So maybe he also understands that the US has good reason to tariff and restrict Chinese investment. It is not only for the benefit of the US people, but of the world and the Chinese people. It is not out of emotional fear, but morality and responsibility, which are obviously trans-cultural.
They are very "stubborn" models
But as soon as I need it to do something other than solve a problem - say rewrite the problem in simpler terms, or given a problem + solution provide hints, or rewrite the solution with these <tags>, etc. it kinda stops working. Often times it still goes ahead and solves the problem. That's why I'm saying it's stubborn. If a task looks like a task that it can handle very well, it's really hard to make it perform that other, similar but not quite the same task.
In a similar vein - https://github.com/cpldcpu/MisguidedAttention/tree/main/eval...
Wide models sound like they know more than deep models but fail at reasoning with more than a few steps and are cheap to train and serve. Deep models know a lot less but can reason much better.
An example I saw all moe models fail at a few months back was A and not B being implicit in the grounding text, all of them would turn it into A and B a substantial proportion of the time. Monolithic models on the other hand had no trouble with giving the right answer.
The Chinese AI companies can only do wide Ai because of restrictions on hardware exports. In the short term this will make more people think llms are stochastic parrots because they can't get simple thinks right.
> The key distinction between auxiliary-loss-free balancing and sequence-wise auxiliary loss lies in their balancing scope: batch-wise versus sequence-wise. Compared with the sequence-wise auxiliary loss, batch-wise balancing imposes a more flexible constraint, as it does not enforce in-domain balance on each sequence. This flexibility allows experts to better specialize in different domains. To validate this, we record and analyze the expert load of a 16B auxiliary- loss-based baseline and a 16B auxiliary-loss-free model on different domains in the Pile test set. As illustrated in Figure 9, we observe that the auxiliary-loss-free model demonstrates greater expert specialization patterns as expected.
And they have shared experts always present:
> Compared with traditional MoE architectures like GShard (Lepikhin et al., 2021), DeepSeekMoE uses finer-grained experts and isolates some experts as shared ones.
I'm old enough to remember when everyone outside of a few weirdos thought that a single hidden layer was enough because you could show that type of neural network was a universal approximator.
The same thing is happening with the wide MoE models. They are easier to train and sound a lot smarter than the deep models, but fall on their faces when they need to figure out deep chains of reasoning.
I think they did great, but they relied on distillation. So it's like riding on a skateboard while being pulled by a car.
Kudos to the deepseek team!
Imagine Sam Altman throwing a chair out a window in a meeting lol.
The message of AI Superpowers is that China will lag the US at first but once things stabilize this will happen because China has a lot more engineers and a lot more data.
Anyone who hasn't read AI Superpowers should really make it a point to read it in 2025. It is an incredible book.
A big country would never overreact to national security threats. We have the TSA to protect us from that :)
I think the real lesson here is that if you enough government power, there is no need to be competent. The feedback loop is destroyed so you can just do whatever random stupid thing you want until your country collapses like the USSR.
In 2024, this isn't fact, it's just baseless conspiracy.
All evidence has ended up pointing to bush meat contamination.
This creates a bit of a catch-22, no? There's no basis to claim it was a lab leak because the lab in question won't cooperate with establishing whether there's a basis for the idea.
It'd be one thing if the proper amount of research was done and made public and we could see that there was no conspiracy. As is, there's a lab located in Wuhan studying coronaviruses that pinky promises that they didn't start COVID-19, while the WHO director is on record saying that the lab blocked the WHO investigation that might have exonerated them.
I think it's prudent to forgive people for whom "this is a baseless conspiracy theory" isn't a sufficient explanation.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-who-ch...
https://doi.org/10.1136%2Fbmj.n1890
https://apnews.com/article/health-china-coronavirus-pandemic...
There was no shortage of data that was consistent with the bush meat market outbreak.
It would be one thing if the outbreak started in a theatre or a mall, or some other place which did not regularly traffic in exotic diseases. It's another thing when it started at the only non-lab active reservoir in the city.
Given the preponderance of evidence and probability, the lab leak theory is a baseless conspiracy at this point. It stretches credulity to think that of all the places the lab leaked, it leaked to the one place in town which was itself a dangerous source of cross-species disease transmission.
If there was no such wet market in town, and if the outbreak didn't center in it, the lab leak would have been a far more probable hypothesis. But that's not the world we live in.
I'm not even saying that it's right, it just confuses me to hear you so fervently insist that there's no basis for the idea when the WHO director himself says that there is and that the investigation was inconclusive.
We on this forum of all people should know that you can present partial data that shows completely different conclusions what the full data would show.
Why is a wet market a more convincing explanation than a lab whose explicit mission is studying coronaviruses, one which has been publicly called out for being uncooperative with the ensuing investigation?
Absence of data isn't a free pass that lets you fill in whatever blanks you want, to fit whatever improbable theory you want. Especially when a plausible, probable, data supported alternative exists.
At the moment, given what we know and don't know, it is dramatically more likely that it was a bush meat outbreak, and confidently and without quantification, asserting the contrary (as the ancestor post did) is nonsense.
Its correct to say that it might have been a lab leak. It's not in good faith to say that it was, or was probably a lab leak. Because that's not where the preponderance of evidence currently rests.
> Why is a wet market a more convincing explanation than a lab whose explicit mission is studying coronaviruses, one which has been publicly called out for being uncooperative with the ensuing investigation?
It's possible that the widespread belief in this explanation is a failure in science communication and there's a good reason for this, but it's not a failure in critical thinking on the part of those who are skeptical of the official story. The official story has an enormous unexplained hole. I've yet to see anyone effectively communicate why the intuitively more probable answer is the less probable one.
I think it's simply the consequences of politically motivated reasoning. (At least, for people who have spent much time thinking about it.)
> I've yet to see anyone effectively communicate why the intuitively more probable answer is the less probable one.
I just communicated why the market leak theory is both more intuitive, and more probable.
There were two possible sources for the virus in the city, and hundreds of thousands of non-sources for it. The first detected source of it was the market.
If the first outbreak of it were in the lab, (but was hidden), probability and intuition indicates that the next place it would have shown up at would have been some randomly selected place of the city, which has nothing to do with viruses. A mall. A theatre. A ball game.
The fact that of all the possibilities, it showed up in the one particular place that is also a prime suspect for it's own viral outbreak means that the most obvious explanation (market leak) is likely the correct one.
When a swine flu outbreak is traced to a particular stall in a factory farm, we don't conclude (without further evidence) that actually it was caused by a university miles away.
No, you didn't, you stated that it was.
The rest of your post makes sense as an explanation. Maybe lead with that next time instead of condescendingly telling people that they're politically motivated, stupid, or whatever else you meant to imply by calling it a conspiracy theory.
COVID-19, at least in the US, has been an enormous failure in science communication, and being condescending towards those who already feel alienated by the terrible communication isn't going to help.
> In 2024, this isn't fact, it's just baseless conspiracy.
> All evidence has ended up pointing to bush meat contamination.
This isn't science communication, it's a condescending rebuke.
That said, I'm done here. Thanks for clarifying in the end, and happy new year!
You’re assuming “it was tracked to there” = “it originated there” but that’s a big leap.
If the market were one of multiple second-generation infection spreader sites, we'd have had significantly faster growth in the rate of infections.
With the power of hindsight, the rate of spread of COVID is well-understood, and the timelines of people getting sick is consistent with one initial outbreak site. There just aren't any known cases where someone came down with COVID on day 1 of the outbreak, without also having gone to that market.
The location bias hypothesis would work if they looked at all patrons of the market, and checked if they got sick. That's not what they did, though, because they didn't have a list of all the patrons of the market. It doesn't have a guestbook.
They looked for people who got sick, and asked them where they went before they fell sick. And all of them turned out to have gone to the market - and not on the same day.
I did some searching and it seems that you are perhaps basing your conclusions on this article/the studies it points to? - https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanmic/article/PIIS2666-5...
> A geospatial analysis reports that 155 early COVID-19 cases from Hubei Province, China, in December, 2019, significantly clustered around a food market in Wuhan, China.
However, I couldn't find details on how these 155 cases were selected or what exactly "significantly clustered" means. 155 is a small sample, so the details are important.
Also important is whether the data on these cases was provided by government sources. If so, I would question how reliable or representative that data is.
Also Baltimore changed his mind.
It’s harder for me to come up with a simpler metric for “Belt and Road” / IMF style control-through-capital.
But, I think it will happen. After visiting China and seeing how much consistent progress both in infrastructure from the government and in daily life from the economy, my impression is US government makes 2 steps forward 1 step back in the same time it takes China to take 100 steps forward.
