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DeepSeek pause fundraise after comments on compute gap to US leaked (transcript) [pdf]
- PeterHolzwarth 3mo agoArticle grabbed at random that provides some more context (tho could use more): https://www.cyberkendra.com/2026/07/deepseek-pauses-fundraising-amid.html https://www.cyberkendra.com/2026/07/deepseek-pauses-fundrais... "The Hangzhou AI lab has told prospective investors in its second fundraising round that it is suspending the deal, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg on Saturday, days after remarks attributed to founder Liang Wenfeng about US-China AI competition circulated widely online." And: "Tencent's technology outlet published a 118-item version covering AGI strategy, chip supply, pricing, and retention. In it, Liang reportedly framed China's disadvantage as an arithmetic problem rather than a talent one: "The biggest gap between us and the US is in resources."" "The specifics were unusually candid. Liang is said to have told investors he needed 200,000 Huawei 950 chips to train a frontier model but received 16,000, adding that "Huawei's problem is still insufficient capacity" and expecting the crunch to last at least three years. He also floated narrowing the gap with US labs to three to six months using a fraction of their computing."
- cyanydeez 3mo agothis bodes well for continuing to refine smaller models and open sourcing them. There's a delusion that what America's AI companies are doing is "best"; the chinese should realize that the forefront is bloated and there's likely hundreds of speed ups viable. Pushing open weights will continue to grind down the bloat.
- Aboutplants 3mo agoI was gonna say, this just puts more pressure to deliver ground breaking research with limited resources. And if history teaches us anything it’s that scarcity produces ingenuity.
- milkshakes 3mo agohttp://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html > One thing that should be learned from the bitter lesson is the great power of general purpose methods, of methods that continue to scale with increased computation even as the available computation becomes very great. The two methods that seem to scale arbitrarily in this way are search and learning.
- anon373839 3mo agoSo what? There are physical and economic ceilings on dumb computation scaling.
- cyanydeez 3mo agoamericas tech stack always ends up bloated. not everything is worth learning. endlessly knowing about pokemon is not delivering value proposition cancer also grows carelessly.
- kaashif 3mo agoRight, and if you come up with an efficiency gain that makes scaling better, e.g. a 50% reduction in required compute. Or even asymptotic improvements e.g. moving from quadratic to linear. Then you're much much better off. There is nothing about the bitter lesson that says just be dumb and pour money into a hole, you still have to invent the methods to scale well, and being under immense pressure with constraints seems likely to produce that research.
- Enginerrrd 3mo agoIt reminds me a bit of the tyranny of the rocket equation. You can always scale your fuel to get a little more delta V, with ever diminishing returns. …but for something like a DEEP space/interstellar mission, it almost always pays to wait a few more years for a faster propulsion system because you’ll get there fastest by always delaying your launch and chasing better technology. I’m not sure how well the analogy holds up, or if there’s anything to be learned from it though.
- strictnein 3mo ago> "There's a delusion that what America's AI companies are doing is "best"" Not sure if the word "delusion" is the correct word here? It has not been proven in either direction. We can all see lots of possible issues with it, but it is also possible that it could be what is needed to unlock key capabilities. We can see that the Chinese models have been getting better, but OpenAI is out there supporting 10 million active users with their frontier models, and now we know that Deepseek can't even get what they need to properly train models.
- 3eb7988a1663 3mo agoThey can't get hardware because the US has put restrictions on how much can be sold to China. There is not a technical or know-how limitation, but political. Deepseek could otherwise write some checks to NVidia for what they want. Thanks to the import restrictions, I expect Chinese GPU hardware to be competitive within a few years.
