Impressive, honestly. They're trying to become a mecca for innovation and research, trying to lead rather than follow, build a culture where innovation can spark future economic advantages, whereas OpenAI seem to more about monetisation currently, many of their researchers and scientists now departed. Under the aegis of a dictatorship they may be, but this encourages me more than anything OpenAI have said in a while.
They're in a perfect position for this, too, and has been noted many times over the past 10+ years, they've already started doing it wrt. electronics manufacturing in general. The West spent the last 50+ years outsourcing its technological expertise to factories in China; as a result, they now have the factories, and two generations of people who know how to work in them, how to turn designs into working products - which necessitates some understanding of the designs themselves - and how to tinker with hardware in general. Now, innovation involves experimentation, so if you're an innovator, it's kind of helpful to have the actual means of production at hand, so you can experiment directly, for cheap, with rapid turnaround.
If that's a problem for the West now, it's a problem of our own creation.
Was open-sourcing Linux a cynical, offensive move to devalue commercial Unix (a scheme hatched by duplicitous Finns)?
But more seriously, DeepSeek is a massive boon for AI consumers. It's price/performance cannot be beat, and the model is open source so if you're inclined to run and train your own you now have access to a world-class model and don't have to settle for LLaMA.
I'll find the quote eventually, but this caught my eye:
>If you need more than 3 levels of indentation, you're screwed anyway, and should fix your program.
Got me thinking. I might heighten up to 4 or 5 simply because modern code needs 2 indents just to start writing a function in a struct. But the quote wasn't as crazy as I thought, even 30 years later.
> Was open-sourcing Linux a cynical, offensive move to devalue commercial Unix
No, because as Stallman had pointed out Linux isn't GNU. One of the differences between the "open source" crowd and the "free software" crowd is that the latter actually does have an explicit goal of denying proprietary software the ability to exist.
You jest,
but honestly, if open source accelerated during the peak Cold War and the Soviets leveraged them to own capitalists American software industry, you bet that the US Govt would be hostile to the open source movement.
My father taught HnD computing in the 70s and 80s at Trent Poly. One of his industry contacts did time for shipping DEC Vax VMS kit to Bulgaria in crates marked "tractor parts"...
you could be a communist if you open source your project
so maybe in that alternative universe, there would be something like close-source-statement instead of open source license, to avoid be accused as a communist
I don't think it makes sense to be that cynical about a company opening their research and powerful technology to the public. The only underhanded thing they could be doing is lying, and it doesn't look like they are - but if they are, we'll know soon enough.
If the goal is to erode the moat around powerful US tech companies, by making tech that rivals theirs and releasing it to the public, it's just good for the world. The only way it isn't is if you believe that power should remain in the hands of certain elites.
This absurd denial of "anything coming out of China" has no place here, and ignoring groundbreaking research simply because it is from China will only leave you falling behind.
I have no love for the CCP, and I believe that they are deceptive - but China has 1.4 billion people in it. It is not a monolith, and it is unsurprising that there would be good people doing good research in such a massive population.
Except it absolutely operates as a monolith on corporate issues, and just because the Chinese government is able to throw trillions of dollars at problems doesn’t mean their innovations, when they rarely discover them, are fit for economic viability.
DeepSeek is proof there isn’t a moat, not a demonstration of Chinese superiority in AI work. When you don’t care if your work makes any business sense, there’s often a lot you can appear to accomplish, until it needs to be sustained.
I'm not talking about "Chinese superiority" at all. I'm talking about whenever there is news about a positive thing happening in China, people make it about the Chinese government and China vs. the west.
Not everything that happens in China needs to be about China vs. America.
You are just shifting to another nebulous criticism instead of substantiating anything about skepticism of research from Chinese people.
It is clear to everyone in the room that recent ML innovations are incredibly powerful and actively being used in many areas to substantial effect. It may be overhyped, but there is clearly real fuel behind it, it's not all hot air.
I'm not sure why. They are doing honest work and publishing it. If they are faking it, it will be known.