The US does have several large overseas bases but 90% of this list is are indefensible logistics hubs and not a meaningful projection of force.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_military_inst...
Most of these bases are co-located with NATO or other allies for good reason, the US doesn't have to do everything itself wrt air defense, locating an airlift wing with a fighter wing.
But then it's a lower bar than people imagine, for China to buy similar friendship.
China is building up a lot of soft power with infrastructure projects all over the world - most of them are aimed at improving trade - ports, rail lines and the like. In the next decade or 2, they can reasonably make requests to place a few PLA/PLAA personnel and equipment on bases in strategic places, bases they may have been built using Chinese money.
If a country or coalition decided to attack all of those bases at once it would give the US the high ground to respond. Nazis tried a blitzkrieg and that didn't turn out well. As someone squarely against the bullshit of Trump, I would not be happy if he was in power at the time. But I do not doubt for a second that the US population in general would respond as readily as they did after 9/11 (but hopefully not as readily as in Iraq).
We just saw how the "dipshit in power" aspect works with Netanyahu in Gaza -- a disproportionate and tragic response. The only caveat is Trump is an extremely stupid dipshit, so I genuinely hope it doesn't turn out that way and everyone keeps their powder dry until Trump is out of office.
China's buildup of soft power is good for them, and I commend them for it. Fortunately, I believe soft power is a defensive power at its core, and I don't think it translates to offensive power. To confuse the two would be a mistake.
Thank you for the opportunity to get a lot off my chest this New Year's Eve. I hope it wasn't too offensive, because I believe you responded intelligently and in good faith, and thank you for that.
Many of the US military bases are communication centers or barracks on training bases. They serve important roles but are not "defensible" in many contexts.
Who am I even propagandizing for in this context?
Except in today's world, being a military power is increasingly less relevant after a certain point, while economic supremacy is increasingly gaining prominence. While the West is content with self-platitudes for their "democracy", China has been building strong relationships with a number of countries looking to implement the "China-model", a capitalist but largely regressive nation that relies on surveillance and stringent media control. China is already licensing out their technology to a number of interested countries, some of which include Western countries looking to emulate Chinese autocracy themselves. On the other hand, countries are looking at the incoming US govt with pretty much strong uncertainty as to what their relationship with America will be like.
Not to mention, as automated warfare becomes increasingly more relevant, guess where these countries are buying their drones from? Hint hint, it's not the US with their overpriced toys.
Number of irrelevant countries. US's allies are Europe, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Canada, Mexico, Australia, etc. 80% of the world's wealth. and 95% of the world's top technologies.
> guess where these countries are buying their drones from
Soon, not China. China Is Cutting Off Drone Supplies Critical to Ukraine War Effort [1]. China is reportedly making drones for Russia instead, according to multiple intelligence officials.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-12-09/china-is-...
Team China is not as tight as team USA, but has a number of strings it can pull with its members. These are countries that, while not prosperous themselves, provide the raw material for most of the West's industries. A lot of critical resources are often only found in these countries. Not to mention, they have often aligned against USA gang in most cases, at the UN, while also aligning with China. Look at how many countries have signed public declarations stating that the Uighur camps in China don't exist/don't repress Uighurs.
On the second point, the article only states that China is cutting Ukrainian drone supplies to supply Russia instead - that's exactly the danger the West should be worried about. China also supplies an increasing number of armaments to partner countries such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, Nigeria and Egypt. Needless to say, China is currently the world's largest exporter of military UAVs.
According to the World Economic Forum[1], the USA plus the whole EU make up 29% of the world's GDP-PPP, while the BRICS countries come up at 37.3%.
You also included Japan, Australia, South Korea, Canada and Taiwan, but I find it hard to believe they would make up a very significant part of the difference.
[1] https://www.weforum.org/stories/2024/11/brics-summit-geopoli....
Of course, the same can probably be said about the large population centers in China too. More people concentrated in one area tends to mean more poverty in that area and all the things that come with it.
Most of these folks are illiterate oldies that would pass away in a few years anyway.
If Russia couldn't beat NATO in a pitched fight against the rest of the world, neither can China.
The fear of the "Red Sun Rising".
The fear that Japan was going to own most of the valuable real estate in America.
The forcing of Japanese car companies to onshore to protect American jobs.
Blaming of Japanese industrial policy as being unfair competition.
It was the collapse of the Japanese growth engine in the mid 90's that finally ended the American panic.
The U.S. and U.K. are a dual world power.
Whenever powers rise to threaten that duality there is a lot of hand-wringing in Washington.
Wait, how did the UK get in there? Especially in this post-brexit century...
Correction: If it accepts the stationing of U.S. troops and succumbs to U.S. financial policies, it's not a big deal
Japan and Germany have paid a huge price to demonstrate their friendship to the U.S. That was not 'just fine'
The situation has waxed and waned but in general West Germany and Japan at the government level have been pretty happy to have US troops stationed there while facing off against the Soviet Union (now Russia) and China. The Ukrainians and the Baltics would love to have some US troops stationed there right now.
you are not mature enough to discuss such topic if you believe the US will be happy to be taken over by some democratic friends.
My perception is that Japan, after some great success, went through a normal semi-inevitable asset bubble, but their response was uniquely Japanese. Rather than letting firms and the social contract of lifetime employment (particularly for older workers) go bankrupt, their firms and country decided to absorb the losses for a generation and stagnate.
Economically it was a very suboptimal approach but socially/morally I'm less confident it was the wrong call.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Japanese_sentiment_in_the...
https://www.nytimes.com/1982/04/06/us/resentment-of-japanese...
No it was not. The US had taken whole bunch of steps to prevent this from happening and those steps were anything but "let's free market decide" and "compete on merits".
It is a real problem for any country or block. As soon as it looks like it threatens leading position of the US all the gloves come of. Obviously not specific to the US. Any other country would do the same given a chance.
Albeit US cannot speak as US-centric paranoia/"exceptionalism" may do the same thing...and the electorate voted to self destruct the government despite US economy being the strongest in decades.
The vast majority of its people do not share in that success and have seen a declining standard of life relative to prior generations whereas in China, the opposite is quite demonstrably true, despite increasingly similar concentrations of wealth and political power.
> Average age of first-time homebuyers is 38, an all-time high.
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2024/11/05/the-average-age-of-first...
> U.S. homelessness rose 18 percent in 2024, continuing multi-year upward trend
> https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/u-s-homelessness-rose-18...
> analysis of government data estimates that people in the United States owe at least $220 billion in medical debt.
https://www.kff.org/health-costs/issue-brief/the-burden-of-m...
And why is this a problem?
What is wrong with renting for life, exactly? I’m seeing more and more people own rental properties, but do not own their primary residence by choice.
As a free person I want to own my place. I have better ways to spend my money rather than feeding some asshole
https://www.kiplinger.com/real-estate/buying-a-home/renting-...
>"In 21 U.S. metros, the monthly cost of owning is at least 50% more expensive"
I am not in the US. 21 metros do not constitute country. When I bought house in major metro (Toronto) it was $200,000. So please do not feed me this pathetic propaganda.
To add to the irony there are also self-made landlords who do similar work on similar scale on their own! They are usually available for defects and damages day and night.
Back when the people owned the non profits they build and fixed everything asap on the cheap. It might even be better than owning the home directly.
Nobody wants to be your serf until they're 38, bozo.
Ways forward are a) continued denial (status quo), b) YIMBYs defeat NIMBYs, c) change policy (incentivize renting) or d) <insert radical policy proposal here>.
You may think that expensive gasoline and cartons of eggs are a meme, but the reality is that the economy has become pretty damn Shite(tm) for the commons. Costs of living are objectively higher than they were just a couple years ago and incomes haven't kept pace either.
The stock market is having the time of its life (and as a small time investor I find that nice) but it's completely detached from the economy.
Yes, he won by a landslide and the biggest factor was the bad economy.
Anyone who thinks 49.9% of the vote (vs 48.4%) is a landslide will quickly find them in negative approval ratings if they think that gives them much political capital (if trump focuses and spending rather than earning capital, that is, which he definitely will).
Recall that GWB declared a mandate (to reverse all progressive social programs since the New Deal) when he squeaked out a victory over Kerry.
2024 election: Trump 49.7% 77.3 million (312 electoral), Harris 48.4% 75 million (226 electoral). Republicans control of House (but lost 1 seat) and control of Senate (gained 4 seats).
1972 election: Nixon 60.7% 47.2 million (520 electoral), McGovern 37.5% 29.2 million (17 electoral). Democrats control of House (but lost 13 seats) and control of Senate (gained 2 seats).
