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On DeepSeek and export controls
- jonathanstrange 2y agoIt's shortsighted to believe that export controls are relevant. China will be able to manufacture as good or better chips than the US in the not too distant future anyway.
- suraci 2y agoThis is a choice between the lesser of two evils, or what could be called "drinking poison to quench thirst." Export controls might lead China to develop its own advanced chips, but without them, China will certainly gain powerful AI capabilities
- CamperBob2 2y agoPoint being, they will gain those capabilities either way. The only question is whether we in the US choose to hamstring ourselves with bureaucracy while we watch them do it.
- Kostchei 2y agoreminds me of every other tariff based failure in the past...
- dutchbookmaker 2y agoI think it is even worse than this. The only way this would work is to create a kind of great firewall of America keeping open source Chinese models out while the remainder of the globe uses something like DeepSeek. It would literally be the dumbest soft-power move in the history of the US.
- wood_spirit 2y agoChina only has to attack Taiwan to deny the US of TSMC’s production capacity. Prediction: they will do this as soon as they see sufficient domestic chip production. The attempts to inshore fabs to the USA is too little too late. And it doesn’t matter if Trump defends Taiwan and makes China back down - the fabs will have been bombed to bits. As it is, trump would probably just do sanctions and tariffs, which - like Russia - China will expect to weather.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- hellojesus 2y ago> And it doesn’t matter if Trump defends Taiwan and makes China back down - the fabs will have been bombed to bits. What would prevent the US from directly attacking China's domestic fabs in this scenario? Defending Taiwan doesn't seem as proxy-ish as Ukraine considering China considers it their territory already.
- wood_spirit 2y agoIt seems unlikely the US will take military action to protect an ally. It seems even more unlikely that, should the US be prepared to bomb land targets in China, that they would do anything beyond overt military targets that are being used to attack Taiwan. When trump has recently been asked what he’ll do when China attacks Taiwan he has just said sanctions and tariffs.
- hellojesus 2y agoMaybe so. Thank you for the perspective. My going hypothesis is that the US cannot politically solve their Modern Monetary Theory national debt blackhole problem and is therefore itching for WW3 to be able to "reset" debts when the dust settles. Taiwan seems like a good opportunity for that, but maybe there is some sanity left in Congress.
- juliuskiesian 2y agoThat's a extremely dangerous, disproportionate and self destructive strategy. What would prevent China from bombing US targets as revenge? Both mainland and Taiwan belong to China, it's written even in the Taiwanese constitution. The controversy is in the definition of China, basically they are supposed to unify mainland while the mainland wants to unify them. A balance will be reached at some point either peacefully or violently. Peace is more likely if the US stops pouring oil on fire. The US should stay out of this situation if its leadership has its own people's interest in mind. A hot war between US and China will cause many millions to die and possibly end of human civilization. Let that sink in.
- astrange 2y agoThat is impossible. There's several layers deep of sole suppliers for them.
- resters 2y agoHe’s lost my Claude pro subscription and my respect with this post
- Verlyn139 2y agoanother American Nationalist that see competition as a "threat" to their monopoly, how Great!!
- epoch_100 2y ago> DeepSeek does not "do for $6M what cost US AI companies billions". I can only speak for Anthropic, but Claude 3.5 Sonnet is a mid-sized model that cost a few $10M's to train (I won't give an exact number). Also, 3.5 Sonnet was not trained in any way that involved a larger or more expensive model (contrary to some rumors). Wow!
- jddj 2y agoThe narrative is running away in every direction. There are popular infographics floating around today which explain to the layman that deepseek invented MoE.
- xtracto 2y agoShit... I was just looking at the DeepSeekMoE paper, almost exactly from 1 year ago: https://arxiv.org/html/2401.06066v1 https://arxiv.org/html/2401.06066v1 The red star in the first chart is so funny.
- Palmik 2y agoAnthropic is, according to themselves, using RLAIF... which is basically using LLM as a judge / reward model. So maybe he means that the models they use for RLAIF are not (much?) more expensive than Sonnet 3.5 (e.g. previous Sonnet or Haiku 3 :)).
- highfrequency 2y agoDo you have a link to Anthropic saying they use RLAIF?
- Palmik 2y agohttps://www.anthropic.com/research/constitutional-ai-harmlessness-from-ai-feedback https://www.anthropic.com/research/constitutional-ai-harmles...
- gadtfly 2y ago
- suraci 2y ago> Thus, in this world, the US and its allies might take a commanding and long-lasting lead on the global stage. This is just like Captain America giving a pre-battle speech to the Avengers—it's so inspiring! Hail Hydra!
