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DeepSeek gives Europe's tech firms a chance to catch up
- ein0p 2y agoNot just Europe. Many companies in the US will benefit, too. As will companies in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. These are the first truly frontier-grade models released under a friendly license. The most potent non-reasoning model before this point was Mistral Large, and it has serious restrictions on allowed uses (research only).
- sega_sai 2y agoGiven the current state of US government I wouldn't be surprised if soon it would introduce sanctions against anyone trying to use Deepseek.
- lyu07282 2y agoI imagine if lets say Hetzner were to offer hosted DeepSeek they would be forced out of the US market, no longer be allowed to even buy NVIDIA. That is a high-risk, assuming EU companies would ever even chose to switch to Hetzner over Azure/etc., which they won't. The EU is acting like and ruled by people who believe the US isn't an hostile entity, that attitude is never going to change and the biggest reason why AI in the EU is dead.
- bootsmann 2y agoAzure/AWS biggest competitor is going to be LIDL, not Hetzner. Hetzner competes with Digitalocean et al.
- belter 2y ago> Azure/AWS biggest competitor is going to be LIDL You can't be serious...I heard to open an account your are supposed to send them a fax... :-)
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- buyucu 2y agoBoth Microsoft and Nvidia are already hosting DeepSeek.
- guerrilla 2y agoNew reasons I never thought I'd have to have to use a VPN. Italy already banned DS by the way.
- walthamstow 2y agoItaly also banned ChatGPT when it was released.
- alwayseasy 2y agoYou're right: Republican Senator Hawley introduced that bill Friday. https://www.hawley.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Hawley-Decoupling-Americas-Artificial-Intelligence-Capabilities-from-China-Act.pdf https://www.hawley.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Haw...
- harry8 2y agoI've been trying both deepseek-r1:8b and deepseek-r1:32b using ollama on a local desktop machine. Trying to get it to generate some pretty simple verilog code with extensive prompting. It seems really bad? Like specify what the module interface should be in the prompt and it ignores it and makes something up bad. Utterly rubbish code beyond that. Specify a calculation to be performed yet it calculates something very different. What am I missing? Why is everyone so excited? Seems significantly worse to me than llama. Both o1-mini and claude haiku imperfect, sure, but way ahead. Both follow the same prompt and get the interface and calculation as specified. Am I doing it all wrong somehow (more than likely)? After fixing up my open-webui install I tried "testing 1 2 3, testing. Respond with ok if you see this." Deepseek-r1:8b started trying to prove a number theory result. Is there a chance this thing is heavily optimised for benchmarking not actual use?
- siwakotisaurav 2y agoYou’re using slightly improved qwen and llama not r1. R1 only has 600b model
- turblety 2y agoJust to confirm, Ollama's naming is very confusing on this. Only the `deepseek-r1:671b` model on Ollama is actually deepseek-r1. The other smaller quants are a distilled version based on llama. https://ollama.com/library/deepseek-r1 https://ollama.com/library/deepseek-r1
- diggan 2y agoWhich, according to the Ollama team, seems to be on purpose, to avoid people accidentally downloading the proper version. Verbatim quote from Ollama: > Probably better for them to misunderstand and run 7b than run 671b. [...] if you don't like how things are done on Ollama, you can run your own object registry, like HF does.
- kgwgk 2y agoIt’s definitely on purpose - but if the purpose was to help the users making good choices they could actually give information - and explain what is what - instead of hiding it.
- seydor 2y agocatch up to whom? china? US? russia?
- baq 2y agoChina and US obviously but first EU needs to be shaken out of complacency. It’s brewing slowly, but as all risk, it’s slow until it isn’t. Shutting down nuclear, outsourcing all tech and manufacturing, overregulation and allowing to be taken over by culture of lazy (and lazy cultures) are all fixable, but it takes time, which is running out.
- rightbyte 2y ago>allowing to be taken over by culture of lazy (and lazy cultures) are all fixable Please wait a bit until I've leveled up to the capitalist class. I'll be there any day now. Thank you.
- antifa 2y agoThe capitalist class is probably the laziest class in the US, one of the loudest capitalist critics of so lazism even has a self-made 20 season documentary on how she does nothing all day.
- iinnPP 2y agoThe lazy culture thing is so overwhelming in Canada right now as well. I have started to note the impact in a lot of places.
- rat9988 2y agoWhat is this lazy culture you are all speaking about?
- zelphirkalt 2y agoIt is deeply ingrained in lots of workforce in lots of jobs. Many people just don't care about doing a good job, especially in state owned institutions, and on the other hand being actually good at your job is not valued or recognized appropriately by bad middle management in tons of places, so people lose motivation to be better than orienting themselves at the average. Many want to do the bare minimum, understandably, when recognition for more does not exist.
