Scale AI CEO Says China Has Quickly Caught the US With DeepSeek 50
The U.S. may have led China in the AI race for the past decade, according to Alexandr Wang, CEO of Scale AI, but on Christmas Day, everything changed. From a report: Wang, whose company provides training data to key AI players including OpenAI, Google and Meta , said Thursday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that DeepSeek, the leading Chinese AI lab, released an "earth-shattering model" on Christmas Day, then followed it up with a powerful reasoning-focused AI model, DeepSeek-R1, which competes with OpenAI's recently released o1 model.
"What we've found is that DeepSeek ... is the top performing, or roughly on par with the best American models," Wang said. In an interview with CNBC, Wang described the artificial intelligence race between the U.S. and China as an "AI war," adding that he believes China has significantly more Nvidia H100 GPUs -- AI chips that are widely used to build leading powerful AI models -- than people may think, especially considering U.S. export controls. [...] "The United States is going to need a huge amount of computational capacity, a huge amount of infrastructure," Wang said, later adding, "We need to unleash U.S. energy to enable this AI boom." DeepSeek's holding company is a quant firm, which happened to have a lot of GPUs for trading and mining. DeepSeek is their "side project."
"What we've found is that DeepSeek ... is the top performing, or roughly on par with the best American models," Wang said. In an interview with CNBC, Wang described the artificial intelligence race between the U.S. and China as an "AI war," adding that he believes China has significantly more Nvidia H100 GPUs -- AI chips that are widely used to build leading powerful AI models -- than people may think, especially considering U.S. export controls. [...] "The United States is going to need a huge amount of computational capacity, a huge amount of infrastructure," Wang said, later adding, "We need to unleash U.S. energy to enable this AI boom." DeepSeek's holding company is a quant firm, which happened to have a lot of GPUs for trading and mining. DeepSeek is their "side project."
Supplier of US AI wants more spent on US AI (Score:2)
i.e. Amazing that a journalist would report this as news.
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Credit Where Credit Is Due (Score:1, Troll)
Those little yellow bastards do steal a lot of technology. A LOT.
But, they're due some credit. They're pretty damn good at developing their own as well. And, their proficiency seems to be accelerating rapidly.
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it's not really a race thing, it's a class thing, these are classists vying for power, they seek to own and control our technology as they do everything else
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You make it sound as if the US developed everything on its own.
It hasn't, most of the US science and technology is the result of both poaching foreign-born (OMG - IMMIGRANT!11!!!) scientists and engineers using the money gotten from the abuse of "soft power" throughout the past century and some espionage.
Not that it was a bad thing, but what China is doing isn't very different.
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It's not just that they are good at engineering, better than us sometimes... It's that they have political stability that makes the Chinese market very attractive. No massive upheavals every 4 years, no chance some populist will randomly put up trade barriers. And no history of colonialism and forcing you to adopt their ideology.
The EU is in a much better position because it does have more stability, but even there it was rocked by Putin's brexit, and now his war in Ukraine.
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no chance some populist will randomly put up trade barriers
You mean like the trade barriers they made an exception to for Tesla alone so that they could steal their EV tech?
Re:Credit Where Credit Is Due (Score:4, Interesting)
Why would they steal Tesla's inferior EV tech? Chinese batteries and drivetrains are already years ahead of what Tesla has.
Even Tesla knows it, which is why they buy Chinese batteries. If you take an otherwise identical pair of Teslas, one with US batteries and one with Chinese batteries, the latter will perform better in every way. Accelerates harder, charges faster, battery produces less heat, weighs less, goes further. And if you pair that battery with a Chinese super efficient drivetrain, there is no comparison... Except to look at how much money you saved.
Oh yeah, and they will give you a 900,000km warranty, or even lifetime on some models. Tesla offers what, 200k km on the luxury models, less on the Model 3?
There is a reason why Musk and other US manufacturers want Chinese car imports effectively blocked - they are too good.
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Why would they steal Tesla's inferior EV tech? Chinese batteries and drivetrains are already years ahead of what Tesla has.
Tesla has Chinese batteries, so they are the same thing. Where do you think the drivetrain tech came from?
