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DeepSeek R2 launch stalled as CEO balks at progress
- sigmoid10 1y agohttps://archive.is/byKrB https://archive.is/byKrB
- teruakohatu 1y agoThe title of the article is "DeepSeek R2 launch stalled as CEO balks at progress" but the body of the article says launch stalled because there is a lack of GPU capacity due to export restrictions, not because a lack of progress. The body does not even mention the word "progress". I can't imagine demand would be greater for R2 than for R1 unless it was a major leap ahead. Maybe R2 is going to be a larger/less performant/more expensive model? Deepseek could deploy in a US or EU datacenter ... but that would be admitting defeat.
- Davidzheng 1y agobut deepseek doesn't actually need to host inference right if they opensource it? I don't see why these companies even bother to host inference. deepseek doesn't need outreach (everyone knows about them) and the huge demand for sota will force western companies to host them anyway.
- teruakohatu 1y agoReleasing the model has paid off handsomely with name recognition and making a significant geopolitical and cultural statement. But will they keep releasing the weights or do an OpenAI and come up with a reason they can't release them anymore? At the end of the day, even if they release the weights, they probably want to make money and leverage the brand by hosting the model API and the consumer mobile app.
- ngruhn 1y agoIf they continue to release the weights + detailed reports what they did, I seriously don't understand why. I mean it's cool. I just don't understand why. It's such a cut throat environment where every little bit of moat counts. I don't think they're naive. I think I'm naive.
- senko 1y agoIf you’re not appearing, you’re disappearing. Now they are firmly on the map, which presumably helps with hiring, doing deals, influence. If they stop publishing something, they run the risk of being labelled a one-hit wonder who got lucky. If they have a reason to believe they can do even better in the near future, releasing current tech might make sense.
- ngruhn 1y agoI think those are valid points but it's hard for me to see that this is worth it. With the might of the CCP in the back and the giant labor pool that is China, surely they can make hiring work either way. If they now start offering a model that's cheaper and better then anyone else's, surely anyone will take notice, even if the weights are not open.
- Davidzheng 1y agoI don't think any of these companies are aiming at long term goal of making money from inference pricing of customers.
- diggan 1y ago> I don't think any of these companies are aiming at long term goal of making money from inference pricing of customers. What is DeepSeek aiming for if not that, which is currently the only thing they offer that cost money? They claim their own inference endpoints has a cost profit margin of 545%, which might be true or not, but the very fact that they mentioned this at all seems to indicate it is of some importance to them and others.
- coderatlarge 1y agomaybe they benefit from the usage data they collect?
- impossiblefork 1y agoThe lack of GPU capacity sounds like bullshit though, and it's unsourced. It's not like you can't offer it as a secondary thing, sort of like O-3 or even just turning on the reasoning.
- coderatlarge 1y agomaybe they’re just waiting to see if they can run on chinese sourced silicon? just speculating
- impossiblefork 1y agoI think my real problem with it is that how slow it is is easy to predict beforehand. If it doesn't meet the goals set for it speed-wise, they could go for something smaller. It should only be quality which could be unpredictable before training.
- coderatlarge 1y agomaybe they need to allocate that hardware to other uses and are waiting for alternatives?
- coderatlarge 1y agoto wit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44441089 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44441089
- Thorrez 1y agoThe article says this: >June 26 (Reuters) - Chinese AI startup DeepSeek has not yet determined the timing of the release of its R2 model as CEO Liang Wenfeng is not satisfied with its performance, >Over the past several months, DeepSeek's engineers have been working to refine R2 until Liang gives the green light for release, according to The Information. But yes, it is strange how the majority of the article is about lack of GPUs.
- chvid 1y agoI am pretty sure that the information has no access to / sources at Deepseek. At most they are basing their article on selective random internet chatter amongst those who follow Chinese ai.
- roenxi 1y agoPresumably there is a CEO statement somewhere. If DeepSeek said May, but it is almost July, that would call for some comment from them. Although I'd like to know the source for the "this is because of chip sanctions" angle. SMIC is claiming they can manufacture at 5nm and a large number of chips at 7nm can get get the same amount of compute of anything Nvidia produces. It wouldn't be market-leading competitive but delaying the release for a few months doesn't change that. I don't really see how DeepSeek production release dates and the chip sanctions could be linked in the small. Unless they're just including that as an aside.
