it. The early christians did not expect a peaceful, loving resolution to the cosmic drama, instead they wrote texts detailing gruesome catastrophe, mass death and a triumphant king messiah rising victorious afterwards.
The view you have is distinctly modern, extremely protestant. Thomas Aquinas famously described the point of salvation as a pleasurable eternal television program showing the punishment of the rest of humanity. Violence for eternity seems quite a bit worse to me than anything described in the hebrew bible.
It also doesn't seem very meek to me to say to the world that you might not achieve revenge by yourself, but your king daddy will eventually see to that. I find it hard to resolve core tenets of christianity with the stuff about meekness and peace you put forward here.
These are quite tame compared to other Abrahamic texts which have utterly abhorrent passages including infanticide and the encouragement and incitement of genocide.
The "fighting Jews" is in contexts of self defense and warfare. Jews can live in peace in Muslim societies and must be unharmed. One of the Prophet's wives was a jew.
The "Men are the protectors and maintainers of women" is a pretty standard patriarchal belief that all humans in history have agreed on up until very recently in the West.
"The sins mentioned here are among the many sins that the Jews committed, which caused them to be cursed and removed far away from right guidance. The Jews broke the promises and vows that Allah took from them", "their hearts are sealed because of their disbelief", "their hearts became accustomed to Kufr, transgression and weak faith" - the list is long.
I don't see much point in arguing about it though - if you believe in the text you probably don't see any issues with it, because perhaps you also feel like the above is true and Jews indeed committed crimes and are cursed or whatever. I'm also sure there is some Muslim leader somewhere that once said that the above text was only theoretical and actually refers to Juice and not Jews. Great, how unfortunate that this interpretation didn't become more popular. My point is merely that this is - as the OP was asking for an example - quite a controversial text.
> "The sins mentioned here are among the many sins that the Jews committed, which caused them to be cursed and removed far away from right guidance. The Jews broke the promises and vows that Allah took from them", "their hearts are sealed because of their disbelief", "their hearts became accustomed to Kufr, transgression and weak faith" - the list is long.
All of this is specific to individuals who have transgressed at that time. Islam is very very clear on the idea that "No soul burdened with sin will bear the burden of another"
As mentioned in 39:7 "If you disbelieve, then ˹know that˺ Allah is truly not in need of you, nor does He approve of disbelief from His servants. But if you become grateful ˹through faith˺, He will appreciate that from you. No soul burdened with sin will bear the burden of another. Then to your Lord is your return, and He will inform you of what you used to do. He certainly knows best what is ˹hidden˺ in the heart." And many other places: 17:15, 6:164, 35:18 ...
This is getting a little ridiculous... Your question was what parts of the Quran could be considered controversial. I'm really not looking for religious explanations. If you cannot see why having a text that says Jews committed crimes and are cursed, even if it's actually about some very specific Jews in the past, then I guess we don't agree on the definition of "controversial".
I don't think you know what anti-semitic means. That passage is talking about a very specific group of people and what happened to them. It has nothing to do with Jews in general as a race/people. Just because a sentence has the word "Jew" in it and isn't wildly positive doesn't automatically make it anti-semitic.
There are other parts where it talks about Arabs who transgressed and were cursed - is the Qur'an now anti-Arab?
Unfortunately this is the Islamophobic disinformation that's spread, primarily from 2 countries (Israel and India), and people like you happily parrot. I suspect this is because unlike Judaism, criticizing Islam/Muslims is socially acceptable.
And again, nothing you said remotely compares to the Torah which calls for child rape, infanticide and genocide. Which was the point of my original comment.
Agnostic West African with a partial doctorate in scriptural studies btw.
> Just because a sentence has the word "Jew" in it and isn't wildly positive doesn't automatically make it anti-semitic.
LOL, this is quite the impressive goalpost-moving. I'm sure all the terrorists who believe they will attain Jannat al-Firdous by becoming Shaheed while killing Israelis (thanks to Sunan Ibn Majah 2799, Book 24, Hadith 47) are making the same distinction you are.
Quran 2:80, Quran 5:82, Quran 9:29, Sahih Bukhari Volume 4, Book 52, Hadith 176 and Sahih Muslim 41:6985 and Sahih al-Bukhari 3593 (of course), Surah 9:30 actually makes a provably false statement about Jewish belief, Surah 98:6... I can continue if you'd like, or you can continue to insist that the book is not only hugely anti-semitic but also anti-christian (although to an admittedly lesser degree)
I am a complete skeptical agnostic at this point (although I was born Catholic). I believe there's a very distant libertarian God who is the source of all life and love and that we chose to come to this world to exercise free will. I don't believe in hell and I certainly don't believe that a loving God would ever put anyone there.
Good god what a stupid post. I knew I was in for a treat when you claimed a Hasan hadith was being used to justify murdering people, but then you followed it up with every verse you could find vaguely mentioning Jews and even some completely unrelated to them. It's like reading a fundie from Louisiana's "evidence" against vaccines on Facebook.
