Deep In The Seek

I am still reeling from the announcement about DeepSeek and the economics it represents for AI. To think that Biden’s chip restrictions had the opposite of the intended effect of curtailing Chinese AI development and actually forced more efficiency into the process.

Wall Street is now worried that may be the case. I mean, how can a small Chinese startup, born out of a hedge fund, spend fractions in terms of both compute and cost and get similar results to Big Tech? That’s what everyone is now scrambling to figure out – Meta, perhaps more than the others because their model with AI is similar to what DeepSeek seeks: an open-source (read: open-weight) model that permeates the industry and drives down costs, thus undercutting rivals who rely on charging for said models. Meta’s problem here is that they’re spending tens of billions of dollars to make such a model. And again, DeepSeek just did it for something a lot closer to $0 than to where Meta’s spend is heading.

No slight against the previous administration here. Who could have predicted that outcome?

→ AI, Uh, Finds a Way by M.G. Siegler