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Tesla started buying Chinese batteries after investing huge sums of money trying to work with Panasonic to develop their own, but they never managed to match Chinese ones.
The drivetrain tech is original Chinese engineering. Unless they have a time machine it must be, because they started to mass produce it long before anyone else, patented it, and deployed it in commercial vehicles and then consumer vehicles. Again, if it was stolen, why is it better than Tesla's?
Tesla's drivetrains are actually pretty medi
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Tesla's drivetrains are actually pretty mediocre. Middle of the pack at best.
Belied by the fact that Teslas quite sell well throughout the world - even in China - and make a profit where most western EV manufacturers are losing money hand over fist.
It'd be impossible for a "mediocre drivetrain" to achieve such dominance - capital markets aren't fundamentally so stupid as to reward inefficiency (which is exactly why capitalist countries uniformly are far better off than all alternatives at all quintiles).
In fact, the Model Y is not only the best selling EV in the world, it's also the
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The EU is fairly stable, although it could obviously be better, and the UK was dragging it down. It is possible to have political stability with a proper representative, democratic government, you just need to build it right. Proportional representation is key, as it prevents minorities of extremists taking too much power.
Either way, it's what we are up against. We have to find a good way to compete with it.
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The opposite is true: Proportional representation gives a platform to extremist populist parties, who can then take power with the help of slightly more central parties.
First past the post means the centre dominates.
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How is that working out in the US and the UK? The US has a hard right party controlling both houses and the presidency, and somehow the Supreme Court as well. The UK just got away from a hard right government, but the populists (Reform) are making big gains and the "centrists" (Labour) are extremely mediocre, so we are headed towards more extremism. Our First Past The Post system is only forcing the Tory Party harder to the right.
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It's not because he's a foreigner, it's because he's an idiot - his post is wrong about UK politics too.
Re: Credit Where Credit Is Due (Score:2)
In no way is that true. Trump claimed to be a Democrat in the 90s, but that was a lie.
PR not the Solution (Score:1)
The UK just got away from a hard right government, but the populists (Reform) are making big gains and the "centrists" (Labour) are extremely mediocre
Labour are not centrists, they are left wing, admittedly not radical left wing like they were under Corbyn, but definitely on the left. The Tories have gone off to the far right to cosy up to Reform and the traditional centrist party, the LibDems seems to have just gone slightly bonkers. I'd argue that this is the major problem with UK politics now: there is no party particularly close to the centre. Labour is probably the closest though.
This is not something that proportional representation will fix. I
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Current Labour is centre right.
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I feel like the best way to keep those terms in place is to make it the constitutional duty of every citizen to murder any politician who attempts to remove or increase term limits without at least 90% approval in a referendum certified by a neutral country given unfettered observer access.
And make failing to perform that duty a capital offense.
If you still end up with a dictator for life even after that, at least you tried, right?
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For the most part to dictatorship will take care of
Re: Credit Where Credit Is Due (Score:1)
(reading) "no history of colonialism or forcing you to adopt their ideoloy" (spits out coffee)
Da fuq you smokin? Oh right, you're obv a Chinese bot/plant here.
China imposes it's heavyhanded will SO BADLY that they've messed up their own economy. My dude, I literally know someone who owns a company in Vietnam, doing trade with China and Japan. he canâ(TM)t stop talking about how Chinaâ(TM)s economy is in shambles due to past policies. oh sure theyâ(TM)ll muscle through like everyone else event
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How many countries has China invaded since WW2? How about the US?
How often has China helped overthrow elected governments? How about the US?
Well, okay, arguably China does interfere in Western elections, but we aren't talking about a coup and then installing their preferred leader.
When China's replacement for US payment systems really gets going the same thing is going to be apparent. The US uses the dollar to exert control, and I'm going to bet that China does not.
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This is a stupid thing to say. Taiwan was "never part of the mainland" simply because it's an island. However, Taiwan was annexed Qing China in 1683 [wikipedia.org]. It remained part of the Chinese empire for over 200 years until it was ceded to Japan in 1895.
Following the Second World War, the KMT government of the Republic of China declared that they were reclaiming the territories ceded to Japan.