- archon1410 1y ago> If DeepSeek said May It is pretty strange that DeepSeek didn't say May anywhere, that was also a Reuters report based on "three people familiar with the company".[1] DeepSeek itself did not respond and did not make any claims about the timeline, ever. [1]: https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/deepseek-rushes-launch-new-ai-model-china-goes-all-2025-02-25/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/d...
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- sschueller 1y ago> lack of GPU capacity due to export restrictions Human progress that benefits everyone being stalled by the few and powerful who want to keep their moats. Sad world we live in.
- crazygringo 1y agoIt's not about people wanting to keep it in moats. It's about China being expansionist, actively preparing to invade Taiwan, and generally becoming an increasing military threat that does not respect the national integrity of other states. The US is fine with other countries having AI if the countries "play nice" with others. Nobody is limiting GPU's in France or Thailand. This is very specific to China's behavior and stated goals.
- mistrial9 1y agoor also there is an interpretation of State actions that says that a government serves itself first and foremost. Unfortunately this includes governments you like and also governments you do not like. Before rising to invective here, also consider that this is not new at all, since early Kingdoms were ruled by Kings and abuse of power was more common than not, so lots of present day politics around the entire world, do have alternates to simple depostic will. So instead of splitting hairs about that description, lets highlight an idea that actually, millions of people doing millions of things per day consitutes its own system, despite what name you call it or who collects the taxes. Observing the actual behavior of that system ("data driven"?) has more benefits than hairsplitting of nomenclature for political studies. Why bother writing this? because simplistic labels for government actions in international affairs is Step 2 of "brain-off" us versus them thinking. Let's find ways to remove fuels from the fires of war. The stakes are too high. Third call to start thinking instead of invective here. Negotiation and trade are the tools. Name calling on those that work for "peace" is Step 2 again. IMHO
- properpopper 1y agoNice media-led narrative. The real reason is that the US cannot compete fairly
- torginus 1y agoI am a bit sceptical about whether this whole thing is true at all. This article links to another, which happens to be behind a paywall, saying 'GPU export sanctions are working' is a message a lot of US administration, people and investors want to hear, so I think there's a good chance that unsubstantiated speculation and wishful thinking is presented as fact here.
- slowmovintarget 1y ago> ...but that would be admitting defeat. Given that DeepSeek is used by the Chinese military, I doubt that it would be a reasonable move for them to host in the U.S., because the capability is about more than profit.
- wizee 1y agoThey just recently released the r1-0528 model which was a massive upgrade over the original R1 and is roughly on par with the current best proprietary western models. Let them take their time on R2.
- A_D_E_P_T 1y agoAt this point the only models I use are o3/o3-pro and R1-0528. The OpenAI model is better at handling data and drawing inferences, whereas the DeepSeek model is better at handling text as a thing in itself -- i.e. for all writing and editing tasks. With this combo, I have no reason to use Claude/Gemini for anything. People don't realize how good the new Deepseek model is.
- energy123 1y agoMy experience with R1-0528 for python code generation was awful. But I was using a context length of 100k tokens, so that might be why. It scores decently in the lmarena code leaderboard, where context length is short.
- diggan 1y agoWould love to see the system/user prompts involved, if possible. Personally I get it to write the same code I'd produce, which obviously I think is OK code, but seems other's experience differs a lot from my own so curious to understand why. I've iterated a lot on my system prompt so could be as easy as that.
- tazjin 1y agoDo you use the DeepSeek hosted R1, or a custom one? The published model has a note strongly recommending that you should not use system prompts at all, and that all instructions should be sent as user messages, so I'm just curious about whether you use system prompts and what your experience with them is. Maybe the hosted service rewrites them into user ones transparently ...
- qwertox 1y ago"We had difficulties accessing OpenAI, our data provider." /s
- astar1 1y agoThis, my guess is OpenAI wised up after r1 and put safeguards in place for o3 that it didn't have for o1, hence the delay.
