While competition sure is a good thing...

[mahnmut]

While I agree in general that competition is generally good, I'd rather some other country was providing the primary competition on the AI front. Both the US and China are racing to incorporate AI into weapon systems. My hope was that China would lag in that space. It looks like maybe not:

A shocking Chinese AI advancement called DeepSeek is sending US stocks plunging

"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."

Nvidia for example dropped $17. I think it's an overreaction since their chips will still be needed for AI. I think what has caused the jitters is that China has developed an AI system (DeepSeek) on much less expensive chips. Apparently the analysts are impressed with what DeepSeek can do. The West has been trying to limit China's access to technology and now they seem to have caught up in the AI race with what we thought was inferior technology.

Oh, and while we're on this:

"DeepSeek is a China-based start-up that last week launched a free AI assistant that it says can operate at a lower cost than American AI models like ChatGPT. The company was founded in 2023 by Liang Wenfeng, co-founder of the hedge fund High Flyer. By Monday it had rocketed to the top of downloads on the Apple Store."

Okay then. Ask it to generate an image of Tiananmen Square as it appeared on 4 June 1989.

Comments

[asthfghl]

[abomvubuso]

You can't make this up:
https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/the-brass-balls-on-these-guys-openai-complains-that-deepseek-has-been-using-its-data-you-know-the-copyrighted-data-its-been-scraping-from-everywhere

[garote]

So-called "AI" and it's antecedent, machine learning, has been in rampant use for years in my line of work, and especially at the two national labs I've worked for. The stuff coming out of generative tools lately has been great for captivating the general public, and news media in their reporting have run far, far ahead of their ability to understand what they're talking about, just like they did - and still usually do - with all this cryptocurrency bullshit. Plus there is, as I've seen half a dozen times in my career already, an absolutely stupid amount of investment money being dumped into this space because hey, investors gotta look like they're being smart for their clients, and all the money that this wacked-out economy constantly siphons up into the upper class has got to get hidden somewhere.

So here we are, talking about an unremarkable AI product dropped online because ohh nooo it's from The Chinese, and weren't we somehow supposed to be keeping The Chinese from even getting ahold of the hardware to develop this (was re: garden variety PCs) or the data to train models (was re: dumps of data from social media feeds, web scrapers, et cetera) but ohh nooo the cat's out of the bag now and look it's somehow a lot better so we should be quaking in our boots... Except not, because this is a nothingburger, and China has already been well on its way for decades building a massive, inescapable surveillance state engineered by, and for, the ruling government, at the expense of whatever people are in the way of what the government decides is the destiny of China ... and OF COURSE this technology is already being leveraged to further tighten the screws in that apparatus, and to a degree that is getting, frankly, beyond merely awful and is now well into farce.

US corporations and the US government have generally been powerless to stop China from rapidly copycatting any intellectual property, designs, processes, drugs, et cetera that have entered or originated in the private sector. Information leaks, even across oceans. China has demonstrated zero interest in adhering to international laws about licensing or patents or copyright or whatnot when those things are in any way unfavorable to China. Which, frankly, should not be surprising to anyone. So what were we expecting?

The good news - which is a real stretch of the term "good" - is that the Chinese government is its own worst enemy when it comes to innovation and will always lag somewhat behind, because it is obsessed with policing the very brains of the Chinese people, and their various mechanisms of autocratic control are quite hostile to the open, collaborative, contentious, bold, outspoken, and fairly anti-authoritarian environment in which science and innovation thrive. So hey, there's that.

It's not going to stop the oncoming inevitable long-term war that China is building towards, with all the disinformation and oppression and extortion and black-ops bullshit that a communist bureaucracy can muster. Get the popcorn and sunflower seeds!

[jacober_calc]

"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim."