DeepSeek continues to not only push the boundaries but also publish these incredible papers explaining how they achieved their gains - something the American labs no longer do unfortunately. Chinese labs are doing the most interesting work in AI right now.
>publish these incredible papers explaining how they achieved their gains - something the American labs no longer do unfortunately.
Google is still releasing a lot of llm architecture research. They introduced speculative decoding of LLMs in 2022[1], then released the code to perform sceculative decoding for their Gemma 4 model this year[2]
Thanks for the clarification - Google does publish more than others - and I actually really appreciate the work they are doing with the Gemma models, which are truly competitive open models. I do wish they’d publish more in depth papers on their Gemma models but appreciate that they are open weights.
They weren't the first to do MTP like this, and arguably did it wrong: the MTP heads are kept in a separate file and have to be welded in by the inference engine.
Qwen 3.6 shipped with working MTP first, and had working MTP in llama.cpp first.
Given the MTP drafter is basically a separate model, keeping it separate makes more sense IMO. It's out of my wheelhouse but it seems like you could adjust the MTP drafter model separately from the main model, too.
Ultimately though the real explanation, I think, is Google doesn't care since for their own purposes (in LiteRT-LM), they do bundle them. As far as I know, anyway.
I mean just like GGUFs aren't technically necessary yet are _way_ more convenient than using Safetensors and configuring the default Jinja prompt by-hand, it makes sense to bundle the draft model too. For all intents and purposes, the only people who will train a draft model are the people who train the original model
Probably because American AI companies are on the hook for quite a lot of investment money. I think they are trying to find the magical moat to justify their valuation.
Revealing optimizations similar to these would pretty much reduce their competitive position.
The question is also what game they're playing. Deepseek came out of a hedge fund. I think it's no coincidence that their publications tend to have a large impact on AI stock prices.
Destroying the growth story of overvalued stocks is an interesting investment strategy. It's not even new. Shortsellers understandably get terrible rep from execs, but their actions are more often in the public interest than you'd think. Normally it's exposing fraud, but here we get the really fortunate side benefit of what could eventually amount to the most significant contribution to the general software community since Linux.
> The question is also what game they're playing. Deepseek came out of a hedge fund. I think it's no coincidence that their publications tend to have a large impact on AI stock prices.
Its revealing that they always seem to publish after some big announcement by American AI companies. But regardless, this is one of the benefits of a duopoly.
No more revealing than OpenAI, Anthropic and Google always having some new model that just so happens to be waiting in the wings whenever their competitors announce their own model bump.
The framing that Chinese labs open-source because they're behind assumes it's purely a competitive tactic. But there's a structural dimension: DeepSeek operates under a completely different funding model than US labs. They're backed by a quantitative hedge fund that views AI as infrastructure, not as a product to monetize directly. The ROI for them comes from trading alpha, not API revenue.
Chinese AI companies also face a domestic market where open-source distribution is often the only way to reach enterprise clients who won't pay SaaS premiums. The business logic aligns with openness in a way that US labs' VC-funded models don't.
> They're backed by a quantitative hedge fund that views AI as infrastructure, not as a product to monetize directly. The ROI for them comes from trading alpha, not API revenue.
That used to be true, but now they've raised ~7B$, so we'll see how / if that changes.
Also, we’re seeing a classic commoditization spiral with open models rapidly closing the gap and driving prices towards the marginal cost of inference. The reality is that models themselves are general commodities and there's just not enough difference between them. A company can get ahead of others by a few months, but then the rest quickly close the gap. It's a really low margin business because there's no way to differentiate yourself.
Chinese companies understand this and they're treating models as shared infrastructure akin to Linux. The money is going to be in customization niches. Companies will charge to tune models for specific use cases and charge support for that. There's also going to be money at the bottom for hardware vendors making chips and memory. But the middle tier of generic LLMs is seeing involution where there's relentless competition driving profits towards the bottom.
Open-source is also altruistic. If DeepSeek does become self-serving once they get the top spot, it doesn’t take away from the altruistic contributions that they made towards open models.
Contributing to it might not necessarily be. Most open source development is funded by large companies after all and from their perspective it can function as a cost saving measure. Allowing them to focus on their core products and removing the possibility of their rivals from getting a competitive advantage due to having a superior low level stack under their product.
Which is why open source is so successful in areas where software is a cost-center but mostly failed for consumer products (since spending resources on them would actually be altruistic unlike e.g. Linux kernel development)
And ultimately the motivation for those contributions just doesn’t matter, except to those who like to anthropomorphize company and argue about their souls.
No parent is right. The core root driver of the world is capitalism, open source exists downstream of that.
Software engineers need money to survive. If they exclusively work on open source stuff where are they getting money from to survive? Follow the money trail… even a donation… eventually it leads to an incentive based source or action.
Is it though? A large number of people get to experience a lot of power over others because they moderate Wikipedia. That's certainly why some of them do it, just like on Reddit
I hate to quote pithy proverbs, but "the road to hell is paved with good intentions." One can have an altruistic goal which ends up harming people too, which is where that proverb comes from. Prohibition and The War on Drugs in the US are two good examples of something that had altruistic origins[†] but ended up doing way more harm than good.
[†] Another problem with altruism: we don't all agree on whether a goal is altruistic, and what's altruistic in the enactor's eyes might not be in yours. Curating a fountain of human knowledge like Wikipedia? Probably altruistic. Protecting humanity from itself by installing your company as the stewards of frontier LLMs? Not so altruistic in my view.
> Prohibition and The War on Drugs in the US are two good examples of something that had altruistic origins
The War on Drugs had the purpose (not just in its origin but in its perpetuation) of inflicting harm on elite-disfavored subsets of the population that could not be openly targeted for Constitutional reasons, which is about as far from an altruistic reason as it possible to get.
This statement is factually true and you are voted down because many people lack knowledge.
Any individual that provides free labor cannot survive off of said free labor. He must work for money to survive or get donations from someone who earned that money from incentive based labor in order to even buy the food he needs to exist as a living human being. Much of the time that labor is actually closed source.
This is a logistical reality. A lot of open source advocates are unable to get their brains out of the whole mentality that open source literally cannot exist without incentive based software supporting it. Who pays for GitHub to exist? Who pays for the food swes eat? I just code for open source all day and money falls out of the sky.
My smart friend says there are jobs that pay you to work on open source exclusively. Smart guy. In this case you follow the money trail. How does that company get enough money to pay a guy to work exclusively on open source?
Free labor enables capitalism, especially if you consider labor arbitrage as a mixture of free labor and properly compensated (according to the real value) labor. From literally being born, to family culture, education, and whatever level of broad social cohesion, it’s all free labor. Without that background, money itself loses its value, since an individual cannot have reasonable confidence in trading it for something of actual tangible value. It is abstract stored value, banked into society for free. Indeed, in many cases, the free labor is in the rational self interest of a group. But stability and love and peace aren’t monetized to their true value. Otherwise, markets should be much less stable. Bubbles are only notable for the large impact of a small group of bad actors. Overall, it’s pretty amazing what free labor does. Open source is just another instance of this long and critical tradition.
Free labor is derivative to incentivized labor. Your statement here doesn’t disprove or counter what I said. Again, follow the money trail. Everything you said if you follow the origin of the money it comes from paid, incentivized labor. Parents need money to raise kids… where do they get that money?? Our economy is called capitalism for a reason there is literally zero reference to charity or altruism in the vocabulary or even standard models that describe our economy and economic theory.
Put it another away: if we removed your ability to do incentivized labor and all you can do is charity work… you would run out of money and die from starvation. If we did the opposite and we removed your ability to do charity work… you’d be fine.
All of this re-emphasizes the point of this thread: In our objective reality, the world is driven by incentive based work while altruism is a side effect of surplus wealth generated by incentive based work. That is the fundamental reality.
Look at how far OpenAI has drifted from their original mission. Everything comes back to greed, so it's ideal for the world if selfish motives happen to coincide with what's good for the world, like advancements in open models
Every company on the face of the earth has a mission statement involving some bs goal that sounds altruistic. For a good example look at googles mission statement.
The real mission statement for most companies is to make as much money as possible.
It's a standard take since it is how markets tend to work. They aren't powered by altruism, it is a big system for turning greed into good results. We don't have all this stuff because people suddenly woke up one morning and decided to be nice.
Mostly they kind of do since we do live in an utopian society of unlimited abundance. Extremely few people can afford to (or want to) spend a very large number of working hours without ever getting anything directly in return for it.
The standard is applied very inconsistently. Nobody accuses the local bakery of being motivated by profit, and that they don't bake bread for you out of altruism.
They are focused on the things you do when you are not over-capitalized and you can’t get unlimited nvidia hardware to train on. And the results speak for themselves.
Meanwhile we in the US are blocked from buying Huawei GPUs and retirees are boasting about the nvidia in their portfolios.
I'm not sure I'd put Google in that list, but either way: Because they think they have enough capital that they can catch up and don't need the reputational boost of this.
The concept of open source doesn't really apply to AI models since their behavior is mostly controlled by the data they were trained on and the complex ways they are trained. Having the source code of the model by itself wouldn't help you.
From a practical POV having all the training data, training infrastructure, and training know-how wouldn't help you either unless you could afford to spend the millions of dollars (hundreds of millions for a SOTA model) in compute to train it each time they released a new training set, in which case you're only talking about the big commercial companies. "open source for the people" just does not apply.
You ask me what I think. So far deepseek has been very consistently trying to advance state of the art research in a transplant and public way by writing papers and publishing working code. They are also not at the mercy of the stock market in the same way many Americans companies are. Before anyone assumes too much, I live in Europe.
Projection is a funny thing. It causes people to misread situations all the time. Southern slaveowners feared violent retribution from freed slaves, for example [1]. It was pure projection and said more about the South than it did the slaves. The reality was there was no violent retribution. It was the opposite where the former slaveowners continued to inflict violence on the formerly enslaved.
I say this because we see the same thing used as an argument against China. "If they overtake us, they'll do imperialism (like us)." Again, it says more about us than them.
A better reading (IMHO) Of the situation is that China believes that AI shouldn't be used simply to mint a few more trillionaires but the benefits should be shared with society. Why do I say this? Because we now have 70+ years of China doing exactly that. The transformation in China all the way from rural villages to Tier 1 cities has been utterly astounding. China has lifted ~800M people out of extreme poverty.
In some ways we're at a similar point to the late 1990s and 2000s when Microsoft execs complained that Linux, being free, destroyed intellectual property value. Linux should be a perfect example of how people can and do act altruistically, or at least not in a way to bait-and-switch to enrich themselves.
It's even worse than that. China publishes stacks upon stacks of policy documents in which they explain clearly what they will do and why. This includes why they do poverty alleviation and why they believe big monopolies that own everything are bad. But almost no western observers care to read those documents. Instead, western observers, including HN, speculate endlessly about China's intentions, and "it would be naive to believe they would not do X" or drawing equivalences to Soviet Union or whatever. And the "journalists" sell this notion that Chinese state intentions are "untransparent" and "unknowable" while pretending the policy documents don't exist.
Meanwhile, Xi Jinping has published his 5th book on how governance in China works and what they're after. These are not books written for a western audience: they're compilations of speeches that he already gave to the Chinese party and state apparatus, so the contents are not sanitized for foreign audiences. But there are no English reviews of summaries of this 5th book at all by the usual China experts that distribute what western audience know about China.
This extends to beyond the government. Even though "for the people but only against the government" is an often-heard mantra, nobody seems to listen to what Chinese AI companies themselves say about why they publish open models. DeepSeek and GLM have said multiple times publicly what their motivations are, yet people on HN still speculate like they usually do.
Truly mind-boggling. I get that a lot of people don't like China. But setting aside the question of whether their dislike is justified, it would at least be rational to properly understand China, even if it's to defeat it. And listening to what China says themselves is absolutely essential for proper understanding. But people don't bother to? And they seem mostly happy with sticking to speculations that match preconceived notions, even if that hurts their chances of defeating China.
Extremely interesting comment, thank you. Got some links where I can download this source material? I don't read or speak the language, but will try interrogating it with an LLM
For Central Party documents: https://news.cn/politics/zywj/. It lists recent Central Committee / General Office / joint Party-State documents, e.g. 2026 documents on township duty lists, Party member development rules, carbon evaluation, long-term care insurance, and SOE leadership rules.
If you simply take what the Chinese government says at face value, you will be correct way more often than 95% of Western policy wonks, media talking heads, "analysts" and so forth. Because, like you say, they tell you everything they're doing.
