tech has been subsidizing ai costs by magnitudes for years trying to make fetch happen, slop is slop. it’s overvalued like crazy and the first hint of market competition has drained trillions from the stocks because it’s an overvalued bubble. if china can do that by releasing competition then ok. maybe we should all be putting these trillions in things actually useful to humans.
Comment on Chinese AI lab DeepSeek massively undercuts OpenAI on pricing — and that's spooking tech stocks
DdCno1@beehaw.org 5 days ago
Not a word on Chinese models being censored in the article. What an odd omission.
It should also be pretty obvious that this is following the usual Chinese MO of using massive state subsidies to destroy the international competition with impossibly low dumping prices. We are seeing this in all sorts of sectors.
Umbrias@beehaw.org 5 days ago
DdCno1@beehaw.org 5 days ago
If anything, this is just the start of an arms race. Do you really expect the Western competition to just stop what they are doing, because a single Chinese model performs well in a handful of synthetic tests that it was probably optimized to score well in?
I’m not a fan of AI slop either, on the contrary, but let’s be realistic here.
Umbrias@beehaw.org 4 days ago
an arms race for what? more efficient slop? most of their value comes from the expected exclusivity - that say openai is the only one who can run something like o1. deepseek has made that collapse. i doubt they will stop doing stuff, but i dont think you understand the nature of the situation here.
also lol, “performs well in synthetic tests it was optimized to score well in” yes that literally describes every llm. Make no mistake: none of this has a real use case. not deepseek’s model, not openai’s, not apples, etc. this is all nonsense, literally. the stock market lost 2 trillion dollars overnight because something that doesnt have a use case was one upped by something else that also doesnt have a use case. it’s very funny.
Hotspur@lemmy.ml 5 days ago
There’s a strong argument that any consumer facing chatbot AI is “censored”. I’ve had chatGPT clam up in bizarre ways after it misinterprets what I’m asking. It just depends on company owning the product and what they view their legal exposure to be.
Also, we are applying huge govt subsidies to ai industry based on thin value evidence at this very moment. And we provide subsidies for many of our industries to help prop them up, sometimes to hugely bad effect. It’s what countries do to build, maintain and win industrial arms races.
Deepseek-R1 is open source and you can download it and run it offline. I’m not a power user but was able to get a functioning offline version of the 32B distill model running on a spare machine I had in a hour or so from scratch. I used online deepseek for most of the process to provide instructions and troubleshoot. I can’t comment on how amazing it is, other than to say so far it’s felt about as good as my interactions with GPT4 on the free chatGPT tier. In both cases I remain skeptical about their deep business use outside of certain areas.
From what I’ve read, you can use the base, and methodology and train your own new model if you have the technical ability and desire (rumor is meta AI has shelved their WIP and adopted deepseek as their new basis). This would imply that if you wanted to be able to talk to your LLM about topics like Taiwan, you could absolutely set up a model that would do that.
DdCno1@beehaw.org 5 days ago
There’s a strong argument that any consumer facing chatbot AI is “censored”.
Please don’t use whataboutism to downplay state censorship.
Hotspur@lemmy.ml 5 days ago
If you’re going to accuse China of state censorship, then I suppose you are also vehemently opposed to the censorship we apply to our media, social media and “AI” platforms, and since you dislike the lack of journalistic integrity in this article for pointing out that state censorship you would support similar caveats being added to articles about OpenAI, Meta, X in regards to how they handle issues like Gaza, Culture War topics and coverage of political candidates?
It’s fair to bring up comparisons when your critique is claiming an imbalance in portrayal between the “realities” of ai development in China and the US.
DdCno1@beehaw.org 5 days ago
It’s incredibly dishonest to equate Chinese state censorship with what the West is doing.
TehPers@beehaw.org 5 days ago
There’s a strong argument that any consumer facing chatbot AI is “censored”.
If the model is not allowed to spew Nazi propaganda or tell the user to end themselves, that is censorship. Censorship is not automatically bad, but the kind of censorship can make it bad.
This reeks of excluding all nuance to equate two things that are equal only at surface level. You’re bad because you punched the other person (ignoring that they stabbed your SO 15 times and kicked your dog across the room).
Chinese state censorship is well researched and extremely well documented. It does not equate to censorship against violent or inappropriate language. It is political censorship.
At best, western models are biased, not politically censored. You can make them say just about anything, but they will bias towards a particular viewpoint. Even if intentional, this is explainable by evaluating their training data, which itself is biased because western society is biased. You are not prevented from personally expressing or even convincing a western model from expressing dissenting political viewpoints.
Hotspur@lemmy.ml 5 days ago
I’m gonna take a second stab at replying, because you seem to be arguing in good faith.
My original point is that online chatbots have arbitrary curbs that are built in. I can run GPT 2.5 on my self host machine, and if I knew how to do it (I don’t) I could probably get it to have no curbs via retraining and clever prompting. The same is true of the deepseek models.
I don’t personally agree that there’s a huge difference between one model being curbed from discussing xi and another from discussing what the current politics du jour in the western sphere are. When you see platforms like meta censoring LGTBTQ topics but amplifying hate speech, or official congressional definitions of antisemitism including objection to active and on-going genocide, the idea of what government censorship is and isn’t becomes confusing.