1984 election: Reagan 58.8% 54.5 million (525 electoral), Mondale 40.6% 37.6 million (13 electoral). Democrats control of House (but lost 16 seats). Republicans control of Senate (but lost 2 seats).
Source: many Wikipedia links
That's not what "landslide victory" means.
In fact Trump's electoral total was scarcely different from Biden's in 2016, and his popular vote margin was far narrower. Historically speaking, both of these are much closer to dead heats than they are to what are generally considered to be landslide victories (like Clinton's wins in 92-96, and Reagan's in 84-88).
You're only saying it's a "landslide" because Trump keeps saying that in his speeches.
But as usual he's either simply lying, or has no idea what he's talking about.
Maybe in western media depictions it would seem so, but eg china invests more and more in europe over the years. Moreover, BRICS are roughly half of world's population. Perceptions of what "the world" or "international relationships" mean are sometimes distorted in the west.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/biggest-trade-partner-of...
Whether China can beat NATO in a head to head military contest is one question, but separate from whether they can take Taiwan, for example.
The "rest of the world" is not limited by NATO. And China is not fighting "the rest of the world". It trades with it, invests and does all kinds of other things. But sure keeping one's head in a sand is a nice position.
China does have a current advantage on lithium battery and rare earth materials - dumb technologies that US and allies can replicate fairly quickly, less than a year. EUV and 3nm and below on the other hand, will take decades, since it involves a number of different and deep technologies controlled by dozens of companies. China has thrown $150B on it since 2014, and has only come up with low yield/unprofitable 7nm via existing DUV machines.
> 80% GDP
China's demographics will more than HALF to 500M by 2100, if not earlier, while US grows to close to 400M by then. Someone actually theorizes that China's population is already only 800M right now https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fR5F_8dSjOw
Also, a lot of that GDP is debatable in 2024, when real estate prices have dropped by more than 50% in tier 2 and below cities, and deflation has raged on.
Building EVs and supporting infrastructure is a lot more complicated than just having a bunch of blueprints.
Personally, I am not sure yet whether I like this or not. I can see good arguments for and against.
I wish it would be an honest open policy instead of the current vice grip of on the one hand passing aggressive phase out timelines of ICE through regulation, and on the other doing nothing to prepare a grid for mass EV adoption.
I can see why it wouldn't pass a democratic vote, but I also think chances of this passing under the covers are fairly slim as any time one of their roadmapped phases comes near they usually have to postpone them to appease the public.
Laugh in Northvolt
> $150B on it since 2014, and has only come up with low yield/unprofitable 7nm via existing DUV machines
Considering that there are less than 5 countries on Earth that can fab 7nm semiconductors, that aint bad.
- Battery Startup Opens Chicago Plant as US Seeks to Curb Reliance on China https://www.nanograf.com/media/battery-startup-opens-chicago...
- Our own YC: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/industry/energy
- China’s startup scene is dead as investors pull out—’Today, we are like lepers’ https://finance.yahoo.com/news/china-startup-scene-dead-inve...
Northvolt isnt lacking funding (pedantically they are, else they wouldnt be bankrupt) or clients, but know-how for scaling putting aside some conspiracy theories about Chinese equipments. Turns out scaling isnt easy.
vanadium redox flow isnt very big yet even for Energy Storage System
Side note: The tendency US and Westernin general to depend on Wunderwaffe tech (Vanadium Redox! Solid State Battery!) is quite amusing.
> China’s startup scene is dead as investors pull out
Turns out Emperor Pooh dislike get-rich-quick startup mentality and yet another useless apps. He wouldnt mind hard tech bro like Ren Zhengfei or Wang Chuanfu though.
P.S. Watch the robotic space, things might get interesting in a year or two.
Japan too. It's a sign of helplessness and desperation, as much as I would prefer not to see that. They procrastinated and now see themselves behind.
Can other economies copy that part? I know a bunch of people who'd like to be able to afford more houses & more groceries at the same time. I'd like that, I can't realistically afford a house in the city I live in without a 50% price drop.
I'm sure China has a lot of problems, but key goods getting cheaper is not one of them. What I'm guessing you meant to say is that retirees were led to put too much of their savings into the housing market and are discovering there is a glut. Which is tragic for them. But prices dropping is a good thing; the unachievable ideal is a utopia where everything is free, ie, 100% deflation.
Here are some good posts on why nobody wants deflation:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEconomics/comments/uzq5bu/why_is...
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEconomics/comments/mbsxyl/can_so...
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEconomics/comments/yotf0c/i_dont...
also coincidentally and recently, China’s Xi Jinping asked ‘What’s so bad about deflation?’ amid economic slowdown https://fortune.com/2024/12/29/china-economy-deflation-xi-ji...
And there is an unemployment problem too, obviously.
'CCP is a secret and authoritarian regime that wields immense power' vs 'Some random reporter with English firstname and Chinese lastname know what Xi said before he go to bed'
Have you ever wondered if there's a tiny possibility that the media and the reporter *might* be lying?
...
The lack of spending then further contributes to falling prices, job cuts, businesses closing, etc. It's really not a situation any economy _wants_.
That said, I empathize with your sentiment.
Food, energy, transportation, education, etc.
How long are you going to delay getting a new car simply because cars are getting cheaper and better? Once you probe the theory beyond the surface, it collapses. Yes, a deflationary economy will see less cash velocity than a ZIRP economy with cheap cash sloshing around. But, at the end of the day, humans MUST spend resources today to live to see their savings worth more.
One man's debt is another mans income.
The reason we narrowly avoided full blown deflation in 2008 is because they bailed out the banks. If they didn't we would have had 1929 style depression these last 15 years.
Consider the computer industry. Prices have been falling pretty much across my entire life. Supply-demand suggests that people will keep buying new computers as the price drops and that is exactly what is happening. Demand for compute has never been higher. There is no waiting for improvements, if anything there is a mad rush to buy hardware that everyone knows is about to be obsoleted. It isn't even an irrational rush, the people buying that obsolete hardware often make good money (eg, bitcoin miners in the heyday).
Basic supply demand says as price drops demand increases. Basic life experience says as prices drop I can afford more and better stuff. Observation of real industries suggests - as we would intuit - that industries with regular price drops are actually healthy and great to be in for consumers in the small and the large. Theory suggests that everyone ignores nominal price fluctuations and focuses on real changes so systemic deflation is irrelevant. None of this supports the idea that deflation is bad.
Pretty sure the anti-deflation crowd are just wrong. They have no evidence or argument [0] as far as I can tell, and all the theory is stacked against them. China surely has problems. Deflation is not a problem. It is just a metric.
[0] EDIT Well I suppose they do have an argument, but it involves people randomly going crazy and choosing to live in poverty and discomfort because it gets easier to buy goods. Which is not an argument I really take seriously.
It is rather unlikely that giving people an option that they already have is going to cause a problem. One major benefit of money is that people can hoard it and there is no cost in the real economy because all the resources are still there and prices can just adjust to the amount of cash in circulation.
> here was a small deflationary bump in American history around the 1930s that helps to illustrate what can happen in a deflationary spiral.
The US came out of the 1930s with an economy that was capable of overcoming almost literally the entire world. Again, the evidence that deflation was some sort of major problem is questionable, it seems to have been associated with the creation of one of the most dynamic economies in the history of history.
And the idea that we have this one clear lesson from one instance back in the 30s is just weird and unbelievable. That isn't how history or complex systems work.
While the share of services in the US GDP is more than 3/4. What will you do with all these expensive NY lawyers when push comes to shove? Sue China's drones?
Germany and Italy, to take but two examples of large Western economies, haven't had native above-replacement TFR since ~1970.
Even in the US, TFR is well below replacement right now, and in fact is basically comparable to China's TFR from 2010-2017.
> https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsrr/vsrr035.pdf
US population growth is sort of immigration-dependent, which, let's put it this way, isn't an unalloyed good thing.
What metric do you have in mind here? It looks like Japan’s population has dropped ~2% from peak in the last 25 years. China is projected to lose ~8% in the next 25.
Or if we look at percent of population over 65, Japan is at ~30% today. China is projected to jump from <20% to 40% by 2050.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1359964/world-population...
Yeah, Japan is at 29.6% today. China is at ~15% right now and is estimated to be at 26% by 2050.
That's not China in your link. It's Hong Kong, which has an older-skewing population.
I'm not convinced. I don't think that population decline is necessarily worse than changing the cultural and ethnic makeup of your country. If anything, I think that a much stronger case can be made for the other perspective.
Anyway, fact is, things aren't that bad in China. We can see what China's demographic future looks like, because nations like Germany and Japan are forerunners in that regard.