In the recent US-China summit, Xi Jinping just came out and used the Thucydides Trap metaphor, which tells you everything about where China thinks it is and where it sees the US going, which is to become increasingly belligerent as their power declines. Now whether or not you agree with that assessment (I do agree), it still tells you China wants to avoid open hostilities, it sees itself as continuing to rise and it fears what a declining US might do.
The Thucydides Trap mention is different from what you describe. Xi has dismissed the Thucydides Trap multiple times in the past as being hearsay and self-imposed bias (https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/944179.shtml). "We should strictly base our judgment on facts, lest we become victims to hearsay, paranoid or self-imposed bias. There is no such thing as the so-called Thucydides trap in the world. But should major countries time and again make the mistakes of strategic miscalculation, they might create such traps for themselves."
But western politicians keep raising this metaphor. So at some point they're like "okay we'll speak your language". They then used this metaphor to make the point "our rise isn't the threat, your fear of it is. If you resist it you're walking right into the trap Thucydides warned about". So your conclusion is still right, they don't want open hostilities, a stable world is in their interest.
Then western media ran away with this and were like "OMG Xi mentioned the Thucydides Trap", completely ignoring his point.
This is the way! Open source models will benefit, and once open source models reach the state of "good enough" the hyped up US AI companies will fear, since the availability of free, good enough, AI models will set the ceiling for how much they can charge. Then the bubble will pop.
Regardless of where they are, the Chinese will always share their progress, as they're collectivist/cooperative at their core, compared to the individualistic/competitive US.
I don't really see the moat for frontier AI labs being "more efficient models" although that could help their margins - I think moats will be built by expanding the horizontal and vertical market expansion - like Anthropic is doing the most at the moment
Until recently, DeepSeek were self-financed (it was a spin-out from a hedge fund). They just raised ~50million RMB (US$7bn), and according to media [0] (which admittedly can be unreliable), the lead investors were:
1) The CEO himself
2) Tencent
3) CALT (the battery company)
4) NetEase (internet/media company)
5) JD.com (ecommerce)
6) Chinese investment firms
What are they expecting in return? I'd say the same thing that all those investors in OpenAI and Anthropic are expecting - profit.
I don't think this question would get to the reason. There could be one or two persons in charge who simply shape the culture of the company, including how much to publish.
Even the latest World Bank report, the defacto neoliberal institution, recognized a couple of months ago that leaving the industries focus be dictaed by purely capital decisions was bad, as in _really_ bad.
> Unlike most OECD databases, which rely on government data provided at country-level, the OECD MAGIC database uses firm-level data. The subsidy estimates included in the database are based on raw data obtained from firms’ annual reports, financial statements, bond prospectuses, IPO prospectuses, etc. The data are collected and verified manually by the OECD to maximise accuracy, consistency, and comparability. In some cases, additional information is also obtained from government databases, either to verify the firm-level information or to complement it. Care is taken to avoid double-counting where the data mix corporate and government sources.
Does that figure hold up when we look at Silicon Valley financing? Uber alone was subsidized to the tune of billions. Let alone the recent batch where we're into hundreds of billions.
Not everyone has the American “fuck you got mine” zero sum game attitude. Also they’re making some of the American and European AI companies look bad which they can leverage with their trades if they wanted to.
Edit: I'm a fan of deepseek and believe it's good to make the technology open/available. And do think that also help business - which I support as well.
I seriously am far from fear mongering and doomsday mentality, but I just can't see how OpenAI and Anthropic can have a successful IPO if the quality gap between the free and paid continues to narrow like that...
Do you think that DeepSeek are building their models for free, or something? They aren't "on the hook" for anything?
What's with all the China glazing about this stuff? They release some open-source work and people act like they are suddenly the beacon of freedom and transparency.
This is incorrect binary thinking. Them releasing open source can be good, but that does not commit you to think that china or chinese companies are saints. There are many shades of grey here and one does not exclude the other (nor include it).
I think there are some sockpuppet accounts active but what also contributes is that many people are absolutely fed up with US technological hegemony and welcome alternatives to core technologies from elsewhere.
Not just US technological hegemony, but the USA has threatened to invade Europe (Greenland) and Canada, and has actually invaded Venezuela and Iran. China hasn't. Maybe lots of people that live in those places are now switching sides.
Over the past 2y the US also started a trade war with Europe, triggered the worst oil shock the world ever experienced for no reasons, threatened to leave NATO, tried to force Ukraine to give up its territory to the invading country, and way more
Publishing by necessity I wonder? American labs on the cutting edge pioneering the way forward, so Deepseek open sourcing what they’ve got is to help even the playing field.
Hopefully the experts here can offer insight. The above is just my hunch and I’m not a specialist in this field.
Yes, challenger Labs publish out of necessity. It is a marketing strategy. People assuming open source means giving something up, but the reality is that Z.ai has a revenue of some $100M and it would be about $0M if they never open sourced their models.
It used to be the case that NSA hired the majority of all math graduates in the US, and were assumed to be years ahead in cryptography. Yet in the 90s, it became clear that they no longer were that - among other things, the cipher of the notorious Clipper chip was broken, and we can rule out that it was made weak on purpose because the whole point of Clipper was that they had a backdoor.
So, despite hiring the cream of the crop of math graduates, who could read the papers of free academia, but whose own result the free world could not access - they fell behind.
I have a theory explaining why. I think it's because science is an interactive process. NSA cryptographers could read papers, but they couldn't talk openly with the authors of those papers, because of secrecy demands - even asking question might indicate what they were working on. You can easily imagine them spending months on something they could have avoided by going to the original authors and getting told "Oh, we tried that for a long time, it doesn't work".
Whether that theory is right or not, cryptography is a concrete example of a domain where public research with fewer resources beat private research with a lot more resources.
Everyone in this thread is getting distracted by nationalism, but you hit the nail on the head. In this case for whatever reason the Chinese AI industry is collaborative and the American AI industry is not. This will result in the Chinese companies making progress faster. Full stop. This isn't a judgement on the merits of either system, only an observation of likely results.
Hasn't that been the mantra of open source for 40 years. Armies of companies, trillions of valuation, or even just Wayland, suggest that isn't always the case.
From what I gather, the Chinese are behind, but a lot of their research amounts to scrappy, clever discoveries in how to use more novel technologies (for Qwen and Deepseek, its mixture of expert models, that can do inference using a portion of the model at a time). The chinese also distill information from American models, so there’s that.
The American companies, from my impression don’t involve themselves with such lowly “hacks” because they have so much money to just push forward with doing everything on big heavy models that run on the most cutting edge nvidia chips that they can, the moment, kinda sorta get on demand (I say that in some degree of jest).
I'm afraid I'm even balking at the word "pioneering" in context with US frontier labs. They are probably doing a few new things, right, but they are not blazing any trails for others to follow along, the Chinese are.
Mixture-of-Expert (MoE) was introduced in the 1990s [1, 2], see also
[3, 4]. The idea was that MOEs scales up model capacity and only
introduces small computation overhead. MoEs did not become viable for high-performance
applications until sparse routing was integrated with modern deep
networks, made possible by large-scale distributed computation. The
breakthrough came with the development of sparsely gated networks [5],
which showed that it is possible to maintain model accuracy while
activating only a small fraction of a large parameter network during both
training and inference.
[1] R. A. Jacobs, M. I. Jordan, S. J. Nowlan, G. E. Hinton, Adaptive mixtures of local experts. (1991)
[2] M. I. Jordan, R. A. Jacobs, Hierarchical mixtures of experts and the EM algorithm. (1993)
[3] L. Xu, M. Jordan, G. E. Hinton, An alternative model for mixtures of experts. (1994)
[4] S. Waterhouse, D. MacKay, A. Robinson, Bayesian methods for mixtures of experts. (1995)
[5] N. Shazeer, A. Mirhoseini, K. Maziarz, A. Davis, Q. Le, G. Hinton, J. Dean, Outrageously large neural networks: The sparsely-gated mixture-of-experts layer. (2017)
They push the boundaries, alright. Of obtaining the results of work without doing the work themselves, which I hate to say it but this is classic Chinese machiavellianist business behavior:
The idea that America is going to stay ahead of China is I think at this point clearly delusional. It's also just such silly framing. Why should 350 million people stay ahead of 1 billion people on the other side of the world? If an AI lab in China cures cancer or something do Americans lose?
So many Americans seem to (at least in theory) be ready to sign up for this ongoing confrontation with China. Does anyone think it isn't America who is poking the bear when it comes to the Thucydides trap? Why not try to get along? It occurs to me the only people more Chinese innovation would hurt are the mega cap class in the United States. Elon Musk certainly doesn't want BYD in the United States. Same story all the way down with these super capitalized AI companies. Most average Americans would probably be better off in a world where the United States and China got along. But its those Americans who will be called upon to suffer most of the burden if that trap ever springs.
I don't think it's very common to believe the Chinese people are bad guys. It's the government and its control of the people that's the problem. And no, I don't think the US is immune to that sort of problem either.
Honestly it's just a hierarchy difference between the two countries. In the US, tech/fin/military companies have the upper hand compared to the government (fragmented between 2 parties). Despite the sharades with Anthropic, Tech-fluencers are in control. Compared to china, the government (dictatorship) has more control over Tech companies (take any example from the past 10 years). For them, undermining the US AI supremacy is an objective, and releasing open weight models is the way, and I'm all for it.
Let's not get crazy here. You can acknowledge that the Chinese AI industry has some structural advantages right now without trying to claim anything else. China is still a brutal autocracy.
Exactly. They did not have to open up their research up and this is what happens when smart researchers are forced to squeeze performance gains out of existing hardware.
They don't have TPUs or access to the latest Vera Rubin GPUs either to get performance gains for free. All of the optimizations Deepseek have done are in software and it goes down to the PTX assembly level.
Compared to Anthropic who are celebrating in fixing a flickering issue in a terminal app which took months to fix.
> All of the optimizations Deepseek have done are in software and it goes down to the PTX assembly level
DeepSeek are still using NVIDIA (PTX) to train on, but for inference have already transitioned to Huawei Ascend chips, and inference speed is what this paper is addressing.
Anthropic almost certainly also has optimized software down to the assembly level, considering this take-home interview challenge they published: https://github.com/anthropics/original_performance_takehome/... which is all about instruction-level performance optimizations. That they don't prioritize UI fixes just means they consider other things more important.
> Compared to Anthropic who are celebrating in fixing a flickering issue in a terminal app which took months to fix.
It's funny, because if you ran Claude Code on a slow terminal, the cause of the flicker was obvious: They kept dumping the entire history of the chat back into the terminal in a number of situations, and relied on the terminal to them end up in the correct state.
Google and Microsoft publish more than enough and American universities are publishing the science beyond DeepSeek's engineering. That fact that you don't know about them means you're not following the science only reading hacker news.
Google hasn’t published much in depth ML work since T5 (which was hugely influential at the time) - most Gemma releases are 1-3 page model card pdfs these days with no in depth analysis. Even TurboQuant is shaking out to have basically been a rehash of previous work without proper attribution. I do think Microsoft is doing some interesting things with smaller models but haven’t read much research, interested in any refs you might have to share!
Check recent iclr acl icml neurips you will see 10-20 papers from Google Research which are not just simple model cards. they are solid reproducible research.
Chinese companies (and labs) operate in conjunction with the CCP so whatever they're doing, it's because it's Chinese state policy.
What became clear when DeepSeek came onto the scene was that China was seeking to commoditize LLMs. They consider it an issue of national security not to be beholden to US tech companies when it comes to AI. And I, for one, fully endorse this policy.
Another data point on this is the black market for Claude tokens in China [1]. The chat logs themselves are a commodity to train models.
I believe that OpenAI in particular is a bet on a trillion dollar pot of gold that doesn't exist. Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta will all be fine. Anthropic is in a far better position than OpenAI (IMHO) but if DeepSeek or some other Chinese open weight model gets as good at coding, they're in real trouble too.
I don’t see how Anthropic is in a better position. They have a slight edge in model quality right at a time when we’re getting a taste of what cheap, “good enough” AI looks like. They don’t own their own compute. And their own arrogance and lies have alienated a huge chunk of their customer base and alerted everyone to the dangers of being dependent on them.
I personally think not owning their own compute is going to be an advantage.
There is a meteor headed towards all this AI investment that I don't think has been properly accounted for and that is, what happens to all the existing hardware investments when NVidia's next architecture comes out. Blackwell (H100/H200) is the current generation. Rubin (R100, presumably R200) is the next and arrives soon. Now a lot of the investment hasn't been spent yet so will likely be spent on Rubin but at that point, what happens when the next iteration comes out and does 3-4x the compute for the same electricity input and same hardware cost?
Also, what happens when people can run way bigger models on consumer hardware in 5 years? The effective limit for useful local LLMs is currently ~31B parameter models because the RTX 5090 has 32GB of VRAM and Apple's shared memory architecture, which can keep bigger models in memory, just doesn't have the raw processing power.
Anyway, why I argue Anthropic is in a better position (than OpenAI) is that they seem to have captured a market that may well be profitable for them as a company, specifically Claude for coding. So they just haven't burnt quite as much cash as OpenAI so aren't in as deep of a hole.
While I think local models are going to improve maassively over the next few years, running them in a data center at scale is always going to be cheaper for a company. Why? Because they can amortize their costs by running 24/7 and powering them and cooling them is simply cheaper at scale when you're talking about 1000+ engineers who otherwise might only be using their hardware ~40 hours a week.
IMHO Google is in the best position here of all the US companies, even though their models aren't the best, because their data centers are ruthlessly efficient, their homegrown TPUs will eventually catch up (and thus avoid the NVidia tax) and they simply haven't bet the farm on winning AI.
However, Google probably won't catch up. Nvidia has been winning in spite of the fact that their hardware is general purpose rather than tuned for inference.
Rubin has architectural differences I don't understand that are supposed to make inference much cheaper and faster while still retaining those other more generic capabilities. Their next generation after that is going to do even better at being fast for inference and general purpose.
Google is betting that their TPUs won't depreciate faster than the markup they have to pay to Nvidia. I don't think they will be right.
Why do people who don't follow the prices of A100 talk like they know things about GPU pricing dynamics?
A100s are ~7 years old and going for more than 2 dollars an hour, significantly more expensive than even 2 years ago. This is because anything with 80gb of VRAM or more and made by Nvidia will have economically useful lifespans of like, 10 years.
So I was curious about how A100s would do running DeepSeek v4. I can't find any instances of running v4 Pro on even an 8xA100 cluster. So you need to run Flash at ~284B params. A100s don't support FP8 so you're running FP16 so you're taking a hit that way. But I see estimates of 30-50tok/s for an 8xA100 cluster. They're drawing 300-400W each so you're looking at probably 3500+ Watts, which is roughly 0.01tok/W.
Now jump ahead 2 years and you seem to have a massive jump in performance [1]. The tokens/Watt goes up by at least 2 orders of magnitude. And the B100 is 3-4x that. And we're about to hit the R100 (Rubin) cliff.
That's what this is going to come down. When hyperscalar DCs are getting to Gigawatt power usage, it all comes down to power efficiency. Those A100s aren't far from being sold for scrap.
I've been looking into how different companies are handling depreciation for this. Amazon seems to be saying the life is 3-4 years, Google 4-5 and Meta is saying 8+, which I think is wildly optimistic.
> Another data point on this is the black market for Claude tokens in China [1]. The chat logs themselves are a commodity to train models.
anyone with IQ higher than 130 (thus qualified for actual AI R&D) would be questioning something obvious here -
if they are already doing such dodgy stuff with the aim to maximize profits, why would those resellers have large amount of logs with actual American model responses to sell to those AI labs in the first place. shouldn't they just post train & customize some leading Chinese open source models to pretend to be Opus or GPT for the vast majority of their users (as classified by some models) who don't know much about expected Opus behaviours & not skilled enough to tell the differences?
that is actually the interesting bit not covered in your censored version of the story line, it is also what happens on the ground. your censored version of the story implies that those dodgy resellers using stolen credit cards, pooling accounts with stolen IDs and illegally selling very personal logs would somehow be honest enough to spend extra $ to ensure their victims (aka paying users) can actually use real Opus and GPT. LOL
resellers wouldn't be trying to sell such junk in the first place. they use faked models to avoid the cost of Opus tokens, not to double dip to scam those with arguably the highest IQ in the country.
AI training is considered transformational. That's how AI training gets around copyright and it's probably consistent with copyright precedent. For example, indexing the web is considered transformational, even though you can recover the full text of everything in an inverted index.
US AI companies trained their own models on vast amounts of copyrighted and publicly available content without obtaining permission. There's no moral high ground here.
You know what, if someone wants to downvote this guy by claiming distillation attacks are not "attacks" or don't cross some ethical bound (especially since I just posted a similar comment), then go right ahead, but if you're combining it with any notion of "leadership", that's like saying that the person in 2nd place in a bike race who is drafting behind the person actually in 1st place is exhibiting "leadership".
There's no "leader" if, absent someone whose results you're copying, you are an emperor without clothes
Besides "attack" being a ludicrous name for distillation, note how your article says "accuses", also it's mostly about Alibaba, not DeepSeek (although it's mentioned there). Both Dario Amodei and Sam Altman publicly claimed that DS used their outputs to train their models, and knowing the differences between all these models by heart, I believe they're simply lying through their teeth to sway the public opinion and/or the policy. These models are absolutely nothing alike, and distillation necessarily makes student's outputs similar to teacher's. This is very visible in Z.ai models (which were trained on Gemini outputs to the point that they repeated Google's conditional prompt injections in the CoT, and later on Claude where it started repeating their CoT as well) and certain Google models which were trained on Claude's outputs in a roundabout way. Distillation always shows up in the result.
And certainly they have no idea whether these outputs (assuming they ever existed and it wasn't made up) were used for training. The article mentions that DS made 150k requests. This isn't much and might have been just an eval or a benchmark to compare their own model against. It's really hard to believe DeepSeek had any Claude outputs anywhere in their training schedule, since it's just too different. Besides training on random vibecode of course, which is mostly written by Claude.
While I don't agree with your comment being downvoted, I don't think distillation is either an "attack" nor is it "stealing". The idea that someone else gets to decide how I use tokens that I pay for is ludicrous.
Imagine if your casio calculator would come with a ToS that says you can't use it to develop a competitor calculator or any other tools. Or that your hammer can't be used to make other tools. Or, closer to the HN crowd, imagine MS in the 90s saying that you can't use their OS to build competing services to MS. They'd be laughed at and be split immediately if they tried that.
The only thing they can do is to refuse serving tokens (and even that's debatable, if we get to tokens being commoditised). But that's gonna be a game of whack-a-mole, and they know it.
Excited to see if this makes it into DwarfStar for local inference, have been using the flash model extensively since the 2-bit quants were made available by antirez.
The paper actually references testing their DSpark speculative decoding strategy with Qwen 3 4b, 8b and 14b models so while I doubt they will release builds themselves, they’ve open sourced (DeepSpec) their training pipeline for this so we will likely see folks adopting for other models.
DeepSeek is, as I feel currently, the sole AI company which is actually trying to innovate rather than top mere benchmarks. Others like OpenAI, Anthropic and Google are mostly just competeing with each rather than keep innovating around the clock.
> DeepSeek is, as I feel currently, the sole AI company which is actually trying to innovate rather than top mere benchmarks.
I'd also include the other Chinese labs like Moonshot (behind Kimi) and Z.ai (behind GLM). They are innovating and continue openly sharing their research to the public. I believe the founder of Moonshot even shared 40 minute video on Twitter where he goes through techniques that powers Kimi.
> Others like OpenAI, Anthropic and Google are mostly just competeing with each rather than keep innovating around the clock.
The strategy for the most companies in the US has been for a long time to capture the social audience, whatever the mean is. Quality and innovation is the second factor. Capture the market, lock in the users, influence regulation and lobbying to keep the power.
> Others like OpenAI, Anthropic and Google are mostly just competeing with each rather than keep innovating around the clock.
They compete with each other by innovating. The innovations result in more utility for the customer, but the technology isn't made public. Trade secrets are secret for a reason.
The reason people may think that DeepSeek is the "most innovative" is because of what they can observe from the outside, much like people may mistakenly conclude models are the "prettiest of the population" because not everyone is photographed for public consumption.
There was a recent exodus from Qwen of researchers who supported their open source efforts, I’m not sure we will see many new open models from them past the 3.6 series.
are you able to say more about this (specifically that the researchers who left were concerned that qwen models were being closed sourced)? I was under the impression that the chinese labs and their employees aren't particularly concerned about ideology/safety/whatever and were just releasing open source models because it helps with publicity and does the most damage to the US AI labs. (and to be clear, I strongly support open source models, I just doubt that the Chinese labs and their employees are actually motivated by morals).
Besides the founder, the only real external investor for DeepSeek is Chinese govt. there are literally zero revenue pressure compare to O, A & G.
To compete in that direction, USG needs to learn from CCP to "seize the means of production", which they are sort of doing, but in such an incompetent way that I'm afraid we will probably end up mixing the worst of both communism and capitalism.
> To compete in that direction, USG needs to learn from CCP to "seize the means of production"
No they don't. The U.S. Government is free to launch their own AI labs if they wish -- and even compete with the private sector -- but that doesn't mean they have to confiscate existing investments and capital. But Congress is unlikely to do that, because we've learned in the course of history that in well-functioning competitive markets, publicly-operated services tend to be worse than private ones across multiple dimensions.
Chinese companies are largely where they are not because they're state funded, but because they operate in ways that would be considered criminal in the U.S. If they didn't constantly trespass on OpenAI and Anthropic to try to achieve product and technological parity, they would be too far behind to produce innovative research.
I’ve been using DeepSeek v4 pro for a month now in Kilo Code and its great. Fast, reliable, large context window and cheap as… Did 1,5B tokens this month and cost me 40usd (majority cached, but still).
Which provider? I went through 40 bucks on it on openrouter. It was not a lot of back and forth, context ended at around 300k, 15kloc output. I was using opencode, unsure if I can make the total token count visible.
OpenRouter sometimes chooses a very expensive provider. Try the floor slug or choose directly the provider. I moved to just putting 5 dollars directly on deepseek instead of going through OR.
It's in the JSONs in ~/.claude, but last 30 days only I think. You can have the model analyze history. So for correct history you'd need to run history analysis on a cron job or something. Kinda hacky.
Seems like they focus on improving the drafter and the verification policy so speculation keeps producing net speedups rather than wasted verification work at deepseek scale.
Title is bad, it's the first line of the abstract instead of the paper title. Speculative decoding for LLM inference was published in 2022: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.17192
This paper seems to be an improvement to speculative decoding but I haven't read it yet.
Yes. Section 5 talks about real-world deployment: 5.1: "The DSpark draft models are co-deployed with the preview versions of DeepSeek-V4-Flash and
DeepSeek-V4-Pro"; 5.4: "MTP-1 represents the former production setup, having
been superseded by DSpark two weeks following the DeepSeek-V4-preview release."
I see a world soon where there’s an extremely wide variety of small models for speculative decoding, unique to use cases, companies, and even individuals.
You clearly didn't read the recent speculative decoding papers because it's been possible to use any model to speculate for any other model for awhile. They solved the tokenization problems that prevented this in the past.
I am wondering if this is why they can offer their pro model at ~1/4th of the price compared to the other providers offering the same model, and if other providers will be able to do the same in a short timeframe.
Inference I estimate runs 90% plus gross margins. Just work out the math on these servers. I am pretty sure any player can price down. It wouldn't look good on an IPO prospectus.
I have been heavily using DeepSeek V4 Pro at Max for a month now and I would say it is 100x cheaper. If I pay for Claude I will hit that limit so fast I am always waiting 5 hours. Using the frontier models at Kilo I go through dollars while doing the same thing via DeepSeek it is pennies.
I believe the comment you replied to was talking about the cost on providers like OpenCode vs Deepseek API. Deepseek API is even cheaper than the other providers for the same deepseek models.
Mullvad has proved it doesn't collect. It's laughable to even suggest it.
They have been raided multiple times, tons of audits, does bleeding edge research on privacy preserving tech, donates to GOS, etc etc. You don't see this kind of VPN company at all because none exists.
Name any 2 or 3 that published bleeding edge research and similar in the last 6 months.
Well I can't think of even one at the moment, to be honest might be biased but all Chinese research labs are largely oss except Alibaba now.
I am certain there are lots of American labs that claim to do it, but either they are marketting in hype since they aren't even close to the frontier or contrarily just don't make anything of significant value public/oss.
As we can see again, this has nothing to do with distillation, yet for every gain Chinese labs make, the US labs will accuse them of theft. Yet they are constantly innovating.
These companies providing tokens, whether SOTA or not, that want to IPO are so fucked as time goes on.
