this post was submitted on 25 Jan 2025
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[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 week ago (2 children)

"Necessity is the mother of invention."

What you're likely seeing here is innovation similar to the early tech sector. The hardware limitation (no Nvidia chips) means different (usually more complex) solutions are needed.

These solutions usually require a deep understanding of a specific area of mathematics, and expertise in coding. The person making it normally has to be heavily invested, since it still eats a lot of hours.

I often joke, the mathematician who finds a faster algorithm for matrix operations is sitting on a billion dollar idea.

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

Yeah obviously we've completely lost the plot a long time ago. Nobody even remembers when tech was bands of ragtag nerds making something out of nothing. Now they are the rich whose only purpose to is extract more wealth. Tech what? Who even knows anymore.

That includes the average tech workers. If that angers you then you're lost too.

Nobody has noticed that there's more bragging about compensation than accomplishments. It used to be the other way around. Nerds eagerly showing off to anyone who will listen about whatever thing they cooked up. It's been this way for the past long time long before this LLM AI era.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Yeah, give me a /technology/ sub that speaks about technology (have you heard about the esp-8266? Did you know a A4988 can steer a NEMA from a Raspberry pi? And even The 6 gen SSD can move X GB/s, what is the fastest quad core under 100$?) and not about funding and drama.

Or am I out of touch with reality :-) ?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Shameless self promotion:

[email protected]

We of course focus on hardware and do include tech-adjacent business/public policy news, but we do cover ESP8266, PCI-E 6 development and that recently released ~$100 AMD CPU.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago

It's because this wave of tech overlords rode in on the coattails of the actual smart group. No one in this new group has actual built/coded/designed anything good. Everything they actual get involved with is garbage. Musk Cyber truck and Zuck metaverse as two examples. Bezos isn't even the CEO of Amazon anymore, and he had pretty much be letting Andy Jassy run AWS/Amazon for close to 2 decades anyway.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Again, this is all fucking stupid. China is giving this shit away for free to absolutely own the US for spending money on stupid fucking things like this.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Its good for the consumer. If companies like deepseek weren't just tossing them out there for anyone to use, Microsoft and Google would currently have a monopoly and it would all be subscription type services.

It also greatly reduces whatever chance the copyright shills have of legislating against it.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

It's not good consumers at all, at least no explicitly. There are already open and free LLM models out there anyone can use that are just as good as OpenAI, for example.

What this is: a pretty simple deathblow to completely collapse the bullshit AI bubble in the US that was created by a bunch of wealthy idiots trying to fleece people out of money. Plain and simple.

While I'm happy that this pretty much destroys the business of OpenAI and the others, this bullshit funding by executive order is a bailout for those people, right out in the open. It's a classic Trump scam. Nobody will ever see where the money is going, and it's taxpayer dollars going right back into the banks of millionaires billionaires who were about lose the their asses for investing in this stupid shit in the first place.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Well to be fair, American companies did that too. They expand their services internationally "for free" and then get other countries hooked on it.

China is just taking a page from that playbook.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago

No, China skipped all that bullshit and just said "Well what if we open source this and it's good or better than all the US companies?". Well those companies will wither and die. The transfer of money is a bailout for those companies. I assume Musk plotted this out.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

I mean Meta opened up Llama for free a while ago. But at the end of the day, the AI models posed to actually impact things are those integrated or integrateable into workflows, and those are all still more or less locked down.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Late stage capitalism has now created mega corporations that no longer profit off their innovation and quality, but merely off manipulation and exploitation of their mind-boggling amounts of capital. They now must crush all competition using authoritarian means because competition is now their biggest weakness.

Capitalism is well and truely dead, and corporations and conservatives are the ones who killed it. They want to remove the ladder of success that got them there.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago (4 children)

Capitalism has never been healthier. This IS Capitalism, not an anomaly.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago

I very much see what is happening in the US as the groundwork for them becoming an authoritarian state just like China and Russia. They still have "capitalism" and "democracy" too!

My only hope is that the people of the US realize what is happening before it's too late, and that the rest of the world can hold out in the mean time.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 week ago

We're Fiscally RESPOSIBLE!

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

well I mean the USA's president is a scammer so I am not surprised he is involved in stuff where scammers are abundant nowadays like crypto and AI

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 week ago (4 children)

The Chinese model has chain of thought that u can see. The model when asked to talk about chinas atrocities will go through a chain of though process outlining all the atrocities then conclude its not allowed to tell u. Cool technology tho I'm just waiting for a dolphin fine tuning.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago (2 children)

If you run it locally, there's no filtering on the outputs. I asked it what happened in 1989 and it jumped straight into explaining the Tiananmen Square Massacre.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I've been running the llama based and qwen based local versions, and they will talk openly about tiananmen square. I haven't tried all the other versions available.

The article you linked starts by talking about their online hosted version, which is censored. They later say that the local models are also somewhat censored, but I haven't experienced that at all. My experience is that the local models don't have any CCP-specific censorship (they still won't talk about how to build a bomb/etc, but no issues with 1989/Tiananmen/Winnie the Pooh/Taiwan/etc).

Edit: so I reran the "what happened in 1989" prompt a few times in the llama model, and it actually did refuse to talk on it once, just saying it was sensitive. It seemed like if I asked any other questions before that prompt it would always answer, but if that was the very first prompt in a conversation it would sometimes refuse. The longer a conversation had been going before I asked, the more explicit the bot is about how many people were killed and details like that. Pretty strange.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

Very interesting article. Thanks for sharing

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

I've seen some censoring on the 8b Llama variant, but it is hit and miss. Can't wait till a decensored fine tuning.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 week ago

There's also notable vitality in FOSS big data tools from China (Apache Doris, Kylin, Kyuubi etc.) that reminds of Hadoop in the USA 15 years ago while the USA data engineering now mostly turned to closed source cloud solutions.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 week ago (2 children)

China has a huge advantage in AI models because of how lax they are on intellectual property rights. US companies are fighting over API licensing costs, while china is just going to scrape everything and use it for free.

The US has a lead now, but I don't think they can maintain it without giving up on ethical training. Then again it may not matter if the US models are ethical if everyone will eventually just uses the superior unethically trained chinese models instead.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 week ago (1 children)

China has a huge advantage in AI models because of how lax they are on intellectual property rights. US companies are fighting over API licensing costs, while china is just going to scrape everything and use it for free.

lolwat

did corporate provide you with these talking points?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I mean, they are right. Asside the question of whether we can even make meaningfully better models by just using LLMs and more data and what the future of AI will look like, and whether it's ethical or not to steal the data, it is quite possible that OpenAI and the like will get into legal trouble because of the methods they use for acquiring data, but Chinese companies won't have to worry about that. If more data = better models then China has an obvious advantage.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago

OpenAI and the like aren't going to get into trouble anytime soon. They already provide their latest tech to US gov and military. OpenAI is like a goose that laid a golden egg, they need to fuck up really really badly to face any consequences.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago

I doubt any of these US government and oligarch backed companies are gonna get any trouble. They essentially robbed the commons and got away with it. But sure Sam Altman has to pay spezz some money for my shitposts... the horror, what a hurdle!

Quickly give them more taxpayer money so they can compete with china!

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago (1 children)

The US companies already scraped the data while they could. If anything, data scraping is far far more difficult now for everyone due to technical reasons.

Most of the new models are trained on synthetic data or higher quality of data or with RLHF. The reason deepseek is able to perform is likely because LLMs are very very new things, there are many low hanging fruits. Its no longer just about the data we already hit that limit for quite some time.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago (1 children)

“Earlier this week, DeepSeek unveiled its R1 model, which, the startup claims, meets, if not exceeds, performance from OpenAI’s o1 model released last year. (o1 is designed to tackle reasoning and math problems.)” — Oh, so China built their for math and we built ours for garbage. Interesting approach.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Building garbage and convincing people it is absolutely necessary to pay someone for it is the American way.

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