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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   12744 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 20, 2025

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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:

We don't understand the motivations of Deepseek and the quant fund High-Flyer that's sponsoring them, but one popular hypothesis is that they are competing with better-connected big tech labs for government support, given American efforts in cutting supply of chips to China. After all, the Chinese also share the same ideas of their trustworthiness, and so you have to be maximally open to Western evaluators to win the Mandate of Heaven.

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:

In the face of disruptive technologies, the moat formed by closed source is short-lived. Even if OpenAI is closed source, it won’t stop others from catching up. So we put the value on our team, our colleagues grow in the process, accumulate a lot of know-how, and form an organization and culture that can innovate, which is our moat.

In fact, nothing is lost with open source and openly published papers. For technologists, being "followed" is a great sense of accomplishment. In fact, open source is more of a cultural behavior than a commercial one. To give is to receive glory. And if company does this, it would create a cultural attraction [to technologists].

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).

There weren’t a lot of deep wizards, just this-year graduates from top colleges and universities, those who are in their 4th or 5th year of PhD, and young people who had only graduated a few years ago. … V2 didn’t use any people coming back from overseas, they are all local. The top 50 people may not be in China, but maybe we can build them ourselves.

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:

To wit, Western and Eastern corporations alike generously feed us – while smothering startups – fancy baubles to tinker with, charismatic talking toys; as they rev up self-improvement engines for full cycle R&D, the way imagined by science fiction authors all these decades ago, monopolizing this bright new world. […] they're all neat. But they don't even pass for prototypes of engines you can hop on and hope to ride up the exponential curve. They're too… soft. And not economical for their merits.

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.

Stargate + related efforts could help the US stay ahead of China, but China will still have their own superintelligence(s) no more than a year later than the US, absent e.g. a war. So unless you want (literal) war, you need to have a vision for navigating multipolar AI outcomes. P.S. the up to one year thing is about a world in which the US keeps or ratchets up the current batch of export controls on China. If the US were to relax them significantly, China could catch up or even leapfrog due to a huge advantage in doing large scale energy buildouts.

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/

I don't subscribe to the Dase Model of the World, but you might find our new administration's focus on missile defense interesting in this regard.

We could probably shoot down 10% of China's 1000 warheads on a good day now, maybe scaling that up to defeat the entire Chinese arsenal is just a matter of procurement. Maybe we could win a war against China without sacrificing anything more than a fleet or two, even if they decide to go nuclear. Food for thought!

Would China continue not maintaining more than 1000 warheads if the 10% figure were to go up, though? Right now, the US is not yet in a quantitative arms race with China. To think that you could just overtake them without triggering one is the most naive failure mode of planning (to think that you can change while the rest of the world remains static), and to start one and win almost reduces to outmanufacturing China (which is certainly not just "a matter of procurement").

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.

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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