- pinoy420 2y agoSide note: what are people’s opinions of the UK regarding AI now? Completely insignificant? I feel the UK has taken a nosedive over at least the past 30 years.
- HPsquared 2y agoDeepMind has made some really amazing stuff. The UK will need to be an AI hotspot if we want to continue being a financial centre.
- teamonkey 2y agoThe UK is a financial (and legal) centre because of its regulations. They make the UK a trustworkthy broker for international companies to deal with. (Also its deregulations, making it easy to squirrel money away to tax havens.) Not sure why AI would help there.
- tim333 2y agoThe trouble in the UK is we have good academics like Hassabis at Deepmind but are not as competitive in business hene Deepmind being bought by Google.
- kypro 2y agoWe have the talent, but lack the vision to ever build something significant. Founders are more likely to want to tackle smaller problems with a more secure business model. Investors are much less likely to back high-risk/high-reward speculative business propositions. Government will insist that we need to go slow and steady and prioritise goals like inclusivity and safety over performance. The public will be sceptical of any large AI company, especially if they're pushing regulatory boundaries, and demand government intervention.
- captainbland 2y agoIt's not an AI specific thing. The UK's investment in harder science/tech seems to be seriously anemic. Every job posting I see seems to be some variation on the theme of pumping some representation of money around or retail/ecomm/HR management.
- dep_b 2y agoWhat data sets do you use when testing this or other open source models?
- Xuban 2y agoIf French, German and British nations start competing (like in the old days) for AI supremacy, it will unleash a level of creativity that we long forgot we are capable of in Europe.
- DrScientist 2y agoDeepMind - the company owned by Google, but behind things like AlphaFold is based on London. And one of the fathers of modern AI - leading the resurgence of research into neural nets - Geoffrey Hinton is British-Canadian. He moved from Britain originally due to the difficulty in getting his research funded. So the issue isn't one of intellectual capital - and while it's obviously the case that well place monetary capital is an issue - it's not clear to me what the real underlying issue is. Perhaps Europe needs a tech/industrial revolution again - where the power shifts from the old guard to the new. Perhaps too many people in charge in Europe are from a certain class that studied history at university.
- rcarmo 2y agoWell, they were completely right in studying history, but maybe they should have studied better economics too.
- DrScientist 2y agoThe most common degree for UK politicians is PPE - politics, philosophy and economics. I'm not sure the problem is an understanding of economics, it's an understanding of how the real world works, and how to make it better - they are often too easily swayed by big lobby groups with vested interests.
- rcarmo 2y agoWell, at least we have more lawyers in the EU…
- DrScientist 2y ago
- wtcactus 2y agoI don't believe it does while the Bureaucrats in Brussels keep getting paid to stifle innovation. If we look at it from a practical view, thousands of mid-level politically appointed people in EU, get paid to make life miserable to anyone that wants to innovate. That's their job. Let us remind that the European Commission, announced with great pomp and circumstance last year that they were proudly the first ones to regulate AI: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/regulatory-framework-ai https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/regulatory... Let's think about it for a minute. Eu was already behind the race, and they were proud for actually creating even more barriers for their businesses and researchers to catch up in the AI race. Europe will have a change (in AI and other areas) if they get rid of most bureaucrats in Brussels. That's it. Otherwise, what expects us, is a long, slow decline into obscurantism and irrelevancy.
- bux93 2y agoSaid barriers to AI are - not allowing the use of AI for social scoring, precrime and other nefarious profiling methods - for high risk applications, requiring a quality system. You know, like the kind of quality system you need in place if you make food for human consumption, produce light bulbs, or any of a myriad of other production processes. Somehow the people doing catering at my employer's canteen manage to comply with that, but it's too complicated for tech bros. https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/high-level-summary/ https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/high-level-summary/
- wtcactus 2y agoI think you fail to realize that's not the utilization end goal that's the problem with regulations, but the fact that you need to put a lot of checks and bureaucrats overseeing the development process to make sure "the rules are being followed". Regulation for building a house in Europe are also totally valid, and what kind of person wouldn't follow them, right? But then you need to send a pre project for approval that takes 6 months (and pay for it), then during construction you need to get a local government worker to check the progress several times and see if the rules are being followed (and pay for it) and after you finish the house, you need to wait up to 12 months for a government official to come inspect the house and declare that your house follows all their rules (and pay for it) and you are finally allowed to live in it. So no, let's not try and declare that these rules are obvious, and great, and we need them and what kind of people wouldn't want to follow them? When in fact, these rules mean that at every single step, you are going to wait for the government to bless what you tell them you want to do and then to make you wait again while they check if you did what they allowed you to do. P.S. do you even have any idea of what kind of hurdles small and big companies in Europe have to go every time they need to do something just because of personal data protection rules?
