(2025-01-31) ZviM Deepseek: Don't Panic

Zvi Mowshowitz: DeepSeek: Don’t Panic. As reactions continue, the word in Washington, and out of OpenAI, is distillation. They’re accusing DeepSeek of distilling o1, of ripping off OpenAI. They claim DeepSeek gasp violated the OpenAI Terms of Service! The horror.

Table of Contents

• Seeking Deeply.
• The Market Is In DeepSeek.
• Machines Not of Loving Grace.
• The Kinda Six Million Dollar Model.
• v3 Implies r1.
• Two Can Play That Game.
• Janus Explores r1’s Chain of Thought Shenanigans.
• In Other DeepSeek and China News.
• The Quest for Sane Regulations.
• Copyright Confrontation.
• Vibe Gap.
• Deeply Seeking Safety.
• Deeply Seeking Robotics.
• Thank You For Your Candor.
• Thank You For Your Understanding.
• The Lighter Side.

Seeking Deeply

If you want to use DeepSeek’s r1 for free, and aren’t happy with using DeepSeek’s own offerings, lambda.chat reports they have the full version available for free, claim your data is safe and they’re hosted in the USA.

The Market Is In DeepSeek

A very detailed and technical analysis of the bear case for Nvidia by Jeffrey Emanuel, that Matt Levine claims may have been responsible for the Nvidia price decline. I suppose many things do indeed come to pass, essentially arguing that Nvidia’s various moats are weak. If this is the reason, then that just raises further questions, but they’re very different ones.

It’s not implausible to me that Nvidia’s moats are being overestimated, and that r1’s architecture suggests future stiffer competition. That’s a good argument, But I certainly strongly disagree with Emanuel’s conclusion in that he says ‘this suggests the entire industry has been massively over-provisioning compute resources,’ and, well, sigh.

DeepSeek just ate Meta’s lunch, it’s rather deeply embarrassing honestly to have spent that much and have an unreleased model that’s strictly worse (according to reports) than what DeepSeek shipped.

The market, of course, sees ‘lower inference costs’ and cheers, exactly because they never gave a damn about Meta’s ability to create good AI models, only Meta’s ability to sell ads and drive engagement. Besides, they were just going to give the thing away anyway, so who cares?

Joe Weisenthal centers in on a key reason the market acts so bonkers. It doesn’t Feel the AGI, and is obsessed with trying to fit AI into boring existing business models. They don’t actually believe in the big capability advancements on the way, let along transformational AI. Like on existential risk (where they don’t not believe in it, they simply don’t think about it at all), they’re wrong.

Machines Not of Loving Grace

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei responds to DeepSeek with not only a call for stronger export controls, now more than ever (which I do support), but for a full jingoistic ‘democracies must have the best models to seek decisive strategic advantage via recursive self-improvement’ race.

I am old enough to remember when Anthropic said they did not want to accelerate AI capabilities. I am two years old. To be fair, in AI years, that’s an eternity.

One odd error is Dario says DeepSeek is first to offer visible CoT. This is not true, Gemini Flash Thinking did it weeks ago. It’s so weird how much Google has utterly failed to spread the word about this product.

Notice that Dario talks of a ‘bipolar’ world of America and China, rather than a world of multiple labs – of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and DeepSeek and so on. One can easily also imagine a very ‘multipolar’ world among several American companies, or a mix of American and Chinese companies. It is not so obvious that the labs will effectively be under government control or otherwise act in a unified fashion. Or that the government won’t effectively be under lab control, for that matter.

v3 Implies r1