Can't sell their SOTA models, only slightly better than the open source models for the models they can sell, cost 20x to 50x for good models, a TAM that consists almost solely of developers, with no customer of theirs actually boasting increased profits as a result of AI...
The question is even, was there EVER a time for an IPO?
If the business model requires hundreds of billions to get the required quality (R&D but also infrastructure to collect data and train, either purchased or rented to 3rd party) while "only" dozens of billions can be earned back (as costs still exist to earn, it's not free once models are trained), then maybe there NEVER was nor till be a good time for an IPO in a rational market.
Unfortunately the market is often not rational in this way.
Hype within retail market means there are suckers willing to buy. Institutional market knows there are suckers when the hype is high. Both would drive the price up, and retail investors the ones left when it falls.
IPOs with massive bags can be wework or spacex, it all depends on vibes. If they buy a couple more articles doomposting and glazing AI on the financial times right before exit they will def find a bunch of boomers to buy their bags. If the narrative changes before they IPO its over.
This is just one of many papers DeepSeek have released to be able to serve models at extremely cheap prices, unlike the others taking on >$100B+ of debt in building data centers for the same thing.
> As with V4-Flash, we treat this point as an indication that DSpark sustains useful
throughput under an interactivity target that the baseline cannot efficiently support. At matched system capacities, DSpark delivers 57% to 78% faster per-user generation.
Reminds me of the flawed solution in scaling servers in 2017 that use memory-intensive technologies by adding even more servers to solve the problem. (It just increases costs.)
Rather than doing that, think about which critical parts of your app can be written in a more performant technology.
Fast forward to 2026, now you can see who is just throwing more money at the problem to create even more problems where as DeepSeek is giving us optimized solutions.
I know exactly who I would pay attention to, and it is absolutely not Anthropic.
For so long American companies have operated under the assumption that servers are cheaper than developers, and that was used to justify all sorts of inefficient practices.
The last year has shown that’s not true anymore (even for web servers).
At this point why can't someone produce a fridge or container-sized AI appliance based on legacy chips (12nm)? I imagine this would cover 80% of corporate use cases where you need to "google-in-a-box" functionality.
The state-of-the-art nanometer are impossible to achieve but if you have infinite solar energy during business hours does it really matter? Every company has a parking spot so this ASIC-like appliance could be as big as a shipping container.
If it could just run recent open models for a handful of users it would be such a nobrainer to buy.
The issue is that there are only so many fabs in the world that make memory. And if you want the good stuff, your easily going into 400 ~ 750b parameter models. That means at FP4 400 to 750GB memory.
Did i mention there are only so many memory makers and they are all busy printing money with HBM memory?
Intel is trying with Crescent Island, to make a 160GB GPU that uses LPDDR5X memory.
HBM takes multiple times the resources to make vs basic DDR5 memory. So by going this route, you have more memory, with the disadvantage that its only 700GB/s. VS HBM pumping out Terrabyte numbers like its nothing.
These cards is reasonably priced, may be good alternative to $10k 96GB Nvidia Blackwells... You give up on token generation (heavily memory dependent), for more memory to run larger models at home/office/company servers.
The problem is, again, there are only so many memory makers and its not like the market is flooded with DDR5 memory anymore, as the big 3 moved a lot of production to HBM.
Another approach is Sandisk making HBF ... Flash memory, like your typical NVME but designed around maximum speed. So instead of loading the models into expensive HBM memory, you use the benefits of density in Flash memory, to offload models into that. Cheaper, but slower... But it leaves your expensive HBM memory free for things like KV Cache, Active parameters, etc... So your model will be slower, but your hybrid using it. As in, faster then running a model from system memory with normal DDR memory, but not as fast as HBM.
So yea, there is a lot in development to reduce the dependance of that resource eating HBM memory. For the wafer cost of 1GB HBM, you normally got 4GB normal memory. That is why the world supply of memory dropped. Not just the insane buying but be HBM is just very inefficient in wafer usage.
Can we not use DDR4 production and create some kind of hybrid solution? Sure, but the big 3 moved away from DDR4 in favor of DDR5 a long time ago. We have competition from China with a mix of DDR4/DDR5, but they also need to scale up. Nobody expected to see a large part of the world production vanish into HBM...
Even if its about DDR4 and older nodes, ironically, most companies had been moving away from DDR4. There is only so much wafer capability in the world, to the point that companies are moving to using DDR2 ... Yea, not a typo, like 2007 DDR2! for IOT devices etc, stuff that does not need fast memory. Because even DDR3 got too expensive for them.
Its not like the old nodes are not used anymore ... Like that capacity was sitting idle. It was still in production making other stuff. The only real solution is that we need more fabs, and those take years to build. And the big 3 delayed investing in new fabs for a long time, unsure about the whole AI bubble stuff. Aka, they did not want to make a ton of fabs to end up with over capacity if the AI growth collapsed.
With MoE models like Deepseek’s and with multiple Crescent Island accelerators, the aggregate memory throughput actually doesn’t look that bad. Two Crescent Island gets roughly 1400GB/s and Deepseek-v4-flash with 13B parameters active nets roughly 100t/s which is decent for a small team or great for a single user.
More Crescent Island scale up, although not likely entirely linearly.
But all GPU inference work like this, it’s not specific to Intel. Just Intel promises more affordable cards with big memory so they’re attractive.
Anyone want to bet that much like speculative execution, speculative decoding is going to introduce a whole slew of vulnerabilities in the ways LLMs work?
Must be wonderful to be on the board of OpenAi et al & their PE investors whilst China keeps blowing up these mines under their feet lmao.
Luckily Korean pension funds will buy all the trash as usual but goddamn you gotta start moving quick or you are gonna need some serious AGI to show you how to offload those bonds
DeepSeek continues to not only push the boundaries but also publish these incredible papers explaining how they achieved their gains - something the American labs no longer do unfortunately. Chinese labs are doing the most interesting work in AI right now.
>publish these incredible papers explaining how they achieved their gains - something the American labs no longer do unfortunately.
Google is still releasing a lot of llm architecture research. They introduced speculative decoding of LLMs in 2022[1], then released the code to perform sceculative decoding for their Gemma 4 model this year[2]
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.17192
[2] https://github.com/google-gemma/cookbook/blob/main/docs/mtp/...
Thanks for the clarification - Google does publish more than others - and I actually really appreciate the work they are doing with the Gemma models, which are truly competitive open models. I do wish they’d publish more in depth papers on their Gemma models but appreciate that they are open weights.
They weren't the first to do MTP like this, and arguably did it wrong: the MTP heads are kept in a separate file and have to be welded in by the inference engine.
Qwen 3.6 shipped with working MTP first, and had working MTP in llama.cpp first.
Given the MTP drafter is basically a separate model, keeping it separate makes more sense IMO. It's out of my wheelhouse but it seems like you could adjust the MTP drafter model separately from the main model, too.
Ultimately though the real explanation, I think, is Google doesn't care since for their own purposes (in LiteRT-LM), they do bundle them. As far as I know, anyway.
I mean just like GGUFs aren't technically necessary yet are _way_ more convenient than using Safetensors and configuring the default Jinja prompt by-hand, it makes sense to bundle the draft model too. For all intents and purposes, the only people who will train a draft model are the people who train the original model
Probably because American AI companies are on the hook for quite a lot of investment money. I think they are trying to find the magical moat to justify their valuation.
Revealing optimizations similar to these would pretty much reduce their competitive position.
Chinese labs are also still behind, so they’re incentivized to collaborate and have no reason to do it in private.
I suspect their tune will change if they ever take the lead..
The question is also what game they're playing. Deepseek came out of a hedge fund. I think it's no coincidence that their publications tend to have a large impact on AI stock prices.
Destroying the growth story of overvalued stocks is an interesting investment strategy. It's not even new. Shortsellers understandably get terrible rep from execs, but their actions are more often in the public interest than you'd think. Normally it's exposing fraud, but here we get the really fortunate side benefit of what could eventually amount to the most significant contribution to the general software community since Linux.
> The question is also what game they're playing. Deepseek came out of a hedge fund. I think it's no coincidence that their publications tend to have a large impact on AI stock prices.
Its revealing that they always seem to publish after some big announcement by American AI companies. But regardless, this is one of the benefits of a duopoly.
No more revealing than OpenAI, Anthropic and Google always having some new model that just so happens to be waiting in the wings whenever their competitors announce their own model bump.
The framing that Chinese labs open-source because they're behind assumes it's purely a competitive tactic. But there's a structural dimension: DeepSeek operates under a completely different funding model than US labs. They're backed by a quantitative hedge fund that views AI as infrastructure, not as a product to monetize directly. The ROI for them comes from trading alpha, not API revenue.
Chinese AI companies also face a domestic market where open-source distribution is often the only way to reach enterprise clients who won't pay SaaS premiums. The business logic aligns with openness in a way that US labs' VC-funded models don't.
> They're backed by a quantitative hedge fund that views AI as infrastructure, not as a product to monetize directly. The ROI for them comes from trading alpha, not API revenue.
That used to be true, but now they've raised ~7B$, so we'll see how / if that changes.
Yeah, they were in a tough position though. All their competitors were offering equity and they didn't.
Also, we’re seeing a classic commoditization spiral with open models rapidly closing the gap and driving prices towards the marginal cost of inference. The reality is that models themselves are general commodities and there's just not enough difference between them. A company can get ahead of others by a few months, but then the rest quickly close the gap. It's a really low margin business because there's no way to differentiate yourself.
Chinese companies understand this and they're treating models as shared infrastructure akin to Linux. The money is going to be in customization niches. Companies will charge to tune models for specific use cases and charge support for that. There's also going to be money at the bottom for hardware vendors making chips and memory. But the middle tier of generic LLMs is seeing involution where there's relentless competition driving profits towards the bottom.
Nope. It is purely a marketing and distribution strategy. Without open sourcing their models, their businesses would have never gotten off the ground. I've written about this here: https://try.works/writing-1#why-chinese-ai-labs-went-open-an...
Which is a good thing. Self-serving motives are more reliable than altruistic ones.
The world runs on incentives. Altruism/Self-serving are down stream of that.
Wikipedia is altruistic, and serves humanity quite well.
Open-source is also altruistic. If DeepSeek does become self-serving once they get the top spot, it doesn’t take away from the altruistic contributions that they made towards open models.
> Open-source is also altruistic
Contributing to it might not necessarily be. Most open source development is funded by large companies after all and from their perspective it can function as a cost saving measure. Allowing them to focus on their core products and removing the possibility of their rivals from getting a competitive advantage due to having a superior low level stack under their product.
Which is why open source is so successful in areas where software is a cost-center but mostly failed for consumer products (since spending resources on them would actually be altruistic unlike e.g. Linux kernel development)
altruism is not discernable from the outside
any altruistic act can be perceived as self serving
And ultimately the motivation for those contributions just doesn’t matter, except to those who like to anthropomorphize company and argue about their souls.
People who donated to OpenAI in its early years might disagree on that.
Or if they want to do anything close to predicting what they will do in the future, like curious and interested humans tend to want to do.
No parent is right. The core root driver of the world is capitalism, open source exists downstream of that.
Software engineers need money to survive. If they exclusively work on open source stuff where are they getting money from to survive? Follow the money trail… even a donation… eventually it leads to an incentive based source or action.
> If they exclusively work on open source stuff where are they getting money from to survive?
From open source. You can earn money from open source. Open source is not opposed to capitalism, idk where you got that idea.
Is it though? A large number of people get to experience a lot of power over others because they moderate Wikipedia. That's certainly why some of them do it, just like on Reddit
I hate to quote pithy proverbs, but "the road to hell is paved with good intentions." One can have an altruistic goal which ends up harming people too, which is where that proverb comes from. Prohibition and The War on Drugs in the US are two good examples of something that had altruistic origins[†] but ended up doing way more harm than good.
[†] Another problem with altruism: we don't all agree on whether a goal is altruistic, and what's altruistic in the enactor's eyes might not be in yours. Curating a fountain of human knowledge like Wikipedia? Probably altruistic. Protecting humanity from itself by installing your company as the stewards of frontier LLMs? Not so altruistic in my view.
> Prohibition and The War on Drugs in the US are two good examples of something that had altruistic origins
The War on Drugs had the purpose (not just in its origin but in its perpetuation) of inflicting harm on elite-disfavored subsets of the population that could not be openly targeted for Constitutional reasons, which is about as far from an altruistic reason as it possible to get.
This statement is factually true and you are voted down because many people lack knowledge.
Any individual that provides free labor cannot survive off of said free labor. He must work for money to survive or get donations from someone who earned that money from incentive based labor in order to even buy the food he needs to exist as a living human being. Much of the time that labor is actually closed source.