Whereas what's Sam doing? Announcing a non-existing 500 billion dollar investment with the president, while all AI companies in the wesy support a trade ban for Nvidia GPUs in China.
What exactly is the problem of showing that other AI companies are trying to create advantages where they don't exist? That they can do it and not price gouge nor try to create moats, and instead push forward the innovation without becoming a greedy fuck like Sam Altman?
I actually praise that offensive move, if AI companies can lost so much value from DeepSeek's open research then it's well deserved, they shouldn't be valued as much.
Americans need to understand that the Chinese are not obsessed with the US. They don't have a saboteur mindset. They want development not because they want US to fail and China to win. It's really sad to look at US state of affairs right now. It used to have a mindset if abundance. It definitely doesn't right now.
The US has always had a mindset of "abundance for us and allies, scorched earth for anyone who dares to oppose us". But players profiting while helping build up American abundance is OK, but that's about it - as soon as you're challenging US power (not necessarily directly, but just by being as successful as the USA at something), that becomes a huge problem and you need to either swear fealty or be stopped.
The USA has never once had friendly relationships with a large power, perhaps with the very special case of the USSR alliance during WWII (and not a second after it). The European powers and Canada are extremely US friendly and support US policies (at the head of state level) in almost everything. Relations with China were good while China was a weak and poor state, acting as almost slave labor for the USA - not great now that they are rising up. Relations with Russia were good for a brief window after the fall of the USSR, while Eltsyn seemed to be "our guy", but quickly soured when it became clear he would not dance to their tune (not to sya that he was a good man or that his disputes with US intentions were good - Russia would have probably been in a better state if it had allied itself more with the USA, rather than becoming the belligerent territorial authoritarian oligarchy that it has).
The cynic in me is much more likely to see this as western companies giving up on innovation in favor of grift, and their competition in the east exposing the move for what it is.
This is why competition is good. Let's make this about us (those who would do this in the open) and them (those who wouldn't) and not us (US) and them (China).
I just realized, this sounds almost exactly like Japan's Fifth Generation AI project[1], where the Japan government funded a massive AI project where they built lots of specialized hardware (symbolic AI). Unfortunately, Intel kept chipping away to the point that it made more sense to just run Intel.
Although it sounds like that project, if successful, would've been pretty fantastic for computing in general. I'm far less interested to see proprietary models secure dominance, whichever country they're in.
I spent quality time thinking about this last night, there is one and only one reasonable motivation that would possibly stop them from doing so - to avoid being killed by the CIA
The whole thing is no longer a startup being disruptive
Why would the CIA get involved in the financial value of NVidia?
The US has been trying to find a "space race" challenge to justify its military spending increases for a while, AI is going to be that, but it's more driven by the US oligarchy than the US MIC this time.
That means that it's going to be driven by financial wealth accumulation instead of power accumulation.
> Why would the CIA get involved in the financial value of NVidia?
the AI race between China and the US is going to shape the future of our generation. CIA has all the motivations to just eliminate all those core Chinese members as they pose direct national security threat to the US dominance in AI.
you need to be really naive to not being able to see these.
The hype over AI being somehow the "future" and replacing every/anything of the current generation is completely over the top.
A couple of years ago, it was VR/AR (2nd time around for VR, it had been hyped in the '90s), before that it was "cloud" etc etc.
The CIA is not going to be going around assassinating AI developers, any more than they are going to kill the people working for ASML because they threaten US dominance in chips.
"Ah yes, because comparing AI’s transformative impact to VR’s niche flops or dismissing cloud (now the backbone of modern tech) proves you’ve got the insight of a dial-up modem. Stay salty and irrelevant!"
Well, that is how US tech companies themselves regularly operate, so it should be withing the game? Selling at loss or giving out for free, until you kill the companies that are actually operating a business is something US tech is normally proud about doing.
I always called it VC-backed price dumping, many American tech companies got successful by taking enormous amounts of VC capital to simply price dump competition.
