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Deepseek R1 and Project Stargate
A few days ago the Chinese AI firm Deepseek released their newest reasoning model, R1. It's very clever according to the benchmarks, roughly on par with OpenAI's O1 at a tiny fraction of the price. My subjective analysis is that it still feels slightly uncanny/unwise compared to Sonnet 3.5 but is also more capable in strategic thinking and not making stupid errors in mathematics. These models are spiky, good in some places and weak in others. Somehow these things can reason together hundreds of lines of code but can't reason simpler, spontaneous things like 'is special relativity relevant here?'. Deepseek R1 also has a totally different attitude to Sonnet, it will stand up for itself and argue with you on matters of interpretation and subjectivity rather than constantly flip-flopping to agree with you like a yesman's yesman. It's also quite a good writer, slop levels are falling fast.
OpenAI has O3 coming soon which should restore qualitative superiority for the US camp. However, Deepseek is still just a few months behind the leading US provider in quality. They're far ahead in compute-efficiency. The clowns at Facebook have far more GPUs, far more money and aren't hampered by sanctions... What have they been doing with their tens, hundreds of thousands of H100s? Deepseek also flexed on them, finetuning Facebook's Llama models into much more capable reasoners as the cherry on top of their R1. Now even local models can display strong maths skills.
At the same time, Deepseek founder Liang Wenfeng was seen with the Premier of China: https://x.com/teortaxesTex/status/1881375948773486646
It's hard to judge whether this is significant, Xi Xinping >>>> the next most influential man in China. Plus, premiers meet lots of people all the time. However, China does have lots of resources, they could probably encourage some of the less capable Chinese AI companies to hand over their compute to Deepseek. China spent hundreds of billions on semiconductor policy for Made in China 2025, they can easily give Deepseek access to real compute as opposed to a couple-thousand of export-grade Nvidia GPUs. Tencent has at least 50,000 H-series GPUs and hasn't done anything particularly exciting with them as far as I know. (I asked R1 and it pointed out that Tencent has also made their own smaller, cheaper, mildly better version of Lambda 405B that probably nobody in the West has ever heard of: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.02265).
However, OpenAI has just announced 'Project Stargate' - a $500 Billion dollar investment in AI compute capacity over the next four years for OpenAI alone. Microsoft, Oracle, Nvidia, ARM are all working together with Softbank and some others, with the US government looming behind them. To a certain extent this is just repackaging re-existing investment as something new. But it's hard to get more serious than a $500 billion dollar capital investment plan. This plan was announced at the White House and Trump smiles on it, he took the Aschenbrenner pill some time ago.
https://x.com/OpenAI/status/1881830103858172059
It's funny to hear Trump reading out this stuff in a complete monotone, like he's bored or sleepy. 500 billion dollar investment... meh, who cares? He does seem to like Altman though, thinks he's the biggest expert in AI. I suspect Altman has used his maxxed out corporate charisma on Trump as well: https://x.com/levie/status/1881838470429319235
Interestingly, there's another huge disparity between the two AI competitors. China enjoys complete dominance in electricity production and grid expansion. They doubled electricity output in 10 years, the US has been treading water. The US talks about a nuclear renaissance and is building 0 new reactors. China is building 29. It's a similar story in all other areas of power production, China produces roughly a Germany's worth of power production every single year. It's possible that Trump's 'drill baby drill' can change this but the US is starting from very far behind China in this part of the race.
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-future-generation/plans-for-new-reactors-worldwide
There are considerable power issues with Stargate, more gas and coal will be needed to bring it online. Also another perspective on Trump's 'energy emergency' as being about AI: https://x.com/energybants/status/1881860142108377412
I see a conflict between two paradigms - power rich, GPU-poor and hyper-talented China vs power-poor, GPU-rich and grimly determined USA.
Political relevance? Trump perks up for a moment: "We want it to be in this country, we want it to be in this country, China is a competitor, others are competitors..." Deepseek has a wildly different vision for AI, open-sourcing everything the moment they can. I don't need to quote the ridiculously benevolent-sounding interviews where they talk about the honour of open-source for engineers as a big part of their strategy - they've backed up talk with action.