This is a logistical reality. A lot of open source advocates are unable to get their brains out of the whole mentality that open source literally cannot exist without incentive based software supporting it. Who pays for GitHub to exist? Who pays for the food swes eat? I just code for open source all day and money falls out of the sky.
My smart friend says there are jobs that pay you to work on open source exclusively. Smart guy. In this case you follow the money trail. How does that company get enough money to pay a guy to work exclusively on open source?
Free labor enables capitalism, especially if you consider labor arbitrage as a mixture of free labor and properly compensated (according to the real value) labor. From literally being born, to family culture, education, and whatever level of broad social cohesion, it’s all free labor. Without that background, money itself loses its value, since an individual cannot have reasonable confidence in trading it for something of actual tangible value. It is abstract stored value, banked into society for free. Indeed, in many cases, the free labor is in the rational self interest of a group. But stability and love and peace aren’t monetized to their true value. Otherwise, markets should be much less stable. Bubbles are only notable for the large impact of a small group of bad actors. Overall, it’s pretty amazing what free labor does. Open source is just another instance of this long and critical tradition.
Free labor is derivative to incentivized labor. Your statement here doesn’t disprove or counter what I said. Again, follow the money trail. Everything you said if you follow the origin of the money it comes from paid, incentivized labor. Parents need money to raise kids… where do they get that money?? Our economy is called capitalism for a reason there is literally zero reference to charity or altruism in the vocabulary or even standard models that describe our economy and economic theory.
Put it another away: if we removed your ability to do incentivized labor and all you can do is charity work… you would run out of money and die from starvation. If we did the opposite and we removed your ability to do charity work… you’d be fine.
All of this re-emphasizes the point of this thread: In our objective reality, the world is driven by incentive based work while altruism is a side effect of surplus wealth generated by incentive based work. That is the fundamental reality.
Go read Max Stirner. True "Alturism" doesn't exist. It's all egoism, even if and especially if you think it's not.
You mean more predictable, not more reliable.
Disagree. It’s More reliable.
Could you explain? (asking in good faith)
I don't think so. I can confidently predict that altruism will give you a very unreliable income stream in the vast majority of cases.
Very interesting take
Look at how far OpenAI has drifted from their original mission. Everything comes back to greed, so it's ideal for the world if selfish motives happen to coincide with what's good for the world, like advancements in open models
can you elaborate? the original mission was "advance digital intelligence in a way that benefits all of humanity"
I don't see an inconsistency. money is pragmatic, the mission needs money
Every company on the face of the earth has a mission statement involving some bs goal that sounds altruistic. For a good example look at googles mission statement.
The real mission statement for most companies is to make as much money as possible.
It's a standard take since it is how markets tend to work. They aren't powered by altruism, it is a big system for turning greed into good results. We don't have all this stuff because people suddenly woke up one morning and decided to be nice.
Yes but there's more to the world than markets.
On aggregate mainly because humans often tend to behave “irrationally” due to various reasons though
I don't understand what is interesting about it: it's the default.
Markets don't run on altruism.
And humans don't run on markets.
Mostly they kind of do since we do live in an utopian society of unlimited abundance. Extremely few people can afford to (or want to) spend a very large number of working hours without ever getting anything directly in return for it.
I think you made a typo of saying do instead of don't and totally reversed your argument
Neither on altruism.
The standard is applied very inconsistently. Nobody accuses the local bakery of being motivated by profit, and that they don't bake bread for you out of altruism.
Isn't it the entire basis of capitalism?
They are focused on the things you do when you are not over-capitalized and you can’t get unlimited nvidia hardware to train on. And the results speak for themselves.
Meanwhile we in the US are blocked from buying Huawei GPUs and retirees are boasting about the nvidia in their portfolios.
> Chinese labs are also still behind, so they’re incentivized to collaborate and have no reason to do it in private.
US labs in Google, Meta and SpaceX are not leading, none of them managed to build something on par with GLM 5.2.
Care to explain to me why they still don't collaborate and still choose to do it in private?
I'm not sure I'd put Google in that list, but either way: Because they think they have enough capital that they can catch up and don't need the reputational boost of this.
As good as Gemini's visual intelligence is, it's a terrible agent.
Google at least still releases open source models to the public.
Aren't they only open weights, not true open source?
The concept of open source doesn't really apply to AI models since their behavior is mostly controlled by the data they were trained on and the complex ways they are trained. Having the source code of the model by itself wouldn't help you.
From a practical POV having all the training data, training infrastructure, and training know-how wouldn't help you either unless you could afford to spend the millions of dollars (hundreds of millions for a SOTA model) in compute to train it each time they released a new training set, in which case you're only talking about the big commercial companies. "open source for the people" just does not apply.
Thank Apple?
Those are mostly for embedded devices and the current "sponsor" is Apple.
Gemini 3.1 is still up there, though? If Google started to compete on price they could be very successful.
Wait, are you claiming that these companies haven't contributed to the ecosystem via research and open source?
No idea I don’t work there.
Also, historically, China has always viewed intellectual property as public property. Similar to open source.
Not everyone is motivated by greed
What do you think is the underlaying motivation?
You ask me what I think. So far deepseek has been very consistently trying to advance state of the art research in a transplant and public way by writing papers and publishing working code. They are also not at the mercy of the stock market in the same way many Americans companies are. Before anyone assumes too much, I live in Europe.
> Chinese labs are also still behind, so they’re incentivized to collaborate and have no reason to do it in private.
Even if they're ahead they don't have enough GPUs to scale. Open sourcing is hence a good strategy to at least get market share (even if not $).
True!
Projection is a funny thing. It causes people to misread situations all the time. Southern slaveowners feared violent retribution from freed slaves, for example [1]. It was pure projection and said more about the South than it did the slaves. The reality was there was no violent retribution. It was the opposite where the former slaveowners continued to inflict violence on the formerly enslaved.
I say this because we see the same thing used as an argument against China. "If they overtake us, they'll do imperialism (like us)." Again, it says more about us than them.
A better reading (IMHO) Of the situation is that China believes that AI shouldn't be used simply to mint a few more trillionaires but the benefits should be shared with society. Why do I say this? Because we now have 70+ years of China doing exactly that. The transformation in China all the way from rural villages to Tier 1 cities has been utterly astounding. China has lifted ~800M people out of extreme poverty.
In some ways we're at a similar point to the late 1990s and 2000s when Microsoft execs complained that Linux, being free, destroyed intellectual property value. Linux should be a perfect example of how people can and do act altruistically, or at least not in a way to bait-and-switch to enrich themselves.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistory/comments/1d26grm/in_the_...
It's even worse than that. China publishes stacks upon stacks of policy documents in which they explain clearly what they will do and why. This includes why they do poverty alleviation and why they believe big monopolies that own everything are bad. But almost no western observers care to read those documents. Instead, western observers, including HN, speculate endlessly about China's intentions, and "it would be naive to believe they would not do X" or drawing equivalences to Soviet Union or whatever. And the "journalists" sell this notion that Chinese state intentions are "untransparent" and "unknowable" while pretending the policy documents don't exist.
Meanwhile, Xi Jinping has published his 5th book on how governance in China works and what they're after. These are not books written for a western audience: they're compilations of speeches that he already gave to the Chinese party and state apparatus, so the contents are not sanitized for foreign audiences. But there are no English reviews of summaries of this 5th book at all by the usual China experts that distribute what western audience know about China.
This extends to beyond the government. Even though "for the people but only against the government" is an often-heard mantra, nobody seems to listen to what Chinese AI companies themselves say about why they publish open models. DeepSeek and GLM have said multiple times publicly what their motivations are, yet people on HN still speculate like they usually do.
Truly mind-boggling. I get that a lot of people don't like China. But setting aside the question of whether their dislike is justified, it would at least be rational to properly understand China, even if it's to defeat it. And listening to what China says themselves is absolutely essential for proper understanding. But people don't bother to? And they seem mostly happy with sticking to speculations that match preconceived notions, even if that hurts their chances of defeating China.
Extremely interesting comment, thank you. Got some links where I can download this source material? I don't read or speak the language, but will try interrogating it with an LLM
The fifth book is on Amazon. https://www.amazon.com/XI-JINPING-GOVERNANCE-CHINA-V/dp/7119... It's already an English translation.
For something shorter, you can see Arnaud Bertrand's recent review. https://arnaudbertrand.substack.com/p/the-book-the-west-refu... The review is behind a paywall, but not expensive.
If you want to read policy documents directly (primary source), try the State Council / Chinese government policy database: https://www.gov.cn/zhengce/ and https://sousuo.www.gov.cn/zcwjk/policyDocumentLibrary
They also provide official translations: https://english.www.gov.cn/policies/
For Central Party documents: https://news.cn/politics/zywj/. It lists recent Central Committee / General Office / joint Party-State documents, e.g. 2026 documents on township duty lists, Party member development rules, carbon evaluation, long-term care insurance, and SOE leadership rules.
Thanks again, this is more than enough for a clanker-assisted rabbit hole to disappear into
I 100% agree with you and want to add something.
If you simply take what the Chinese government says at face value, you will be correct way more often than 95% of Western policy wonks, media talking heads, "analysts" and so forth. Because, like you say, they tell you everything they're doing.
In the recent US-China summit, Xi Jinping just came out and used the Thucydides Trap metaphor, which tells you everything about where China thinks it is and where it sees the US going, which is to become increasingly belligerent as their power declines. Now whether or not you agree with that assessment (I do agree), it still tells you China wants to avoid open hostilities, it sees itself as continuing to rise and it fears what a declining US might do.
The Thucydides Trap mention is different from what you describe. Xi has dismissed the Thucydides Trap multiple times in the past as being hearsay and self-imposed bias (https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/944179.shtml). "We should strictly base our judgment on facts, lest we become victims to hearsay, paranoid or self-imposed bias. There is no such thing as the so-called Thucydides trap in the world. But should major countries time and again make the mistakes of strategic miscalculation, they might create such traps for themselves."
But western politicians keep raising this metaphor. So at some point they're like "okay we'll speak your language". They then used this metaphor to make the point "our rise isn't the threat, your fear of it is. If you resist it you're walking right into the trap Thucydides warned about". So your conclusion is still right, they don't want open hostilities, a stable world is in their interest.
Then western media ran away with this and were like "OMG Xi mentioned the Thucydides Trap", completely ignoring his point.
So the marketplace is working.
This is the way! Open source models will benefit, and once open source models reach the state of "good enough" the hyped up US AI companies will fear, since the availability of free, good enough, AI models will set the ceiling for how much they can charge. Then the bubble will pop.
You mean open weights, I guess? There are as far as I know very few open source models, the training data is seldom released. Sadly.
Regardless of where they are, the Chinese will always share their progress, as they're collectivist/cooperative at their core, compared to the individualistic/competitive US.
I don't really see the moat for frontier AI labs being "more efficient models" although that could help their margins - I think moats will be built by expanding the horizontal and vertical market expansion - like Anthropic is doing the most at the moment
Who is financing DeepSeek and what are they expecting in return?
Until recently, DeepSeek were self-financed (it was a spin-out from a hedge fund). They just raised ~50million RMB (US$7bn), and according to media [0] (which admittedly can be unreliable), the lead investors were:
1) The CEO himself 2) Tencent 3) CALT (the battery company) 4) NetEase (internet/media company) 5) JD.com (ecommerce) 6) Chinese investment firms
What are they expecting in return? I'd say the same thing that all those investors in OpenAI and Anthropic are expecting - profit.
[0] https://finance.sina.com.cn/stock/vcpe/2026-06-11/doc-iniazi...
I don't think this question would get to the reason. There could be one or two persons in charge who simply shape the culture of the company, including how much to publish.
They are self financed, the company that makes DeepSeek is a finance company that trades on the markets.
The CCP's approach has historically been to subsidize their companies far more than other countries do. Why would LLMs be any different?
https://www.oecd.org/en/data/dashboards/magic-database-indus...
Access to everything every American company feeds into the AI is well worth it to the CCP.
Even the latest World Bank report, the defacto neoliberal institution, recognized a couple of months ago that leaving the industries focus be dictaed by purely capital decisions was bad, as in _really_ bad.
According to EU statistics, yeah
OECD isn’t the EU.
