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Jeffrey L Minch's avatar

This is a gigantic overreaction and the sky is not falling. Calm down, all of us.

The big takeaway is that DeepSeek did their work without the same number of Nvidia chips as the Americans, but we only have their word on that and I wouldn't believe China as it relates to whether water is wet. Color me wildly skeptical.

This speaks to efficiency, if correct and a different software thrust.

The Americans have massively superior compute, data, and scale whilst they now also have an inkling as to how the Chinese did their work. Much of the DeepSeek work is open source, but not all of it.

This gap will be quickly closed.

If the Americans adopt some or all of the Chinese approach and couple that with access to chips and compute, data, and scale then the outcome is predictable.

This may indeed be a Sputnik moment, but let's recall how that ended with America spurred to compete and untimately overcome any shortlived Russian advantage.

In many ways there is a different scale issue at work that is similar to nuclear weapons. Is there any real advantage of one adversary having a 250kt weapon when its enemy has a 150kt weapon?

No, it then becomes weapon reliability, the delivery system and market penetration. The US needs to have a coherent and war time footing policy on its chip manufacturing because this -- in the implementation phase -- becomes a war on chips.

Chips -- designing them, making them, obtaining them, using them -- is splitting the atom as it relates to nuclear weapons. The Chinese are wildly vulnerable as to interdicting the flow of chips in the world.

One of the reasons the Chinese have done this with a smaller base of chips is because they are not supposed to be able to access Nvidia chips. [The Chinese have another advantage -- total focus via a single company.]

The Holy Grail is AGI. Keep the main thing the main thing. The Americans should get to AGI before the rest of the world. Everyone will eventually get there.

Instead of regulating American AI, we should be spurring them on. Turn them loose.

This kick in the balls will be very good for American tech.

JLM

www.themusingsofthebigredcar.com

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