DeepSeek just proved Lina Khan right

https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/deepseek-openai-lina-khan-sam-altman

by kelthuzad • 1 year ago

8 7 1 year ago

aurareturn3• 1 year ago

So why did the Biden administration block China's access to advanced AI chips? Why did Biden not reverse Trump's Huawei ban?

DeepSeek did not prove Lina Khan right. These things are honestly not even that related.

kelthuzad3• 1 year ago

I think you're missing the core argument here. Khan's warning wasn't about foreign competition - it was about how monopolistic behavior leads to technological stagnation. The Deepseek situation demonstrates this perfectly. Let's look at the actual numbers:

- DeepSeek built their model with 2,048 H800 GPUs and $5.5M in computational costs

- Meta targeting 600,000 H100 GPUs

- OpenAI Used ~25,000 A100 GPUs for GPT-4

- Altman claims to need $7T for his "dream AI"

This massive efficiency gap suggests something deeper than just trade policy at work. American tech giants have become accustomed to solving problems by throwing massive resources at them rather than through efficient engineering. The chip restrictions and Huawei ban are separate policy decisions based on national security concerns. But they don't address what Khan warned about - namely that allowing monopolistic practices would make these companies "fat and happy inside their castles," focusing on "performing alchemy with spreadsheets" rather than actual innovation.

DeepSeek's achievement is particularly interesting because they succeeded despite having access to less advanced chips (H800s instead of H100s/A100s). They had to optimize for efficiency, which ironically led to better results.

This isn't about whether export controls are justified - it's about how domestic monopolistic practices made our tech companies vulnerable to more innovative competitors, exactly as Khan predicted.

aurareturn3• 1 year ago

Deepseek trained their models on GPT4o and Claude 3.5 and Llamma outputs. In other words, DeepSeek models needed billions in training cost done for them before they could train their models for $5.5m in compute cost.

Farfignoggen• 1 year ago

The US has forced China to build a Better Mousetrap! And do so with GPUs of lesser processing power than the west has access to! The west's policy to limit GPU technology access to China has necessitated that innovation that is utilizing lower power GPU hardware than was assumed was needed! And so what a mother of invention that's become to the tune of some trillion+ loss in market value among the US AI Monopolies! The US has become so good at stifling out fair competition and the very driver of that innovation that creates the real wealth!

DeepSeek just proved Lina Khan right

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