I get side eyes from Americans when I bring this up as a key factor when they try to shit on Europe for "lack of innovation", it's more a lack of bottomless stacks of cash enabling undercutting competition on price until they fold, then jacking up prices for VC ROI.
They aren't "giving out for free", though. If you're not paying for something from a US tech company, unless it's explicitly a non-profit, it's fairly safe to assume that you, dear reader, are the product.
You pay with your data.
This could very well be the long-term plan with DeepSeek, or it could be the AI application of how China deals with other industries: massive state subsidies to companies participating in important markets.
The profit isn't the point, at least not at first. Driving everyone else out is. That's why it's hard to get any real name brands off of Amazon anymore. Cheap goods from China undercut brand-name competition from elsewhere and soon, that competition was finding it unprofitable to compete on Amazon, so they withdrew.
I used to get HEPA filters from Amazon that were from a trusted name brand. I can't find those anymore. What I can find is a bunch of identical offerings for "Colorfullfe", "Der Blue" and "Extolife", all priced similarly. I cannot find any information on those companies online. Given their origin it's safe to assume they all come from the same factory in China and that said factory is at least partially supported by the state.
Over time this has the net effect of draining the rest of the world of the ability to create useful technology and products without at least some Chinese component to the design or manufacture of the same. That of course becomes leverage.
Same here. If I'm an investor in an AI startup, I'm not looking at the American offerings, because long-term geopolitical stability isn't my concern. Getting the most value for my investment is, so I'm telling them to use the Chinese models and training techniques for now, and boom: it just became a little less profitable for Sam Altman to do what he does. And that's the point.
>They aren't "giving out for free", though. If you're not paying for something from a US tech company, unless it's explicitly a non-profit, it's fairly safe to assume that you, dear reader, are the product.
In this case it's open source, and with papers published. So any US company can (way more cheaply than ChatGPT and co iiuc) train their own model based on this and offer it as well.
No one ever explains how it's possible for China to simply give "massive state subsidies" and take over the entire global economy from a starting point of Haitian-level GDP per capita 25 years ago. It sounds extremely easy though - I assume it should be in econ 101 textbooks and India, Indonesia, Nigeria, etc will soon follow this playbook?
It's a very good question. We used to hear that subsidies resulted in lazy inefficient companies that couldn't compete in global markets. How did they become a cheat code for success?
> No one ever explains how it's possible for China to simply give "massive state subsidies" and take over the entire global economy from a starting point of Haitian-level GDP per capita 25 years ago
The biggest purchaser of technology and goods and services is the US Government. It spends over $760 billion annually on products and services.
But if any other country does the same it would classify as "massive state subsidies".
I would take it a step further and say that the biggest employer in US is the US Federal Government.
They don’t have the navy for it. They’re also bordered by the First Island Chain, a string of countries they have been pissing off for a thousand years.
Patrolling shipping lanes is a peacetime operation, so I don't see how the First Island Chain matters. They're not going to halt Chinese naval ships going on patrol missions. It just means the patrols won't be secret.
Patrolling shipping lanes is a power projection, one that US allies and non-allies alike enjoyed or tolerated due to the demonstration of the US’s impartiality and commitment to free trade. China projecting such power will not be seen as impartial, especially given the never-resolved territorial disputes in the region.
In ten years China’s population decline will go from “moderate” to “accelerating,” and we will be a decade into the collapse of globalization. It’s doubtful they will have the expertise or even raw materials to float a navy capable of even regional patrol, much less world patrol.
Around the time of Deng the CCP realized that strict collectivization wasn't a recipe for economic success. Also around that time, a far more sociopathic strain of executive was coming into the boardrooms of American companies, one who wanted things as cheap as possible, externalities (like the American social fabric and economy) be damned. Tienanmen Square proved that the Chinese were willing to crush rabble rousers who desired political and economic reforms.