I find it quite ironic that the censored, dictatorial Chinese are the bastions of open-source technology for the everyman while the democratic, liberty-loving Americans are plotting to monopolize the most powerful technology in history and shroud it in secrecy. I suppose that's another cultural difference between the West and China. We have been fixated upon the dangers of robotics and mechanization for 60 years if not longer. We have the Daleks, the Cybermen, Skynet, HAL, GLADOS, the Matrix, SHODAN, Ultron, M3gan and so much more that I've not even heard about. Our cultural ethos is that AI is supremely political and dangerous and important and must be considered very very very carefully. There are good AIs like Cortana but even Cortana goes rogue at points.
The Chinese have... a goofy meme robot with a cannon on its crotch. As far as I can see, that is the absolute closest thing they have to a malign robot/AI in their cultural sphere. There's nothing with any broad cultural salience like Skynet, only this silly little guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xianxingzhe
I think this may be relevant to how AI programs are developed and the mindset of AI development. Google, Facebook and Anthropic are all spending huge amounts of time and resources to be careful, making sure everything is safe and nontoxic, making sure they're genre-aware, carefully considering the worldshaping effects of the algorithm, ensuring the AIs can't escape and betray them. Someone in Google really wanted there to be black Vikings in this world and made it so in their image model. Whereas the people at Deepseek don't really care about politics beyond holding to the party line in the required areas, they go: 'don't be such a pussy, advance forwards with longtermism'.
Amazing how as recently as 2008 the $750 billion bank bailout was unpresented, and now $500 billion is an afterthought. goes to show how much bigger the economy is and how these fears of debt are mostly hot air or unacted on. The people who have predicted debt collapse for the past 20+ years keep being wrong.
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Modern Chinese cultural attitudes towards robots are largely taken from the most effervescent outputs of cultural proximates.
In otherwords, Chinese robotics developers are anime nerds. And specifically the anime nerds that got excited by robot companions, with the cutesy human interface therein.
Pudu robotics sells the cat faced robots, with that design feature specifically meant to evoke friendliness and relatability, not the depersonalized industrial robots that western companies like Aethon built. Chinese dog robots like the Go2 and its knockoffs all come with the "dance" and "sit+handshake" command preloaded into hotkeys on the controllers because it is expected that these cute whirring things will be entertaining to children. The Chinese attitude to robots is largely founded on the idea of usability in the human sphere, and the idea that robots will rise up to be a threat to kill us all isn't really on the forefront of their mind.
This is not to say the Chinese are moral in terms of their attitude to robots. They, like everyone else, have military technologists who enthusiastically adopted nerdy shit to be destructive killbots. In particular fixed wing loitering munition robotics seem to be developed by nerds that saw terminator and went 'yes we want that' as opposed to the nerds that saw robots as companions to our lives.
On that note, watch the Chinese space for humanoid form factor robotics. They are using AI to train humanoid movements for dynamic locomotion, or at least an approximation of such. Uh ok no easy way to say this, its sexbots. A number of sex doll companies have already started training AI on porn videos to learn technique and visual presentation, and have integrated character AI (one poster here talked about character chat AI a few months ago and it was great I can't remember who), and said personalities were already rather advanced mid 2024. Fully expect to see domestic humanoid form factor robots come out of China in 2026 onwards. Special functions hidden behind paywall of course.
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Deepseek cannot show correctly that L = {w ∈ {0}^n | w is a substring of the decimal places of π} is decidable, and instead opts for a Turing machine that only enumerates through pi's digits, which might not halt and therefore does not actually decide the language. And while you said
when I told it that I've been lying and it actually is undecidable, it agrees and comes up with a "proof".
So overall I conclude that we are still away from a proper reasoning model which solves logically intricate problems. Not sure whether I should be glad or disappointed about it.
Wait, how do you figure it's decidable? Last I checked, it was still open whether pi is normal (contains all strings of digits as substrings). Containing arbitrarily long runs of zeroes is weaker, but doesn't feel weaker in a way that would likely be easier to prove. If we don't know a priori that it has all possible runs, how could we do better to determine if it has a particular one than semi-deciding by enumerating the digits?
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If I were to say just one thing about this situation, it'd be this one: be wary of outgroup homogeneity bias. People are not “China” or “America”. Not even Xi himself is “China”, whatever Louis XIV had to say on the matter. Certainly neither is Liang Wenfeng.