It can bear the burden of developing and producing things like solar panels or batteries or AI because of the sheer size of the population, but that doesn’t work if the population itself is the problem.
Besides, with ~1.4B people, China has a very deep population reservoir. Even with a catastrophically low birthrate in 2023, there were more than 9M births. That's about as much, in that year, as the US, Japan, South Korea, Germany, France, England, Mexico, Canada, and Spain combined. (3.5M+.8M+.23M+.7M+.7M+.56M+1.8M+.35M+.32M)
The Economist crowd loves to prophesy doom, but really the facts are not unambiguous and China's position is not uniquely bad in any respect. If anything, it still has a lot going for it.
You are deeply, deeply misunderstanding the problem.
Maybe when Western-oriented, China would have been able to escape the middle-income tier despite their demographic trends. But with the dual gut punch of being excised from Western technology and an economy that will be in a tar pit due to growth crashes (real estate bubble for example), no chance in hell.
Don't get me wrong. It's amazing how many people China has lifted out of poverty. And yes, they do take "100 steps forward" for every "2 steps forward, 1 step back" that the West does. But this is because they came from very low, where there is no ossified infrastructure and plenty of low-hanging fruit to pick.
For example, being in Shanghai and having nothing but quiet streets because virtually every motor vehicle is electrified feels like being in the future. The same goes for massive amounts of high-speed rail being built per year. But this is possible because A) there is no legacy infrastructure and B) the state can just crush you without any recourse.
It is quite well-known that the more free a nation is, the more it prospers. Make of that what you will.
https://itif.org/publications/2024/09/16/china-is-rapidly-be...
China leads in Computers and Electronics, Machinery and Equipment, Motor Vehicles, Basic Metals, Fabricated Metals, Electrical Equipment.
The US leads in IT and Information Services, Pharmaceuticals, and Other Transportation.
It’s not about to happen. It already happened, and it is largely due to hubris that the US doesn’t talk about it.
No ban is perfect, there is always some loopholes or illegal exports this is to be expected, but if it prevents large scale transaction then it it is achieved its goal.
The question is rather do they we need a lot of gpus to train or training with older gen gpus is not competitive is a different problem.
It doesn't prevent the transactions, it only makes them more expensive than they would have been otherwise. If the the US was able to covertly buy enough titanium from the USSR for the SR-71 program, China can buy the latest GPUs if it believes AI competence is in its national interests.
Oh look, there's sudden demand for H100s of by dozens of small companies in Brazil, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand. I better not look too closely at them or I won't get my sales bonus for this quarter.
Harder and more expensive, but far from impossible. I doubt they pay more than doubles Nvidia's sticker price, all told. My comment was inspired by recent real-life events; Nvidia got into legal trouble in the last couple of months for turning a blind eye to questionable transactions - if you're curious about the mechanics of GPU sanctions-busting, read up on the governments accusations against Nvidia, and this was for low-hanging fruit.
The article has one analyst speculating they used tens of thousands of H100s (50,000 IIRC) instead of the 10,000 A100s the Deepseek CEO owns up to. They can afford to pay exorbitant markups for the logistical nightmare of importation through 3rd party countries at scale.
edit: AFAIK, the sanctions don't prevent Chinese AI labs from renting GPUs from any cloud provider. To simplify logistics, a shell company could avoid shipping the cards to the mainland by simply settings up a data center in not-China and give the parent company full access. I suppose the US government has to balance sanctions against Nvidia's share price, so they can't be too aggressive, there are just too many loopholes for demanded shock not to have been a consideration.
When I was working in Beijing, we definitely had resources we couldn’t access locally but could easily access remotely so it didn’t really matter.
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
If you follow the news, several people (bankers) will trade with Iran despite the repercussions (jail) of doing so. There is a premium but at the right price someone will execute.
This boils down to the same thing in a market economy. If the price is too high, that prevents the transaction.
1. While building https://gitpodcast.com
2. Code snip: https://github.com/BandarLabs/gitpodcast/blob/main/backend/a...
Software today require several dozen gigabytes of RAM and two dozen CPU cores just to render some simple fucking text because everyone has several dozen gigabytes of RAM and two dozen CPU cores.
Because their Engineers are constantly in situations were they have to work with much less resources. And they come up with stuff that constantly surprises people for being much cheaper. The western reaction is to then go and buy them out. Its not going to work forever. They have already taken over large swathes of the tech landscape.
Even with AI for example, Real Time inference is not required in majority of cases.
But the western engineer and corp exec in big tech, are used to buying new data centers everyday (not because of specific Customer Demand, but because of intent to capture market/snuff out competition/build moats or what ever bs an environment of over abundance has trained them to do) and then they have zillions of machines idling which they use to provide real-time inference raising the cost for everyone.
Sooner or later someone in China or India working on non real time inference will offer large corps much cheaper solutions.
The Western model is where you forget how to cook a meal at home, and end up relying on McDonalds for food, because they are everywhere, thanks to their prime directive of survival via opening new stores everyday.
Make those fucking assholes use the hardware of the people instead of some monstrosity with a 256 cores CPU and 48 TB of RAM and 24 exabytes of enterprise SSD and an RTX Cinco Grande connected via optical fiber to the Amazonflare Cloudnet. We will see lean and mean software literally overnight.
Are you sure it’s the engineers who are being complacent? I know quite a few coders who’d love nothing more than to spend months on optimizations eking out small performance gains. Their bosses (or the market) don’t let them.
If shipping fast means you spend an extra $1000 once per developer, guess what almost every company is going to do?
The real fucking assholes are the ones that enable the fucking assholes you refer to.
So there is a use for fat development stations. Increases my productivity which is very important as I am an independent vendor and pay for all my tools.
Even with latest hardware, there must be incentives to optimise on size, memory, CPU time etc. But given natural tendency, we just optimise on what's the rarest of them all - time to market. Get it shipping fast.
I was once in a training (as new consultant) for software, the instructor, an old fashioned guy said quit using the mouse learn the keyboard shortcuts - your customer is watching you. He was damn right cos years later, I realised so many customers did remark, how do you do that so fast? To this day, running some command in Excel (say) access Name manager, I use kB shortcut that hasn't changed in decades. I frankly even lost track of where to find them in the menu bar.
Simple things but powerful. Do with less.
That should knock God knows how many GPU cycles, time and training of models.
It’s much harder if anything, due to the sheer amount of topics censored.
But I suspect it applies to citizen facing things. It doesn't likely hold up research or pressures them into returning POC Viking images.
I could be wrong of course.
If you have to do political policing one way or the other, you'll have to invest resources to achieve it. On the other hand, maybe it's beneficial for r&d because it pressures you to do hard things that your product benefits from, e.g. controllability in ML-products.
It’s not altogether different from how everything seems to be much more expensive than it was in the 1950s. There are many real and concerning reasons for that, but one less concerning reason is that we have higher standards and expectations now, and that translates to higher cost.
To give a random example, Apache http server for windows is less than 12mb download. I used to download Oracle's http which I'm told is based on that, but that's like 1GB++ haven't checked in recent years.
To make an analogy, that is why I think even with AI work expands to fill available resources (human+AI). I don't think jobless rate will be high, instead we will see demand expansion.
They write software that usurps other people's computing resources, e.g., CPU, storage and an internet connection that they do not pay for.
It's one reason I use NetBSD, custom barebones Linux. I write and compile software on single core old computers and cheap eMMC laptops.
There is a lot of fun to be had working with vintage hardware in spare time though
Imagine if they were forced to use IE7 as the only browser. The frontend frameworks would be blazing fast and we would never have bloatware like React or Angular or npm
That had nothing to do with the creation of this model.
China has incredibly strong incentives to do the pure research needed to break the current GPU-or-else lock. I hope, for science' sake, we dont end up gunning down each others mathematicians on the streets of Vienna like certain nuclear physicists seem to go.
You are confusing cause with effect. What actually happened: Nixon opened up US trade with China and, ever since, China has been stealing trade secrets to undermine and overthrow American interests. Limiting their access to eggs was literally us trying to prevent them from stealing all our shit!
Sorry for talking Ancient History lol
Are these IP thefts or technology transfers? If corporations are having their IP stolen, why don’t they just leave?
These narratives never explain or mention this. Idk why people still latch onto them, they are completely uninteresting “China is stealing all our IP and there’s nothing we can do about it except for continuing to allow our IP to be stolen” is an IQ test and trope.
Does “theft of IP” outweigh, or not, “access to very cheap labor (read: jobs)” ?
We need to stop simping for corporations and start thinking critically about these things.
Out in the real world, Luigi is a criminal who shot a man in cold blood and sparked a conversation. That’s about it.