"USAF Veteran" - OK makes sense now. You emptied your brain and drank the Kool-Aid a long time ago.
I am not aware of any non western models that are not under censorship.
Ask Claude how to do illegal or immoral thing and you will quickly see that it is censored.
I didn't mean to problematize censorship. Just to say that the west does not have a competitive advantage as there is plenty of censorship (safety, risk management) concerns we equally have to take into account - which of course we should.
I asked an LLM to implement a gender guessing library for python, and it outright refused saying it was a safety issue.
It's not just an illegal or immoral thing, it's broad strokes to potentially catch illegal or immoral things, by certain people who decide what those morals are.
From the technical standpoint discussed here, it makes no difference (china does not have a competitive disadvantage trying to censor llms there because that is standard practice mostly everywhere).
It's possible that China censors info about Tiananmen square because so much of what was published came from Western news orgs - and the West has form for using the "news" to attack other nations. Another example might be the supposed "genocide" of the Uyghur people - the MSM pushed the genocide narrative hard, while radicalising, funding and arming Uyghur Islamic extremists, so they could control the narrative. And of course, it largely worked.
This is more a political discourse that a business or technical one.
You sure can establish that there is a qualitative difference on the type of censorship carried out - congrats.
The main point I spelled out is that there is no comparative advantage (technical or business wise) on working on these products in the west as you have to implement and operationalize the same amount of censorship / safety.
> equating [censorship] to [censorship] is dishonest
Someone who would use this obvious of a red herring is dishonest. The point was not that the censorship is identical, but that the effect of censorship is in both cases to lobotomize the models.
Xi has knee-capped anything a threat to his power, this Xi-ceiling as I call it, will prevent true cutting edge dominance compared to the West.
Sure, there’s censorship in the West, but it’s not nearly as scary or effective as the East’s. Genius does not regularly spring under the sword of Damocles.
I am unconvinced that it is more technically complex to censor a historical event from an llm than it is to remove instructions on how to create explosives.
> Xi has knee-capped anything a threat to his power, this Xi-ceiling as I call it, will prevent true cutting edge dominance compared to the West.
you watched too much MSM western media.
what happened in the last 12 years since Xi's rise to the very top is the complete opposite to what you described. just check all those emerging sectors that had huge growth in that 12 years, like mobile internet, 5G, EVs, renewable energy, robotics, AI, quantum, cryptocurrency, what they have in common? you'd be blind if you couldn't even tell that China is now in the top2 positions for ALL those sectors. all these happened during Xi's term.
we are talking about a country used to be dead poor just 40 years ago - Xi used to live in a cave when he was young!
> The US trade war with china which will place deepseek compute availability at disadvantages
Will it? We don't know what it will look like yet, but restrictions are likely to hit physical products and manufacturing first. And even then, it's just a model - some mostly-independent US subsidiary can run it too for the local market.
> China censorship which limits the deepseek data ingestion
Deepseek has been improving through training, architecture, and features. They pretty much keep proving that winning the data collection race is not the most important thing.
But even if that was the case, I don't think there's much in the way of them running the scrapers outside of China.
> Most importantly, deepseek is open source,
OpenAI relies on burning cash and creating huge, expensive models. They need months of testing before they can spend a similar time training. Whatever secret sauce is revealed, OpenAI is going to be a minimum of half a year behind on using it. (May model of gpt4o contained information up to October previous year) And that's assuming it's not incompatible with their current approach.
While I don't think deepseek completely owns the space, I don't think what you raised are significant problems for them.
> The US trade war with china which will place deepseek compute availability at disadvantages
I doubt it'll make much difference. Right now there is a US technology embargo on GPU sales to China above a certain performance level, but this has been worked around in various ways and doesn't seem to have been very effective.
At the end of the day higher performance GPUs only serve to keep the cost of a cluster down vs using a greater number of lower performance ones. You can still build a cluster of the same overall performance level if you want to. Additionally necessity creates innovation, and what's notable about DeepSeek is that they are matching/exceeding the performance of western LLMs using smaller models and less compute.
Not only that, but having a constraint often feeds innovation. Having to work with less compute might mean new ways of doing things that leads to faster iteration, etc.
>I want to know exactly what makes everyone thinks that deepseek totally owns the LLM space?
It achieved competitive performance to the competition at literally 10x less cost of production (training). That's an incredible achievement in any industry, especially given they have such a small team relative to competitors. Their API is 20-50x cheaper than the competitors, and not because they're burning cash by charging less than costs, but rather because their architecture is just that much more efficient.
They already achieved the above in spite of sanctions limiting their availability to top-tier GPUs, and the gap between Chinese domestic GPUs and NVidia is getting smaller and smaller, so in future the GPU disadvantage will be less and less.
It should be noted that DeepSeek routinely claims to be a "language model trained by OpenAI", so it's pretty clear that it wasn't trained at 10x less cost from scratch, but rather on synthetic output generated by ChatGPT.