- Synaesthesia 2y agoDemocratic USA must prevail against Communist China by having better models. edit: (Please read this in a sarcastic voice, I think it's a crazy idea!)
- suraci 2y agootherwise it will become to a multipolar world(or 'bipolar', said the article) that would be horrible, a multipolar world? what a nightmare
- bcrosby95 2y agoPowerful people are playing chess and the rest of us are pawns - whatever could go wrong?
- verdverm 2y agoDepending on your perspective, pawns that get promoted?
- rvnx 2y agoAs users, we would have more choices, more competition, and access to cheaper AI, more freedom (if DeepSeek stays open), higher quality models. The same with chips, if no sanctions on exports to NVIDIA, we would have access to Huawei Ascend chips (used by DeepSeek to have lower runtime costs)
- inglor_cz 2y agoMultipolar world is probably going to have multiple wars on the "edges of control", similar to the one now raging in Ukraine. It may also have some positives, too, but situations with several similarly sized powers competing for primacy have historically been pretty bloody. Unlike Apple and Google, the US, China, Russia etc. have military forces at their disposal.
- world2vec 2y agoAt least they're all coming out of the woodwork and start telling more details about their own training runs, costs, efficiency rates and so on. Interesting to see how an open-weights model could force their hand like that.
- pavl- 2y agoUnless the author makes a compelling case about why AI breaks the MAD status-quo between nuclear powers, I will assume that their appeals to NATSEC are an attempt to artificially create moat for their company.
- highfrequency 2y agoI also find it counterintuitively reassuring that we have already had the power to blow up the planet for decades. But at least in theory - GPT10 level AI could help develop missile defense systems that actually work at scale, which would eliminate the MAD status quo, no?
- mistercheph 2y agoWhat about the missile guidance / launch systems it could develop? The question at the at the limit of development becomes is nuclear warfare slightly attacker biased or slightly defender biased?
- superq 2y agoAI is potentially so much deeper than MAD status quo.
- flashman 2y agoI imagine that argument is a pretty easy sell. Of course governments will want to create moats that protect their incumbents.
- Palmik 2y ago> All of this is to say that DeepSeek-V3 is not a unique breakthrough or something that fundamentally changes the economics of LLM’s; it’s an expected point on an ongoing cost reduction curve. What’s different this time is that the company that was first to demonstrate the expected cost reductions was Chinese. Says the CEO whose product [1] costs 15-50x times more. (This is not just the DeepSeek's API, but also 3p providers hosting the same model) > DeepSeek does not "do for $6M5 what cost US AI companies billions". I can only speak for Anthropic, but Claude 3.5 Sonnet is a mid-sized model that cost a few $10M's to train Ok, that's still at least 3-10x cost reduction (assuming "a few $10M" lowerbound of $20M). And for a model that he later implies is 2x larger than Sonnet. So that's 6-10x efficiency improvement. Nice! > Since DeepSeek-V3 is worse than those US frontier models — let’s say by ~2x on the scaling curve. What curve? Does he mean the simplistic performance / model params curve? That does not take into account that DeepSeek v3 is a MoE (can't compare MoE and dense param # in a naive way), nor the other architecture changes (KV compression, etc.). Also, if Sonnet 3.5 is 2x smaller, then why is inference 15-50x more expensive than DeepSeek v3's? Does Anthropic not have good GPU engineers? Are they just running at insanely high margins? As a consumer I don't care how big your model is behind the scenes. I care about API costs or inference efficiency when hosting the model myself. [1] Product that is mostly comparable and in some ways quite ahead.
- kalkin 2y agoWhere does he imply that it's 2x larger than Sonnet?
- Palmik 2y agoI inferred that from the other statement: > Since DeepSeek-V3 is worse than those US frontier models — let’s say by ~2x on the scaling curve, which I think is quite generous to DeepSeek-V3 He says that it's 2x worse. So if it has the ~same quality [1], it would imply it's 2x larger. Unless I misunderstood what he meant there, of course. [1]: "DeepSeek produced a model close to the performance of US models" -- in his own words.
- 2y ago
- daft_pink 2y agoI just want to ask if when we talk about export controls on AI chips, is this going to create export controls on general consumer goods in the near future. Given Moore’s law and the efficiency that will clearly come from optimizing chips for AI and competition increasing the amount of VRAM on these devices to run models locally. Is creating an export regime today going to mean that in 3 or 4 years general smart phones and high end laptops are all going to be subject to export controls? Keep in mind that at one time computers that consumed entire building are less powerful than my apple watch.