And regarding the dataset:
> Unlike most OECD databases, which rely on government data provided at country-level, the OECD MAGIC database uses firm-level data. The subsidy estimates included in the database are based on raw data obtained from firms’ annual reports, financial statements, bond prospectuses, IPO prospectuses, etc. The data are collected and verified manually by the OECD to maximise accuracy, consistency, and comparability. In some cases, additional information is also obtained from government databases, either to verify the firm-level information or to complement it. Care is taken to avoid double-counting where the data mix corporate and government sources.
Does that figure hold up when we look at Silicon Valley financing? Uber alone was subsidized to the tune of billions. Let alone the recent batch where we're into hundreds of billions.
Even if they were fully self-financed, which isn’t the case, they would expect something in return.
You can give them money by using their api. Just because their model is open, doesn’t mean they are a non profit.
Not everyone has the American “fuck you got mine” zero sum game attitude. Also they’re making some of the American and European AI companies look bad which they can leverage with their trades if they wanted to.
IMHO to promote that China believes in free markets and making the technology available to all.
Which will likely help them bolster the sales of the MANY new AI chips in development/use in China to international markets. Dislodging Nvidia.
Kinda the opposite of what Jensen Huang (Nvidia) thinks US is doing: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/u3SY8nvjhQA
Edit: I'm a fan of deepseek and believe it's good to make the technology open/available. And do think that also help business - which I support as well.
Edit 2: No idea why I'm getting downvoted. That's also their official stance https://english.www.gov.cn/news/202601/08/content_WS695f1b55...
Short AI companies
???
Profit!
Not suggesting this is it, but you know, one possible angle.
I seriously am far from fear mongering and doomsday mentality, but I just can't see how OpenAI and Anthropic can have a successful IPO if the quality gap between the free and paid continues to narrow like that...
> Probably because American AI companies are on the hook for quite a lot of investment money
That's a lot of words to say it's just capitalist greed.
Do you think that DeepSeek are building their models for free, or something? They aren't "on the hook" for anything?
What's with all the China glazing about this stuff? They release some open-source work and people act like they are suddenly the beacon of freedom and transparency.
This is incorrect binary thinking. Them releasing open source can be good, but that does not commit you to think that china or chinese companies are saints. There are many shades of grey here and one does not exclude the other (nor include it).
Are you reading the comments?
I think there are some sockpuppet accounts active but what also contributes is that many people are absolutely fed up with US technological hegemony and welcome alternatives to core technologies from elsewhere.
Not just US technological hegemony, but the USA has threatened to invade Europe (Greenland) and Canada, and has actually invaded Venezuela and Iran. China hasn't. Maybe lots of people that live in those places are now switching sides.
Over the past 2y the US also started a trade war with Europe, triggered the worst oil shock the world ever experienced for no reasons, threatened to leave NATO, tried to force Ukraine to give up its territory to the invading country, and way more
I’m think its in our best interests to lever these american ai companies to exhibit at least some degree of freedom and transparency anyway we can…
This is so out of touch. Go to Neurips or the top AI conferences to see what is happening.
Publishing by necessity I wonder? American labs on the cutting edge pioneering the way forward, so Deepseek open sourcing what they’ve got is to help even the playing field.
Hopefully the experts here can offer insight. The above is just my hunch and I’m not a specialist in this field.
Yes, challenger Labs publish out of necessity. It is a marketing strategy. People assuming open source means giving something up, but the reality is that Z.ai has a revenue of some $100M and it would be about $0M if they never open sourced their models.
Wouldn’t that just help the American labs anyway though? Or do they assume they’ve actually already figured this stuff out and kept it secret?
It used to be the case that NSA hired the majority of all math graduates in the US, and were assumed to be years ahead in cryptography. Yet in the 90s, it became clear that they no longer were that - among other things, the cipher of the notorious Clipper chip was broken, and we can rule out that it was made weak on purpose because the whole point of Clipper was that they had a backdoor.
So, despite hiring the cream of the crop of math graduates, who could read the papers of free academia, but whose own result the free world could not access - they fell behind.
I have a theory explaining why. I think it's because science is an interactive process. NSA cryptographers could read papers, but they couldn't talk openly with the authors of those papers, because of secrecy demands - even asking question might indicate what they were working on. You can easily imagine them spending months on something they could have avoided by going to the original authors and getting told "Oh, we tried that for a long time, it doesn't work".
Whether that theory is right or not, cryptography is a concrete example of a domain where public research with fewer resources beat private research with a lot more resources.
Everyone in this thread is getting distracted by nationalism, but you hit the nail on the head. In this case for whatever reason the Chinese AI industry is collaborative and the American AI industry is not. This will result in the Chinese companies making progress faster. Full stop. This isn't a judgement on the merits of either system, only an observation of likely results.
Hasn't that been the mantra of open source for 40 years. Armies of companies, trillions of valuation, or even just Wayland, suggest that isn't always the case.
So free software can only be considered a successful strategy if every single project succeeds?
Reminds me of Dot Net in the early 2000-2012... No one collaborated
From what I gather, the Chinese are behind, but a lot of their research amounts to scrappy, clever discoveries in how to use more novel technologies (for Qwen and Deepseek, its mixture of expert models, that can do inference using a portion of the model at a time). The chinese also distill information from American models, so there’s that.
The American companies, from my impression don’t involve themselves with such lowly “hacks” because they have so much money to just push forward with doing everything on big heavy models that run on the most cutting edge nvidia chips that they can, the moment, kinda sorta get on demand (I say that in some degree of jest).
The American companies would love to develop these 'hacks' because it would make them more money, something they are in existential need of right now.
They don't develop them because they don't collaborate publicly anymore.
Where would the whole industry be if Google never allowed publishing the transformers paper?
It's not a coincidence that the American AI industry grew fastest in capability when it was the most open.
Just a crazy catch 22, it seems
Why would they collaborate? Why not defect and just keep theirs private and implement the open ones?
I'm afraid I'm even balking at the word "pioneering" in context with US frontier labs. They are probably doing a few new things, right, but they are not blazing any trails for others to follow along, the Chinese are.
> Publishing by necessity
It's more a cultural thing. Sharing progress is just in their blood.
This is overly simplistic to the point of glazing. Plenty of Chinese companies maintain industrial secrets to gain an advantage.
Chinese papers and techniques have been very influential and copied by US labs.
Multi-head Latent Attention (MLA), Multi-Token prediction, MoE architecture are some of the most famous examples.
MoE is from Google (Noam Shazeer)
MTP is from Meta
Another DeepSeek advance that the west are copying is DeepSeek Sparse Attention (DSA)
Mixture-of-Expert (MoE) was introduced in the 1990s [1, 2], see also [3, 4]. The idea was that MOEs scales up model capacity and only introduces small computation overhead. MoEs did not become viable for high-performance applications until sparse routing was integrated with modern deep networks, made possible by large-scale distributed computation. The breakthrough came with the development of sparsely gated networks [5], which showed that it is possible to maintain model accuracy while activating only a small fraction of a large parameter network during both training and inference.
[1] R. A. Jacobs, M. I. Jordan, S. J. Nowlan, G. E. Hinton, Adaptive mixtures of local experts. (1991)
[2] M. I. Jordan, R. A. Jacobs, Hierarchical mixtures of experts and the EM algorithm. (1993)
[3] L. Xu, M. Jordan, G. E. Hinton, An alternative model for mixtures of experts. (1994)
[4] S. Waterhouse, D. MacKay, A. Robinson, Bayesian methods for mixtures of experts. (1995)
[5] N. Shazeer, A. Mirhoseini, K. Maziarz, A. Davis, Q. Le, G. Hinton, J. Dean, Outrageously large neural networks: The sparsely-gated mixture-of-experts layer. (2017)
Deepseek is commoditizing the performance gains US labs rely on to make their investors money.
If American labs aren't publishing, it doesn't mean they aren't doing even more interesting work.
You could also come up with a cure for cancer, but if nobody knows what you’ve done then there’s not a whole lot we can say about it
They push the boundaries, alright. Of obtaining the results of work without doing the work themselves, which I hate to say it but this is classic Chinese machiavellianist business behavior:
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/24/anthropic-alibaba-distillati...
The idea that America is going to stay ahead of China is I think at this point clearly delusional. It's also just such silly framing. Why should 350 million people stay ahead of 1 billion people on the other side of the world? If an AI lab in China cures cancer or something do Americans lose?
So many Americans seem to (at least in theory) be ready to sign up for this ongoing confrontation with China. Does anyone think it isn't America who is poking the bear when it comes to the Thucydides trap? Why not try to get along? It occurs to me the only people more Chinese innovation would hurt are the mega cap class in the United States. Elon Musk certainly doesn't want BYD in the United States. Same story all the way down with these super capitalized AI companies. Most average Americans would probably be better off in a world where the United States and China got along. But its those Americans who will be called upon to suffer most of the burden if that trap ever springs.
By this population-only logic, you should concede that India will overtake China.
Why not talk about how China shut out American companies for decades before complaining about BYD?
As an Indian immigrant, the PRC China has engaged in conflict with almost all its neighbors and stated wars in its short history.
China is not so benevolent when they get to the #1 spot:
https://m.economictimes.com/industry/renewables/china-wto-co...
Yep. It's about time western world realized Chinese are not the "very bad guys under dictatorship"
I don't think it's very common to believe the Chinese people are bad guys. It's the government and its control of the people that's the problem. And no, I don't think the US is immune to that sort of problem either.
Honestly it's just a hierarchy difference between the two countries. In the US, tech/fin/military companies have the upper hand compared to the government (fragmented between 2 parties). Despite the sharades with Anthropic, Tech-fluencers are in control. Compared to china, the government (dictatorship) has more control over Tech companies (take any example from the past 10 years). For them, undermining the US AI supremacy is an objective, and releasing open weight models is the way, and I'm all for it.
Let's not get crazy here. You can acknowledge that the Chinese AI industry has some structural advantages right now without trying to claim anything else. China is still a brutal autocracy.
I'm deep seeking for that open in OpenAI indeed. It’s clear who’s the most anthropocentric in this space.
Exactly. They did not have to open up their research up and this is what happens when smart researchers are forced to squeeze performance gains out of existing hardware.
They don't have TPUs or access to the latest Vera Rubin GPUs either to get performance gains for free. All of the optimizations Deepseek have done are in software and it goes down to the PTX assembly level.
Compared to Anthropic who are celebrating in fixing a flickering issue in a terminal app which took months to fix.
> All of the optimizations Deepseek have done are in software and it goes down to the PTX assembly level
DeepSeek are still using NVIDIA (PTX) to train on, but for inference have already transitioned to Huawei Ascend chips, and inference speed is what this paper is addressing.
Anthropic almost certainly also has optimized software down to the assembly level, considering this take-home interview challenge they published: https://github.com/anthropics/original_performance_takehome/... which is all about instruction-level performance optimizations. That they don't prioritize UI fixes just means they consider other things more important.
Unlikely: that product is written completely by AI, of which they are not lacking.
More likely is that an AI generated codename is impossible to fix by humans, and SOTA was not able to figure it out until now.
that's pretty silly to use as a measure of what they do internally
It's pretty representative of what they do internally
> Compared to Anthropic who are celebrating in fixing a flickering issue in a terminal app which took months to fix.
It's funny, because if you ran Claude Code on a slow terminal, the cause of the flicker was obvious: They kept dumping the entire history of the chat back into the terminal in a number of situations, and relied on the terminal to them end up in the correct state.
All frontier labs are working down to the PTX level (and lower)
It's almost as if ... they were what OpenAI was when it started. Sad to see but glad someone is doing is.
Google and Microsoft publish more than enough and American universities are publishing the science beyond DeepSeek's engineering. That fact that you don't know about them means you're not following the science only reading hacker news.
Google hasn’t published much in depth ML work since T5 (which was hugely influential at the time) - most Gemma releases are 1-3 page model card pdfs these days with no in depth analysis. Even TurboQuant is shaking out to have basically been a rehash of previous work without proper attribution. I do think Microsoft is doing some interesting things with smaller models but haven’t read much research, interested in any refs you might have to share!
Check recent iclr acl icml neurips you will see 10-20 papers from Google Research which are not just simple model cards. they are solid reproducible research.
R1 was very influential on US models development.
Thank you so much to everyone at DeepSeek who is working on this and who have the courage and generosity to open source this for humanity.
We in the United States will never forget!
For all the harm Trump does to the US at least he is helping China!
Chinese companies (and labs) operate in conjunction with the CCP so whatever they're doing, it's because it's Chinese state policy.
What became clear when DeepSeek came onto the scene was that China was seeking to commoditize LLMs. They consider it an issue of national security not to be beholden to US tech companies when it comes to AI. And I, for one, fully endorse this policy.