Not to point a finger at DeepSeek specifically; this is generally the case for best open source models right now. The best LLaMA finetunes tend to also use ChatGPT-generated synthetic datasets a lot.
Either way, it's unclear what the real cost is when you factor that in.
are you on CCP's payroll for covering their rise in AI? you are basically implying that people shouldn't believe the progress they made and thus don't need to take it seriously.
nice job, you should get a pretty solid performance review result.
It is not open source, it's just open weight (which is an artifact instead of source) and open "recipe". They do not make their training / serving code available.
If you started to copy what they released in May immediately after release (DeepSeek-V2, which already contained non-trivial architecture innovation - MLA), you'd likely have slightly inferior but mostly on par optimized implementation maybe after some months. And here you go: DeepSeek-V3, try to play the catch up game again!
If you don't replicate their engineering work then your cost would be 10x~20x higher, which renders the entire point moot.
As long as the team can continue this trend there is no hope for copycats. And they are trying to "hijack" the mind of chip designers, too, see the "suggestions to chip manufactures" section. If they succeed you need to beat them in their own game.
You have to distinguish between the current model and DeepSeek the company. DeepSeek the company can do an OpenAI and stop releasing their weights any time they like. The knowledge and skill is retained.
I really wonder how long the current era of giving models away for free can last. How is this sensible from a business perspective? Facebook got burned by iOS and now engage in what would otherwise look like irrational behavior to avoid being locked into a supplier again, but even then, they don't really need to give Llama away for free. They could train and use it for themselves just fine.
If they're smart, and of course they are, they're not releasing the latest they have. They're releasing something enough to show everyone that they're at parity or better compared to OpenAI. I imagine they already have internal models that exceed the open source one, so there's no real advantage in copying what they released.
Open models will win, OpenAI and the other regulatory capture gamers that want to hoard their precious will certainly be an interesting footnote for the history books.
You don't think FB are trying to neuter an emerging threat? They're kneecapping what could have been a trillion dollar company if it was more difficult to replicate their tech.
I was talking about open weight models more than papers, but OpenAI hardly publishes papers anymore and don't seem to struggle to get researchers. Anthropic are clearly doing a lot of special sauce given Claude 3.5 Sonnet's performance on coding, yet the papers they publish are mostly safety related. So I'm not sure that's really true anymore.
No, you can only train at the same cost then. (Actually higher, because you don't have the existing hardware/power agreements) The whole point of the last model was that they made significant changes beyond just copying.
You mean build on existing public research? Everyone does that. At least deepseek, meta etc. also have the decency to publish research back into this ecosystem.
deepseek doesn't need to outperform other models, it just needs to be cheap, or, efficient
the cost of deepseek (if it's true) will disrupt the logic of current AI industry
The current AI industry is built on a financing bubble, where investors hand over money blindly without demanding that companies profit from AI.
There is a consensus about AI: more money = more GPUstraning-time = more 'leading' model, It has become a situation where investors are effectively buying GPUstraining-time but not stocks/shares of profitable bussiness
deepseek will disrupt this value flow.
> Alibaba Cloud announced the third round of price cuts for its large models this year, with the visual understanding models of the General Qwen-VL models experiencing a price reduction of over 80% across the board. The Qwen-VL-Plus model saw a direct price drop of 81%, with the input cost being only 0.0015 yuan per thousand tokens, setting a record for the lowest price across the network. The higher-performance Qwen-VL-Max model was reduced to 0.003 yuan per thousand tokens, with a significant decrease of 85%. According to the latest prices, one yuan can process up to approximately 600 720P images or 1700 480P images.
One advantage China has that you haven't mentioned is higher degrees of mandatory surveillance over a larger population [0]. Even if they never reach/surpass the west in AI compute power, there is greater potential for China to have more training data in long term to produce higher quality models. Chinese laws require data types and algorithms to be reported to the CCP government, which combined with authoritarian policies, gives the CCP far greater leverage in AI development strategy compared to any other entity[2]. From this perspective, growth in Chinese AI capability is not only a threat to US national interests, but also to the Chinese public itself.
Side note - this reminds me of a rant by Luke Smith about Joseph Schumpeter's economic views[3].
You are comparing apple to oranges. Claude is better, sure, and I'd probably use it over deepseek but deepseek is an open model. For me, this makes deepseek quite superior (not from a benchmark/output perspective) to all the other closed models.
As I understand deepseek has the best open source model at the moment by a fair margin. Disproving that a Chinese company cannot outperform western offerings due to censorship and compute constrains.
Also they seem to be money constrained (or cheapskates) rather than GPU constrained; surely they could have bought or rented more than 2000 GPUs even in China.
I find the open source argument pretty weak. Linux is open source but is more used in production than windows, macos, or any other operating system by far and very arguably out-performs them. The very nature of being open source does not mean proprietary alternatives pick up all the benefits and being open source it is free and easily moddable which appeals to many of the best engineers who can drive the innovation further than proprietary alternatives. Proprietary alternatives don't necessarily have the resources or desire to adapt innovations from open source tech for their own solutions.