So American investors dumped a metric crapload of money into the Chinese economy for things like manufacturing. The labor was cheap, and anyone who wanted better outside of the status quo was going to be turned into hamburger under the treads of a tank. No longer would they have to deal with the labor unions of the Midwest and Great Lakes regions, or have to deal with American environmental, corruption, and labor laws. The investment was the seed money for the startup we know as modern China.
There was literal starvation in the US in the Great Depression too (which was 1929 all the way to the late 30s, pretty close to WWII). The US got over it after a couple of decades.
Similarly the EU of 2025, has nothing to do with WW2-era starvation, that has been over half a century in the past.
And of course there was literal starvation in China as well after WWII, and much more poverty there than in the EU 30 years ago (even including Eastern Europe).
And you think China, which had started for a very poor place after their civil wars, and had been ravaged by the Japanese invasion and occupation (including the only mass scale biological warfare in modern times), weathered WWII better than Europe?
EU taxes exorbitantly and does not reinvest in people. Instead wastes money on expanding bureaucracy and making the Government fatter. Passes asinine laws that stifle companies from innovating. If a company is wasting more time trying to be compliant with crazy regulations and avoiding ridiculous fines, it won't have time to focus on innovation.
First, the EU (well, governments of EU member countries, not the EU itself, which anyway doesn't tax citizens) invests far more into people than China does; civil services, from sanitation to healthcare to schools to social security, are all much better in the EU countries than in China.
Secondly, China also has extremely high bureaucracy, and extreme levels of government regulation - a classic problem for dictatorial regimes, especially ones spanning huge spaces (where direct control is physically impossible, even in the information age).
The big difference is that EU governments have drunk the coolaid on modern economical theories, and don't generally pick winners and losers in the market (beyond few key companies with deep ties to the ruling elites, mostly in banking), don't invest massive amounts to prop up companies doing price dumping, and generally play within the rules of world trade.
Of course, those rules are made up specifically to prevent any state from using its power to out-compete incumbent companies, many of which are US owned, but also German, French, Spanish etc owned.
Also, there is little appetite for EU level strategic decisions, EU member countries are far too divided. For example, Finland probably didn't have the power to prop up Nokia's phone division when Apple and Samsung started eating its lunch with smartphones, and France or Germany wouldn't have wanted to invest EU resources into doing it either. France is likely not going to be ok with propping up a German rival to BYD using massive funds, or vice versa for a French company.
So, while collectively the EU easily rivals China on money antld the USA on population, it is far too divided to pool those powers together, and the EU population mirrors this sentiment - there is not a strong EU identity that would see a Belgian person deeply proud of a major tech company based in Slovenia, or a Czech person cheering for a massive new investment in Portugal.
> If you're not paying for something from a US tech company, unless it's explicitly a non-profit, it's fairly safe to assume that you, dear reader, are the product. You pay with your data.
They extract the very same data from paying users. And even with data factors in, they give products away at loss explicitly to undercut the competition.
But this time the technology is open sourced, it's not like Uber operating at a loss to make other startup fail. It might however become like that when there is no more competition. However, at least for now it's not like that
You can say cynically. I say optimistically. US relied too much on secrets and menufactured inefficiency to keep that faux value. It's only natural that talent elsewhere will undercut that. Invisible Hand isn't limited to the US
It's essentially the same tactic as META have employed and one of the key pillars of a free market.
They also are making important contributions to efficiency sure to their hardware limitations which hopefully has a strong impact on reducing the long term power consumption of these models
Why couldn't this be viewed from the capitalistic lens of good old fashioned competition? No cynicism is required in viewing the export restrictions on ASML's lithography technology and nVidia's most advanced chips as blantantly anti-competitive.
A lot of sour grapes on here, and the attendant cognitive dissonance. Communism and open-source development have overlapping ideals, and there's no better project for worldwide cooperation than AI. But that's at odds of the US having monopolistic control over the SOTA. Ultimately capitalism horseshoes into the authoritarianism, gross inequality, and poverty of the Soviet states it likes to contrast itself to.
