6 ms·

This is unfortunate, but understood. I worked in a university research spinout US-China multinational AI hardware startup, and (without getting into confidenti

by neilv 2y ago

This is unfortunate, but understood. I worked in a university research spinout US-China multinational AI hardware startup, and (without getting into confidential information, but only speaking of general engineering practice) I can mention that both nations' government concerns could be barriers. And some rules can be counterproductive for the one making the rule, even from a competitive perspective -- not even turning a win-win into a lose-lose, but turning it into a lose-win where you are the "side" who loses. Another thing I'd like like to say, as a US person, who interfaced throughout the org chart at the multinational startup, is that my colleagues in China, as well as those who were recent immigrants, were generally very smart and knowledgeable, and also very nice people. It's especially tragic when nations feel they have to act adversarily on tensions, because (as seen in this case) the respective individual citizens are not natural enemies, but rather, they are natural friends. They are also valuable fellow contributors, to the shared wealth of our shared world. In recent weeks, the world is fortunate that DeepSeek has shared some of its AI advancements, even in the context of themselves being denied the latest hardware with which to work. I hope that this sharing will continue and increase, in all directions.

echelon 2y ago
> I hope that this sharing will continue and increase It will continue until they pass us. They're coming from behind, and releasing models as open source essentially wipes the board of hundreds of American startups. Growth hackers and solopreneurs like @levelsio can be nipping at the heels of $300M funded companies who poured all of their points into training models, making expensive mistakes, and overpaying for compute. Companies like RunwayML are probably doomed at this point between Hunyuan, Wan, and the half dozen other open source foundation video models. They failed to raise their last round in 2024, and they definitely face a much bleaker world in 2025. To expound on that some more, while China might not be leading in LLMs just yet, they definitely are with media. Their video models are the best in class. This poses some significant questions. In some years, China might be able to unseat the US as the global cultural export powerhouse. As the price of content creation drops orders of magnitude, content creation will become hyper local. That'll be another ding to US soft power. China will want to commoditize this.
- Zamiel_Snawley 2y ago
  I think this is the best economic function of open source—it forces innovation by elimination of rent seeking. If you sit on your laurels, someone will make a solution thats at least 70% as good for free.
  - wavefunction 2y ago
    or they will regulatory capture, that seems more likely
  - Philpax 2y ago
    It's a nice sentiment and I agree, but I'm not sure we'll see this applied to AI going forward. These training runs cost a lot of money - at some point, every player in the game will realise that they need to charge something or they'll left without enough chips to play in the next round. DeepSeek's altruism has taken them far, but they have costs, too, and High Flyer / their personal warchest can only take them so far. And that's before any potential government intervention - it's very likely that this will become a natsec concern for all nations involved.
    - baby_souffle 2y ago
      I think there's always going to be somebody that doesn't want to bother with the complexities of setting up a model to run locally. Spending way too much time trying to track down a very particular version of a GPU driver or similar just isn't going to be worth it if you can make an API call to some remote endpoint that's already done the heavy lifting. Plenty of value in handling the hard part so your customer doesn't have to. I don't know how much of the current focus on local models comes from privacy concerns, but at least some does. Once there's something like the gdpr but for data provided for inference, I think even more people will put down the docker containers and pick up the rest endpoints.