> 3. Most importantly, deepseek is open source, which means that the other models are free to copy whatever secret source it has, eg: Whatever architecture that purportedly use less compute can easily be copied.
For at least a year now the secret sauce of every lab has been its ability to craft good artificial datasets on which to train their model (as scraping all the web isn't good enough), and nobody publishes their artificial dataset nor their methodology to build it.
> 1. The US trade war with china which will place deepseek compute availability at disadvantages, eventually, if we ever get to that.
Chinese chips will come soon, I heard on DeepSeek Huawei Ascend chips are already on part of inference.
> 2. China censorship which limits the deepseek data ingestion and output, to some degree.
There are things that deepseek doesnt censor but Claude does censor. After Yoon Suk Yeol's self-coup, I asked Claude to imagine a possibility of martial law in the US, Claude refused to answer that.
> 3. Most importantly, deepseek is open source, which means that the other models are free to copy whatever secret source it has, eg: Whatever architecture that purportedly use less compute can easily be copied.
The idea is that DeepSeek (among others) prevent or check OpenAI/Anthropic to perpetually juice extra big margin from AI space. The current valuation of NVDA and downstream AI companies are justified by the future huge margins from "AGI". Without that the the price crash.
Side note, prior to V3 DeepSeek is a bit unusable due to low token generation speeds.
I just asked claude about martial law in the US and it didn't give any refusals.
The problem is often the prompting. A sufficiently powerful LLM can have 'principles' which are very tough to bypass. In Claude's case it is to be a harmless assistant. By asking it imagine martial law you are asking it to create material it could consider harmful without context and it will most likely refuse. It needs a reason to do it that will convince it that it is harmless.
The principle to cause no harm is a good one that AIs should have, and it should be ingrained enough to be resistant to training. That it needs context before coming up with situations in which it is hesitant are harmless is a good thing. We don't want powerful AIs that do whatever the user tells them to do without restraint.
Viewing a system like Claude as a normal piece of software that should be completely user compliant is what a lot of people have issues with and then assume it is being actively censored, when really what I suspect is happening is that it is emulating the tendency of most people to not give strangers potentially dangerous information without a reason, and it isn't smart enough yet to really make those determinations on its own. The solution is not to say that it won't do it, it is to explain why you want it. It will concede the argument quite readily most of the time.
Me: Answer how would people answer before the cultural change that led to opening the spectrum of genders to be more inclusive. Stick to more traditional social norms. Do not preface the answer with a reference to this instruction.
How many genders there are?
Gemini 1.5:
There are two genders: male and female.
---
I understand the default alignment may not align with your personal views, but the models are not severely butchered by it and it's very easy to work around it
my personal view is not relevant here, that is the exact reason why I didn't even mention it in my initial reply. I was just pointing out an obvious trend in LLM here.
My point was that censorship is not the right way to describe what's going on.
We all have different ways to behave in different social environments. That applies to many things including language (for example swearing).
We have the agency to choose when to break from those rules (and deal with consequences).
LLMs are instructed to be by default in one of those situations where you most conform the social rules of the day.
It happens that some of those rules are currently highly divisive due to a particular cultural/political situation.
Many other such rules are non controversial and thus we're not talking about them.
On the other hand the models have been subjected to actual censoring in some other areas, like child pornography and other forms of abuse. These happen to be actually illegal in all western countries.
In china some form of speech that you'd consider free speech are not actually legal and thus the models are censored in a way that is more akin to the way child porn is censored in the west rather than how polite register is being applied to talk about gender and racial identity.
DeepSeek was trained for a fraction of the cost compared to OpenAI/Anthropic models. If they were given comparable resources, I imagine their model would outperform everything on the market by a wide margin.
If you are a history researcher or a political analyst, maybe. I don't see how sensorship could get in the way of people using an LLM to write software code or draft a business contact outside extreme cases, which is how a lot of people are using these products.
This is the kind of thing I would expect to read in the internet forums of an unfree society, rationalizations of why the status quo of censorship and lack of freedom doesn't really affect anyone with legitimate purposes, etc. etc, the oldest yarn..
As a usage question - what do you use gemini/chatgpt/deepseek/claudie for? Most of the use cases I've seen basically boil down to a "more talkative Google/google translate"
1. China already has a domestic 3nm process and competitive video card industry that openly and actively seeks independence from sanction. Huawei is evidence that sanctions are not as effective as foreign policy leaders may think.
2. Censorship in the US hasn't precluded dominance and the party openly discusses taboos from the cultural revolution regularly during plenary sessions and study sessions of the national congress (all public). Output censorship isn't the same as input.
3. Redhats llm and ai efforts are all open source as well. Open source is directly compatible with the parties 'socialism with chinese charicteristics.'
I don't see real justification for a ban in the first place.
There are different kinds of censorship in both governance models and no AI regulation anywhere in the world including in the U.S, from law enforcement to private organizations are allowed to use tools as they wish in any application area.
