alt Hacker NewsThis really not that hard.
Deepseek started as Liang's side project funded with his hedgefund couch change compute. That set the economics for everyone else in PRC. If deepseek releases for free because Liang doesn't give a shit about making $$$ on his hobby, every other PRC player has to follow. And serendipitously, due to US export controls, PRC tech companies can't dig themselves into ruinous seppuku debt buying compute even if they wanted to - what they can buy, i.e. everything around DC infra including power, they get for fraction of the cost expediently.
TLDR Liang said fuck profits... which means every other PRC competitor had to fuck profits, which ends up fucking profits of western labs so deep in debt due to rampant financialization and can not afford to say fuck profits.
Sometimes a billionaire is fine just burning $$$ on a hobby while remaining a billionaire instead of trillionaire, and it just so happens the side effect might mean preventing others from being trillionaires as well. Bonus others is geopolitical adversary who is hedging economy on trillion $$$ returns.
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I'm still not understanding why one hobby projecing being open source means others should also be open source. So you're saying that PRC is making a bet against US companies and the US markets to crash them in order to stifle the US economy? That is an interesting take, I would think the US market is far more resilient than just the tech stocks. Speaking with my communist friends though, it does seem like this is the ultimate goal: Topple the US hegemony and US foreign control by crashing it's economy while China makes a bet on free/cheaper AI models, with the ultimate goal of agitating the people enough to cause a revolution to turn the US into a communist state (really delulu stuff if you ask me)
Seems kind of pointless? Wouldn't anyone in the US/western world simply use the chinese models in their own inference? That would not strengthen the Chinese position because the models got downloaded for free off HuggingFace, and then cloud inference bills would just put money into US companies.