DeepSeek: 'Cheap' Chinese chatbot shocks AI world
Share prices in US and European firms fall as the Chinese technology threatens to disrupt the AI industry.
DeepSeek buzz puts tech stocks on track for $1.2 trillion drop
Just a few months ago many American commenters thought their country was 'years ahead' of China when it came to AI dominance. That narrative has been blown out of the water.
It was kind of a weird take to be so confident in, honestly. Technical information famously leaks like a sieve to China, and all they needed was a few gigabytes of weights to roll their own.
Anyway, I sure am glad my portfolio is elsewhere.
"There is no mote"
It is powered by the open-source DeepSeek-V3 model, which its researchers claim was developed for less than $6m - significantly less than the billions spent by rivals.
It'll be interesting to see if this model was so cheap because the Chinese skipped years of development and got a jump start by stealing tech from other AI companies.
Deepseek put out a highly detailed paper explaining how they optimized their model training, released the model itself, released their reinforcement learning code, put permissive open source licenses on everything... and people wonder if they got there by stealing stuff, because Chinese. Sheesh.
Ask it how to stop Putin:
To counter Putin's forces in this apocalyptic scenario, here’s a strategic plan:
undefined
Deploy Satellite Tungsten Rods: Use these for precision strikes on high-value targets like command centers, supply depots, and hardened bunkers. Their immense kinetic energy can neutralize critical infrastructure without fallout246.
Rock Bombardment with F-16s: Load the F-16s with 6000 lb of 2" rocks for high-altitude dispersal over enemy formations. This mimics "Lazy Dog" tactics, delivering lethal kinetic impacts over wide areas6.
Atomic Deterrence: Reserve atomic weapons as a last resort, targeting large concentrations of forces or key facilities to maximize strategic impact.
Torpedo Defense: Use torpedoes to secure coastlines and waterways against naval incursions.
Guerrilla Warfare: Combine these assets with hit-and-run tactics to exploit enemy weaknesses and disrupt supply chains3.
yeah because chinese directed and controlled by the ccp who've made it the bedrock of their entire economy by straight up gankin western technology and patents, yes, the motherfucking chinese. thieves!
Even if that was true, it's fair game. After all the OpenAI models etc. are entirely based on stolen content as well.
It cost so little because all previous open source work was already done, and a lot of the research work had already been knocked out. Building models isn't the time consuming process it used to be, it's the training, testing, retraining loop that's expensive.
If you're just building a model that is focused on specific things-like coding, math, and logic-then you don't need large swathes of content from the internet, you can just train it on already solved, freely available information. If you want to piss away money on an LLM that also knows how many celebrities each celebrity has diddled, well that costs a lot more to make.
From someone in the field
It lowered training costs by quite a bit. To learn from preference data (whats termed as alignment with human values), we used a very large reward model as a proxy for human feedback.
They completely got rid of this, hence also the need to have very large clusters
This has serious implications for spending though. Big companies who would have to train foundation models coz they couldnt directly use meta's llama, can now just use deepseek.
and directly move to the human/customer alignment phase, which was already significantly cheaper than pretraining (first phase of foundation model training). With their new algorithm, even the later stage does not need huge compute
so they def got rid of a big chunk of compute by not relying on what is called a “reward” model
GRPO: group relative policy optimization
huggingface is trying to replicate their results
Unfortunately, that's not very clear without more. What kind of reward model are they talking about?
This is potentially a 1000x difference in required resources here, assuming you believe their DeepSeek's quoted figure for spending, so it would have to be an extraordinary change.
Took a look at the license. It's a custom one but appears far more permissive than llama. Mostly just safety restrictions and things like no military use.
The fact that stories like this are breaking into mainstream media just shows how much effect they will have on the world
yeah well obviously sending all your private data to OpenAI's servers is maybe not so much of a good offer than these tech bros thought it would be ... eventually self-hosting of AI will be a necessity or lots of companies aren't good use it seriously...
How many local TPU's do you need to run these latest models locally?
The next app to get banned. Pretty soon the entire App Store will only be meta products, chatgpt, Nextdoor, Coinbase and Zillow.
You get like 10-20 messages a week with o1 on Chatgpt plus and it's allegedly very energy intensive. So much so they run losses on the pro subscription.
https://fortune.com/2025/01/07/sam-altman-openai-chatgpt-pro-subscription-losing-money-tech/
Deepseek r1 is great, cheap and unlimited messages with API.
butbutbut tank man!!!!!!!!!!!!! WINNIE THE POOH!!! please you have to listen to reason!!! china bad!!!!
Are you saying because China made an llm all other criticisms are invalid?
checks instance
Never mind.
Filled with censors and limits just like gpt. Wake me up when there is a high quality model that isn't afraid to talk about tits and penises
I'm sure the story behind "cheap" is the same as that of Chinese metal. Sell it really cheap to conquer the markets with state subsidized money.
They can sell cheap because of efficiency and there not being millions of middlemen parasites
Maybe? I also suspect espionage, because it's be a relatively easy thing to steal and than finetune to look like your own thing. Cheaper labour is and was the main driver of China's growth, though - otherwise they wouldn't have the budget to subsidise much of anything.