- wongarsu 2y agoThat would be a great way to give Non-American companies an advantage in the market. Imagine if Apple has to constantly worry about complying with US export controls while Samsung, a Korean company, can just ship whatever they want with zero additional paperwork as long as they avoid US suppliers. Multiply that over all consumer goods that might include AI.
- itishappy 2y agoI don't expect so. Export controls are aimed at chips needed for training, not inference. The H20 with 96GB of memory is currently available in China. We're a ways off from restricting consumer devices.
- alexlur 2y agoNote: Author is the CEO of Anthropic.
- throwaway_32u10 2y agoI'm kind of tired of the entire narrative that "US good, everyone else bad", as if only US deserves to hold powerful technology because it will be used for "the greater good", rather than employ it in military applications, as if Anthropic didn't partner with Palantir. And it amazes me how many people can't seem to see past the "US is good, everyone else are bad" smoke mirror.
- BizarreByte 2y ago[flagged]
- dang 2y agoPlease don't take HN threads further into flamewar hell, and certainly not nationalistic flamewar hell. It's repetitive and evokes worse from others. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- StefanBatory 2y agoI mean, in the end, USA is still better than the alternative.
- femiagbabiaka 2y agoU.S. and Chinese hegemony are just different kinds of bad. We could put the pros and cons up and debate it endlessly, but in the end ranking them is pointless, humanity should just be trying to make a better alternative
- tuyguntn 2y agoUSA is still better for whom? Can't remember which countries where bombed by China in last 50 years, but I can give you plenty of examples for the USA
- rcarmo 2y agoThe civilizational alternative is Europe. The economic alternative, that we can debate...
- simplyluke 2y agoFrom my perspective it’s very convenient that all the new information and competition supports his existing priors that: 1) we need to do various forms of regulation to entrench US closed source market leaders, which happens to increase his company’s value 2) the best way towards improvement in models is not efficiency but continuing to burn ever increasing piles of money, which happens to increase his company’s value
- tuyguntn 2y agoI call this capitalism when its convenient for us, socialism when we are struggling. I hope one day, China starts blocking advanced tech from US, for the good of the whole world
- Kostchei 2y agoI hope they learn from the terrible job of stewardship of tech the west has done and don't repeat our mistakes.
- rcarmo 2y agoI like a lot of what Dario writes, but in this case I just can't follow the reasoning. Everything I've picked up about how DeepSeek did what they did (including going a level lower than CUDA to better take advantage of the limited hardware[1], and the balance of techniques used[2]) points to some very smart Chinese engineers having out-smarted US ones (to put it in terms that matter to US folk, because I'm European and I ordinarily wouldn't care): 1 - https://stratechery.com/2025/deepseek-faq/ 2 - https://epoch.ai/gradient-updates/how-has-deepseek-improved-the-transformer-architecture This post comes across as overly defensive of the US export controls and leaning on the authoritarian regime angle far too much to feel like it isn't just a way to shore up interest in US-based AI companies and widen the moat (or just make sure someone else shores it up politically while they catch up technically). Anyway, this will always be a deep pocket race. But I wish it wasn't so much about brute-forcing GPUs and wasting power to (as yet) uncertain outcomes as far as model capabilities are concerned, and to me what DeepSeek achieved was to point out ingenuity and better techniques should be something that both OpenAI and Anthropic ought to be pursuing instead of burning cash.
- Kostchei 2y agoyeh. I see Dario saying "let's protect the US more" for no reason other than bias and "of course they improved over time" which feels like a mighty strong strain of copium. Very disappointing for a leader of an organization i respected. Assuming he speaks for Anthropic, and it seems he does, Past tense.
- rcarmo 2y agoThe "good" news is that neither Anthropic nor OpenAI are based in Europe, so I don't have to feel like they're burning my taxpayer money. The "bad" news is that so far I've yet to see a serious contender emerging from that part of the world (although the Middle East has invested heavily in LLMs due to obvious cultural differences).
- sitkack 2y agoYou can hear it directly from Dario Navigating a world in transition: Dario Amodei in conversation with Zanny Minton Beddoes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvMolVW_2v0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvMolVW_2v0 You can tell as an academic he wants to give DeepSeek props, at least that is what I would like to believe. The first third has the presenter leaning into "cheap chinese" too many times.
- AlanYx 2y agoThis piece ignores recent news that DeepSeek is doing inference on Huawei’s Ascend 910C GPUs. The simplified export control analysis Amodei gives here gets a lot more complicated when increasing export controls potentially ends up spurring additional R&D in Nvidia competitors.
- rcarmo 2y agoThere are lots of people working on ASICs for inference. There are already people using FPGAs for some vertically integrated AI stacks, so it's only a matter of time until we start discussing literally hard-coding models (or flashing them) to hardware to make them go faster.