- sanxiyn 2y ago> OpenAI charges $2.5 for 1 million input tokens, or units of data processed by the AI model, while DeepSeek is currently charging $0.014 for the same number of tokens. This is somewhat misleading, because OpenAI price is for uncached and DeepSeek price is for cached. DeepSeek uncached price is $0.14.
- TeMPOraL 2y agoDeepSeek API has also been down for over a week now, so does this even mean anything?
- highcountess 2y ago[dead]
- thrance 2y agoMy humble opinion as an European citizen: let the US sink $500B in GPUs if they feel like it. I think they have bigger problems than marginally improving next token predictors, but who am I to judge. We'll just distill their models for a fraction of the cost, if need be. There is no moat in AI. The AI race is not about innovation, it's about speculation. I do believe the tech holds promises, but as it stands now, the primary goal of AI is to attract capital. The benefits of AI are going straight up, siphoned by tech billionaires, and I don't see many improvements in the lives of my American friends.
- Ekaros 2y agoIs there truly a moat there? Is there truly some very secret sauce that one must learn? Or can the results be replicated in reasonable time when they are developed. Does it make sense to burn lot of money now? Or more to wait the technology and field to mature and then buy it for commodity prices. Think back to solar and wind power for example.
- jiehong 2y agoUnless the US forbids the exports of the AI.
- thrance 2y agoThen US tech companies will crumble and we won't have to catch up to anything?
- hirokio123 2y agoIt's interesting how ChatGPT is securing major deals with governments and large corporations, while DeepSeek is gaining support from smaller startups. The contrast is also intriguing from the perspective of the power dynamics between the U.S. and China.
- highcountess 2y ago[dead]
- karmasimida 2y agoDeepSeek gives everyone a chance to catch up, to be precise. It is just the beginning.
- world2vec 2y agoBesides Mistral which AI companies are out there in Europe really competing against the US and Chinese tech giants? Deepmind doesn't count, it's owned by Google for quite some time now.
- diggan 2y agoBesides Mistral there are a bunch of smaller "research" models like https://huggingface.co/Almawave/Velvet-14B https://huggingface.co/Almawave/Velvet-14B (Italian) and https://huggingface.co/projecte-aina/aguila-7b https://huggingface.co/projecte-aina/aguila-7b (Spanish/Catalan), but as far I'm aware, nothing that really competes with OpenAI/DeepSeek so far (which tbh, I don't think Google does at this time either? None of their models I've tried even came close to GPT4)
- mrdevlar 2y agoNo, I don't think so. I think most of the work done in AI here is focused on current applications of AI not on the development of new AI.
- alecco 2y agoEurope: Deepmind. But if you mean EU, practically nobody. A lot of talent would just move to US for a 3x salary and smaller income tax on it.
- croemer 2y agoAlephAlpha pretends to
- Havoc 2y ago> There was an offer from DeepSeek which was five times lower than their actual prices, Lower than the usual DS price? Or than OAI? Article is a little ambiguous. Would be surprised if DS is offering 1/5 rates
- ForHackernews 2y ago> "If you have built your application using OpenAI, you can easily migrate to the other ones ... it took us minutes to switch," he said in an interview on the sidelines of the GoWest conference for venture capitalists in Gothenburg, Sweden. I suppose this is the plus side of picking "unstructured human language" as your API. If everything is a chatbot, then the vendor lock-in is minimal.
- blastonico 2y agoEurope could create an AI agent to regulate everything.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- hcfman 2y agoNah, the new AI law likely has introduced unacceptable business risk to such things now. But we can always dream.
- rcarmo 2y agoI would agree with the (highly summarized) premise of the article if Europe actually had a technology strategy. I’ve seen the multiple announcements of “national pride” LLM initiatives that aim to create “a native national chatbot”, sometimes launched under extremely cringe circumstances (like the Portuguese one, announced at WebSummit and that is going to be trained at a “partially Portuguese” “supercomputer” in Spain, which most of us found hilarious). Otherwise, Europe is doomed to doing pointless, prematurely dead-ended one-offs.
- waltercool 2y agoUntil Europeans do a massive regulation against AI, strong enough to keep them out of the business and research pace.
- nialv7 2y agoLooks like they are indeed doing something: https://openeurollm.eu/launch-press-release https://openeurollm.eu/launch-press-release
- croemer 2y agoDo these massive collaborations ever produce useful output?