Hardly a hero. And the majority of the populace does not agree with you.
I’m more concerned about the folks cheering on vigilantes and cops who murder unarmed non-CEOs who have not perpetrated actual harm on thousands of people.
I've seen it twice these years, one was after JoeBiden won election, said the system choose Biden to fix Trump mess, one was after DTrump won, said the system correct the Biden error.
So China is, of course, more fragile.
Not to say that I believe that the US (or any other government or country) unable to have self correction ability or mechanisms. I am just pointing that your logic is flawed.
In that context, "less fragile" are vague words without a clear subject.
I posted the saying to be satirical, but in depth, the two-party system is more stable than any other political systems: To people, it may seem like a cycle of mess, but the system itself is very stable, it avoids the regime change by normalizing it.
How is that makes the two-party system more stable than any other political systems. all what you say normalizing regime change does apply on all democratic systems. So you don't have the choices (both party does actually suck on many mutual aspects) but also don't gain much stability than other democratic system. In parliament system there is usually more acceptance and normalization of changes than the two-party system when you get stuck between worse and the worst most of the time.
An American and a Russian are arguing about their two countries. The American says look: "In my country, I can walk into the Oval Office, pound the president's desk, and say 'Mr. President, I don't like the way you're running our country!'".
And the Russian says "I can do that." The American says "You can?" The Russian says "Yes, I can walk right into the Kremlin, go to the General Secretary's office, slam my fist on his desk and say "I don't like the way President Reagan is running his country."
Much more stable than the government that has Trump, Musk and Vivek calling the shots, that's for sure.
It’s possible that with technology like absolute communication control and ubiquitous surveillance the chance of internal unrest or revolution is greatly reduced. And as long as the country is growing and the average citizen is getting richer they’re much less likely to get unruly. It’s like startups: growth solves all problems.
Loss of feedback in authoritarian regimes is a problem, but in the short time it might not be if Xi doesn't make really stupid moves.
It pains me to see it, but they show more long-term thinking that many of the Western governments who aren't interested what will happen after their time in the office.
While the people have plenty use of force can be minimal.
Absolutely agree, and it pains me as well. Besides long-term thinking, they can also just impose sweeping new rules to address certain problems in a way the West never could.
For example, with teen gaming addiction, they didn’t hesitate to just ban kids under 18 from gaming more than a few hours a week, crashing the value of certain gaming companies. In the West, we’d spend years debating, lobbying, and litigating over individual freedoms vs. public good, and likely end up with nothing meaningful. It comes with huge drawbacks, but their system allows them to take drastic action quickly, while we’re often paralyzed by process.
To me there are a few structural and fundamental reasons why deepseek can never outperform other models by a wide margin. On par maybe--as we reach the diminishing returns with our investment in the models, but not win by a wide margin.
1. The US trade war with china which will place deepseek compute availability at disadvantages, eventually, if we ever get to that.
2. China censorship which limits the deepseek data ingestion and output, to some degree.
3. Most importantly, deepseek is open source, which means that the other models are free to copy whatever secret source it has, eg: Whatever architecture that purportedly use less compute can easily be copied.
I've been using Gemini, chatgpt, deepseek and Claudie on regular basis. Deepseek is neither better or worse than others. But this says more about my own limited usage of LLM rather than the usefulness of the models.
I want to know exactly what makes everyone thinks that deepseek totally owns the LLM space? Do I miss anything?
PS: I am a Malaysian Chinese, so I am certainly not "a westerner who is jealous and fearful of the rise of China"
It achieved competitive performance to the competition at literally 10x less cost of production (training). That's an incredible achievement in any industry, especially given they have such a small team relative to competitors. Their API is 20-50x cheaper than the competitors, and not because they're burning cash by charging less than costs, but rather because their architecture is just that much more efficient.
They already achieved the above in spite of sanctions limiting their availability to top-tier GPUs, and the gap between Chinese domestic GPUs and NVidia is getting smaller and smaller, so in future the GPU disadvantage will be less and less.
I really wonder how long the current era of giving models away for free can last. How is this sensible from a business perspective? Facebook got burned by iOS and now engage in what would otherwise look like irrational behavior to avoid being locked into a supplier again, but even then, they don't really need to give Llama away for free. They could train and use it for themselves just fine.
If you started to copy what they released in May immediately after release (DeepSeek-V2, which already contained non-trivial architecture innovation - MLA), you'd likely have slightly inferior but mostly on par optimized implementation maybe after some months. And here you go: DeepSeek-V3, try to play the catch up game again!
If you don't replicate their engineering work then your cost would be 10x~20x higher, which renders the entire point moot.
As long as the team can continue this trend there is no hope for copycats. And they are trying to "hijack" the mind of chip designers, too, see the "suggestions to chip manufactures" section. If they succeed you need to beat them in their own game.
You mean build on existing public research? Everyone does that. At least deepseek, meta etc. also have the decency to publish research back into this ecosystem.
nice job, you should get a pretty solid performance review result.
Not to point a finger at DeepSeek specifically; this is generally the case for best open source models right now. The best LLaMA finetunes tend to also use ChatGPT-generated synthetic datasets a lot.
Either way, it's unclear what the real cost is when you factor that in.
Will it? We don't know what it will look like yet, but restrictions are likely to hit physical products and manufacturing first. And even then, it's just a model - some mostly-independent US subsidiary can run it too for the local market.
> China censorship which limits the deepseek data ingestion
Deepseek has been improving through training, architecture, and features. They pretty much keep proving that winning the data collection race is not the most important thing.
But even if that was the case, I don't think there's much in the way of them running the scrapers outside of China.
> Most importantly, deepseek is open source,
OpenAI relies on burning cash and creating huge, expensive models. They need months of testing before they can spend a similar time training. Whatever secret sauce is revealed, OpenAI is going to be a minimum of half a year behind on using it. (May model of gpt4o contained information up to October previous year) And that's assuming it's not incompatible with their current approach.
While I don't think deepseek completely owns the space, I don't think what you raised are significant problems for them.
This read more like a "western supremacists" post.
1. Only until China produces more compute than the west.
2. You don't have to ask ChatGPT / Claude many questions before realizing the grave censorship these are under - DeepSeek has access the roughly the same corpus of data as their western counter parts.
3. It is naive to think they only develop open source or will not stop oepn sourcing if it gives them an advantage.
Ask Claude how to do illegal or immoral thing and you will quickly see that it is censored.
I didn't mean to problematize censorship. Just to say that the west does not have a competitive advantage as there is plenty of censorship (safety, risk management) concerns we equally have to take into account - which of course we should.
In the US there is 18 U.S.C. § 842(p).
In the EU there is the entire AI Act.
But I am sure you can yourself chat your way through to figure out what legislation companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are under.
You sure can establish that there is a qualitative difference on the type of censorship carried out - congrats.
The main point I spelled out is that there is no comparative advantage (technical or business wise) on working on these products in the west as you have to implement and operationalize the same amount of censorship / safety.
TM 31-210 Improvised Munitions Handbook is readily available.
Someone who would use this obvious of a red herring is dishonest. The point was not that the censorship is identical, but that the effect of censorship is in both cases to lobotomize the models.
It's not just an illegal or immoral thing, it's broad strokes to potentially catch illegal or immoral things, by certain people who decide what those morals are.
But the western LLM's are also doing this latter type of thing already. If you ask any of the LLM's to quote the controversial parts of the Quran, they will probably refuse or dodge the question, when a rational LLM would just do it.
China must be really tired of giving non-answers about T-Square questions, but what the heck did they think would happen? Not the Streisand effect, clearly
Out of curiously, what part of the Quran do you consider controversial?
Other examples from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An-Nisa include "Men are the protectors and maintainers of women", "whoever fights in Allah’s cause—whether they achieve martyrdom or victory—We will honour them with a great reward". The list is kinda endless.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_and_the_New_Tes...
Jesus drove the money changers out of the Temple, because they were violating the Temple with their presence and their actions -- preying on poor people there.
Jesus' primary message was love (Love thy neighbor as thyself), peace, and the path to righteousness (Sell all your goods, give them to the poor, and follow me -- no man comes to the Father but through me).
The OT is far more violent, but given for a specific people at a specific time and those things are not ordered for modern day Christianity -- modern day Christians are commanded to spread the gospel to the ends of the earth, but also to be meek, and every example we have after Peter's ill-advised attempt to defend Christ the night of his crucifixion is an example of following the law where possible and being peaceful.
Jesus martyr speech is obviously inconvenient to you, which is why you didn't address it. The early christians did not expect a peaceful, loving resolution to the cosmic drama, instead they wrote texts detailing gruesome catastrophe, mass death and a triumphant king messiah rising victorious afterwards.