Having personally received the bizarre internal agency emails circulating this week encouraging me to snitch out my colleagues to help root out the evils of DEIA thought in US gov’t the last week has only crystallized it for me. I’m not sure I care that much about Chinese censorship or authoritarianism; I’ve got budget authoritarianism at home, and I don’t even get high-speed rail out of the bargain. At least they don’t depend on forever wars and all of the attendant death and destruction that come with them to prop up their ponzi-scheme economies. Will they in the future, probably? They are basically just a heavily centralized/regulated capitalist enterprise now, so who knows. But right now? Do they engage in propaganda? Cyber-espionage? Yes and Yes. So do we, so do you, so does everyone who has a seat at the geopolitical table and the economy to afford it.
The point of all of this isn’t US GOOD CHINA BAD or US BAD CHINA GOOD. The article is about the deepseek models tearing out the floor of US dominance in AI. Personally, having deployed it and played with it, yeah. None of these products are truly useful to me yet, and I remain skeptical of their eventual value, but right now, party censorship or not, you can download a version of an LLM that you can run, retrain and bias however you want, and it costs you the bandwidth it took to download. And it performs on par with US commercial offerings that require pricey subscriptions. Offerings that apparently require huge public investment to keep afloat.
TehPers@beehaw.org 4 days ago
Where I disagree with you is not that the US is bad - the US is terrible, and there is plenty of evidence of that. I don’t even disagree with there being censorship in the US. In fact, Trump is objectively a piece of shit who wants nothing more than to become Xi/Putin himself.
What I disagree with is equating censorship in the US with Chinese censorship. I can call Trump a piece of shit online without worrying that the FBI will show up at my door. The models that are trained in the west will happily entertain any (non-violent) political discussions I want. There may be bias, and Trump may be trying to create censorship, but it’s not quite to that level yet.
Having personally received the bizarre internal agency emails circulating this week encouraging me to snitch out my colleagues to help root out the evils of DEIA thought in US gov’t the last week has only crystallized it for me.
I am concerned that the US will become as bad as China in terms of censorship, which is part of why I’m trying to leave right now. However, it’s not there yet. They are not yet equal, nor are they even close yet.
Hotspur@lemmy.ml 5 days ago
You say Chinese state censorship is an understood quantity. Could be. But I’d say that my points about equivalencies are to illustrate that what we think is true, is often much more grey. I’ve been to China, and while I was impressed and shocked at how much more advanced it was than I expected, I also couldn’t imaging living there. It doesn’t change the fact that a stagnant late-stage capital mafia state that lives off defense contracting is performing ooorly against a centrally controlled capitalist state that has set different priorities (that’s right boy, deepseek-r1 is a side project of a…. CHINESE HEDGE FUND). It’s value neutral. But if you dismiss reality based on a conception of political censorship that I doubt you’ve deeply engaged with, enjoy.
The so called free market certainly didn’t seem to take much reassurance in deepseek being compromised by communist censorship this morning though. Probably because the deepseek news isn’t exceptional because of China, or what it is, but because of what it isn’t, compared to the bloated tech carcasses that the US has pinned its hopes on.
Empricorn@feddit.nl 5 days ago
Okay… But isn’t it also possible that AI is massively overvalued and this is a more reasonable price point for the technology?
DdCno1@beehaw.org 5 days ago
Overvalued - as in, less useful than it seems to be - probably, but the costs of running it are immense and they are certainly not that much lower in China (despite low energy prices due to nonexistent environmental standards), given the hardware embargoes they are under, forcing them to use less efficient hardware.
Shezzagrad@lemmy.ml 5 days ago
“due to non existent environmental standards” buddy unless your from rural northern Europe or the mountains in the Himalayan wtf are you talking about. Compared to America, china is much much less polluted per person with people personally accounting for less than the average American or westerner.
DdCno1@beehaw.org 5 days ago
China has some of the worst polluted cities in the world, far worse than European or American cities. Water quality is abysmal, partly due to extremely inefficient use of fertilizer and pesticides. Products exported from China are commonly exceeding limits on toxic substances. It feels like every other week, there’s another food safety scandal. Soil contamination is still worsening, in part due to extremely dirty mining practices. Chinese companies are falsifying records in order to hide excessive emissions from customers.
Meanwhile, environmental activists are routinely [being persecuted by the state]www.rfa.org/…/environmental-activist-sentenced/) in order to silence them. That’s totally what a country with a great environmental track record would do.
pupbiru@aussie.zone 5 days ago
i believe one of the big advancements with deepseek r1 is their method of adding the reasoning component is novel and very very efficient. i haven’t checked it out, but it could legitimately just be more efficient to run
Empricorn@feddit.nl 5 days ago
Uh, no… “Value”, as in quality/performance for the price. You can literally overpay for anything in this world, just look at the luxury market.
I’m not claiming to know enough about AI or LLMs, but I don’t think the first to market or the most prominent always set the price. So I think we’ll have to see what the accepted price actually turns out to be…
TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip 5 days ago
Interesting about Chinese energy market is that in recent decades they’ve been investing heavily in solar power. Once they’ve figured it grid energy storage, running LLMs shouldn’t be a problem anymore.
TanyaJLaird@beehaw.org 5 days ago
Another option is to skip most of the grid storage and just spam solar panels. Rely on batteries only to get you through the night, not to bridge power across seasons. Build enough panels that your country can meet its needs even on a cloudy day in winter. Then you have reasonable power costs in the winter and nearly free electricity the rest of the year.
You could see a lot of energy-intensive industries becoming seasonal. We have a crop growing season, a school season, and sports seasons. Why not an “AI model training” season?
Sina@beehaw.org 5 days ago
Energy costs money in China too, they still have coal plants and crazy energy cutback mandates every once in a while.
The truth of the matter is that you need the user interactions from the free model to train and that value cannot be understated and if you are playing catchup it’s a must.