Still, first about DeepSeek and China.
I think that the US-PRC AI competition is the most important story of our age, so I pretty much don't comment on anything else here. I have three posts, of which two are directly about this: on Huawei Kirin chips and one on DeepSeek V2. Prior to that major writeup I've said:
Well, as you note, nowadays Wenfeng gets invited to talk to the second man in all of China, so if that were his goal, he has probably succeeded. But (since you haven't I'll bother to quote) we've learned in the last few months – and I agree he's proven his sincerity with abundant evidence, from revealed company direction to testimonies of ex-researchers in the West – that his actual angle was different:
With this one weird trick, he's built apparently the highest-talent-density AGI lab in China. Scientists have ambitions beyond making Sam Altman filthy rich and powerful or receiving generational wealth as crumbs from his table. They want to make a name for themselves. Some are even naive enough to want to contribute something to the world. This is not very stereotypically Chinese, and so Wenfeng has gotten himself a non-stereotypical Chinese company. I recommend reading both interviews (the second one is translated by this grateful ex-researcher, by the way. That, too, is not a very typical thing to do for your former boss).
I've been an increasingly convinced DeepSeek fanatic ever since their very first LLMs, Coder-33B and 6.7B, first surfaced on Reddit around October 2023. I could tell at a glance that this is an abnormally efficient company, with some unusual ethos, and that it displays total lack of chabuduo attitude that at that point came to be expected, and is still expected, from Chinese AI project (clueless training on test and OpenAI outputs, distasteful self-promotion, absence of actual scientific interest and ambition, petty myopic objectives…) How much they have achieved is still a large surprise to me. I use V3, and now R1+search, dozens of times per day, it's not out of some confused loyalty, it's just that good, fast, free and pleasant. It has replaced Sonnet 3.5 for almost every use case.
In that post 6 months ago I've said:
Some have argued that Llama-405B will puncture my narrative. It hasn't, it's been every bit as useless and economically unjustifiable a money sink as I imagined it to be. Ditto for Mistral Large. For whatever reason, rich Westerners prove to be very aligned to strategic national interests, and won't take the initiative in releasing disruptive technology. DeepSeek-Coder-V2 was the prototype of that engine for riding up the exponent. R1 is its somewhat flawed production version. Nothing else in the open comes close as of yet. Maybe we don't need much of anything else.
So, about the West.
From what I can tell, the path to AGI, then ASI is now clear. R1 is probably big enough to be an AGI, has some crucial properties of one, and what remains is just implementing a few tricks we already know and can cover in a post no longer than this one. It will take less engineering than goes into a typical woke AAA game that flops on Steam. If Li Quiang and Pooh Man Bad so wished, they could mobilize a few battalions of software devs plus compute and infra resources hoarded by the likes of Baidu and Alibaba, hand that off to Wenfeng and say “keep cooking, Comrade” – that'd be completely sufficient. (Alas, I doubt that model would be open). The same logic applies to Google, which has shipped a cheap and fast reasoner model mere hours after DeepSeek, mostly matching it on perf and exceeding on features. Reasoning is quickly getting commoditized.
So I am not sure what happens next, or what will be done with those $500B. To be clear it's not some state program like the CHIPS act, but mostly capex and investments that has already been planned, repackaged to fit into Trumpian MAGA agenda. But in any case: the Western frontier is several months ahead of DeepSeek, and there are indeed hundreds of thousands of GPUs available, and we know that it only takes 2048 nerfed ones, 2 months and 130 cracked Chinese kids to get to bootstrap slow but steady recursive self-improvement. Some specific Meta departments have orders of magnitude more than that, even Chinese kids. Deep fusion multimodality, RL from-scratch to replace language pretraining, immense context lengths? Just how wasteful can you be with compute to need to tap into new nuclear buildouts before you have a superhuman system on your hands? Feverishly design nanobots or better fighter jets to truly show Commuist Choyna who's who? What's the game plan?
I think Miles, ex OpenAI Policy head, appears to be increasingly correct: there's no winning this race.