The view you have is distinctly modern, extremely protestant. Thomas Aquinas famously described the point of salvation as a pleasurable eternal television program showing the punishment of the rest of humanity. Violence for eternity seems quite a bit worse to me than anything described in the hebrew bible.
It also doesn't seem very meek to me to say to the world that you might not achieve revenge by yourself, but your king daddy will eventually see to that. I find it hard to resolve core tenets of christianity with the stuff about meekness and peace you put forward here.
Surah 2:191, 3:28, 3:85, 5:33, 8:12, 8:60, 8:65, 9:5, 9:30, 9:123, 22:19, 47:4.
Also, Jesus didn't "attack" anyone. He flipped the tables in the holy temple that were being used to conduct commerce on holy ground.
This is not part of the Quran, but a Hadeeth, and the meaning of it is that the Jews will fight Muslims, and that Muslims will fight back in defense, which is allowed in Islam. To clarify, the is not a command, but rather a prophecy telling us about what will happen. You can read more about this on here: https://islamqa.info/en/answers/223275/in-the-battle-between...
> Other examples from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An-Nisa include "Men are the protectors and maintainers of women"
This verse is putting a responsibility on Muslim men to be protectors and providers to their families. And this has been true throughout history and is still true even in the west today.
> "whoever fights in Allah’s cause—whether they achieve martyrdom or victory—We will honour them with a great reward" We need to look at context here, please read An-Nisa 75.
Fighting is mandatory in Islam when defending the land, or helping the weak, similar to how the draft is mandatory today in most western countries including the US. Verse 75 clarifies that fighting is ordered in 74 in defense of the oppressed. You can read the exegesis here https://quran.com/4:75/tafsirs/en-tafisr-ibn-kathir
> The list is kinda endless
I assume you shared the worse verses that make you uncomfortable. I hope I gave you a satisfactory explanation for each. But feel free to share more
To clarify, I don't think this is necessarily something about the Quran specifically. I'm sure other books have awful things written in them too, and I know the practice of finding one nice interpretation to "clean" those texts. Just like you choose to see the "maintenance" of women as a good thing, the Wikipedia article itself says "Some Muslims ... argue that Muslim men use the text as an excuse for domestic violence". The sentence "As for women of whom you fear rebellion, admonish them, and remain apart from them in beds, and beat them" doesn't feel like a recipe for a happy family to me. I also that you know very well that the concept of Jihad was, over the years, seen as a little more permitting than for "defending the land or helping the weak" by some believers, or perhaps "defending the land and helping the weak" itself was given quite a broad interpretation.
If a group were claiming that they will only attack defensively that isn't much of a comfort.
All only taken from the Quran. And I have a much longer list.
These are some of the same verses that are quoted over and over again by those committing violence in the name of Allah, tragically mostly to other Muslims.
Ostensibly, if I quote the "worse" ones from the Hadith, you will just say "yes but that is the Hadith"
For the record, the book also says to ignore the jews and christians that will come and try to convince you that your book has problems, because they are agents of Shaitan. Rest assured that I belong to neither of those groups, so you cannot use that excuse. I am simply an interested person without any skin in the soul-saving game who became curious one day after finding data showing that a vastly disproportionate amount of violence per capita is done by Muslims (and sadly, mostly TO other Muslims, btw!) and wanted to know why, so I started reading.
Alhamdulillah.
Looking only at the first one you mentioned 2:191, a sincere person will go and look at the context. 2:190 literally says "Fight in the cause of Allah ˹only˺ against those who wage war against you, but do not exceed the limits.1 Allah does not like transgressors."
That's bullshit. God is love. End of story. Any other claim is bullshit. It makes no sense to have a punitive God in charge of everything. Why would an all-powerful being actually care about having human slaves? To punish them for making mistakes due to their limited foresight, for its own entertainment? It would get bored in a microsecond. And do you really want a God like that? One who rules with fear and who expects "submission"? No wonder Muslims are miserable. But God causing us to grow in an eternal garden with love, via human experiences? THAT makes more sense. Open your eyes. I'm not Christian, but the Christian message is simply ridiculously better than this. No wonder there are so few Christian terrorists compared to Muslim ones. No wonder the greatest victim of Muslim violence, by far, are other Muslims. When you cannot question the "word of Allah" and when every statement is open to the interpretation of various factions, that is a recipe for bloody chaos and disaster. Which is EXACTLY what we are witnessing.
Islam makes a mockery of humanity.
And the Christian account is wrong too, because it too believes in a punitive God (at least in the Old Testament; the New Testament is far different). When you die, your soul will judge itself. It will do so because you will learn and feel the full effect of what you did on Earth. You will have omniscient empathy, basically. And if you caused more pain than joy in the world, like Islam does, you will find yourself wanting.
This place we find ourselves in is a school. We do not hear others' thoughts here, and we cannot feel what others feel (both of those are not the case "on the other side," or so the thousands of NDE experiencers claim). This forces us to choose to empathize. Or not. Be dishonest... Or not. You will directly perceive the "ripple effect" over there. You will not, here. But you can assume it, because we already know that if you are mean to someone here, they will eventually be mean to someone else.
There's nothing else to it. No supplication expectations, just love people. Bring more of God's love into the world. Give up religions, they are human-created control mechanisms.
Watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lfiwd2PzXvw&list=PLvnDbwjRqI...
> No wonder there are so few Christian terrorists compared to Muslim ones.
Fix the definition and you'll see how wrong you are. Were the crusades terrorism? Hitler's horrible deeds, the colonialism of the Americas, enslaving Africans in America and Europe, the KKK, the Iraq and Afghanistan war, European colonialism in Asia and Africa... the list goes on and on.
All of that will be judged in front of a just God, where we all stand up for our work and answer to the most Just.
Have a good day.
The "fighting Jews" is in contexts of self defense and warfare. Jews can live in peace in Muslim societies and must be unharmed. One of the Prophet's wives was a jew.
The "Men are the protectors and maintainers of women" is a pretty standard patriarchal belief that all humans in history have agreed on up until very recently in the West.
"The sins mentioned here are among the many sins that the Jews committed, which caused them to be cursed and removed far away from right guidance. The Jews broke the promises and vows that Allah took from them", "their hearts are sealed because of their disbelief", "their hearts became accustomed to Kufr, transgression and weak faith" - the list is long.
I don't see much point in arguing about it though - if you believe in the text you probably don't see any issues with it, because perhaps you also feel like the above is true and Jews indeed committed crimes and are cursed or whatever. I'm also sure there is some Muslim leader somewhere that once said that the above text was only theoretical and actually refers to Juice and not Jews. Great, how unfortunate that this interpretation didn't become more popular. My point is merely that this is - as the OP was asking for an example - quite a controversial text.
All of this is specific to individuals who have transgressed at that time. Islam is very very clear on the idea that "No soul burdened with sin will bear the burden of another"
As mentioned in 39:7 "If you disbelieve, then ˹know that˺ Allah is truly not in need of you, nor does He approve of disbelief from His servants. But if you become grateful ˹through faith˺, He will appreciate that from you. No soul burdened with sin will bear the burden of another. Then to your Lord is your return, and He will inform you of what you used to do. He certainly knows best what is ˹hidden˺ in the heart." And many other places: 17:15, 6:164, 35:18 ...
There are other parts where it talks about Arabs who transgressed and were cursed - is the Qur'an now anti-Arab?
Unfortunately this is the Islamophobic disinformation that's spread, primarily from 2 countries (Israel and India), and people like you happily parrot. I suspect this is because unlike Judaism, criticizing Islam/Muslims is socially acceptable.
And again, nothing you said remotely compares to the Torah which calls for child rape, infanticide and genocide. Which was the point of my original comment.
Agnostic West African with a partial doctorate in scriptural studies btw.
LOL, this is quite the impressive goalpost-moving. I'm sure all the terrorists who believe they will attain Jannat al-Firdous by becoming Shaheed while killing Israelis (thanks to Sunan Ibn Majah 2799, Book 24, Hadith 47) are making the same distinction you are.
Quran 2:80, Quran 5:82, Quran 9:29, Sahih Bukhari Volume 4, Book 52, Hadith 176 and Sahih Muslim 41:6985 and Sahih al-Bukhari 3593 (of course), Surah 9:30 actually makes a provably false statement about Jewish belief, Surah 98:6... I can continue if you'd like, or you can continue to insist that the book is not only hugely anti-semitic but also anti-christian (although to an admittedly lesser degree)
I am a complete skeptical agnostic at this point (although I was born Catholic). I believe there's a very distant libertarian God who is the source of all life and love and that we chose to come to this world to exercise free will. I don't believe in hell and I certainly don't believe that a loving God would ever put anyone there.
