DeepSeek’s founder is threatening US dominance in AI race

Being in your early 20s during the economic crisis, would mean spending your early to mid career during the economic boom of the 2010s.

It would mean some harsh years at first, but it’s a good time to hit the market.

I remember being told I’d never be successful, or make as much money as my parents.

I only wish I hadn’t listened to those people so long.

It’s funny, R1 came out and matched 4o/o1 at the time, you could claim it was very slightly behind but it was basically even.

It’s been 6 months? Geminis big upgrade was 2 months ago and o3 even more recent.

It’s just funny that US companies just barely got ahead the last couple months and already it’s a “drawn out narrative” that they aren’t ahead.

For all we know R2 drops tomorrow? If it’s ahead or even how are we supposed to think about the narrative?

IMO it’s not really that much of a stretch to say they’re fairly close together. I’d want to wait 6 more months where the US stayed significantly ahead before I’d be complaining about narratives. I know things move fast but that’s all the more reason to wait and see.

In absolute scores, no one is leading. They all plateaued around the same level. The difference is that models are optimized in different ways. This makes R1 useful/ahead for some people but not for others.

However, on cost, R1 beats the Western models by miles.

I'd reference something like https://llm-stats.com/ which suggests that the story is ... muddled. On the one hand, Deepseek is clearly not leading. On the other hand, they aren't really "behind" in any sense I care about. They'd have world-leading performance with their models this time last year.

The field is really moving too quickly to talk too certainly about "dominance" or "ahead". My observation is projects I care about on GitHub come with a Chinese README and many interesting talkers at conferences have strong Chinese accents. But I know a good researcher personally and it isn't so apparent to me if these are Chinese Chinese people or Americans of recent Chinese descent.

I use Qwen 2.5, it works better for my tasks than larger models.

(But I use it for actual work, not for chatting with imaginary friends. Maybe you really do need a "frontier model" if you want to monetize imaginary friends. I woun't know or care.)

Journalists give what their readers want, and what they want is a discussion about a US-China race or "AI". There is also an equity ownership aspect as well, because tech stocks in China tend to be the primary market in the green within the larger SSE and Hang Sen, and a DeepSeek/AI story makes China oriented emerging market ETFs much more enticing. Same reason you see much more financial reporting in American business news about India now that Indian equities are now available in emerging market ETFs.

That said, Deepseek is a decent model and was the forcing function needed to give a reality check to a number of AI Startups (and has had the positive effect of making it easier for startups I've helped incubate make the case for their own domain specific foundation model strategy). It's impact shouldn't be understated.

This is not so different than the greatest of all time debate in sports.

It makes for interesting television.

For that reason, it probably won't stop anytime soon.

The accuracy of this comparison is highly speculative. One should not ignore the possibility that dominant firms in the market might be inflating their cost figures to block new entrants and extract more capital from investors through such narratives. When you compare electricity prices in China with those in the U.S., such a large gap would require a truly extraordinary breakthrough to be justified.After all, these are privately held commercial firms, and they are not obligated to disclose their financials accurately.

Indeed, see https://semianalysis.com/2025/01/31/deepseek-debates/ for a well researched article about the actual cost.

What do we know now that we did not know in Jan? Is there some information on this that I have missed?

I'll put my tinfoil hat on and say it plays to the current US vs China "propaganda" tune, that US is winning on all fronts, but the ice thin and have to support local tech behemoths to full extent to secure our position in this world defining struggle.

Bloomberg still has not retracted (or even really commented on) the Supermicro spy chip story, preferring to hope people just forget about it if they maintain total silence. They're fine if you need to look up where the Nasdaq closed yesterday, but don't expect serious tech reporting from them.

Please don't post nationalistic swipes like this in comments on HN. We've had to ask you to avoid political flamewar comments before. Please make an effort to correct this or we'll have to ban the account.

I talked with a Chinese friend at Meta about this. We agreed that no one would have been interested in Deepseek as a Chinese run service (loose “no one”) but as a tool to undercut the value of US AI, it’s seemingly effective.

I see no downside here. Force US to innovate beyond “it costs a lot of money and we conveniently had that upfront” while also undercutting the law makers and people trying to enforce regulatory capture on a new thing like they’ve done on all the old things.

As a person interested in tech and tools and America, I have no issues with Deepseek and Hunyuan and Wan being effectively CCP funded. Keep it up. Accelerate. Push.