Oh no the Chinese are doing the useless thing that gives wrong answers cheaper
https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/27/tech/deepseek-stocks-ai-china/index.html
US stocks dropped sharply Monday — and chipmaker Nvidia lost nearly $600 billion in market value — after a surprise advancement from a Chinese artificial intelligence company, DeepSeek, threatened the aura of invincibility surrounding America’s technology industry.
@scalzi It's interesting IMO because:
- You can run the smallest model on a Ras Pi with no internet connection.
- It prints its "train of thought".
- The models are all open source.
I have no love of China, or of how the tech industry has watered machine learning down to "everything is a shitty chatbot", but I can't deny that this is an impressive breakthrough and I hope it's enough to help drive real innovation in ML.
On the other hand, I also realize this is probably going to buoy the grift even longer.
@faoluin
> You can run the smallest model on a Ras Pi with no internet connection
That is interesting. But I've seen a smaller Llama model run on a MacBook with no net connection. I'm still not convinced that makes it anything beyond a vaguely amusing waste of resources.
> The models are all open source
Including the weights and the data they're generated from?
@faoluin
> [weights and the data being freely licensed] would be preferable
As a number of software freedom activists have pointed out, these are just as necessary to recreate the model as its source code. So it's not just preferable, it's a prerequisite for saying with accuracy that ...
> The models are all open source
@faoluin
> I'm not going to waste time on pedantics on this topic
You specified that the models are "open source" is if it matters. Now you're arguing that distinguishing actual Open Source from openwashing is "pedantics". Not sure how you square that circle.
Scalzi
Softwarewolf
Strypey