Chat interface with a question about the yellow umbrella protests and a detailed response about China's governance.

My LinkedIn and Bluesky account has been full of pretty much two things today: the 80th International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and a new Chinese AI model called DeepSeek r1.

There have been many, many hot takes about the latter. I’m not here to do anything other than point out how awesome it is that this runs offline, is Open Source, and has been trained for 100x less than the equivalent models provided by American companies such as OpenAI, Meta, et al. I also included the image at the top because how much this has to conform to the official Chinese government ideology is, of course, one of the first thing that any self-respecting techie will want to test.

As usual, if you’re going to read someone’s opinion about all of this, Ryan Broderick is your guy. Here’s part of what he said in his newsletter Garbage Day which, if you’re not subscribing to at this point, I’m not sure what you’re doing with your life.

Now, we don’t yet know how the American AI industry will react to DeepSeek, but OpenAI’s Sam Altman announced on Saturday that free ChatGPT users are getting access to a more advanced model. Likely as a way to quickly respond to the DeepSeek hype. Meta are also frantically beefing up their own AI tools. But it’s hard to imagine how American AI companies can compete after they spent the last four years insisting that they need infinite money to buy infinite computing power to accomplish what is now open source. DeepSeek r1 can even run without an internet connection. So it’s possible that OpenAI, the biggest money sink of all, may, as cognitive scientist and AI critic Gary Marcus wrote today, “some day been seen as the WeWork of AI.” And that some day might be sooner than you think. The mood is changing fast. El Salvador’s hustle bro millennial dictator Nayib Bukele posted on X over the weekend, “So, [more than] 95% of the cost of developing new AI models is purely overhead?”

But, like TikTok, it’s doubtful that American tech oligarchs are actually capable of accepting how screwed they are because AI is not just a massive pyramid scheme to them. It has ballooned out into a psuedo-religion. And Andreessen has spent the last week frantically posting through it, doing his best impression of a doomsday evangelist trying to convince his flock that, yes, he knew that the roadmap was changing and that, yes, the promised revelation is still coming.

“A world in which human wages crash from AI — logically, necessarily — is a world in which productivity growth goes through the roof, and prices for goods and services crash to near zero,” he wrote on X, quivering in his shell. “Everything you need and want for pennies.” Everything, it seems, also includes AI.

Source: Garbage Day

Image: Alexios Mantzarlis