    - tecleandor 2y ago
      Yeah well, but you should add OpenAI to that "altruism" first. They're the ones burning money like crazy that could find themselves in the end of their runway quite quickly. Isn't crazy to think DeepSeek could break even and make a good profit before OpenAI goes broke, if they don't find another investor with even bigger pockets.
neuralkoi 2y ago
When nations attack each other, often innocent people are the ones that end up suffering.
- ycuser2 2y ago
  Not often, but always.
- decremental 2y ago
  [dead]
- BLKNSLVR 2y ago
  "When elephants fight, it's the grass that gets trampled" Not sure of the attribution of this quote.
  - genewitch 2y ago
    I got this off a .ke domain site that has an "African proverb of the day": > In the 1970s Julius Nyerere (then the President of Tanzania) used this proverb in a speech at the United Nations in New York. The Democratic Republic of the Congo (then Zaire) Ambassador to Great Britain used this same proverb in a talk to a group of Missionaries of Africa (White Fathers) in London. The meaning was the same: In the Cold War between the (then) two great super powers — the United States and Russia — it was the poor Third World countries such as those in Africa who suffered and were victimized. so that's probably why we've heard it; but it's probably much older than that. i didn't dig in to it too hard because that site was really slow, i got the attribution, though. you'll note it has a slightly different connotation - the "reeds" aren't the citizens of the warring countries - the "grass" is Africans.
    - worik 2y ago
      I know it as: If the elephants are fighting or fucking the ants are scared The context I heard it was politics
  - janalsncm 2y ago
dataviz1000 2y ago
> they are natural friends December, flying out of Thailand I spent one night in Bangkok. Looking for a bar late for one or two drinks after I settled into my hotel I saw two guys, one Chinese and other Russian, stumbling out of a building a few doors down from my hotel. I asked, "Is that a bar or a brothel? I'm looking for a bar." They laughed saying they were looking for a bar too and it was a brothel which is why they were leaving. The Chinese guy said he knows where to find some bars and they invited me to join them. The Russian stopped in a ganja shop on the way. The Russian in his late twenties left a few years ago to avoid conscription. Least I could do to show my appreciation for his dedication to world peace was buy him drinks for the rest of the night. So .... A Chinese, Russian, and American walk into a bar ... and the jokes write themselves. The shenanigans and tuk tuk rides that ensued continued till the sun came up. One of the more interesting aspects of going to Stuyvesant High School in the 90s was a very large portion of my classmates and subsequently friends were born in communist China or Soviet Union who travelled on the F Train from either direction. I was reminded of some aspects of my teenage years like hanging out with a group friends who were born in either China or Russia.
- petesergeant 2y ago
  > Is that a bar or a brothel In many parts of Thailand it's really not an either/or situation
  - seanmcdirmid 2y ago
    A lot of bars in Asia will have working girls. I used to go to a Russian bar in Beijing called Chocolate Bar (ya, that was its actual name), which had a Russian stage show that is kind of cool if you’ve never seen one before. There were a bunch of girls in the back from Ukraine (or Russia), Mongolia, and China. Beijing had a lot of that actually, but I think Xi cracked down, although I stopped going to bars after getting married.

