3 ms·

This is the rare earth minerals dumping all over again. Devalue to such a price as to make the market participants quit, so they can later have a strategic stra

by ptsneves 11mo ago

This is the rare earth minerals dumping all over again. Devalue to such a price as to make the market participants quit, so they can later have a strategic stranglehold on the supply. This is using open source in a bit of different spirit than the hacker ethos, and I am not sure how I feel about it. It is a kind of cheat on the fair market but at the same time it is also costly to China and its capital costs may become unsustainable before the last players fold.

jsiepkes 11mo ago
The way we fund the AI bubble in the west could also be described as: "kind of cheat on the fair market". OpenAI has never made a single dime of profit.
- nylonstrung 10mo ago
  Yeah and OpenAI's CPO was artificially commissioned as a Lt. Colonel in the US Army in conjunction with a $200M contract Absurd to say Deepseek is CCP controlled while ignoring the govt connection here
embedding-shape 11mo ago
> This is using open source in a bit of different spirit than the hacker ethos, and I am not sure how I feel about it. It's a bit early to have any sort of feelings about it, isn't it? You're speaking in absolutes, but none of this is necessarily 100% true as we don't know their intentions. And judging a group of individuals intention based on what their country seems to want, from the lens of a foreign country, usually doesn't land you with the right interpretation.
CamperBob2 11mo ago
Good luck making OpenAI and Google cry uncle. They have the US government on their side. They will not be allowed to fail, and they know it. What I appreciate about the Chinese efforts is that they are being forced to get more intelligence from less hardware, and they are not only releasing their work products but documenting the R&D behind them at least as well as our own closed-source companies do. A good reason to stir up dumping accusations and anti-China bias would be if they stopped publishing not just the open-source models, but the technical papers that go with them. Until that happens, I think it's better to prefer more charitable explanations for their posture.
tokioyoyo 11mo ago
I mentioned this before as well, but AI-competition within China doesn’t care that much about the western companies. Internal market is huge, and they know winner-takes-it-all in this space is real.
Jedd 11mo ago
> It is a kind of cheat on the fair market ... I am very curious on your definition and usage of 'fair' there, and whether you would call the LLM etc sector as it stands now, but hypothetically absent deepseek say, a 'fair market'. (If not, why not?)
jascha_eng 11mo ago
Do they actually spend that much though? I think they are getting similar results with much fewer resources. It's also a bit funny that providing free models is probably the most communist thing China has done in a long time.
josh_p 11mo ago
Isn’t it already well accepted that the LLM market exists in a bubble with a handful of companies artificially inflating their own values? ESH
DiogenesKynikos 11mo ago
Are you by chance an OpenAI investor? We should all be happy about the price of AI coming down.
- doctorwho42 11mo ago
  But the economy!!! /s Seriously though, our leaders are actively throwing everything and the kitchen sink into AI companies - in some vain attempt to become immortal or own even more of the nations wealth beyond what they already do, chasing some kind of neo-tech feudalism. Both are unachievable because they rely on a complex system that they clearly don't understand.
coliveira 11mo ago
> cheat on the fair market Can you really view this as a cheat this when the US is throwing a trillion dollars in support of a supposedly "fair market"?
deaux 10mo ago
Ah, so exactly like Uber, Netflix, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook and so on have done to the rest of the world over the last few decades then? Where do you think they learnt this trick? Years lurking on HN and this post's comment section wins #1 on the American Hypocrisy chart. Unbelievable that even in the current US people can't recognize when they're looking in the mirror. But I guess you're disincentivized to do so when most of your net worth stems from exactly those companies and those practices.
- corimaith 10mo ago
  Except domestic alternatives to the tech companies you listed were not driven out by them, they still exist today with substantial market share. American tech dominance elsewhere has more to do a lack of competition, and when competition does exist they're more often than not held at a disadvantage by domestic governments. So your counter narrative is false here.
  - devsda 10mo ago
    > American tech dominance elsewhere has more to do a lack of competition, Do you believe the lack of competition is purely because the products are superior? US tech is now sort of like the dollar. People/countries outside the US need and want alternatives to hedge against in the event of political uncertainity but cannot do it completely for various reasons including arm twisting by the US govt. One example is some govts and universities in the EU are trying to get rid of MS products for decades but they are unable to.
  - bogdan 10mo ago
    > American tech dominance elsewhere has more to do a lack of competition If that's true, why doesn't America compete on this front against China? > they're more often than not held at a disadvantage by domestic governments So when the US had the policy advantage over the EU it was just the market working, but when China has the policy advantage over the US it suddenly becomes unfair?
    - corimaith 10mo ago
csomar 10mo ago
Prosecutor, judge and jury? You have access to their minds to know their true intentions? This whole “deepseek is controlled by CCP” is ridiculous. If you want to know how bad the CCP is at IT, then check the government backed banks. The way I see this, some tech teams in China have figured out that training and tuning LLMs is not that expensive after all and they can do it at a fraction of the cost. So they are doing it to enter a market previously dominated by US only players.
nextaccountic 10mo ago
Where exactly is this fair market? Giant US companies love rules and regulations, but only when it benefits them (and they pay dearly for it)

jsiepkes 11mo ago

The way we fund the AI bubble in the west could also be described as: "kind of cheat on the fair market". OpenAI has never made a single dime of profit.