- ozgune 1y agoI think that's unlikely. DeepSeek-R1 0528 performs almost as well as o3 in AI quality benchmarks. So, either OpenAI didn't restrict access, DeepSeek wasn't using OpenAI's output, or using OpenAI's output doesn't have a material impact in DeepSeek's performance. https://artificialanalysis.ai/?models=gpt-4-1%2Co4-mini%2Co3%2Co3-pro%2Cllama-4-maverick%2Cclaude-4-opus-thinking%2Cdeepseek-r1%2Cdeepseek-v3-0324%2Cqwen3-235b-a22b-instruct-reasoning%2Co1-preview%2Cdeepseek-r1-0120 https://artificialanalysis.ai/?models=gpt-4-1%2Co4-mini%2Co3...
- astar1 1y agoalmost as well as o3? kind of like gemini 2.5? I dug deeper and surprise surprise: https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/03/deepseek-may-have-used-googles-gemini-to-train-its-latest-model/ https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/03/deepseek-may-have-used-goo... I am not at all surprised, the CCP views AI race as absolutely critical for their own survival...
- orbital-decay 1y agoNot everything that's written is worth reading, let alone drawing conclusions from. That benchmark shows different trees each time the author runs it, which should tell you something about it. It also stacks grok-3-beta together with gpt-4.5-preview in the GPT family, making the former appear to be trained on the latter. This doesn't make sense if you check the release dates. And previously it classified gpt-4.5-preview to be in a completely different branch than 4o (which does make some sense but now it's different). EQBench, another "slop benchmark" from the same author, is equally dubious, as is most of his work, e.g. antislop sampler which is trying to solve an NLP task in a programmatic manner.
- spaceman_2020 1y agoHonestly, AI progress suffers because of these export restrictions. An open source model that can compete with Gemini Pro 2.5 and o3 is good for the world, and good for AI
- energy123 1y agoYour views on this question are going to differ a lot depending on the probability you assign to a conflict with China in the next five years. I feel like that number should be offered up for scrutiny before a discussion on the cost vs benefits of export controls even starts.
- spaceman_2020 1y agoI'm not American. Ever since I've been old enough to understand the world, the only country constantly at war everywhere is America. An all-powerful American AI is scarier to me than an open source Chinese one
- throwaway290 1y agoAs Russian I only recently started to understand that russian government was at wars for a lot of its existence from USSR times: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_Russia#Soviet_Union_(1922%E2%80%931991) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_Russia#.... Many invasions and wars in places Russia should have no business in. Most of them not publicized in the country. Unlike US it was not spreading liberal values of individual freedom and against violent dictatorships, actually maybe the other way around
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- KronisLV 1y agoI wonder how different things would be if the CPU and GPU supply chain was more distributed globally: if we were at a point where we'd have models (edit: of hardware, my bad on the wording) developed and produced in the EU, as well as other parts of the world. Maybe then we wouldn't be beholden to Nvidia's whims (sour spot in regards to buying their cards and the costs of those, vs what Intel is trying to do with their Pro cards but inevitably worse software support, as well as import costs), or those of a particular government. I wonder if we'll ever live in such a world.
- diggan 1y ago> if we were at a point where we'd have models developed and produced in the EU, as well as other parts of the world. But we have models developing and being produced outside of the US already, both in Asia but also Europe. Sure, it would be cool to see more from South America and Africa, but the playing field is not just in the US anymore, particularly when it comes to open weights (which seems more of a "world benefit" than closed APIs), then the US is lagging far behind.
- ignoramous 1y ago> when it comes to open weights (which seems more of a "world benefit" than closed APIs), then the US is lagging far behind. Llama (v4 notwithstanding) and Gemma (particularly v3) aren't my idea of lagging far behind...
- diggan 1y ago> Llama (v4 notwithstanding) and Gemma (particularly v3) aren't my idea of lagging far behind... While neat and of course Llama kicked off a large part of the ecosystem, so credit where credit is due, both of those suffer from "open-but-not-quite" as they have large documents of "Acceptable Use" which outlines what you can and cannot do with the weights, while the Chinese counter-parts slap a FOSS-compatible license on the weights and calls it a day. We could argue if that's the best approach, or even legal considering the (probable) origin of their training data, but the end result remains the same, Chinese companies are doing FOSS releases and American companies are doing something more similar to BSL/hybrid-open releases. It should tell you something when the legal department of one of these companies calls the model+weights "proprietary" while their marketing department continues to calling the same model+weights "open source". I know who I trust of those two to be more accurate. I guess that's why I see American companies as being further behind, even though they do release something.