Another data point on this is the black market for Claude tokens in China [1]. The chat logs themselves are a commodity to train models.
I believe that OpenAI in particular is a bet on a trillion dollar pot of gold that doesn't exist. Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta will all be fine. Anthropic is in a far better position than OpenAI (IMHO) but if DeepSeek or some other Chinese open weight model gets as good at coding, they're in real trouble too.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48667495
I don’t see how Anthropic is in a better position. They have a slight edge in model quality right at a time when we’re getting a taste of what cheap, “good enough” AI looks like. They don’t own their own compute. And their own arrogance and lies have alienated a huge chunk of their customer base and alerted everyone to the dangers of being dependent on them.
I personally think not owning their own compute is going to be an advantage.
There is a meteor headed towards all this AI investment that I don't think has been properly accounted for and that is, what happens to all the existing hardware investments when NVidia's next architecture comes out. Blackwell (H100/H200) is the current generation. Rubin (R100, presumably R200) is the next and arrives soon. Now a lot of the investment hasn't been spent yet so will likely be spent on Rubin but at that point, what happens when the next iteration comes out and does 3-4x the compute for the same electricity input and same hardware cost?
Also, what happens when people can run way bigger models on consumer hardware in 5 years? The effective limit for useful local LLMs is currently ~31B parameter models because the RTX 5090 has 32GB of VRAM and Apple's shared memory architecture, which can keep bigger models in memory, just doesn't have the raw processing power.
Anyway, why I argue Anthropic is in a better position (than OpenAI) is that they seem to have captured a market that may well be profitable for them as a company, specifically Claude for coding. So they just haven't burnt quite as much cash as OpenAI so aren't in as deep of a hole.
While I think local models are going to improve maassively over the next few years, running them in a data center at scale is always going to be cheaper for a company. Why? Because they can amortize their costs by running 24/7 and powering them and cooling them is simply cheaper at scale when you're talking about 1000+ engineers who otherwise might only be using their hardware ~40 hours a week.
IMHO Google is in the best position here of all the US companies, even though their models aren't the best, because their data centers are ruthlessly efficient, their homegrown TPUs will eventually catch up (and thus avoid the NVidia tax) and they simply haven't bet the farm on winning AI.
I'm generally with you on all of these ideas.
However, Google probably won't catch up. Nvidia has been winning in spite of the fact that their hardware is general purpose rather than tuned for inference.
Rubin has architectural differences I don't understand that are supposed to make inference much cheaper and faster while still retaining those other more generic capabilities. Their next generation after that is going to do even better at being fast for inference and general purpose.
Google is betting that their TPUs won't depreciate faster than the markup they have to pay to Nvidia. I don't think they will be right.
Why do people who don't follow the prices of A100 talk like they know things about GPU pricing dynamics?
A100s are ~7 years old and going for more than 2 dollars an hour, significantly more expensive than even 2 years ago. This is because anything with 80gb of VRAM or more and made by Nvidia will have economically useful lifespans of like, 10 years.
I could see H100s getting 12 years.
Micheal Berry doesn't know shit about GPUs.
So I was curious about how A100s would do running DeepSeek v4. I can't find any instances of running v4 Pro on even an 8xA100 cluster. So you need to run Flash at ~284B params. A100s don't support FP8 so you're running FP16 so you're taking a hit that way. But I see estimates of 30-50tok/s for an 8xA100 cluster. They're drawing 300-400W each so you're looking at probably 3500+ Watts, which is roughly 0.01tok/W.
Now jump ahead 2 years and you seem to have a massive jump in performance [1]. The tokens/Watt goes up by at least 2 orders of magnitude. And the B100 is 3-4x that. And we're about to hit the R100 (Rubin) cliff.
That's what this is going to come down. When hyperscalar DCs are getting to Gigawatt power usage, it all comes down to power efficiency. Those A100s aren't far from being sold for scrap.
I've been looking into how different companies are handling depreciation for this. Amazon seems to be saying the life is 3-4 years, Google 4-5 and Meta is saying 8+, which I think is wildly optimistic.
[1]: https://lambda.ai/inference-models/deepseek-ai/deepseek-v4-f...
> Another data point on this is the black market for Claude tokens in China [1]. The chat logs themselves are a commodity to train models.
anyone with IQ higher than 130 (thus qualified for actual AI R&D) would be questioning something obvious here -
if they are already doing such dodgy stuff with the aim to maximize profits, why would those resellers have large amount of logs with actual American model responses to sell to those AI labs in the first place. shouldn't they just post train & customize some leading Chinese open source models to pretend to be Opus or GPT for the vast majority of their users (as classified by some models) who don't know much about expected Opus behaviours & not skilled enough to tell the differences?
that is actually the interesting bit not covered in your censored version of the story line, it is also what happens on the ground. your censored version of the story implies that those dodgy resellers using stolen credit cards, pooling accounts with stolen IDs and illegally selling very personal logs would somehow be honest enough to spend extra $ to ensure their victims (aka paying users) can actually use real Opus and GPT. LOL
dude, you failed this IQ test miserably.
You don't actually need a very high IQ to do AI R&D. More than it takes to post IQ comments on this site, maybe.
The galaxy brains in the labs putatively buying the logs wouldn't notice this? Or figure out a structure to prevent this?
resellers wouldn't be trying to sell such junk in the first place. they use faked models to avoid the cost of Opus tokens, not to double dip to scam those with arguably the highest IQ in the country.
The difference between greed and power
Its because our culture worships pieces of paper the government tells us is worth something.
Nope, people seek it out because government tells them to pay taxes _or else_.
Money is just a physical representation of the ability to get what you want. The problem is not money. It’s the fact that we live in a “me” society.
Sure, in part by "stealing" from American AI companies with Distillation attacks:
https://yipzap.com/anthropic-accuses-alibaba-of-largest-ai-d...
If your moat is “please don’t copy my outputs”, you don’t have a moat. There is no such thing as a distillation “attack”.
How very machiavellianist-libertarian of you.
Don't even try to combine it with any notion of "leadership" then, however, since distillation is literally "copying the actual leader"
How does it differ from pirating music or movies?
According to US AI labs, training on other people's output is fair use. So that's how.
AI training is considered transformational. That's how AI training gets around copyright and it's probably consistent with copyright precedent. For example, indexing the web is considered transformational, even though you can recover the full text of everything in an inverted index.
Machine-extruded text is not copyrightable, since there was no human creativity involved in producing it.
(and if you argue the US models do produce copyrighted works, then oooops - whose copyright is it huh?)
Ow my head.
That when I pay for a model, the copyright of the output belongs to me. This is as work for hire as it gets.
US AI companies trained their own models on vast amounts of copyrighted and publicly available content without obtaining permission. There's no moral high ground here.
You know what, if someone wants to downvote this guy by claiming distillation attacks are not "attacks" or don't cross some ethical bound (especially since I just posted a similar comment), then go right ahead, but if you're combining it with any notion of "leadership", that's like saying that the person in 2nd place in a bike race who is drafting behind the person actually in 1st place is exhibiting "leadership".
There's no "leader" if, absent someone whose results you're copying, you are an emperor without clothes
Besides "attack" being a ludicrous name for distillation, note how your article says "accuses", also it's mostly about Alibaba, not DeepSeek (although it's mentioned there). Both Dario Amodei and Sam Altman publicly claimed that DS used their outputs to train their models, and knowing the differences between all these models by heart, I believe they're simply lying through their teeth to sway the public opinion and/or the policy. These models are absolutely nothing alike, and distillation necessarily makes student's outputs similar to teacher's. This is very visible in Z.ai models (which were trained on Gemini outputs to the point that they repeated Google's conditional prompt injections in the CoT, and later on Claude where it started repeating their CoT as well) and certain Google models which were trained on Claude's outputs in a roundabout way. Distillation always shows up in the result.
And certainly they have no idea whether these outputs (assuming they ever existed and it wasn't made up) were used for training. The article mentions that DS made 150k requests. This isn't much and might have been just an eval or a benchmark to compare their own model against. It's really hard to believe DeepSeek had any Claude outputs anywhere in their training schedule, since it's just too different. Besides training on random vibecode of course, which is mostly written by Claude.
While I don't agree with your comment being downvoted, I don't think distillation is either an "attack" nor is it "stealing". The idea that someone else gets to decide how I use tokens that I pay for is ludicrous.
Imagine if your casio calculator would come with a ToS that says you can't use it to develop a competitor calculator or any other tools. Or that your hammer can't be used to make other tools. Or, closer to the HN crowd, imagine MS in the 90s saying that you can't use their OS to build competing services to MS. They'd be laughed at and be split immediately if they tried that.
The only thing they can do is to refuse serving tokens (and even that's debatable, if we get to tokens being commoditised). But that's gonna be a game of whack-a-mole, and they know it.
The hugging face models are already up and seem to be the original models with the speculative decoding module built in which is very cool:
Flash: https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4-Flash-DSpark
Pro: https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4-Pro-DSpark
Excited to see if this makes it into DwarfStar for local inference, have been using the flash model extensively since the 2-bit quants were made available by antirez.
Any chance they will have this for Qwen 27 b also?
The paper actually references testing their DSpark speculative decoding strategy with Qwen 3 4b, 8b and 14b models so while I doubt they will release builds themselves, they’ve open sourced (DeepSpec) their training pipeline for this so we will likely see folks adopting for other models.
DeepSeek is, as I feel currently, the sole AI company which is actually trying to innovate rather than top mere benchmarks. Others like OpenAI, Anthropic and Google are mostly just competeing with each rather than keep innovating around the clock.
Please explain how distillation == innovation
Especially since your 5-day-old account is sus, and thus likely not yet proven not to be a Chinese bot
You can't lead by following the actual leader LOL
The only real innovation I've seen from Deepseek is the out-loud reasoning thing in R1
> DeepSeek is, as I feel currently, the sole AI company which is actually trying to innovate rather than top mere benchmarks.
I'd also include the other Chinese labs like Moonshot (behind Kimi) and Z.ai (behind GLM). They are innovating and continue openly sharing their research to the public. I believe the founder of Moonshot even shared 40 minute video on Twitter where he goes through techniques that powers Kimi.
> Others like OpenAI, Anthropic and Google are mostly just competeing with each rather than keep innovating around the clock.
The strategy for the most companies in the US has been for a long time to capture the social audience, whatever the mean is. Quality and innovation is the second factor. Capture the market, lock in the users, influence regulation and lobbying to keep the power.
> Others like OpenAI, Anthropic and Google are mostly just competeing with each rather than keep innovating around the clock.
They compete with each other by innovating. The innovations result in more utility for the customer, but the technology isn't made public. Trade secrets are secret for a reason.
The reason people may think that DeepSeek is the "most innovative" is because of what they can observe from the outside, much like people may mistakenly conclude models are the "prettiest of the population" because not everyone is photographed for public consumption.
the big labs have already been doing this for at least a year
Qwen as well.
There was a recent exodus from Qwen of researchers who supported their open source efforts, I’m not sure we will see many new open models from them past the 3.6 series.
are you able to say more about this (specifically that the researchers who left were concerned that qwen models were being closed sourced)? I was under the impression that the chinese labs and their employees aren't particularly concerned about ideology/safety/whatever and were just releasing open source models because it helps with publicity and does the most damage to the US AI labs. (and to be clear, I strongly support open source models, I just doubt that the Chinese labs and their employees are actually motivated by morals).
Besides the founder, the only real external investor for DeepSeek is Chinese govt. there are literally zero revenue pressure compare to O, A & G.
To compete in that direction, USG needs to learn from CCP to "seize the means of production", which they are sort of doing, but in such an incompetent way that I'm afraid we will probably end up mixing the worst of both communism and capitalism.
> To compete in that direction, USG needs to learn from CCP to "seize the means of production"
No they don't. The U.S. Government is free to launch their own AI labs if they wish -- and even compete with the private sector -- but that doesn't mean they have to confiscate existing investments and capital. But Congress is unlikely to do that, because we've learned in the course of history that in well-functioning competitive markets, publicly-operated services tend to be worse than private ones across multiple dimensions.
Chinese companies are largely where they are not because they're state funded, but because they operate in ways that would be considered criminal in the U.S. If they didn't constantly trespass on OpenAI and Anthropic to try to achieve product and technological parity, they would be too far behind to produce innovative research.
China is just taking a lot of ideas from the USG when it was doing things correctly and is using those for innovation.
In this case, it feels like they are just funding multiple independent pure research projects and letting the chips fall where they may.
Doesn't even really seem like Europe can coordinate that.