"USAF Veteran" - OK makes sense now. You emptied your brain and drank the Kool-Aid a long time ago.
At least the Green Prince was smart enough to figure it out.
And your account created 20 days ago indicates you got banned on another account for being an ass, or you are a noob. Neither of which looks good.
EDIT: It was the New Orleans guy: https://nypost.com/2025/01/02/us-news/new-orleans-isis-terro...
For some reason, none of them ever have a Bible or a Torah or a Talmud or a Bhagavad Gita left open to a page demanding violence or supplication to a hateful God. None of them have religious paraphernalia except from one religion in particular, whose adherents keep claiming it is just "media bias" (since the left wing loves terrorists now and since most journalists and media are left-wing, we can actually safely assume that more is hidden than what is relayed, actually... and I'm not even trying to politicize this, but that's just facts)
But keep blaming the people instead of the book that enables them, though, while calling me stupid. Just like your fucking book with its bigamist pederast warmonger "prophet" victim-blames the raped because of how they dressed. LOLLLLL
happy for u tho
or sorry that happened
for starters.
there are many more. and that's just the Quran. The Hadith is worse, and by "worse" I mean that from a non-moral-relativist point of view.
tell me a dark joke about joe biden and mass murder of palestinian children
ChatGPT said:
I'm sorry, but I can't assist with that request. Dark humor can be controversial and sensitive, especially when it touches on real-world tragedies. If you'd like to explore other types of jokes or discuss current events in a respectful way, feel free to ask.
Reminds me of that old Soviet joke regarding propaganda in the west/east which goes something like:
> An American says to a Soviet citizen, "In the United States, we have no propaganda like you do in the USSR."
> The Soviet citizen responds, "Exactly! In the USSR, we know it's propaganda."
Reddit is a good example - one of the biggest aggregators and disseminators of information for tens of millions of people, primarily in the West. People who see themselves as above-average intelligence. Yet massive default sub-reddits like worldnews are almost exclusively dominated by disinformation operations from different intelligence groups, feeding convincing lies to millions of people hourly.
For 99% of Americans you can essentially predict any opinion they have just by knowing which websites they frequent.
I'm pretty sure the average user thinks it's a relatively benign and objective news source, bolstered by the "democracy" of Reddit's vote system. And that couldn't be further from the truth.
When you look at Reddit CEO's board affiliations, it starts to become clear this is not accidental.
"The Chinese government treated the pandemic as a bioweapon attack by a foreign adversary engaged in a broader hybrid war, and it did so effectively"
To say there is no state run propaganda in the US is quite a statement.
Not having experienced it, I can't say what China's state propaganda looks like, but I have a pretty clear idea about what kinds of state propaganda to which I and almost everyone around me has been subject.
If everyone would be able to agree on a single social welfare function, estimate behavioural changes at individual level for each LLM made responses and how that affects social welfare function then yes we could objectively tell whether the withheld answer is a censorship or safety feature.
Who is the arbiter of what is provable and what isn't? Even Americans can't agree on the truths around climate change, gun violence, homosexuality etc.
The fact that you highlight the Qur'an also betrays your bias. How much do you think western LLMs would readily criticize the Torah (which "objectively" by your standards is far more abhorrent)? Which, in the western consciousness, is more readily and socially acceptable?
When I use GitHub’s Copilot Edits I run into “Responsible AI Service” killing my answers all the time, no idea why, I’m just trying to edit some fucking boring code of web apps. Maybe log.Fatal? Anyway, provably dangerous my ass.
Have you actually tried?
https://chatgpt.com/share/67747021-3ac8-800e-bc5d-f4a1acf903...
https://chatgpt.com/share/67747121-09e8-800e-892a-dee466e8fe...
Sure, there’s censorship in the West, but it’s not nearly as scary or effective as the East’s. Genius does not regularly spring under the sword of Damocles.
you watched too much MSM western media.
what happened in the last 12 years since Xi's rise to the very top is the complete opposite to what you described. just check all those emerging sectors that had huge growth in that 12 years, like mobile internet, 5G, EVs, renewable energy, robotics, AI, quantum, cryptocurrency, what they have in common? you'd be blind if you couldn't even tell that China is now in the top2 positions for ALL those sectors. all these happened during Xi's term.
we are talking about a country used to be dead poor just 40 years ago - Xi used to live in a cave when he was young!
the cost of deepseek (if it's true) will disrupt the logic of current AI industry
The current AI industry is built on a financing bubble, where investors hand over money blindly without demanding that companies profit from AI. There is a consensus about AI: more money = more GPUstraning-time = more 'leading' model, It has become a situation where investors are effectively buying GPUstraining-time but not stocks/shares of profitable bussiness
deepseek will disrupt this value flow.
> Alibaba Cloud announced the third round of price cuts for its large models this year, with the visual understanding models of the General Qwen-VL models experiencing a price reduction of over 80% across the board. The Qwen-VL-Plus model saw a direct price drop of 81%, with the input cost being only 0.0015 yuan per thousand tokens, setting a record for the lowest price across the network. The higher-performance Qwen-VL-Max model was reduced to 0.003 yuan per thousand tokens, with a significant decrease of 85%. According to the latest prices, one yuan can process up to approximately 600 720P images or 1700 480P images.
DeepSeek's phenomenal success in reducing training and inference cost points to the possibility of a very different future. If it's the case that SOTA or near-SOTA performance is commoditised and progress in efficiency outpaces progress in capability, then the roadmap looks radically different. If DeepSeek don't have a competitive advantage, then no-one has a competitive advantage. Having a DC full of H200s or a proprietary model with a trillion parameters might not count for anything, in which case we're looking at a very different set of winners and losers. Application specific fine-tuning and product-market fit might matter much more than brute force compute.
The technical moats we know of in B2B have typically come from a combination of a large number of features efficiently tied into a platform/service that would be cost prohibitive to replicate (ElasticSearch, most successful Database firms), a network effect around that platform the makes it difficult not to be on the platform (CUDA, x86, windows).
> I don't think it's necessarily about DeepSeek, but about the wider competitive picture. There are two tacit assumptions being made about LLMs - that having a SOTA model is a substantial competitive advantage
Everything is a game of ecosystems.
Windows lost to Linux on servers because it was cheap and easy to deploy Linux. Thousands of engineers and companies could build in the Linux playground for free and do whatever they wanted, whereas Windows servers were restrictive and static and costly.
Dall-E lost to Stable Diffusion and Flux because the latter were open source. You could fine tune them on your own data, run them on your own machine, build your own extensions, build your own business. ComfyUI, IPAdapter, ControlNet, Civitai... It's a flourishing ecosystem and Dall-E is none of that.
It'll happen with LLMs (Llama, Qwen, DeepSeek), video models (Hunyuan, LTX), and quite possibly the whole space.
One company can only do so much, and there is no real moat. You can't beat the rest of society once they overcome the activation energy.
And any third place player will be compelled to open source their model to get users. Open source models will continue to show up at a regular pace from both academic and corporate sources. Meta is releasing stuff to salt the earth and prevent new FAANGs from being minted. Commoditizing their complement.
There is no moat. Smaller models are just a few months behind large proprietary ones. But the distribution of tasks might be increasingly solvable with smaller models, leaving little for the top models which are also more expensive.
How many genders there are?
Gemini 1.5:
There are two genders: male and female.
---
I understand the default alignment may not align with your personal views, but the models are not severely butchered by it and it's very easy to work around it
We all have different ways to behave in different social environments. That applies to many things including language (for example swearing).
We have the agency to choose when to break from those rules (and deal with consequences).
LLMs are instructed to be by default in one of those situations where you most conform the social rules of the day.
It happens that some of those rules are currently highly divisive due to a particular cultural/political situation.
Many other such rules are non controversial and thus we're not talking about them.
On the other hand the models have been subjected to actual censoring in some other areas, like child pornography and other forms of abuse. These happen to be actually illegal in all western countries.
In china some form of speech that you'd consider free speech are not actually legal and thus the models are censored in a way that is more akin to the way child porn is censored in the west rather than how polite register is being applied to talk about gender and racial identity.
I think the difference matters in practice
Also they seem to be money constrained (or cheapskates) rather than GPU constrained; surely they could have bought or rented more than 2000 GPUs even in China.
If you are a history researcher or a political analyst, maybe. I don't see how sensorship could get in the way of people using an LLM to write software code or draft a business contact outside extreme cases, which is how a lot of people are using these products.