- Leary 2y agoDario certainly had no qualms about working with authoritarian regimes when he worked for Baidu! Also, if the US seeks a permanent advantage over China by 2027 with self-replicating AI, so much so that it can dictate whatever terms militarily. Wouldn't that just force China to send a few cruise missiles to TSMC before that happen?
- beardyw 2y ago> force China to send a few cruise missiles to TSMC before that happen? Why on earth would they do that? China considers Taiwan to be rightfully theirs and would consider TMSC to be a valuable asset.
- dtquad 2y ago>Dario certainly had no qualms about working with authoritarian regimes when he worked for Baidu Maybe it's worth listening to a Western AI researcher who worked for a Chinese company and came to the conclusion "China must not beat us to AGI/ASI".
- breakitmakeit 2y ago[flagged]
- highfrequency 2y agoThe technical summary is excellent. But I worry that prominent US voices couching AI progress in Cold War style war rhetoric is likely to be... self-fulfilling. Surely some of the people paying closest attention to these articles are Chinese politicians and military leaders - it would definitely seem alarming to me if the Deepseek CEO kept writing things like: "whoever reaches this threshold of AI intelligence first will accelerate into world military domination - we must beat the US." There's a reason why Oppenheimer & co. weren't non-stop publishing internationally accessible op-eds during WWII about how important it is that Germany not develop a scaled uranium fission bomb before the US.
- rcarmo 2y agoIf you read enough history books (and have a passable grasp of German, and tolerate the weird lead types used in the press for those days) you will be able to find _a lot_ of opinion pieces from our recent history that play along the same lines, but for earlier industries (like automotive). People _really_ ought to study more of our past.
- highfrequency 2y agoLinks and book recs are great - sounds like a helpful perspective
- rcarmo 2y agoNot all of it is digitized. I happened to spend a few weeks in Germany once and had access to a library in Dusseldorf.
- mola 2y agoMaybe if US wasn't led by a bully that care's not about democratic ideals, but only on the rule of power it'll be easier to support the notion of US the leader of the free world. But just take a look at how he handled Denmark-Greenland issue, Pure bullying. In the Trumpian world, US has no allies, only vassals.
- zb3 2y ago> In the end, AI companies in the US and other democracies must have better models than those in China if we want to prevail. How about everyone has access to the best model because it's Open Source and openly developed?
- baggiponte 2y agohe's coping so hard.
- Verlyn139 2y ago[flagged]
- game_the0ry 2y agoCEO of an AI company asks for regulation against a country that is out-competing him. Are we still capitalists? I think the answer is - no.
- snake_doc 2y agoWithout taking a position on unipolar vs. multi-polar: Dario makes an astounding implicit assumption: - China originating labs cannot acquire chips providing 80-90% similar utility without the US within the next 2-3 years. I'll make an observation, re: DeepSeek's incentives that drove them to create the innovations from the V2 and V3 papers. DeepSeek, compared to American AI labs, are much more compute constrained, but in a unique way. Their chips are more memory bandwidth constrained (depending on type anywhere from 50% to 80% less bandwidth). Therefore, each dollar/hour of investment towards memory optimization is worth MORE to DeepSeek than to American labs. In the V2/3 paper, they've demonstrated exactly that with these memory optimization techniques. 1. MLA -> reduces KV cache by nearly 80% compared to GQA. By the way, this was published in V2 in May 2024. 2. FP8 matmul (while still accumlating in FP32 gradients) without losing significant quality. 3. DualPipe scheduling and reworking of Hopper SM's allocation on communication vs. computation -> DeepSeek's V3 paper has 2 full pages of hardware suggestions for "hardware designers" (read NVIDIA) Export controls in a global market create different incentives in parties. The resulting incentives will change, and agents (using it as an traditional economics term) will change their capital allocation strategy.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- horsawlarway 2y agoI find this article to be exceptionally self-serving.
- codekilla 2y agoThe author seems to be of the opinion that the creators of DeepSeek will either be unable to, or will not see the value of optimizing the 'second stage' RL component of the 'new' (post pre-training RL) way of training frontier foundation models. Every competent programmer in China is now looking for low level ptx optimizations for EVERY SINGLE STAGE of the pipeline. They will now, likely not publish any of it.
- astrange 2y agoThere isn't a "the pipeline". You'd have to work at DeepSeek for your low-level work to affect it.
- zerotolerance 2y agoAI is a race to the bottom, and a race to over-spend. Seeing this as competition will bankrupt the players, make enablers rich, and end up killing a lot of people when the need to bolster confidence in its capabilities overrules basic common sense.