by neilv 2y ago

echelon 2y ago

> I hope that this sharing will continue and increase It will continue until they pass us. They're coming from behind, and releasing models as open source essentially wipes the board of hundreds of American startups. Growth hackers and solopreneurs like @levelsio can be nipping at the heels of $300M funded companies who poured all of their points into training models, making expensive mistakes, and overpaying for compute. Companies like RunwayML are probably doomed at this point between Hunyuan, Wan, and the half dozen other open source foundation video models. They failed to raise their last round in 2024, and they definitely face a much bleaker world in 2025. To expound on that some more, while China might not be leading in LLMs just yet, they definitely are with media. Their video models are the best in class. This poses some significant questions. In some years, China might be able to unseat the US as the global cultural export powerhouse. As the price of content creation drops orders of magnitude, content creation will become hyper local. That'll be another ding to US soft power. China will want to commoditize this.

Zamiel_Snawley 2y ago
I think this is the best economic function of open source—it forces innovation by elimination of rent seeking. If you sit on your laurels, someone will make a solution thats at least 70% as good for free.
- wavefunction 2y ago
  or they will regulatory capture, that seems more likely
- Philpax 2y ago
  It's a nice sentiment and I agree, but I'm not sure we'll see this applied to AI going forward. These training runs cost a lot of money - at some point, every player in the game will realise that they need to charge something or they'll left without enough chips to play in the next round. DeepSeek's altruism has taken them far, but they have costs, too, and High Flyer / their personal warchest can only take them so far. And that's before any potential government intervention - it's very likely that this will become a natsec concern for all nations involved.
  - baby_souffle 2y ago
    I think there's always going to be somebody that doesn't want to bother with the complexities of setting up a model to run locally. Spending way too much time trying to track down a very particular version of a GPU driver or similar just isn't going to be worth it if you can make an API call to some remote endpoint that's already done the heavy lifting. Plenty of value in handling the hard part so your customer doesn't have to. I don't know how much of the current focus on local models comes from privacy concerns, but at least some does. Once there's something like the gdpr but for data provided for inference, I think even more people will put down the docker containers and pick up the rest endpoints.
  - tecleandor 2y ago
    Yeah well, but you should add OpenAI to that "altruism" first. They're the ones burning money like crazy that could find themselves in the end of their runway quite quickly. Isn't crazy to think DeepSeek could break even and make a good profit before OpenAI goes broke, if they don't find another investor with even bigger pockets.

neuralkoi 2y ago

When nations attack each other, often innocent people are the ones that end up suffering.

ycuser2 2y ago
Not often, but always.
decremental 2y ago
[dead]
BLKNSLVR 2y ago
"When elephants fight, it's the grass that gets trampled" Not sure of the attribution of this quote.
- genewitch 2y ago
  I got this off a .ke domain site that has an "African proverb of the day": > In the 1970s Julius Nyerere (then the President of Tanzania) used this proverb in a speech at the United Nations in New York. The Democratic Republic of the Congo (then Zaire) Ambassador to Great Britain used this same proverb in a talk to a group of Missionaries of Africa (White Fathers) in London. The meaning was the same: In the Cold War between the (then) two great super powers — the United States and Russia — it was the poor Third World countries such as those in Africa who suffered and were victimized. so that's probably why we've heard it; but it's probably much older than that. i didn't dig in to it too hard because that site was really slow, i got the attribution, though. you'll note it has a slightly different connotation - the "reeds" aren't the citizens of the warring countries - the "grass" is Africans.
  - worik 2y ago
    I know it as: If the elephants are fighting or fucking the ants are scared The context I heard it was politics
- janalsncm 2y ago

dataviz1000 2y ago

> they are natural friends December, flying out of Thailand I spent one night in Bangkok. Looking for a bar late for one or two drinks after I settled into my hotel I saw two guys, one Chinese and other Russian, stumbling out of a building a few doors down from my hotel. I asked, "Is that a bar or a brothel? I'm looking for a bar." They laughed saying they were looking for a bar too and it was a brothel which is why they were leaving. The Chinese guy said he knows where to find some bars and they invited me to join them. The Russian stopped in a ganja shop on the way. The Russian in his late twenties left a few years ago to avoid conscription. Least I could do to show my appreciation for his dedication to world peace was buy him drinks for the rest of the night. So .... A Chinese, Russian, and American walk into a bar ... and the jokes write themselves. The shenanigans and tuk tuk rides that ensued continued till the sun came up. One of the more interesting aspects of going to Stuyvesant High School in the 90s was a very large portion of my classmates and subsequently friends were born in communist China or Soviet Union who travelled on the F Train from either direction. I was reminded of some aspects of my teenage years like hanging out with a group friends who were born in either China or Russia.

petesergeant 2y ago
> Is that a bar or a brothel In many parts of Thailand it's really not an either/or situation
- seanmcdirmid 2y ago
  A lot of bars in Asia will have working girls. I used to go to a Russian bar in Beijing called Chocolate Bar (ya, that was its actual name), which had a Russian stage show that is kind of cool if you’ve never seen one before. There were a bunch of girls in the back from Ukraine (or Russia), Mongolia, and China. Beijing had a lot of that actually, but I think Xi cracked down, although I stopped going to bars after getting married.