I’ve been using DeepSeek v4 pro for a month now in Kilo Code and its great. Fast, reliable, large context window and cheap as… Did 1,5B tokens this month and cost me 40usd (majority cached, but still).
Which provider? I went through 40 bucks on it on openrouter. It was not a lot of back and forth, context ended at around 300k, 15kloc output. I was using opencode, unsure if I can make the total token count visible.
OpenRouter sometimes chooses a very expensive provider. Try the floor slug or choose directly the provider. I moved to just putting 5 dollars directly on deepseek instead of going through OR.
Have you compared Kilo to Pi or OpenCode? Those are the two I'm most familiar with but always looking for alternatives.
I've been using omp with deepseek as my task and quicktask agents, and sonnet as everything else.
It's drastically reduced my AI spend. I went from spending $40/day to $10/day.
Is there a way to see how many tokes one does with claude code (pro)?
the casino has no clocks, as one HN user put it some time ago.
I second ccusage, it's nice
https://ccusage.com/
It's in the JSONs in ~/.claude, but last 30 days only I think. You can have the model analyze history. So for correct history you'd need to run history analysis on a cron job or something. Kinda hacky.
The 30 day limit can be overridden by adding "cleanupPeriodDays": 9999 to .claude/settings.json
Nice.
Guessing the timing isn't accidental. Demonstrated openness vs harsh regulation
China = Open. US = Harsh Regulation
Strange timeline, though this only works because it’s aligned with Xi’s goals.
Yeah can definitely see a world where china pivots and we're stuck with closed/closed
Mistral...don't fumble this
Nobody forced anthropic to go on a media blitz loudly proclaiming the dangers their new AI model. Serves them right honestly.
Is this newer/better than the speculative decoding from 2022? https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.17192
That paper is cited in the 'introduction' and 'background' sections. This paper is improving by removing some bottlenecks.
Seems like they focus on improving the drafter and the verification policy so speculation keeps producing net speedups rather than wasted verification work at deepseek scale.
Title is bad, it's the first line of the abstract instead of the paper title. Speculative decoding for LLM inference was published in 2022: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.17192
This paper seems to be an improvement to speculative decoding but I haven't read it yet.
Presumably this has been in production for a while, and is one of the reasons they were able to dramatically lower prices a month ago?
Yes. Section 5 talks about real-world deployment: 5.1: "The DSpark draft models are co-deployed with the preview versions of DeepSeek-V4-Flash and DeepSeek-V4-Pro"; 5.4: "MTP-1 represents the former production setup, having been superseded by DSpark two weeks following the DeepSeek-V4-preview release."
Lookahead Sparse Attention should be playing a big role as well, as it dramatically slashes memory consumption.
I see a world soon where there’s an extremely wide variety of small models for speculative decoding, unique to use cases, companies, and even individuals.
Hopefully that is the case and hardware does not get impossible to get.
yes, heavily constrained by sophisticated guardrails.
this is definitely where things are going. the enormous "eat the world" models have extreme diminishing returns by comparison.
You clearly didn't read the recent speculative decoding papers because it's been possible to use any model to speculate for any other model for awhile. They solved the tokenization problems that prevented this in the past.
I am wondering if this is why they can offer their pro model at ~1/4th of the price compared to the other providers offering the same model, and if other providers will be able to do the same in a short timeframe.
Inference I estimate runs 90% plus gross margins. Just work out the math on these servers. I am pretty sure any player can price down. It wouldn't look good on an IPO prospectus.
I have been heavily using DeepSeek V4 Pro at Max for a month now and I would say it is 100x cheaper. If I pay for Claude I will hit that limit so fast I am always waiting 5 hours. Using the frontier models at Kilo I go through dollars while doing the same thing via DeepSeek it is pennies.
I believe the comment you replied to was talking about the cost on providers like OpenCode vs Deepseek API. Deepseek API is even cheaper than the other providers for the same deepseek models.
It'd presumably help a lot, but also when you use their endpoint they get more training data.
This applies to every provider. OpenAI seems to be the worst hoarder.
actually you can buy inference on third party providers that serve deepseek v4 pro with zero data retention (ZDR).
How does one find trustworthy ZDR DeepSeek 4 Pro providers?
Only reliable way to have zero data retention is to self-host.
True. But at some point you got to close your eyes and take a step forward.
It’s like with VPN providers. Is Mullvad actually collaborating with law enforcement? They very well could be. It is a calculated risk.
Is DeepInfra actually logging and training or selling the logs? They could be.
Mullvad has proved it doesn't collect. It's laughable to even suggest it.
They have been raided multiple times, tons of audits, does bleeding edge research on privacy preserving tech, donates to GOS, etc etc. You don't see this kind of VPN company at all because none exists.
With Mullvad the threat space is also different. Most of the data is end-to-end encrypted anyway with proven methods. With LLMs you can't do that yet.
US labs do it too.
Name any 2 or 3 that published bleeding edge research and similar in the last 6 months.
Well I can't think of even one at the moment, to be honest might be biased but all Chinese research labs are largely oss except Alibaba now.
I am certain there are lots of American labs that claim to do it, but either they are marketting in hype since they aren't even close to the frontier or contrarily just don't make anything of significant value public/oss.
US labs are the biggest data broker in the current history. They collect everything, dumb fuck.
As we can see again, this has nothing to do with distillation, yet for every gain Chinese labs make, the US labs will accuse them of theft. Yet they are constantly innovating.
These companies providing tokens, whether SOTA or not, that want to IPO are so fucked as time goes on.
Can't sell their SOTA models, only slightly better than the open source models for the models they can sell, cost 20x to 50x for good models, a TAM that consists almost solely of developers, with no customer of theirs actually boasting increased profits as a result of AI...
I fear their time to IPO may have passed.
The question is even, was there EVER a time for an IPO?
If the business model requires hundreds of billions to get the required quality (R&D but also infrastructure to collect data and train, either purchased or rented to 3rd party) while "only" dozens of billions can be earned back (as costs still exist to earn, it's not free once models are trained), then maybe there NEVER was nor till be a good time for an IPO in a rational market.
> in a rational market.
Unfortunately the market is often not rational in this way.
Hype within retail market means there are suckers willing to buy. Institutional market knows there are suckers when the hype is high. Both would drive the price up, and retail investors the ones left when it falls.
IPOs with massive bags can be wework or spacex, it all depends on vibes. If they buy a couple more articles doomposting and glazing AI on the financial times right before exit they will def find a bunch of boomers to buy their bags. If the narrative changes before they IPO its over.
Would love to see these numbers reproduced on consumer GPUs, not just A100s.
This is an efficiency improvement that significantly lowers the amount of RAM you have to look at, on average, during decode.
It should improve performance on most hardware because most LLMs are memory bandwidth bound during decode.
Maybe somaday an 8gb videocard can be used for coding...
AI making AI faster. Next up: AI writing papers about how AI makes AI faster
This is just one of many papers DeepSeek have released to be able to serve models at extremely cheap prices, unlike the others taking on >$100B+ of debt in building data centers for the same thing.
> As with V4-Flash, we treat this point as an indication that DSpark sustains useful throughput under an interactivity target that the baseline cannot efficiently support. At matched system capacities, DSpark delivers 57% to 78% faster per-user generation.
Reminds me of the flawed solution in scaling servers in 2017 that use memory-intensive technologies by adding even more servers to solve the problem. (It just increases costs.)
Rather than doing that, think about which critical parts of your app can be written in a more performant technology.
Fast forward to 2026, now you can see who is just throwing more money at the problem to create even more problems where as DeepSeek is giving us optimized solutions.
I know exactly who I would pay attention to, and it is absolutely not Anthropic.
For so long American companies have operated under the assumption that servers are cheaper than developers, and that was used to justify all sorts of inefficient practices.
The last year has shown that’s not true anymore (even for web servers).
...... are you really suggesting OpenAI and Anthropic don't have access to these techniques?
That's why I pay them. Regularly. Without fail. Despite my token usage isn't that much.
But I vote for these heroes with my wallet. Just yesterday did again.
Cudos to you!If people realized how much power we had we's have a better world
At this point why can't someone produce a fridge or container-sized AI appliance based on legacy chips (12nm)? I imagine this would cover 80% of corporate use cases where you need to "google-in-a-box" functionality.
The state-of-the-art nanometer are impossible to achieve but if you have infinite solar energy during business hours does it really matter? Every company has a parking spot so this ASIC-like appliance could be as big as a shipping container.
If it could just run recent open models for a handful of users it would be such a nobrainer to buy.
See "exabox" from George Hotz: https://tinycorp.myshopify.com/products/exabox-preorder
No one's buying that shitbox.
Why?
Nvidia is already selling exactly this I think, not sure when it's expected to ship
The issue is that there are only so many fabs in the world that make memory. And if you want the good stuff, your easily going into 400 ~ 750b parameter models. That means at FP4 400 to 750GB memory.
Did i mention there are only so many memory makers and they are all busy printing money with HBM memory?
Intel is trying with Crescent Island, to make a 160GB GPU that uses LPDDR5X memory.
HBM takes multiple times the resources to make vs basic DDR5 memory. So by going this route, you have more memory, with the disadvantage that its only 700GB/s. VS HBM pumping out Terrabyte numbers like its nothing.
These cards is reasonably priced, may be good alternative to $10k 96GB Nvidia Blackwells... You give up on token generation (heavily memory dependent), for more memory to run larger models at home/office/company servers.
The problem is, again, there are only so many memory makers and its not like the market is flooded with DDR5 memory anymore, as the big 3 moved a lot of production to HBM.
Another approach is Sandisk making HBF ... Flash memory, like your typical NVME but designed around maximum speed. So instead of loading the models into expensive HBM memory, you use the benefits of density in Flash memory, to offload models into that. Cheaper, but slower... But it leaves your expensive HBM memory free for things like KV Cache, Active parameters, etc... So your model will be slower, but your hybrid using it. As in, faster then running a model from system memory with normal DDR memory, but not as fast as HBM.
So yea, there is a lot in development to reduce the dependance of that resource eating HBM memory. For the wafer cost of 1GB HBM, you normally got 4GB normal memory. That is why the world supply of memory dropped. Not just the insane buying but be HBM is just very inefficient in wafer usage.
Can we not use DDR4 production and create some kind of hybrid solution? Sure, but the big 3 moved away from DDR4 in favor of DDR5 a long time ago. We have competition from China with a mix of DDR4/DDR5, but they also need to scale up. Nobody expected to see a large part of the world production vanish into HBM...
Even if its about DDR4 and older nodes, ironically, most companies had been moving away from DDR4. There is only so much wafer capability in the world, to the point that companies are moving to using DDR2 ... Yea, not a typo, like 2007 DDR2! for IOT devices etc, stuff that does not need fast memory. Because even DDR3 got too expensive for them.
Its not like the old nodes are not used anymore ... Like that capacity was sitting idle. It was still in production making other stuff. The only real solution is that we need more fabs, and those take years to build. And the big 3 delayed investing in new fabs for a long time, unsure about the whole AI bubble stuff. Aka, they did not want to make a ton of fabs to end up with over capacity if the AI growth collapsed.
With MoE models like Deepseek’s and with multiple Crescent Island accelerators, the aggregate memory throughput actually doesn’t look that bad. Two Crescent Island gets roughly 1400GB/s and Deepseek-v4-flash with 13B parameters active nets roughly 100t/s which is decent for a small team or great for a single user.
More Crescent Island scale up, although not likely entirely linearly.
But all GPU inference work like this, it’s not specific to Intel. Just Intel promises more affordable cards with big memory so they’re attractive.
Anyone want to bet that much like speculative execution, speculative decoding is going to introduce a whole slew of vulnerabilities in the ways LLMs work?
Must be wonderful to be on the board of OpenAi et al & their PE investors whilst China keeps blowing up these mines under their feet lmao. Luckily Korean pension funds will buy all the trash as usual but goddamn you gotta start moving quick or you are gonna need some serious AGI to show you how to offload those bonds
"We will build the machine-god and pray for it to pay for itself."
Every day, the rate of “could post a picture of 40k tech priests and have it taken unironically” goes up, and it’s starting to get concerning.
Don’t worry they will sell all the hardware and data they acquired with their grift
do they use their OCR, or someone else?
Yet another band aid.
Meanwhile OpenAI is drafting an “open letter” to Congress /s
OpenAI and Anthropic are doing nothing interesting.
Basically forgot about them 2 years ago.
I don’t use DeepSeek either but at least they do interesting stuff - they were the first to do “thinking” iirc