Both the ROC a
I wouldn't call China political stability (Score:2)
America's problem isn't a lack of stability per se it's that every single one of our political institutions has been compromised. To be honest they were always a little dodgy. They had tons of anti-de
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If you look at the structure of the CCP, it has a lot of ideological and policy stability built in. There are internal democratic processes, but they are of course on the social democracy model, similar to what much of Europe has. So while it is in theory possible for there to be big upheavals, in practice China has proven to be a very stable partner.
But look, you don't have to be China to look stable and reliable these days. The US has had Trump twice, and now he's talking about massive tariffs to punish h
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It's not just that they are good at engineering, better than us sometimes... It's that they have political stability that makes the Chinese market very attractive. No massive upheavals every 4 years, no chance some populist will randomly put up trade barriers.
I am assuming you aren't attempting satire. ALL totalitarian regimes are efficient in this manner and free from periodic "upheavals" compared to libertarian "colonialists" societies that "fascistically" value elected representatives, personal freedom, property rights, equality of opportunity, and free speech. The Nazi trains ran on time.
The key difference is that China is free from copyright and patent restrictions, as well as heavy regulation, which yields the efficiency that you so admire.
But this type of
DO NOT REPLY to racism or ad hominems (Score:2)
"AI race", "AI Boom", any more grande lies? (Score:3)
What about a little honesty, namely that AI (the LLM variant) is not ready for prime time and may never be ready?
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It might not be good enough for grandpa, but I've been using LLMs heavily for all sorts of things.
Re: "AI race", "AI Boom", any more grande lies? (Score:2)
Such as...?
you know for all the people who pointed out the flaws in AI, I think the people who reply with something so simple just saying itâ(TM)s fine ought to cite some major examples.
so go ahead, show us your work please. I think we could all benefit from a little fact rather than just opinion.
Re: "AI race", "AI Boom", any more grande lies? (Score:2)
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Not the other poster, but I've found it useful in three ways.
First, to assist in programming tasks. I'm a mathematician, not a programmer by trade, but do sometimes need quick calculations done. I can ask the LLM to write a Python function that does something, and it will often work outright (which one can check by checking it agrees with specific values) and when it fails, it is often easy to debug to turn into working code. For a rough calibration: ChatGPT is a better programmer than a talented 8th g
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Now, none of these are amazing game-changers. So even if lots of people have different small uses for these systems, it still seems like the current boom has a lot of hype.
Indeed. All of your applications and the LLM "proficiency" levels are plausible and pretty much match what I see. And that is rather not a lot given the effort to train and then run an LLM. For example, having it do use-once code where you both have good test cases and actually understand the the problem you are trying to solve is rather a niche application. Not saying it is a bad use of an LLM. But in actual software projects, code maintenance (i.e. later changes) are somewhat around 2...3x the effort of i
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Available evidence suggests that
a) You are lying
b) You might actually use it to some degree but to no real advantage
and
c) You are not smart enough to understand b)
All new tech has its clueless fanbois. Congratulations, you are one for the LLM hype.
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What about a little honesty, namely that AI (the LLM variant) is not ready for prime time and may never be ready?
AI bubble may be inaccurate to use. Because we humans might be the thing that pops if we do it badly enough.
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The Great Depression almost ended the world, at least democracy, as it fueled world tensions. If Germany had done a few things different, it would have won. Thus, the poppage of market bubbles has already almost ended the world.
We are probably still here because of survivor bias, not "luck". The number of cold-war 50/50 near misses is staggering. The world is fragile, don't gamble with it.
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"No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame."
Oh Slashdot! Never grow up!
ChatGPT, the fastest growing consumer application in history, isn't doing it for you? Not prime time enough?
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No, it's extremely useful with just a bit of imagination and care -
You mean with some level of hallucination on the user's side? I can believe that.
Translation (Score:4)
The United States is going to need a huge amount of computational capacity, a huge amount of infrastructure...
"The United States is going to get a huge increase in wealth concentration, corporate power, and greenhouse gas emissions. Oh look! A squir... a promise that AI will help us fight global warming!"
"We need to unleash U.S. energy to enable this AI boom."
We need to unleash the bullshit machines to convince everyone that they want and need AI. And everyone who isn't convinced will have it shoved up their asses anyway."