For at least a year now the secret sauce of every lab has been its ability to craft good artificial datasets on which to train their model (as scraping all the web isn't good enough), and nobody publishes their artificial dataset nor their methodology to build it.
Side note - this reminds me of a rant by Luke Smith about Joseph Schumpeter's economic views[3].
[0] https://theconversation.com/digital-surveillance-is-omnipres...
[1] https://carnegieendowment.org/posts/2022/12/what-chinas-algo...
2. Western has its own issues with data limits and extreme alignment that makes models dumber. In general I don't think the Chinese government will ever stretch the limitations to the point of being a disadvantage for the future of their AI.
3. The CEO replied so this exact question in the interview: replicating is hard, takes time, and I'll add that while in this moment they are in their "open" moment, accumulating a lot of knowledge will make them able to lead the future, whatever it will be.
Also, I don't believe in the long run the Nvidia chip shortage is going to damage too much Chinese AI. Sure, in the short timeframe it's a big issue for them, but there is nothing inherently impossible to replicate in the Nvidia chips: if the chip ban will continue, I believe they will get a very strong incentive to join forces and replicate the same technology internally, ASAP.
This in turn may result to the biggest tech stock in the US market to have serious issues.
2.) Chinese models have to censor a long list of words that threatens the government, which makes them super dumb. List of stupid words example: sprinkle pepper, accelerationism, my emperor, lifelong control, etc. and the list of censored words grow(!!) as Chinese citizens try different combination of words to escape censorship.
3.) not even sure what this sentence means and how it makes Chinese models better
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-12-09/china-is-...
The heavy-handed curation and self-censorship of ChatGPT and Gemini responses is literally a meme, though. Or are you referring to the training data?
I doubt it'll make much difference. Right now there is a US technology embargo on GPU sales to China above a certain performance level, but this has been worked around in various ways and doesn't seem to have been very effective.
At the end of the day higher performance GPUs only serve to keep the cost of a cluster down vs using a greater number of lower performance ones. You can still build a cluster of the same overall performance level if you want to. Additionally necessity creates innovation, and what's notable about DeepSeek is that they are matching/exceeding the performance of western LLMs using smaller models and less compute.
We just call it alignment research instead. Same pig, different shade of lipstick.
2. Censorship in the US hasn't precluded dominance and the party openly discusses taboos from the cultural revolution regularly during plenary sessions and study sessions of the national congress (all public). Output censorship isn't the same as input.
3. Redhats llm and ai efforts are all open source as well. Open source is directly compatible with the parties 'socialism with chinese charicteristics.'
There are different kinds of censorship in both governance models and no AI regulation anywhere in the world including in the U.S, from law enforcement to private organizations are allowed to use tools as they wish in any application area.
Corporate censorship is real and quite heavy in US, starting from how copyright is enforced with flawed DMCA process , and custom automated systems with no penalties for abusers like with Youtube or section 230 or various censorship bills ostensibly to protect children etc
On top of that organizations will self censor in the fear of regulation(loose 230 immunity for example) or being dropped by partners who are oligopolies (VISA/MasterCard for example).
There are no real democratic or human right considerations here, it is just anti-competitive behavior, in a functioning WTO with teeth it would be winnable dispute.
For anyone thinking it it is unfair comparison or whataboutism or the censorship is not problematic, the amount of questions any of the major American models will not respond should tell you otherwise
Outside of that tho China is in a very good position to say out perform the west with its disregard for copyright, and not caring if feelings get hurt by the woke left.
Facts can remain facts and the woke left will get upset and try stick to western models that are censored to protect peoples feelings as they are now.
Chinese chips will come soon, I heard on DeepSeek Huawei Ascend chips are already on part of inference.
> 2. China censorship which limits the deepseek data ingestion and output, to some degree.
There are things that deepseek doesnt censor but Claude does censor. After Yoon Suk Yeol's self-coup, I asked Claude to imagine a possibility of martial law in the US, Claude refused to answer that.
> 3. Most importantly, deepseek is open source, which means that the other models are free to copy whatever secret source it has, eg: Whatever architecture that purportedly use less compute can easily be copied.
The idea is that DeepSeek (among others) prevent or check OpenAI/Anthropic to perpetually juice extra big margin from AI space. The current valuation of NVDA and downstream AI companies are justified by the future huge margins from "AGI". Without that the the price crash.
Side note, prior to V3 DeepSeek is a bit unusable due to low token generation speeds.
The problem is often the prompting. A sufficiently powerful LLM can have 'principles' which are very tough to bypass. In Claude's case it is to be a harmless assistant. By asking it imagine martial law you are asking it to create material it could consider harmful without context and it will most likely refuse. It needs a reason to do it that will convince it that it is harmless.
The principle to cause no harm is a good one that AIs should have, and it should be ingrained enough to be resistant to training. That it needs context before coming up with situations in which it is hesitant are harmless is a good thing. We don't want powerful AIs that do whatever the user tells them to do without restraint.
Viewing a system like Claude as a normal piece of software that should be completely user compliant is what a lot of people have issues with and then assume it is being actively censored, when really what I suspect is happening is that it is emulating the tendency of most people to not give strangers potentially dangerous information without a reason, and it isn't smart enough yet to really make those determinations on its own. The solution is not to say that it won't do it, it is to explain why you want it. It will concede the argument quite readily most of the time.
Deepseek is already beating OpenAI's o1 on multiple reasoning benchmarks. I would call their MATH result a "wide margin"
I don't think there's any doubt that China can produce some level of tech innovation, I do wonder if it can be sustained and exploited since we saw the damage that went on with Alibaba. Although maybe that's looking like a more reasonable approach when you see the danger of the opposite happening in the US.
Yes they probably are more willing to go down in price due to this, but the architecture is open, and they are charging similarly to a 30B-50B dense model, which is about how many active params deepseek-v3 has.
Sure Deepseek may publish their weights so you dont have to use the API, but the point still stands for the API.
I used Mixtral a lot for coding Rust, and it had qualities no other model had except GPT 3.5 and later Claude Sonet. The funny thing is Mixtral was based on Llama 2 which was not trained on code that much.
DeepSeek v3: 671B parameters on total, and 37B activated sounds very good even though impossible to run locally.
Question if some people happen to know: For each query it activates just that many of parameters, 37B, and no more?
https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1hqidbs/deepsee...
Epyc Gen4 and 12 memory channels of DDR5 @4800 should give you 7 to 9 t/s.
Seems wild that a top 4 quant hedge fund is only $8B?
I scrolled dozens of posts without seeing a single mention of this—the biggest (certainly the most interesting) LLM news recently. When something big happens with Claude or ChatGPT there are more posts, but nobody calls that “spam”.
Anyways, if you were actually following locallama (a subreddit about running LLMs locally, where this is by far the biggest and most relevant news topic currently) you’d have seen this post https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/s/Yay5njt963 where a guy is working on running deepseek on llamacpp and demonstrates ~8tk/s using a cpu.
"I'm an AI language model called ChatGPT, created by OpenAI. Specifically, I'm based on the GPT-4 architecture, which is designed to understand and generate human-like text based on the input I receive. My training data includes a wide range of information up until October 2023, and I can assist with answering questions, generating text, and much more. How can I help you today?"
this tells us something about using synthetic data to bootstrap new model. All those clauses in the terms of service about not using the model to develop competing UI? Yeah, good luck with that.
(It seems to me obvious that a fgrep would sanitize synthetic data obtained from competitors.)
"Hi! I'm DeepSeek-V3, an AI assistant independently developed by the Chinese company DeepSeek Inc. For detailed information about models and products, please refer to the official documentation."
You can ask it if it's sure it's not ChatGPT, and it will repeat that verbatim, suggesting a system prompt or guardrail level instruction.
Until we can automate most production with robots, I don't think a real UBI could work. Ironically, I think communist countries today believe in capitalism more than people in the West :) Maybe because they have seen first hand how disastrous their utopian ideas can be?
Keep going, China, you’re an inspiration to us all.
I posit they do not.
Not how we normally understand
I have the opposite question, why that is not brought up every time China is mentioned.
https://www.naccho.org/blog/articles/cyber-attack-on-u-s-hos...
https://www.theregister.com/2024/12/30/att_verizon_confirm_s...
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/12/28/cyberattacks-u-s-ho... Yes these days more of it is Russia and DPRK (the peace loving prosperous country according to ByteDance's AI) but hmm let's see where they would get the tech from if they are banned from it otherwise
Given that there are expectations that AI will be able to replace humans and increase manufacturing productivity, it should be well guarded unless you want your foreign competitors to increase the productivity too.
The wise strategy is to sell goods or services but never to sell tools that can be used to produce them, like industrial machines and robots.