You are just adding a sinister spin to it. Every move that any company (local or foreign) competing in AI is is intended to devalue and hurt US AI companies. That's what "competing" is, the rules are made so that people compete to offer a better service rather than kill one another (ie: mobs).
And if that was the intended purpose, would you prefer a reality where they don’t release it at all? This benefits a lot more consumers of AI, and that’s a good thing IMO. If OpenAI and other AI companies become less valuable, then i am more than eager to live with that
Of course. China wants to beat the US in innovation, and gain the economic and militaristic advantages which that brings. And they're going about it the right way if there's any substance behind that press statement.
The same AI companies that release proprietary software in an offensive move intended to devalue and hurt work of many professionals, sure. So, a good thing.
Exactly. Meta specifically opened their models to "commoditise their complement" [1]. Does it automatically become a national issue When a Chinese company does the same?
It absolutely is true. This Chinese model wiped hundreds of billions in value from the American market, positioned China as a leading innovator, and pivoted the world to using a model with heavy Chinese biases. It's a brilliant masterstroke for the advancement of China on the global stage.
Good. Companies screwing each other over like this creates huge social benefits. This is one of the best mechanisms capitalism has to externalize surplus value, a la "commoditizing your complement".
Everything done in China, furthering any intellectual goal, is automatically going to be seen by most of us as a turn played in the game to become the world's #1 superpower. It's not unnatural for them to do this; I assume any nation would push for it if given the chance. The reason this causes so much suspicion is because we westerners are terrified of what that would mean for the rest of the world.
So, sadly, even something that seems noble and refreshing like open-sourcing their AI advancements will be treated with suspicion.
> What gets me is when people present it like it's bad to play that game.
It's not bad. But the western superpowers, however flawed, are at least familiar. For the past 75 years we've avoided world war under this power balance. A new power balance could turn out better in that regard, but that doesn't mean it won't be scary, especially for those who value individual liberty.
>"we westerners are terrified of what that would mean for the rest of the world."
I suspect "we westerners" think of "we westerners" and do not give a flying fuck about "the rest of the world". Well, as long as they keep trading exclusively in our currency etc. etc.
Is it "veiled racism" to point out how China continues to wield the great firewall that effectively blocks most internet users from outside news and entertainment while Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Japan et al. do not? The basic world view in China of 天下 -- the universal dominion of China. Hence the general unpopularity of China in Vietnam, South Korea, and japan.
I don't think it's veiled at all, to bring up these things every time there is a success in China.
I agree that the CCP's view of the world and population control is negative. But don't let that poison your opinion of all Chinese people. We're all people on Earth, and we need to be forging bonds with our intelligent and good-hearted international kin that break down the walls that those in power create to keep themselves there.
I've lived and roamed across much of China, studied in Taiwan and South Korea, and know Japan and Hong Kong well. Many Chinese are indeed great, but in the end the Chinese tendency to game every possible system, make clever use of naive 老外 to advance themselves, and just shamelessly appropriate IP ("hey, they did it too in the 18th century, and remember the Opium War!") has massively turned me off China generally. Not to mention the 50,000 RMB bounty now offered in China for reporting a "foreign spy".
The recent TV drama 赤热 (English title: Silicon Wave, available with subtitles on youtube) shows the whole China nationalist tech narrative in vivid relief, including "veiled racism" against Americans, e.g. the depiction of the Chinese protagonist's American mentor at UC Berkeley.
And just look at the history and career of Li Kaifu and the cavalier way he has treated all the benefits he received in the US turned into promoting the glorious 祖国. Foolish 老外 indeed.
> The reason this causes so much suspicion is because we westerners are terrified of what that would mean for the rest of the world.
It would mean having to eschew the neoliberal ideals that impede research and development in favour of the old that made America and to some extent the rest of the West the dominant superpower in R&D for many decades. We should be familiar with it, even if we have lived all or most of ours lives in the former.
Or it would be hard to convert back and we'd have a war first.
I've read a few times that sharing knowledge is also deeply ingrained in Chinese culture. Which led to the copycat nature of their past (~violating western practices in the process) according to some.