Do you want (literal) war, dear Americans? It's quite possible that you'll never again have a good chance to start one. The Chinese are still at only like 1000 nuclear warheads. You can sacrifice all the population of your major cities in a desperate bid for geopolitical hegemony and Evangelical Rapture fantasies. Or you can fantasize about your Wonder Weapon that'll be so much more Wonderful before the other guy's that it'll be akin to a paperclip against soft flesh – just give Sama or Ilya several hundreds of billions more. Or you can cope with the world where other powers, nasty and illiberal ones, get to exist indefinitely.
I won't give advice except checking out R1 with and without Search, it's terribly entertaining if nothing else. https://chat.deepseek.com/
Deepseek R1 is surprisingly good. My go to when testing out a new LLM is to open a new chat and ask "Amuse me". R1 started out with a trite joke but when admonished for it moved up to a higher and more interesting level, comping up with a scenario about a world where your hair colour changes whenever you tell a lie and the social dynamics it would have (invest in hair colour companies). Definitely something which prompted 15 seconds of thought in me.
Most LLMs are significantly worse at this, they don't realize I'm not looking for humour but rather amusement and keep on putting out more and more verbose jokes.
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Like a ghost from the past, he’s returned. DM me the link to your AI blog, I won’t share it.
Trump folded on TikTok because zoomers got a little mad and he wanted to stay popular. The entire natsec establishment and a supermajority in congress got foiled by kids whining about not being able to access 30 second skits and clips of teenagers lipsyncing. There will probably be no war with China.
I don't have a blog, I'm too disorganized to run one.
I find it unlikely you stopped writing, is my point.
Rookie mistake, you should have asked in private. Now he has to deny that there's any blog to share.
Maybe he sent me the link 👀
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My immediate impression is that R1 is good at writing and RP-style chatting, and is sure to be the new hotness among goons if it remains this cheap and available. Chat V3's writing was already quite serviceable but suffered from apparent lack of multi-turn training, which led to collapsing into format/content looping within the first ~15 chat messages (sometimes regurgitating entire messages from earlier in place of a response) and proved unfixable via pure prompting. I plugged R1 into long chats to test and so far it doesn't seem to have this issue; also unlike V3, R1 seems to have somehow picked up the old-Claude-style "mad poet" schtick where it can output assorted schizokino with minimal prompting. Reportedly no positivity bias either (sure looks like it at least), but I haven't ahem tested extensively yet.
Quite impressed with what I see and read so far, R1 really feels like Claude-lite - maybe not quite Opus-level in terms of writing quality/style, although it's honestly hard to gauge objectively, but absolutely a worthy Sonnet replacement once people figure out how to properly prompt it (and once I can actually pass parameters like temp through OR, doesn't seem to be supported yet).
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It actually can tell there are three R's in "strawberry". The actual log is hilarious, as it's struggling with the fact that every time it counts it finds three of them and goes, "Wait a minute, that doesn't seem right. Let me double-check the spelling of "strawberry.""
And it still can't solve this itself:
After some extensive hinting it finally gets it:
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I am mildly impressed
I'd like to see "the infinite blink server crasher Temporalis build but it's a cautionary lullaby" now. Although I doubt it's in the dataset yet.
Some flavors of the Forbidden Build should be old enough.
In fact I just asked out of curiosity and R1 was able to figure out and explain how wardloop works with minimal nudging on my part, even just explicitly calling it "wardloop" was enough. I like how it shows the thinking process, very cute.
"Now, Jarvis, tell me how the Chinese dupe mirrors."
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Schizoposting: Altman doesn’t have rizz. I won’t call it a cabal (in part because it actually isn’t), but there’s just a group of very well-connected gay men around Altman/Thiel in SV who are very powerful and constantly back each other up. Trump, in a way, enjoys the company and attention of gay men (I don’t mean in a bi/gay way himself, but in the sense that I truly believe he has a certain affinity for gay men and always has), and is kind of a straight queen, and so it all works pretty well.
Trump has always been deeply interested in image, not just his own or what's broadly anything associated with him, but the objective and subjective perception of anything. Certain gay men are better equipped than anyone else to talk to Trump about specific angles, historically certain black men and women too, but some of that was burned either by Obama skepticism and much more once he was the frontrunner in 2016.
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