The DeepSeek challenge
the Chinese can innovate
More on why tariffs won’t work and why US consumers will be financially repressed.
Yes, China is taking the lead in AI. Whether China lied about the cost or worked around the export restrictions doesn’t matter. Their code is better. Keep in mind that the Chinese labor force is about four times the size of America’s and is highly educated for the most part. Here’s what Grok has to say.
The replication of DeepSeek's development process for its V3 and R1 models has been a topic of interest within the AI research community, particularly due to the methodologies and costs involved:
Replication in Reality or Simulation: There has been a notable initiative called "Open R1" which aims to fully replicate the DeepSeek-R1 training pipeline. This project is hosted on Hugging Face's platform and focuses on open-sourcing the training data, scripts, and other resources necessary for reproducing DeepSeek-R1's functionalities. This indicates an attempt to replicate the development in reality, emphasizing transparency and collaboration. However, there's no clear evidence in the provided sources of a complete and verified replication of either V3 or R1 in simulation or reality by independent parties outside of this Open R1 project.
Claims Regarding Cost: DeepSeek has claimed that their V3 model was developed at a relatively low cost of approximately $5.58 million, which is significantly less than the costs associated with similar efforts by other major AI labs like Meta, OpenAI, or Google. This figure has sparked discussion and skepticism in some quarters about the feasibility and transparency of such a low-cost development for a frontier-level model. The efficiency and cost-effectiveness are attributed to innovations like Multi-head Latent Attention, DeepSeekMoE, and a novel reinforcement learning approach without extensive supervised fine-tuning. However, posts on X and various web discussions show a mix of admiration for the engineering prowess and skepticism about whether all costs are fully accounted for, especially given the complexity of such models.
In summary, while there are initiatives to replicate DeepSeek's model development, particularly with R1, the complete replication in both reality and simulation by independent entities remains unconfirmed by the available sources. Regarding costs, DeepSeek's claims are innovative but viewed with a degree of skepticism regarding their transparency and completeness. The AI community continues to discuss and analyze these claims, looking for more detailed breakdowns or validations.
Here’s “Inside China Business” on Chinese universities and where their best students want to work. It’s not longer the US.
Pray for peace!