thewayne | The Chinese release an open source chatbot AI, slams American stocks

This is pretty amusing, funny, and ironic, for certain values of amusing, funny, and ironic.

The Chinese have released an open source LLM chatbot, it's called DeepSeek R1. It's available on GitHub, you can download it and play with it, tear apart the code, tweak it, etc. Completely free. It was built in TWO MONTHS for $6,000,000. And on lower grade GPUs because of export restrictions placed on the Chinese - can't have them getting top of the line GPUs now, can we? And they didn't scrape the internet, stealing trademarked and copyrighted information without permission to train it.

And it's the top downloaded app on the Apple app store.

The belief was that with denying the Chinese the top-end GPUs needed to do the crunching to construct large language models, that they had no hope of catching up with Team USA when it came to building AIs. Well, it seems that Team USA forgot the phrase 'Work smarter, not harder'. The Chinese applied a lot of smarts to work around the restrictions that were placed upon them and produced a much better product.

And stocks tanked because it's good software. From the article: "GPU maker NVIDIA fell 11%, Oracle dropped 8%, and Palantir was down 5% ... Stocks are adjusting to the revelation that China can build AI faster, cheaper, and just as good as America."

The comments in the article are amusing.

Nice slice of humble pie served up there.

https://gizmodo.com/chinese-ai-deepseek-deep-sixes-openai-on-the-app-store-stocks-tank-2000555171

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

frith

My biggest beef with AI and Bitcoin (and "cloud" storage) is the energy drain. We are waltzing away to hell in a handbasket and this is not helping. That DeepSeek R1 can apparently achieve the same results as OpenAI and company using less power is fine but I expect that it's going to be LED lights all over again. People are just going to use it a lot more. Plus it does nothing about growth in block-chain and server farms.

thewayne

Absolutely agree. The fact that they're restarting mothballed nuclear plants to power data centers is.... interesting. The power requirements are absolutely staggering, I hate crypto currency/meme coins/NFTs and anything block chain for this reason. And this is right up there with them.

garote

A good excuse to knock some wind out of a couple obscenely overvalued stocks.

white_aster

Aha, that's what the headline I read was referring to. Interesting, and honestly, the way that AI has just become this money magnet felt very much dot.com bubble-esque.

Yeah, there's definitely a dot com bubble aspect to the current boom. It'll be interesting when it bursts, currently the current bursting bubble is the EV manufacturing market.