Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

Information lag, especially with respect to PRC developments and technical developments. Taking 1-2 week for info to be shared and passed down info chain not unusual. IRC COT typically increase inference 1-5x depending on task complexity, i.e. instead of scaling down compute demand by 50x, it's 10x, which is still substantial. Could investors be panicking? Sure, but there's rational basis for doing so.





DeepSeek V3 is a 671B parameter MOE model? I am not sure why it's 50x cheaper at inference time than other models. We don't know what the cost of running o1 is, but I doubt it has 50x as many params as R1. Most the advantages of MOE are reduced when using reasonable branch sizes so that wouldn't make R1 cheaper in practice either. I think people might be seeing a lower markup from DeepSeek and confusing it with cheaper inference?

If DeepSeek is side/pet project for PRC quants whose fine with subsisting on low markup then that's market price competitors have to calibrate return on investment and future capex. DeepSeek also appear open and performative enough to drive cheaper inference on commodity hardware with very different margins for variety of use cases, including existing hardware. At least short term there's going to be % of LLM use cases that has to compete on China prices or previously considered depreciated hardware. IMO snowballing interests undoubtly getting investors to pay attention and deep dive to related developments, i.e. Bank of China's 1T AI fund, and DeepSeek CEO just met PRC premiere a few days ago. AFAIK DeepSeek hasn't ever gotten this much domestic political attention before, they're potentially going to be elevated as domestic champion and it's likely to open a lot of more doors, i.e. significantly more compute. Hard to tell how that will effect western models business models short term.



Consider applying for YC's Spring batch! Applications are open till Feb 11.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: