Hacker News Reader

Comment by crocowhile | Hacker News Reader

When the price difference is so high and the performance so close, of course you have a major issue with competition. Let alone the fact this is fully open source.

Most importantly, this is a signal: openAI and META are trying to build a moat using massive hardware investments. Deepseek took the opposite direction and not only does it show that hardware is no moat, it basically makes fool of their multibillion claims. This is massive. If only investors had the brain it takes, we would pop this bubble alread.

View on HN

Why should the bubble pop when we just got the proof that these models can be much more efficient than we thought?

I mean, sure, no one is going to have a monopoly, and we're going to see a race to the bottom in prices, but on the other hand, the AI revolution is going to come much sooner than expected, and it's going to be on everyone's pocket this year. Isn't that a bullish signal for the economy?

Chances are the investors who put in all that capital would rather invest it in the team that has the ability to make the most of it. Deepseek calls into question whether OpenAI, Anthropic or Google are as world class as everyone thought a few days ago.

It doesn’t call it into question- they’re not. OpenAI has been bleeding researchers since the Anthropic split (and arguably their best ones, given Claude vs GPT-4o). While Google should have all the data in the world to build the best models, they still seem organizationally incapable of leveraging it to the their advantage, as was the case with their inventing Transformers in the first place.

> While Google should have all the data in the world to build the best models

They do have the best models. Two models made by Google share the first place on Chatbot Arena.

[1] https://lmarena.ai/?leaderboard

I'm not sure placing first in Chatbot Arena is proof of anything except being the best at Chatbot Arena, it's been shown that models that format things in a visually more pleasant way tend to win side by side comparisons.

In my experience doing actual work, not side by side comparisons, Claude wins outright as a daily work horse for any and all technical tasks. Chatbot Arena may say Gemini is "better", but my reality of solving actual coding problems says Claude is miles ahead.

I think this is the correct take. There might be a small bubble burst initially after a bunch of US stocks retrace due to uncertainty. But in the long run this should speed up the proliferation of productivity gains unlocked by AI.

I think we should not underestimate one aspect: at the moment, a lot of hype is artificial (and despicable if you ask me). Anthropic says AI can double human lifespan in 10 years time; openAI says they have AGI behind the corner; META keeps insisting on their model being open source when they in fact only release the weights. They think - maybe they are right - that they would not be able to get these massive investments without hyping things a bit but deepseek's performance should call for things to be reviewed.

Based on reports from a16z the US Government likely wants to bifurcate the top-tier tech and bring it into DARPA, with clear rules for how capable anything can be that the public will be able to access.

I consider it unlikely that the new administration is philosophically different with respect to its prioritization of "national security" concerns.

> Anthropic says AI can double human lifespan in 10 years time;

That's not a crazy thing to say, at all.

Lots of AI researchers think that ASI is less than 5 years away.

> deepseek's performance should call for things to be reviewed.

Their investments, maybe, their predictions of AGI? They should be reviewed to be more optimistic.

I am a professor of Neurobiology, I know a thing or two about lifespan research. To claim that human lifespan can be doubled is crazy per se. To claim it can be done in 10 years by a system that does not even exist is even sillier.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com