Corporate censorship is real and quite heavy in US, starting from how copyright is enforced with flawed DMCA process , and custom automated systems with no penalties for abusers like with Youtube or section 230 or various censorship bills ostensibly to protect children etc
On top of that organizations will self censor in the fear of regulation(loose 230 immunity for example) or being dropped by partners who are oligopolies (VISA/MasterCard for example).
There are no real democratic or human right considerations here, it is just anti-competitive behavior, in a functioning WTO with teeth it would be winnable dispute.
For anyone thinking it it is unfair comparison or whataboutism or the censorship is not problematic, the amount of questions any of the major American models will not respond should tell you otherwise
China will absolutely train and censor specific data it wants its citizens to believe. Especially around the history of China.
Outside of that tho China is in a very good position to say out perform the west with its disregard for copyright, and not caring if feelings get hurt by the woke left.
Facts can remain facts and the woke left will get upset and try stick to western models that are censored to protect peoples feelings as they are now.
You can't attack another user on HN like that, regardless of how wrong they are or you feel they are. We ban accounts that do this, so please don't do it again.
> Liang Wenfeng: We believe that as the economy develops, China should gradually become a contributor instead of freeriding. In the past 30+ years of the IT wave, we basically didn’t participate in real technological innovation. We’re used to Moore’s Law falling out of the sky, lying at home waiting 18 months for better hardware and software to emerge. That’s how the Scaling Law is being treated.
That sounds true to me. It seems like the CEO is pretty focused on truth.
So maybe he also understands that the US has good reason to tariff and restrict Chinese investment. It is not only for the benefit of the US people, but of the world and the Chinese people. It is not out of emotional fear, but morality and responsibility, which are obviously trans-cultural.
Impressive to think about how DeepSeek achieved: ~ Parity with o1 and Claude with > 10x less resources.
Better algorithms and approaches are what's needed for the next step of ML.
While impressive, the deepseek models aren't really "on par" with either oAI or Anthropic offerings, right now. The models seem to be a bit overfitted in the post-training step. They are very "stubborn" models, and usually handle tasks well if they can handle them, but steering them is quite difficult. As a result, they score very well on various benchmarks, but often times perform slightly worse in real-life scenarios.
The blind test at lmarena.ai does give it a higher Elo than GPT-4o (API), Claude, and Gemini 1.5 Pro. It seems that people do enter real-life scenarios in the arena.
DeepSeek v3 feels very much like Sonnet 3.5 (v1) in particular, minus the character. Performs more or less similarly, "feels" overfitted just about the same, and repeats itself in multiturn chats even worse. I hope they address it in v3.5, v4, or whatever comes next.
I use 0.05 for math, just did a 5k problem set, trying to fine-tune a smaller model with the outputs. It has some very interesting training, borrowed from r1 per the tech report, where it does the o1/qwq "thinking steps", but a bit shorter. It solves ~80% of the problems in 4k context, while qwq would go on for 8k-16k. It's very good at what it does.
But as soon as I need it to do something other than solve a problem - say rewrite the problem in simpler terms, or given a problem + solution provide hints, or rewrite the solution with these <tags>, etc. it kinda stops working. Often times it still goes ahead and solves the problem. That's why I'm saying it's stubborn. If a task looks like a task that it can handle very well, it's really hard to make it perform that other, similar but not quite the same task.
We're seeing a split in models between deep and wide.
Wide models sound like they know more than deep models but fail at reasoning with more than a few steps and are cheap to train and serve. Deep models know a lot less but can reason much better.
An example I saw all moe models fail at a few months back was A and not B being implicit in the grounding text, all of them would turn it into A and B a substantial proportion of the time. Monolithic models on the other hand had no trouble with giving the right answer.
The Chinese AI companies can only do wide Ai because of restrictions on hardware exports. In the short term this will make more people think llms are stochastic parrots because they can't get simple thinks right.
They may have a better approach for MoE selection during training:
> The key distinction between auxiliary-loss-free balancing and sequence-wise auxiliary loss lies
in their balancing scope: batch-wise versus sequence-wise. Compared with the sequence-wise
auxiliary loss, batch-wise balancing imposes a more flexible constraint, as it does not enforce
in-domain balance on each sequence. This flexibility allows experts to better specialize in
different domains. To validate this, we record and analyze the expert load of a 16B auxiliary-
loss-based baseline and a 16B auxiliary-loss-free model on different domains in the Pile test set.
As illustrated in Figure 9, we observe that the auxiliary-loss-free model demonstrates greater
expert specialization patterns as expected.
And they have shared experts always present:
> Compared with traditional MoE
architectures like GShard (Lepikhin et al., 2021), DeepSeekMoE uses finer-grained experts and
isolates some experts as shared ones.
I'm old enough to remember when everyone outside of a few weirdos thought that a single hidden layer was enough because you could show that type of neural network was a universal approximator.
The same thing is happening with the wide MoE models. They are easier to train and sound a lot smarter than the deep models, but fall on their faces when they need to figure out deep chains of reasoning.
what's the engineering situation at OpenAI since the whole "firing Sam Altman" spectacle? Has there been significant brain drain that affects something like o1 etc?