- torginus 3mo agoI wonder if it would be viable for the Chinese to pursue a huge buildout of less sophisticated logic fabs. My experience with GPGPU is that it seems to intensely skew towards memory bandwidth, and has a much lower compute intensity than graphics (by which I mean rasterization and shaders). This seems to be holding true for AI as well. I'm sure if you have an excess of compute and a dearth of bandwidth, you can trade the former for the latter, but still, this is a fundamenta property. A lot of talk has been said about how companies are doing 'financial tricks' to extend the useful life of GPUs by showing lower depreciation - but what if these are not tricks at all - new GPUs don't really have that much more bandwidth, and while they might be clever in some other ways, they are limited in how much they can improve fundamentals. This has been reflected in how memory vendors' stock price has exploded, but NVIDIA stayed stagnant. Since the Chinese are far closer to the US in building SOTA memory chips, it's possible that their disadvantages are far overstated.
- yogthos 3mo agoThe real question is whether it's easier to improve the software side instead. There are likely a lot more optimizations possible in terms of model architecture, and if there is a compute bottleneck, then it's going to put a lot of pressure on Chinese labs to address the problem using more efficient designs.
- downrightmike 3mo agoAnd that's why OpenAI bought all the future ram contracts
- credit_guy 3mo agoI think the way to parse the current title "DeepSeek pause fundraise after comments on compute gap to US leaked (transcript) [pdf]" is that there was a leak that DeepSeek will pause fundraising because they perceive there is a compute gap with the US. I am also guessing that the majority of the people who read this title will think that DeepSeek is pausing this fundraising because some comments they made about the compute gap were leaked. That is not the case.
- solarkraft 3mo agoThank you! That is indeed how I read it.
- culi 3mo agoMaybe: "Leaked Deepseek transcripts reveal plan to pause fundraising due to compute gap" I don't know what "compute gap" means in this context though and it's not clear that that's why they plan to pause fundraising or if the title is conflating.
- topspin 3mo ago> if the title is conflating The title is certainly a great conflation. Any seeker of capital would want to regroup after an unfiltered leak of this magnitude, if for no other reason than to secure the forum from future leaks. The comments about the unlikelihood of enormous future profits were at least as consequential with regard to capital investment as anything else that was said.
- AnnikaL 3mo agoYeah, wouldn't it makes sense to increase fundraising, so as to acquire more compute to close the gap?
- epolanski 3mo agoI guess they likely can't right now due to no hardware available, either cause of bans or already all booked.
- toomuchtodo 3mo agoPerhaps there is an opportunity for China to close the compute gap by renting compute from hyperscalers through a complex web of shell entities similarly to how the US procured titanium for the SR-71 during the Cold War. https://theaviationgeekclub.com/in-1960s-russia-sold-titanium-to-the-us-believing-they-needed-it-for-pizza-ovens-but-instead-they-used-it-to-build-the-sr-71-blackbird-mach-3-spy-plane/ https://theaviationgeekclub.com/in-1960s-russia-sold-titaniu... https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/titanium-russia-was-secret-ingredient-sr-71-blackbird-207691 https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/titanium-russia-was-s...
- culi 3mo agoTrump reversed course on the NVIDIA ban. It's now China that is blocking their companies from buying NVIDIA chips. So the shell entities would be to get around Chinese, not USian restrictions
- fspeech 3mo agoThat's not true. First there is still a licensing and quota scheme on the US side for the H200s. Secondly China blocked them for use in inferencing. Thirdly Chinese companies don't want them for training because newer chips are more cost effective.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- culi 3mo ago> Thirdly Chinese companies don't want them for training because newer chips are more cost effective. Please read the FTA. Deepseek is literally explicitly talking about wishing they could get their hands on H200s > Secondly China blocked them for use in inferencing. This seems to be false unless you can provide a source. I tried looking into it > First there is still a licensing and quota scheme on the US side for the H200s. A major reversal from Trump's outright ban. As I stated.