- Aeolun 1y agoSo Nvidia stock is going to crash hard when the Chinese inevitably produce their own competitive chip. Though I’m baffled by the fact they don’t just license and pump out billions of AMD chips. Nvidia is ahead, but not that far ahead. My consumer AMD card (7900 XTX) outperforms the 15x more expensive Nvidia server chip (L40S) that I was using.
- Papazsazsa 1y agoI don't know why this isn't the crux of our current geopolitical spat. Surely it would be cheaper and easier for the CCP to develop their own chipmaking capacity than going to war in the Taiwan strait?
- Davidzheng 1y agoUS will intervene militarily to stop China from taking control of TSMC if Taiwan isn't pressured by US to destroy the plants themselves, so I don't think taking Taiwan is a viable path to leading in silica only lowering US ability but given the current gap in GPUs it's not clear how helpful this is to China. So all in all I don't think China views taking Taiwan as beneficial in the AI race at all.
- tw1984 1y ago> US will intervene militarily with a reality tv show dude being the commander in chief and a news reporter being the defense secretary. life is tough in america, man.
- lossolo 1y ago> US will intervene militarily to stop China from taking control of TSMC if Taiwan isn't pressured by US to destroy the plants themselves That's not certain. Most war games show that the U.S. would lose the war (also read official reports done for congress). You can't win against the world's leading producer of goods by trying to attack them from the sea when they can reach you with rockets from their own territory.
- b0a04gl 1y agono way this delay's about gpus lol. deepseek prob has r2 cooked already. r1‑0528 already pumped expectations too high. if r2 lands flat ppl start doubting. or who knows maybe they just chillin watching how west labs burn gpu money, let eval metas shift. then drop r2 when oai/claude trust graph dips a bit
- Art9681 1y agoDistilling western SOTA models that now summarize their thought process is expensive in 2025.
- numair 1y ago> The Information reported on Thursday, citing two people with knowledge of the situation. I miss the old days of journalism, when they might feel inclined to let the reader know that their source for the indirect source is almost entirely funded by the fortune generated by a man who worked slavishly to become a close friend of the boss of one of DeepSeek’s main competitors (Meta). Feel bad for anyone who gets their news from The Information and doesn’t have this key bit of context.
- sailingparrot 1y agoI missed the old days of HN commenters when they might feel inclined to let the reader know who they are talking about without having to solve a 6 steps enigma.
- gwern 1y agoI don't think it's well known that TI has FB CoIs. I didn't know myself until fairly recently. You can talk to a lot of people about this sort of stuff without anyone pointing it out.
- numair 1y agoAbsolutely. I think the FB CoI within American venture capital, where they have fully infested the LP and GP ranks of most funds, is a much bigger and more important story. It really helped me understand that we need to work really hard to keep the rest of the world’s capital markets free and open — a major focus for me these days. You never know which stories The Information won’t run, or which “negative” articles are actually deflections. Similarly, you never know which amazing startups remain shut out of funding, and a lot of entrepreneurs have no idea about the amount of back channel collusion goes on in creating the funding rounds and “overnight successes” they’re told to idolize. A random dude on HN such as me shouldn’t be the source of this knowledge. Hope someone takes up the cause, but we live in a time of astounding cowardice.
- jekwoooooe 1y agoAh well this time they can’t just illegally acquire a bunch of gpus and then just train a model from openai outputs. R1 was so overhyped
- rsanek 1y ago"wildly popular"? maybe there was alot of interest when it was released, but who even is still using R1 these days? i previously utilized it through perplexity but the o3/Gemini pro models are so much better i rarely bother to read its responses. it's not even in the top ten based on OpenRouter https://openrouter.ai/rankings?view=month https://openrouter.ai/rankings?view=month
- pama 1y agoV3 is number 5 in your list. R1-0528(free) is number11 and R1(free) is number15. Openrouter separates the free (in the top 20 list you shared) vs paid (further down) instances of V3 and R1, and of course it doesnt count the direct connection to the providers, or the various self-hosted solutions (choice of companies working in sensitive areas, including many of my friends).
- lossolo 1y agoMay 2025, Shenzhen, China HGX 8x Nvidia H100 cluster for sale. https://imgur.com/a/r6tBkN3 https://imgur.com/a/r6tBkN3 You can buy whatever you want. Export controls are basically fiction. Trying to stop global trade is like trying to stop a river with your bare hands.