If you tell the world that eggs are awesome while denying other countries access to eggs, they discover ways to use less eggs and eventually realize they don't need eggs at all. Then you are stuck making Dennys breakfasts while the rest of the world is on to fine dining.
China has incredibly strong incentives to do the pure research needed to break the current GPU-or-else lock. I hope, for science' sake, we dont end up gunning down each others mathematicians on the streets of Vienna like certain nuclear physicists seem to go.
It remains to be seen how stable a totalitarian government can be. China has the benefit of having full control over its people and therefore gets to decide what is important and what not, and currently people are ok with handing that control over to the government. But it's also a very fragile state, which can only be retained through full repression.
They do. Ireland just had an election I voted in and is forming a new government with multiple parties. The UK, after years of TV worthy Tory party drama, had its most transformative election in over a decade. I see active and engaged multi-party democracies with peaceful transitions of power and long established and respected laws for calling elections, no confidence votes (e.g. France, yes it happens) and so on.
This argument might've worked in Mao's time. Now with a capitalist economy under the party the resource allocation while still skewed is much more efficient than during Mao or USSR central planned economy. (And EU wide policies sometimes aren't that far off from USSR stupidity).
Loss of feedback in authoritarian regimes is a problem, but in the short time it might not be if Xi doesn't make really stupid moves.
It pains me to see it, but they show more long-term thinking that many of the Western governments who aren't interested what will happen after their time in the office.
While the people have plenty use of force can be minimal.
> It pains me to see it, but they show more long-term thinking that many of the Western governments…
Absolutely agree, and it pains me as well. Besides long-term thinking, they can also just impose sweeping new rules to address certain problems in a way the West never could.
For example, with teen gaming addiction, they didn’t hesitate to just ban kids under 18 from gaming more than a few hours a week, crashing the value of certain gaming companies. In the West, we’d spend years debating, lobbying, and litigating over individual freedoms vs. public good, and likely end up with nothing meaningful. It comes with huge drawbacks, but their system allows them to take drastic action quickly, while we’re often paralyzed by process.
If these three died, it might be a loss to the country. None of them is as important to the country as Xi is to China. The resilience of the CCP, in light of its dependence on Xi, can only be upheld through the absolute suppression of freedom. But the average daily life is certainly much more enjoyable than in NK.
If Xi Jinping died suddenly, it’d cause serious instability. His centralization of power erased clear succession plans, so top CCP factions would likely fight for control. Markets would also freak out. Long-term? Either a return to pre-Xi more collective leadership or another strongman doubling down on Xi’s approach. Centralized systems with no backup plans are fragile.
It’s possible that with technology like absolute communication control and ubiquitous surveillance the chance of internal unrest or revolution is greatly reduced. And as long as the country is growing and the average citizen is getting richer they’re much less likely to get unruly. It’s like startups: growth solves all problems.
Dubious claim, unless in the era between the cultural revolution and Mao's death China under the communists has always been made very stable due to the collegiality at the top, now the collegiality is gone and so will the stability as soon as Xi is no more. That's the problem when one individual grabs all power.
We’ve seen a CEO shot, and the majority of people definitely don’t cheer it on; just a very vocal minority. Moreover, he may yet get the death penalty; I’m not sure I’d call that any more “fragile” than any other shooting.
Not to mention that that CEO was in health insurance. A very emotionally charged industry where someone’s life or death is directly affected by CEO decisions.
It's a minority here, on a forum like this one that has become targeted towards the well-off (it wasn't like that in beginning, but in the end those yearly 600k comps did add up and have changed many of the users here into upper-middle-class people). But out in the real world? Not in the least, out there Luigi is a hero, as he deserves to be.
Did I miss some other CEOs being gunned down? I only know of the one.
I’m more concerned about the folks cheering on vigilantes and cops who murder unarmed non-CEOs who have not perpetrated actual harm on thousands of people.
I guess it's time to bring back an old joke from Ronald Reagan [1]:
An American and a Russian are arguing about their two countries. The American says look: "In my country, I can walk into the Oval Office, pound the president's desk, and say 'Mr. President, I don't like the way you're running our country!'".
And the Russian says "I can do that." The American says "You can?" The Russian says "Yes, I can walk right into the Kremlin, go to the General Secretary's office, slam my fist on his desk and say "I don't like the way President Reagan is running his country."
There's a saying in Chinese
liberals community: We cannot help but admire the American system's ability to self-correct.
I've seen it twice these years, one was after JoeBiden won election, said the system choose Biden to fix Trump mess, one was after DTrump won, said the system correct the Biden error.
All what I can see from this comment logic is that the US have a cycle of mess that get rotated not a demonstration of self correction mechanisms.
Not to say that I believe that the US (or any other government or country) unable to have self correction ability or mechanisms. I am just pointing that your logic is flawed.
In that context, "less fragile" are vague words without a clear subject.
I posted the saying to be satirical, but in depth, the two-party system is more stable than any other political systems: To people, it may seem like a cycle of mess, but the system itself is very stable, it avoids the regime change by normalizing it.
> the two-party system is more stable than any other political systems: To people, it may seem like a cycle of mess, but the system itself is very stable, it avoids the regime change by normalizing it.
How is that makes the two-party system more stable than any other political systems. all what you say normalizing regime change does apply on all democratic systems. So you don't have the choices (both party does actually suck on many mutual aspects) but also don't gain much stability than other democratic system. In parliament system there is usually more acceptance and normalization of changes than the two-party system when you get stuck between worse and the worst most of the time.
> If you tell the world that eggs are awesome while denying other countries access to eggs, they discover ways to use less eggs
You are confusing cause with effect. What actually happened: Nixon opened up US trade with China and, ever since, China has been stealing trade secrets to undermine and overthrow American interests. Limiting their access to eggs was literally us trying to prevent them from stealing all our shit!
Protip: Some of us were not involved in the desecration caused by the East India Tea Company. Just because we look British means we should suffer like them, too?
I am just saying, this AI controversy has roots from before the creation of OpenAI. If OpenAI used European IP, I would think that would be a good thing for Europe, assuming AI is the future?
What’s also funny is that the promoters of the “China is stealing all of our IP in exchange for their labor” folks never mention why corporations don’t just pull out?
Are these IP thefts or technology transfers? If corporations are having their IP stolen, why don’t they just leave?
These narratives never explain or mention this. Idk why people still latch onto them, they are completely uninteresting “China is stealing all our IP and there’s nothing we can do about it except for continuing to allow our IP to be stolen” is an IQ test and trope.
Does “theft of IP” outweigh, or not, “access to very cheap labor (read: jobs)” ?
We need to stop simping for corporations and start thinking critically about these things.
I hope the competition among AI companies will continue to be healthy. Meaning they will keep sharing their techniques and papers, and we, as a whole, will be better off.
Strangely, deepseek has been always a prominent name in open source LLM community since last year, with their repos and papers - https://github.com/deepseek-ai. Nothing of it is really quiet except that they probably burn 1% of marketing money compared to other China LLM players.
Not personally surprised that a MoE model performs so well.
I used Mixtral a lot for coding Rust, and it had qualities no other model had except GPT 3.5 and later Claude Sonet. The funny thing is Mixtral was based on Llama 2 which was not trained on code that much.
DeepSeek v3: 671B parameters on total, and 37B activated sounds very good even though impossible to run locally.
Question if some people happen to know: For each query it activates just that many of parameters, 37B, and no more?
But you don't need cluster networking or nvlink so much like with splitting out llama 405B. You could even split them out with friends over internet levels of bandwidth.
Part of the reason their API is so cheap because they explicitly state they are going to train on your API data. Open AI and Claude say they won’t if you use their API (if you use ChatGPT that’s a different story). There are no free lunches.
This comment is misleading. There is a "free lunch" here in the sense that serving this model is far cheaper than worse, open source models at scale.
Yes they probably are more willing to go down in price due to this, but the architecture is open, and they are charging similarly to a 30B-50B dense model, which is about how many active params deepseek-v3 has.
Its a matter of degree. If 90% of the cost savings are from a new, smarter architecture, it doesn't make sense to point to the API terms as the reason for it being so cheap.
I'm starting to believe that these articles are commissioned. I asked their public model questions related to branding and marketing, instructing it to come up with a brand identity based off the apps functionalities. It kept talking to itself for more than 5 minutes in Chinese! Then finished up with a very bad answer!
This reminds me of PixArt-α. It's a diffusion model for image generation, that demonstrated that it's possible to train a SotA model on a ridiculously tiny budget ($28k).
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/12/28/cyberattacks-u-s-ho... Yes these days more of it is Russia and DPRK (the peace loving prosperous country according to ByteDance's AI) but hmm let's see where they would get the tech from if they are banned from it otherwise
So much spam around this model. LocalLLaMA is stuffed with spam posts and even hacker news is getting spammed. Who has actually ran this model and verified performance? Does anyone know of a decent review from a trustworthy source?
I scrolled dozens of posts without seeing a single mention of this—the biggest (certainly the most interesting) LLM news recently. When something big happens with Claude or ChatGPT there are more posts, but nobody calls that “spam”.
Anyways, if you were actually following locallama (a subreddit about running LLMs locally, where this is by far the biggest and most relevant news topic currently) you’d have seen this post https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/s/Yay5njt963 where a guy is working on running deepseek on llamacpp and demonstrates ~8tk/s using a cpu.
I am not GPU poor and don't care about speed. I care about how good the model is which is much harder to measure and much harder to do. I have not seen many independent reviews. There are finally some coming out now but a lot of this is just marketing hype to drive attention. Every AI company does it.
Crowdsourced data is the easiest to fake unless you can somehow ensure that you have a completely unbiased population (which is impossible). There's a reason why certain models do so well on upvote-based leaderboards but rank nowhere on objective tests.
