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
Comment on Chinese AI lab DeepSeek massively undercuts OpenAI on pricing — and that's spooking tech stocks
DdCno1@beehaw.org 5 weeks agoOvervalued - 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.
pupbiru@aussie.zone 5 weeks ago
Empricorn@feddit.nl 5 weeks ago
Overvalued - as in, less useful than it seems to be
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 weeks 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 weeks 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?
TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip 5 weeks ago
That would be possible, but seasonal production has some serious downsides.
Let’s say you have a steel mill with several solar powered arc furnaces and enough batteries to keep production running through the night. During the summer you can continue production 24/7, but in the winter you’ll have to shut down completely, because there’s not enough energy to keep even a single production line running. This means that there will be wild fluctuations in a variety of things:
- number of employees on site
- rate of steel produced
- demand for storage space for raw materials and steel products
- demand for logistics
- demand for maintenance This means, that in order to deal with the fluctuations, you would need to have lots of spare capacity in pretty much everything: More machines, more people, more money. If you could keep the production steady throughout the year, you could do so with less.
In the winter you’ll have plenty of time to fix anything that’s broken, but if there’s an unscheduled shutdown during the summer, you’re suddenly going to need lots of maintenance personnel and materials. Incidentally, those will be in short supply in the summer, because all the other factories would have the same problem. You would need to have lots of spare capacity in maintenance as well.
The AI industry should be fine, since you could train models when energy is cheap. Oh, but what if the summer isn’t long enough for you to update all your models? Simply just buy more computers so you have more spare capa… Oh, it’s the steel mill problem all over again. Oh, but what about the people who use the models during the winter? Maybe you could charge your customers double the price during the winter so that the traffic would be reduced to a reasonable level.
drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 weeks ago
At to end of the day it comes down to this:
Is it cheaper to store steel stock in a warehouse or terrawatt-hours of electricity.
Is it cheaper to perform maintainance on 2 or 3x the number of smelters or is it cheaper to maintain millions of battery or pumped hydro facilities?
I’m sure production companies would love it if governments or electrical companies bore the costs of evening out fluctuations in production, just like I’m sure farmers would love it if money got teleported into their bank account for free and they never had to worry about growing seasons. But I’m not sure that’s the best situation for society as a whole.
TanyaJLaird@beehaw.org 5 weeks ago
Honestly, this all seems like small potatoes. We’re trying to save our species from extinction here. We’re trying to maintain the standard of living that came with the Industrial Revolution without burning out planet to a cinder.
If doing so means our steel industry runs 10% less efficiently, I really don’t give a damn.
Shezzagrad@lemmy.ml 5 weeks 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 weeks 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.
Shezzagrad@lemmy.ml 5 weeks ago
Did you just really send me iqair with such a bold statement without even checking the link itself? DUDE, JERUSALEM AMD SOFIA IN BULGARIA ARE MORE POLLUTED THAN SHANGHAI. For a nation of 1.4x thats seriously impressive. None of their cities crack top 5.
Wisdom is chasing you, but you are faster
DdCno1@beehaw.org 5 weeks ago
Here’s a challenge for you: Write something that is actually critical of the Chinese government. Can you do it?