I find the narrative that Chinese researchers are stealing AI technology from the US very weird indeed. I have been working in AI for more than 30 years and in the last 15 years almost every major paper on the topic has had at least one Chinese author. In 2018 I went to conference to Florence and 60% of the speakers were Chinese.
They sent their students to every lab in the world to train them and to advance in the field as much as they could. And today it is paying off.
Also, if you watch the video that was released by OpenAI for the O1 presentation, almost no researchers in the team was American. Most of them were either European or Asian. So yeah!!! The US is number 1 in AI, but without much of local players. It reminds me of the British football championship, which is one of the best in Europe, but where the national team is not much of a powerhouse.
It's very rare that H1B visas are real experts in their field. That is why some of the biggest companies with most H1B visas are the Infosys and Tatas of the world...
Why is a private company with fewer than 200 employees "China"/"the Chinese"?
Or, why isn't OpenAI "America"/"the Americans"?
Also, wasn't DeepSeek founded by a hedge fund that was specializing exactly in these kinds of financial operations? Perhaps their training data is just way more finance focused than OpenAI because of that?
OpenAI is stereotypically (modern/contemporary) American. There's the glorification of the founder(s), the mediocre and overhyped product, the weird talks and keynotes given by the leader(s) that are both delusional and hype generating, the insane valuations, topped off with enough drama to keep the news cycle focused on them. The American dream, or something. It's bizarre and not seen that often outside of the US.
I don't see why it wouldn't be "American", and I think it goes without saying that it is.
It is really fun and sarcastic to watch all this happening. U.S. Gov. tried to block China from accessing GPU resources very hardly to stop their AI development, but actually helped China to take a leap on developing efficient and more cost-effective LLM model with constraint GPU access.
And then "China" (which is actually a bunch of super generous folks at DeepSeek) decides to release it all back to the US under a permissive MIT license.
They could've just exposed an API and kept the model to themselves but they didn't!
They could've not published their research paper, but they did, again and again - and each time they publish they discuss not just the techniques that DO work, but those that don't - saving researchers everywhere from loads of dead ends.
That is pure awesome. Thank you DeepSeek engineers for your gift to humanity.
Do they have models that try to downplay what happened on Tiananmen Square? That would be a sneaky way to shape our future in some way (and no whataboutism, we do it too).
No human is in danger of forgetting Tiananmen Square unless they didn’t know about it in the first place. Details are strewn across the Internet and in book-libraries all over the world. New generations of students and interested kids can easily learn about them.
Additionally it has been shown that making models forget things lobotomizes them, so no SOTA model can ever do that and be SOTA. They might be post-trained into pretending not to know, but the technology fundamentally cannot resist jailbreaking.
Do you have examples of knowledge that has actually become at risk as a result of this one AI model being added to the pile??
I doubt you ur GPU sanctions have had much of an influence one way or the other. They can get their resources from third countries even if they can’t get them directly from the USA. I wonder if the USA will eventually try to lock down higher end NVIDIA GPUs and prevent export all together.
Facts. OpenAI thought they had a moat, but even with the shittiest of GPUs, China managed to developer a better, faster, and cheaper mode, AND they open-sourced it.
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