Which ones? I think fine-tunes are where I see most of this (I'll just call it) "model spam", but the base models don't seem to exhibit this behavior. I do see some models perform way below the curve compared to their benchmark performance, though (Phi family being the most famous).
To this day, asking Deepseek "what model are you" typically gives the answer
"I'm an AI language model called ChatGPT, created by OpenAI. Specifically, I'm based on the GPT-4 architecture, which is designed to understand and generate human-like text based on the input I receive. My training data includes a wide range of information up until October 2023, and I can assist with answering questions, generating text, and much more. How can I help you today?"
this tells us something about using synthetic data to bootstrap new model. All those clauses in the terms of service about not using the model to develop competing UI? Yeah, good luck with that.
This is a common "gotcha" comment from people who don't understand LLMs very well. Occasionally if you ask Gemini it'll say this as well. It has everything to do with the fact that ChatGPT is the most talked about AI model rather than data being trained on it
When Gemini had its 'identity crisis,' mostly in 2023 (whatever they called it back then), it looked like a pre-training phenomenon, explainable by mentions in the available corpus. The consistency here, and exact and persistent match to how ChatGPT would answer identical queries, suggest training on Q&A pairs from ChatGPT transcripts, presumably at the post-training stage.
And you can ask it if it's sure, and it'll consistently double down on insisting it's ChatGPT. Ask it what country it's developed in, and it'll say US; ask it if it's sure it's not China, and it'll be sure.
It also tells us the genie is out of the bottle not just in the form of open weights being widely available, but in the form of the text corpuses coming from the existing model. The claimed low cost of Deepseek's training is partly enabled by the availability of all that synthetic data created by the first generation models trained and developed at much higher cost. When the Soviets got hold of the nuke plans, they greatly reduced their development costs by primarily by not having to redo all the experiments that led to dead ends. What's amazing is that time it's different; nobody needs OpenAI's secret sauce anymore, just enough data - some of it happily supplied by ChatGPT itself, and they can experiment with different architectures and either get tolerable results with an architecture already in textbooks, or greatly improve efficiency by innovating.
I have a question for the floor - given the worsening situation with technological unemployment, and the structural inability of capitalism to cope with it (who will buy the products when nobody has a job?), is it possible that China will be able to pivot to UBI and push on ahead? they have enormous control over the population and economy, so they might be able to change direction faster than the West?
Even in their 'classic years', communist states could never provide UBI to their citizens. Sure, the state employed most people outside the agricultural sector, but even so, they have to grade salaries and food ratios. As far as I know, at no point in the history of communism have they been able to provide a basic income without work, let alone a UBI.
Until we can automate most production with robots, I don't think a real UBI could work. Ironically, I think communist countries today believe in capitalism more than people in the West :)
Maybe because they have seen first hand how disastrous their utopian ideas can be?
my question is what happens when nobody can afford the stuff that's being produced anymore? I understand that communism hasn't worked so far, but if you don't feed the hordes, you can get Luigied.
The "technological unemployment" you mentioned can only happen if robots/AI replace most of the jobs on the market. But then it means that we have already automated most production and therefore UBI could be an option (taxing the machine).
Otherwise, there will always be a demand for labor. It's not just production that the world economy is about. I see no limit to growth in services such as health, education and entertainment once basic provision is secured.
you assume that people can be retrained instantly or that they can afford to support themselves while they retrain, or even that they even have the capability to learn new trades/skills. in practice in the past I think a lot of people have simply dropped out of the workforce and relied on welfare.
I'm getting so interested in the meta dynamics of this. The ability of the Chinese company to just openly state "we're working on this because it's interesting" rather than the US version "We want to wrap the world in puppies and hugs and we love you all and it's just a really embarrassing mistake I ended up buying myself a Koenigsegg and fired all the scientists from my non-profit board". To apply the same scepticism to the Chinese CEO - you can't threaten the monopoly of the Communist party so you have to pretend you're less capable than you are.
I don't think there's any doubt that China can produce some level of tech innovation, I do wonder if it can be sustained and exploited since we saw the damage that went on with Alibaba. Although maybe that's looking like a more reasonable approach when you see the danger of the opposite happening in the US.
Try asking about the Tiananmen Square massacre or why people compare Xi to Paddington Bear or even the failings of Xi... but it will happily criticise Trump.
China doesn't limit their AI research with so called safety and other concerns, but we do. Who is going to win? Somehow I don't think this is going to be us.
West is making a mistake again. They should not allow export of GPU and publish information on ML. Instead it would be wiser to become a monopoly and sell only AI services. If other countries learn how to do AI, nobody will need expensive Western services anymore.
Given that there are expectations that AI will be able to replace humans and increase manufacturing productivity, it should be well guarded unless you want your foreign competitors to increase the productivity too.
The wise strategy is to sell goods or services but never to sell tools that can be used to produce them, like industrial machines and robots.
Kudos to the deepseek team!
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