Its fascinating to me that someone in their early 20s in the 2008 worldwide economic recession to have that much economic success.
The fact that this guy could see that massive data analysis with was a winning investment strategy and then out compete others with way more experience in financial markets is impressive.
I’d be curious in the markets he initially invested in. Was this a market inefficiency specifically in China in the late 2000s?
I’ve always assumed that quantitative analysis requires PhD level knowledge of markets and mathematics but maybe I’m being way too conservative?
Can we stop this drawn-out narrative that Deepseek is at the level of Gemini or o3? It’s brilliant in its own way but for some reason a lot of journalists think it’s still at par with American frontier models.
It’s funny, R1 came out and matched 4o/o1 at the time, you could claim it was very slightly behind but it was basically even.
It’s been 6 months? Geminis big upgrade was 2 months ago and o3 even more recent.
It’s just funny that US companies just barely got ahead the last couple months and already it’s a “drawn out narrative” that they aren’t ahead.
For all we know R2 drops tomorrow? If it’s ahead or even how are we supposed to think about the narrative?
IMO it’s not really that much of a stretch to say they’re fairly close together. I’d want to wait 6 more months where the US stayed significantly ahead before I’d be complaining about narratives. I know things move fast but that’s all the more reason to wait and see.
DeepSeek is trash at agent behavior, where even llama4 is far better. That's just one of many examples of American dominance.
What's DeepSeeks context window size again vs ChatGPT/Gemini at the time of release? Mmmhmm, not so sinophilic now huh? Eat a god damn burger and read your constitution.
Also open secret that they used a lot of OpenAI completions both in pre-training and their distillation processes.
I'd reference something like https://llm-stats.com/ which suggests that the story is ... muddled. On the one hand, Deepseek is clearly not leading. On the other hand, they aren't really "behind" in any sense I care about. They'd have world-leading performance with their models this time last year.
The field is really moving too quickly to talk too certainly about "dominance" or "ahead". My observation is projects I care about on GitHub come with a Chinese README and many interesting talkers at conferences have strong Chinese accents. But I know a good researcher personally and it isn't so apparent to me if these are Chinese Chinese people or Americans of recent Chinese descent.
Americans can raise more cash. They are still pretty unbeatable on that front. So until that changes they will always be ahead no matter what happens on the tech front.
Journalists give what their readers want, and what they want is a discussion about a US-China race or "AI". There is also an equity ownership aspect as well, because tech stocks in China tend to be the primary market in the green within the larger SSE and Hang Sen, and a DeepSeek/AI story makes China oriented emerging market ETFs much more enticing. Same reason you see much more financial reporting in American business news about India now that Indian equities are now available in emerging market ETFs.
That said, Deepseek is a decent model and was the forcing function needed to give a reality check to a number of AI Startups (and has had the positive effect of making it easier for startups I've helped incubate make the case for their own domain specific foundation model strategy). It's impact shouldn't be understated.
The accuracy of this comparison is highly speculative. One should not ignore the possibility that dominant firms in the market might be inflating their cost figures to block new entrants and extract more capital from investors through such narratives. When you compare electricity prices in China with those in the U.S., such a large gap would require a truly extraordinary breakthrough to be justified.After all, these are privately held commercial firms, and they are not obligated to disclose their financials accurately.
The provided source for every concrete figure on DS in that article is "we are confident that", "we believe" or something equivalent. How is it any better researched than any other article with a conflicting set of beliefs?
There are times when "just trust me bro" is okay. Semianalysis articles are one of those times. You are free to pull the contrarian "source please" shit, but the reality is that they are far more accurate at most types of GPU, Cloud, or AI analysis than almost anyone on this websites or anywhere else.
Yeah apparently they parked the cost of hardware, 50k GPUs and model development underneath another entity, high-flyer because it was "shared resource".
You could maybe make that accusation about V3 (to the extent that it's a bad thing and not fair use, specially considering amoral origin of OpenAI's models in first place), but don't think the claim makes sense for R1 since OpenAI's o1 did not expose its CoT traces even in API.
They published about GRPO (key algorithm behind R1) a full year before[1] they scaled it for R1. Given the research they do in open, it's not far-fetched to think they had the talent and technical know-how to achieve R1 on their own.
I don't see the issue here. OpenAI trained ChatGPT off my own comments, and your comments, and the comments from the person you replied to.. I didn't authorize it and you probably didn't too.
Meta was caught pirating over 80TB of books to train their AI, and they are claiming not only training AI on other people's stuff is legal, but piracy is also legal (well at least, piracy done by US tech giants is legal)
I'll put my tinfoil hat on and say it plays to the current US vs China "propaganda" tune, that US is winning on all fronts, but the ice thin and have to support local tech behemoths to full extent to secure our position in this world defining struggle.
Bloomberg still has not retracted (or even really commented on) the Supermicro spy chip story, preferring to hope people just forget about it if they maintain total silence. They're fine if you need to look up where the Nasdaq closed yesterday, but don't expect serious tech reporting from them.
> not retracted (or even really commented on) the Supermicro spy chip story
They doubled down on it. They did a follow-up claiming that a cyber security researcher from a US-based firm had been called in to investigate suspicious traffic at a US telecom. The investigators claimed to have logs and a bunch of other evidence. The investigators also claimed that Bloomberg was misleading people by focusing on SuperMicro, as they'd reportedly seen to with other manufacturers too.
You’re really naive. Bloomberg is one of the better news outlets, and I would put no weight on Supermicro’s denials, as they have a pattern of lying about financials and have a sweepingly broad supply chain vulnerable to sabotage and counterfeiting.
The Federal government and some banks hire companies to do supply chain integrity inspection and management. They find bad parts all of the time, especially in the channel.
There’s a pretty obvious reason why they wouldn’t want to talk about a detected case of foreign espionage embedded in servers after publishing.
Feels to me that it's Google which has done the most recently to optimize the cost/performance-ratio of these models and no one seems to be talking about it.
Please don't post nationalistic swipes like this in comments on HN. We've had to ask you to avoid political flamewar comments before. Please make an effort to correct this or we'll have to ban the account.
Also, if China keeps using this type of tech to imprison their own population even more effectively, that’s also good for the US, because no one wants to flee to an even better dystopia.
I talked with a Chinese friend at Meta about this. We agreed that no one would have been interested in Deepseek as a Chinese run service (loose “no one”) but as a tool to undercut the value of US AI, it’s seemingly effective.
I see no downside here. Force US to innovate beyond “it costs a lot of money and we conveniently had that upfront” while also undercutting the law makers and people trying to enforce regulatory capture on a new thing like they’ve done on all the old things.
As a person interested in tech and tools and America, I have no issues with Deepseek and Hunyuan and Wan being effectively CCP funded. Keep it up. Accelerate. Push.