- wood_spirit 2y ago> Export controls serve a vital purpose: keeping democratic nations at the forefront of AI development. As an outsider looking in, I’m not thinking of the USA as a particularly democratic country any more. And I didn’t think its export controls were about democracy, but rather a trade weapon.
- wood_spirit 2y agoStepping back, it feels like the techies working on ai have been celebrating the expense of it all. That techies have been wanting bigger and bigger clusters as some kind of bragging rights and that suits the suits who see it as a most to protect their crazy stock validations. The money was being made not by the miners but by nvidia selling shovels they could name the price of. Necessity is the mother of invention. Deepseek is demonstrating that if the incentives are aligned to want efficiency then good engineers - and there are plenty of them in every country - can make things fly.
- scilro 2y ago>Even if the US and China were at parity in AI systems, it seems likely that China could direct more talent, capital, and focus to military applications of the technology. Combined with its large industrial base and military-strategic advantages, this could help China take a commanding lead on the global stage, not just for AI but for everything. China spends 1.5% of its GDP on its military. The US spends 3.5%. I get that the two countries are engaged in competition for dominance, but why is China the bigger threat here? Also, there are a great deal of groups and institutions out there that are pushing for more diplomacy, more cooperation, and a ratcheting down of tensions. If Dario is going to get political anyway, why not go that route?
- yucatansunshine 2y agoIt's also funny that there's a scary implication "China could do XYZ and focus on military applications" when Anthropic and Palantir teamed up last year to offer Claude models to US Defense orgs https://investors.palantir.com/news-details/2024/Anthropic-and-Palantir-Partner-to-Bring-Claude-AI-Models-to-AWS-for-U.S.-Government-Intelligence-and-Defense-Operations/ https://investors.palantir.com/news-details/2024/Anthropic-a...
- flashman 2y ago"Making AI that is smarter than almost all humans at almost all things will require millions of chips, tens of billions of dollars (at least), and is most likely to happen in 2026-2027." What an incredible claim to just slip in two-thirds of the way through! Where have I heard it before? 1965, H. A. Simon: "Machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work a man can do."
- quantum_state 2y agoSomeone might just be the Trojan horse … encouraging the current path from within …
- curious_cat_163 2y ago> All of this is to say that DeepSeek-V3 is not a unique breakthrough or something that fundamentally changes the economics of LLM’s; it’s an expected point on an ongoing cost reduction curve. What’s different this time is that the company that was first to demonstrate the expected cost reductions was Chinese. Excellent analysis and I largely agree. The part where he looses me here is the certainty in the claim around fundamental changes to the economics... This is open weights with a (largely) open recipe. Arguably, Meta has already been at it but now there are two labs producing frontier models at this level. A wishful analysis could imagine that there _might_ be more and that _could_ result in a qualitative shift in how the frontier model research is being done and hence affect the economics but Dario seems to have largely ignored this aspect. Not sure why?
- orbital-decay 2y agoThat post is really dishonest, which is expected from Anthropic's CEO talking about the competitors. Dario conveniently omits that R1's approach was validated months before o1-preview came out, and DeepSeek releases the weights and architecture unlike Anthropic and OAI which produce black box models in the name of "safety". Then he tries to diminish their innovation, dismissing it as a normal step they're also capable of, saying v3 and R1 are competing with models that are 9-10 months old. Which is not really true. And then there goes the usual techno-feudal interjection: >If China can't get millions of chips, we'll (at least temporarily) live in a unipolar world, where only the US and its allies have these models. It's unclear whether the unipolar world will last, but there's at least the possibility that, but there's at least the possibility that, because AI systems can eventually help make even smarter AI systems, a temporary lead could be parlayed into a durable advantage So Dario envisions a unipolar world where a black box corporation (his own one, of course) controls a perpetually self-improving machine god and distributes scraps to the masses that are too unwashed and dangerous to control it themselves, while at the same time preventing other countries from breaking out and making their own self-improving machine god because they're evil. A boot stomping on your face forever, regardless of who you are. That's coming from an "ethical, helpful, and honest" guy. >To be clear, the goal here is not to deny China or any other authoritarian country the immense benefits in science, medicine, quality of life, etc. that come from very powerful AI systems. Everyone should be able to benefit from AI. The goal is to prevent them from gaining military dominance. And of course he immediately tries to deny that thought.
- buyucu 2y agoAnthropic CEO is just mad that there is a new player in the business. DeepSeek models are not just better, they are also open weight. I'm sure Anthropic's valuation got hit badly by the DeepSeek saga, and the CEO is lashing out in panic.