- fulladder 3mo ago
- orbital-decay 3mo agoEverything in this transcript reads so very different from what megalomaniacs in charge of Anthropic/OAI have to say
- BolsunBacset 3mo ago[dead]
- nullbio 3mo agoNot sure why people keep lumping OAI and Anthropic together. Really, Anthropic are the evil ones. You can make the case OAI are evil too if you want, but Anthropic are very clearly significantly worse and they aren't even in the same ballpark. Notice how OAI signed the recent open-source/open-weights letter with all of the other big tech companies, but Anthropic are the only ones who didn't? Notice how their employees are getting huge heat on X for dropping gems like this: https://x.com/Mononofu/status/2080937562739531837 https://x.com/Mononofu/status/2080937562739531837 This is how their brains work. They think everyone in the world except them are stupid and gullible, will fall for their incessant lying, gas-lighting and fearmongering, and can't be trusted with AI. They believe that only they deserve the keys to the AI castle. They've created a literal cult out of their culture while their employees are serving as useful idiot ideologues for the execs who are power and wealth hungry. They've also just increased their political spending from 20mil to 40mil - and that's just what's on the books.
- ranguna 3mo agoYou think OAI are doing all that out of the goodness of their hearts? OAI was a market leader until anthropic decided to start placing all their bets on coding agents, they became the leader and now OAI is scrambling and doing everything they can to de-throne. Don't forget that it was OAI that started this whole RAM shortage, instead of being sustainable about it, they just up and decided to buy 40% of all memory production. They are all bad mate, all fighting for this virtual crown that no one cares except for them. In the end, what matters is pricing, whoever offers sonnet 4.6 quality at the cheapest monthly pricing will win.
- culi 3mo ago> Objectively speaking, if I can spend two billion this year, it would indicate that our procurement department has achieved outstanding performance. The main gap between us and the United States lies in resources, while the disparity in personnel is minimal—there is virtually no difference, as we are essentially the same team of people, possibly from China. > With the largest models available today, we simply cannot afford to train them It seems they're largely talking about literally purchasing NVIDIA H200 chips. Important context is that Trump first started the trade war with China largely focusing on banning anything that could improve the Chinese domestic semiconductor industry. It was a blatant attempt to prevent China from progressing up the value chain to high tech. China's response is the reason they went from a miniscule player in EVs to the world's largest manufacturer (same for other high tech industries like LIDAR, solar, etc). In his second term, Trump blocked NVIDIA from selling chips to China. China again responded with astounding progress on their domestic semiconductor industry which led to Trump backing down on the ban. However, China shocked everyone by banning their own companies from buying NVIDIA in order to support the domestic semiconductor industry. Obviously China is still years away from EUV but it now produces most of its own >14nm chips and is rapidly growing
- pinkmuffinere 3mo agoWow, that is fascinating, I didn't realize China was now blocking foreign chips, lol. It's not a definitive indicator, but I feel that doesn't bode well for US dominance in this area -- when your competitor thinks they'd be helping _you_ by using your resources, that's not great.
- culi 3mo agoThey've achieved self-sufficiency in >14nm chips in remarkable timing. Unfortunately for DeepSeek, it's the <14nm chips that are needed for massive training tasks. I wouldn't be surprised if China backs down and lets them purchase the chips given that they are still years away from being able to make them themselves. Either that or the gov't steps in and forces them to share resources And even if Huawei's Ascend 910C can compete with NVIDIA's H200, CUDA is still a large moat
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- grim_io 3mo agoOne has to be careful when pointing out problems in China, lest such criticism be confused with criticism of the Party's policies.
- iepathos 3mo agoThere is no war in Ba Sing Se
- throw101010 3mo agoIt's funny that you mention this because with the current US administration it works in a similar fashion... see Anthropic not cooperating with the US military and getting their new shiny model "paused" few weeks later (and officials like Hegseth being pretty open about it beforehand, signalling to them that criticizing the US admin/not cooperating will hurt their business: https://xcancel.com/SecWar/status/2027507717469049070 https://xcancel.com/SecWar/status/2027507717469049070 ) I'm not defending China at all, just noticing a detestable trend.
- jimbob45 3mo agoThis seems like when Indians were super excited about China having castes too. Then, it turned out that they were egregiously incomparable. US incumbent party criticism is nothing like CCP criticism.
