Deep pockets + simple control = perfect culture to just hire talent and let them go wild without worrying about financial viability, as long as the king CEO is fine with it that is
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/chinas-deepseek-c...
The company is doing well and providing great PR so the party is content to not meddle too much I imagine.
My comparison with American labs is more that I think they have to deal with bean counters, creditors, investors etc which can shuffle incentives and aims (and is a big reason why they dont do open weights anymore)
Yes, credit to Deepseek for actually scaling it up and releasing a frontier flash LLM.
Edit: the rest of this thread has become a US China infowar theory culture war. I am not of either of these countries and the above comment isnt meant to implicitly support either "side".
Deepseek delivers 1 product; Microsoft delivers dozens (or hundreds depending on how you want to count it) across various domains.
It's quite crazy that it's Deepseek's background/original purpose. We already had very advanced stuff from the world of HFT, but now a frontier family of models from a private company that used to be (still is?) in HFT is plain bonkers.
Is more known about them and the HFT background?
> Many of High-Flyer's original team members worked on AI. Back then, we tried a lot of fields before getting our big break in finance, which is complex enough. AGI is probably one of the hardest things we can do next, so for us it was a question of how, not why.
It's a very good interview:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kANyEjDDFWkhSKbcK/two-interv...
Incidentally, Wenfeng is kind of reverse Hassabis. There were some rumours that:
> Hassabis quietly assembled a team of around 20 researchers to develop high-frequency trading algorithms, without Google's approval. When the parent company found out, the project was disbanded.
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/technology/tech-news/whe...
anyways, remember HN rules: "Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data."
Direct quote from the second top comment:
> Whenever I see the new releases around video generation (and image) generation models, I get goosebumps, because it just feels so fun to work with them.
Compare that with the launch of ChatGPT Image of yesterday.
So why, for example, are posts on the Inkling[1] release (an American model) thread mostly positive? It's as if there's something else at play here, but I can't quite put my finger on it, hmm... :P
It so happens Chinese companies are more friendly towards open weights, autonomy and freedom that most US based ones. Who would have guessed?
American models are closed, expensive, neutered, and make Dario and Sam even more rich and powerful.
Chinese models are open-weight, cheap, neutered only about things like Tiananmen Square and the treatment of Uyghurs, and scare Sam and Dario.
There are more people who go to church on Sundays in China than the United States. There are 10x more mosques in China than the United States.
Tiananmen square was a student revolt literally egged on by cold war western institutions, who attempted to use chinese students as pawns for geo-political games.
Westerners really need to rethink their opinions on China, it seems obvious to me they are not the ones to be worried about (although, all governments do tons of harm).
(I mainly mentioned those specific topics to establish clearly I am not part of the alleged influence operation.)
Yes, its quite similar. Norway forces people to attend cultural schooling, where theyre provided housing in the interim. Its quite similar. However, the migrants in Norway are there because the Norwegian state through its participation in NATO murdered millions of people in the middle east. Which China has not done.
Go take a trip to Xinjiang.
Then go take a trip to parts of Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan or Palestine and tell me which nations are treating muslims worse.
I reiterate, more people go to church in China on Sunday than the USA. There are 10x more musjids in China than in the USA.
Please go live in China for a couple years and you'll realize everything you're told about China is a complete lie.
Weird of you to turn technical discussions into weird nationalistic debates. Maybe lay off the X algo, I think elon has oneshot your brain. .
Deepseek's source: mostly open
i wonder if there's any relationship hmmmm