nylonstrung 10mo ago
Yeah and OpenAI's CPO was artificially commissioned as a Lt. Colonel in the US Army in conjunction with a $200M contract Absurd to say Deepseek is CCP controlled while ignoring the govt connection here

embedding-shape 11mo ago

> This is using open source in a bit of different spirit than the hacker ethos, and I am not sure how I feel about it. It's a bit early to have any sort of feelings about it, isn't it? You're speaking in absolutes, but none of this is necessarily 100% true as we don't know their intentions. And judging a group of individuals intention based on what their country seems to want, from the lens of a foreign country, usually doesn't land you with the right interpretation.

CamperBob2 11mo ago

Good luck making OpenAI and Google cry uncle. They have the US government on their side. They will not be allowed to fail, and they know it. What I appreciate about the Chinese efforts is that they are being forced to get more intelligence from less hardware, and they are not only releasing their work products but documenting the R&D behind them at least as well as our own closed-source companies do. A good reason to stir up dumping accusations and anti-China bias would be if they stopped publishing not just the open-source models, but the technical papers that go with them. Until that happens, I think it's better to prefer more charitable explanations for their posture.

tokioyoyo 11mo ago

I mentioned this before as well, but AI-competition within China doesn’t care that much about the western companies. Internal market is huge, and they know winner-takes-it-all in this space is real.

Jedd 11mo ago

> It is a kind of cheat on the fair market ... I am very curious on your definition and usage of 'fair' there, and whether you would call the LLM etc sector as it stands now, but hypothetically absent deepseek say, a 'fair market'. (If not, why not?)

jascha_eng 11mo ago

Do they actually spend that much though? I think they are getting similar results with much fewer resources. It's also a bit funny that providing free models is probably the most communist thing China has done in a long time.

josh_p 11mo ago

Isn’t it already well accepted that the LLM market exists in a bubble with a handful of companies artificially inflating their own values? ESH

DiogenesKynikos 11mo ago

Are you by chance an OpenAI investor? We should all be happy about the price of AI coming down.

doctorwho42 11mo ago
But the economy!!! /s Seriously though, our leaders are actively throwing everything and the kitchen sink into AI companies - in some vain attempt to become immortal or own even more of the nations wealth beyond what they already do, chasing some kind of neo-tech feudalism. Both are unachievable because they rely on a complex system that they clearly don't understand.

coliveira 11mo ago

> cheat on the fair market Can you really view this as a cheat this when the US is throwing a trillion dollars in support of a supposedly "fair market"?

deaux 10mo ago

Ah, so exactly like Uber, Netflix, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook and so on have done to the rest of the world over the last few decades then? Where do you think they learnt this trick? Years lurking on HN and this post's comment section wins #1 on the American Hypocrisy chart. Unbelievable that even in the current US people can't recognize when they're looking in the mirror. But I guess you're disincentivized to do so when most of your net worth stems from exactly those companies and those practices.

corimaith 10mo ago
Except domestic alternatives to the tech companies you listed were not driven out by them, they still exist today with substantial market share. American tech dominance elsewhere has more to do a lack of competition, and when competition does exist they're more often than not held at a disadvantage by domestic governments. So your counter narrative is false here.
- devsda 10mo ago
  > American tech dominance elsewhere has more to do a lack of competition, Do you believe the lack of competition is purely because the products are superior? US tech is now sort of like the dollar. People/countries outside the US need and want alternatives to hedge against in the event of political uncertainity but cannot do it completely for various reasons including arm twisting by the US govt. One example is some govts and universities in the EU are trying to get rid of MS products for decades but they are unable to.
- bogdan 10mo ago
  > American tech dominance elsewhere has more to do a lack of competition If that's true, why doesn't America compete on this front against China? > they're more often than not held at a disadvantage by domestic governments So when the US had the policy advantage over the EU it was just the market working, but when China has the policy advantage over the US it suddenly becomes unfair?
  - corimaith 10mo ago

csomar 10mo ago

Prosecutor, judge and jury? You have access to their minds to know their true intentions? This whole “deepseek is controlled by CCP” is ridiculous. If you want to know how bad the CCP is at IT, then check the government backed banks. The way I see this, some tech teams in China have figured out that training and tuning LLMs is not that expensive after all and they can do it at a fraction of the cost. So they are doing it to enter a market previously dominated by US only players.

nextaccountic 10mo ago

Where exactly is this fair market? Giant US companies love rules and regulations, but only when it benefits them (and they pay dearly for it)