- UltraSane 3mo agoIt is really sad how India doesn't try to be better but tries to prove China is just as bad.
- Waterluvian 3mo agoAnd it’s not even reading between the lines and being a conspiracy theorist. The current U.S. regime has made it abundantly clear that they will gladly operate in bad faith. Being rational and predictable is likely a more important quality than ideology now that the Americans are threatening everyone and forcing us all to pick sides.
- nsoonhui 3mo agoHere's something I really don't understand: If as alleged Chinese open weight models are catching up with US anyway, and the performance is near US frontier model level but Chinese can do it with a fraction of cost, and eventually AI model will be commodified, wouldn't that means that the billion or even trillion dollars that US labs spend have only diminishing returns and the lead is only temporary? So why Deepseek also want to go down that route? Is having the absolute frontier really that important, given that the performance difference is just transient and costly?
- kburman 3mo agoThey want to achieve AGI first because, once it is achieved, no one knows what the world will look like.
- sd2ff 3mo agoWho actually believes this nonsense?
- whatever1 3mo agoBut this will not be a singular event. And like humans it does not mean that the smartest makes the best decisions.
- reverius42 3mo agoMore like a singularity event.
- josh_p 3mo agoI doubt this is the case. It should be common knowledge at least among the people building these things that a true AGI isn’t possible with LLMs. Unless I’ve missed some advancement?
- revetkn 3mo agoIt's understood that LLMs have limitations and people are working on "the next thing" to try and make it to real AGI, e.g. Yann LeCun.
- twothreeone 3mo agoIf this is true it almost sounds like DeepSeek is following the Anthropic playbook of trying to pressure the local government into aligning with their corporate agenda through scare tactics. So I wouldn't be surprised if Liang Wenfeng "disappears" for a little while from the public eye in a few weeks.
- zmmmmm 3mo agoCurious what the fundamental limit on Huawei's capacity is. China has shown if nothing else they know how to scale when they want to. If it came down to just building more of what they know how to do, it would be happening. Is there more to it?
- seanmcdirmid 3mo agoTheir yields on high performance chips that could do training is really bad, and they aren’t getting more of the outdated ASML machines that they could use to scale up even with bad yields. It will still take China a few years or a decade to build out the tech needed to fab high performance chips economically on their own.
- edg5000 3mo agoCan't they use GlobalFoundries, Intel or TSMC in addition to their own fabs?
- trollbridge 3mo agoChinese companies are effectively embargoed from using them for <14nm.
- znnajdla 3mo agoSounds like an invasion of Taiwan could fix that problem for them.
- seanmcdirmid 3mo agoNo, Taiwan has to import the machines, the spare parts, and even some of the raw materials from western firms. If China invaded Taiwan, they might get some engineers, and maybe some designs they had no hope of implementing anytime soon. The fans, if they survived, wouldn’t be very useful. There is a reason the west doesn’t tell China adjacent countries that they can’t fab due to risk of invasion.
- Reubend 3mo ago[dead]
- zkmon 3mo agoGive it 5 years for China to have it's own ASML. Nothing big bang is going to happen in 5 years or even a decade from now, execpt for a few more hypes, deep corrections and the political drama. AGI is not a destination, but a journey. There are no winners.
- progval 3mo agoThe repository was force-pushed so the link doesn't work anymore, but the file is still available at: https://github.com/demo-zexuan/liang-wenfeng-investor-meeting-2026-7-22/blob/15c6504be51b884a0adc5d77e4dba41f94431454/%E6%A2%81%E6%96%87%E9%94%8B%E6%8A%95%E8%B5%84%E8%80%85%E4%BA%A4%E6%B5%81%E4%BC%9A-%E6%96%87%E5%AD%97%E7%A8%BF_1_18_translate_20260723201651.pdf https://github.com/demo-zexuan/liang-wenfeng-investor-meetin...
- trollbridge 3mo agoThank you. These documents are a particularly valuable insight into the kind of thinking going on at DeepSeek. The part about how inference should be priced at a level that's enough to return capex in 10 months, but no higher, is really interesting. Liang Wenfeng simply has different motivations than we're used to over here in the West.
- sinuhe69 3mo agoSome deleted it (again?). But the comments of Liang could be found somewhere else. [1] https://aiproem.substack.com/p/must-read-deepseek-liang-wenfeng https://aiproem.substack.com/p/must-read-deepseek-liang-wenf...
- sifar 3mo ago>> As you can understand, during V3 training, NVIDIA GPUs were still used, but the NVIDIA ecosystem was no longer employed. Ironic that these large LLMs are eroding Nividia's moat. In the next paragraph he talks about Nvidia digging its own grave. I wonder if Nividia is aware of this and the frequent release cycle is a response to this development ?
- NitpickLawyer 3mo ago> Ironic that these large LLMs are eroding Nividia's moat. That's not what the quoted part meant. During v3 development they only had access to hardware limited variants of H series GPUs. Those had less interconnect bandwidth IIRC. So, at the time, the low-level wizards that ds employed bypassed the official APIs (i.e. the nvda ecosystem) and hand wrote alternatives to say nccl, to better use those limited GPUs. I remember them publishing some of it as well. It had to do with allocating memory, moving stuff around, etc. Basically bypassing some limitations by going lower than the official APIs support. There is no eroding of their moat, as long as they sell GPUs. ANd they're selling GPUs like crazy. The moat speaks for itself, if I may :)
- sifar 3mo agoThey talk about developing and using TileLang which they ported to Huawei's 950 GPUs. And it makes sense, as these LLMs become more capable in coding abilities - people will use them to develop their own abstractions to work on different HW. You cannot have it otherwise. If SaaS companies get threatened that their SW doesn't have a moat why do you expect Nividia's SW to have moat ? The computing algorithms are not even proprietary. It is only a matter of whether someones cares about it and is committed. This should be encouraging for new AI chip development companies. The very progress that Nividia enables also has a negative feedback that threatens it.
- egeozcan 3mo agoI don't think his pitch when asking money from investors should mean too much for us. He wants the funds, and he needs to point to a deficiency that those funds should cover. We cannot know for sure but he may be exaggerating, or let's just say, talking strategically. This is also me who wants to believe that we can make all this very efficient, so take my warning with a grain of salt.
- mirekrusin 3mo ago[dead]
- d5lt5 3mo agoA lot of people here are saying that chinese open weight models are state-sponsored. If it's so, why would deepseek seek a fundraising?
- knodi 3mo agoIdiots say idiotic things.
- tonyhart7 3mo agoso this is why they still not release deepseek r2 yet there is just not enough resources right now, US sales block is working
- wilsonjholmes 3mo agoIs there a mirror? Getting 404...
- emilfihlman 3mo agoFrom another comment: https://github.com/demo-zexuan/liang-wenfeng-investor-meeting-2026-7-22/blob/15c6504be51b884a0adc5d77e4dba41f94431454/%E6%A2%81%E6%96%87%E9%94%8B%E6%8A%95%E8%B5%84%E8%80%85%E4%BA%A4%E6%B5%81%E4%BC%9A-%E6%96%87%E5%AD%97%E7%A8%BF_1_18_translate_20260723201651.pdf https://github.com/demo-zexuan/liang-wenfeng-investor-meetin...
- afdsaifdoi 3mo ago[dead]
- rush86999 3mo agoThe main goal is AGI, and the underlying prerequisite theme is continuous learning. Everyone is trying to figure out how to achieve this prerequisite. I'm thinking of agent harnesses. That's what everyone is trying to do at this point. That's the same problem I'm trying to solve: https://github.com/rush86999/atom https://github.com/rush86999/atom
- punkahhwhiteboy 3mo ago> when you're the Chinese CEO, but all your phraseology comes from reading fortune cookies
- haeberli 3mo agolink broken!