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The biggest revelation from Deepseek is that Open Source has won. For a 1% difference in performance, it will be difficult for OpenAI to justify its price when the competition is free and formidable. -from my interview with Bloomberg

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Kai-Fu Lee

1,333,862 subscribers

759,832 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr •via X (Twitter)

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11 Kommentare

Profilbild von AshutoshShrivastava
AshutoshShrivastavavor 1 Jahr

Open Source is the hope for humanity.

Profilbild von Dan Ryder - primedefi.com
Dan Ryder - primedefi.comvor 1 Jahr

DeFi is quietly stealing the spotlight from CeFi. BTC staking is creating a buzz. AI agents are working around the clock to maximize returns. Cross-chain advancements are opening doors to untapped liquidity. In other words...The financial landscape is transforming faster than ever. How are you positioning yourself for this shift?

Profilbild von Kathleen Tyson
Kathleen Tysonvor 1 Jahr

DeepSeek: Free, formidable, improving at speed, globalising at scale.

Profilbild von ryan yang
ryan yangvor 1 Jahr

Open-source's tipping point—when 'good enough' meets cost efficiency, the math gets simple. But scaling adoption? That's where orgs stumble. Start with narrow use cases, prove ROI, then expand. Legacy systems won't vanish overnight; layer AI where it sticks. Iterate > overcommit.

Profilbild von Minh Do
Minh Dovor 1 Jahr

This statement ignores the fact that OpenAI makes billions per year from subscriptions because of user lock-in, brand recognition and business development. Not to mention that although the presumable cost is lower, DeepSeek R1 is still not outperforming the top line proprietary AI models: ChatGPT o3, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, Google Gemini, and Grok3.

Profilbild von Absolute.Dan
Absolute.Danvor 1 Jahr

Can't agree more. 1% performance advantage is nothing while comparing with the dramatic cost saving. Show my respect to your decision for changing the strategy in Yi-lightening business, big desicion🫡🫡🫡

Profilbild von Pratik_Shahi
Pratik_Shahivor 1 Jahr

If AI becomes self-aware, do you think it would pretend to be dumb just to avoid getting more work? 😂

Profilbild von Franck SN
Franck SNvor 1 Jahr

Open source AI will win. LFG

Profilbild von casslin 🦇🔊🛡️
casslin 🦇🔊🛡️vor 1 Jahr

it's real.

Profilbild von Ξdo
Ξdovor 1 Jahr

Subscribers are still mostly using proprietary AIs because it's more than 1% difference

Profilbild von A
Avor 1 Jahr

makes no sense to pay 200$ or even 20$ soon

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What's the Big Deal with DeepSeek in AI? Here's why DeepSeek is making everyone take notice: 1. Super Smart on a Budget: DeepSeek showed you can make awesome AI without breaking the bank. Their latest model, DeepSeek-V3, was trained for only about $10 million, which is a lot less than the usual big bucks spent on AI, like the rumored $78 million for some of OpenAI's models. They did this in just two months with fewer fancy computers. 2. Open for Everyone: DeepSeek isn't keeping their tech a secret. They've made it open-source, meaning anyone can use, tweak, and learn from it. It's like they're saying, "Come join the party!" 3. Beating the Big Names: DeepSeek-V3 has done better than some top dogs from companies like OpenAI and Google in solving puzzles, math, and coding. This proves you can get great AI results without spending a fortune. 4. Challenging NVIDIA: NVIDIA's chips are usually the choice for AI because they're really powerful. But since DeepSeek did so well with less expensive chips, it might make people think twice about always going for NVIDIA's priciest options. 5. The DeepSeek Crew: The team at DeepSeek is young and smart, mostly from top Chinese schools, with brains in physics, math, and computer science. They learned AI in about six months by themselves! They use first principle thinking, which means they break down problems to the basics and build from there. This has helped them come up with cool new ways to do AI. 6. Changing AI for Good: DeepSeek is showing that AI can be cheaper and more open to everyone. They're changing how we think AI should be made and shared, which could shake up the whole AI world. So, as we watch DeepSeek, it's clear they're not just another player; they're changing the rules of the game. I predicted that this would be a make or break year for all the massive investments made in AI by American VC's. A few weeks later, DeepSeek happens! Watch the rest of my predictions in my 2025 outlook video . Link in replies #AIInnovation #DeepSeek #NVIDIA #OpenAI #TechDisruption

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Jensen Huang was asked whether AI's future is open source or proprietary the question the whole industry keeps fighting over. He didn't pick a side. He said something that quietly ends the fight. "models is a technology, not a product. Model is a technology, not a service" "For the vast majority of consumers, the horizontal layer, the general intelligence, I would really, really love not to go fine-tune my own" "all these industries, their domain expertise, their specialization has to be channeled, has to be captured in a way that they can control, and that it can only come from open models" "the open model industry we're contributing tremendously to it is near the frontier" Everyone else is arguing about which lab wins OpenAI or Anthropic, who has the smartest frontier model this quarter. Jensen is standing on stage saying that's the sideshow. The proprietary model is the convenience layer you rent when you don't care. The open model is the thing you own when the work is yours. Two different products for two different needs not two horses in one race. open models are the second-biggest in the room. Ahead of Anthropic. Behind only OpenAI.
2:51

Jensen Huang was asked whether AI's future is open source or proprietary the question the whole industry keeps fighting over. He didn't pick a side. He said something that quietly ends the fight. "models is a technology, not a product. Model is a technology, not a service" "For the vast majority of consumers, the horizontal layer, the general intelligence, I would really, really love not to go fine-tune my own" "all these industries, their domain expertise, their specialization has to be channeled, has to be captured in a way that they can control, and that it can only come from open models" "the open model industry we're contributing tremendously to it is near the frontier" Everyone else is arguing about which lab wins OpenAI or Anthropic, who has the smartest frontier model this quarter. Jensen is standing on stage saying that's the sideshow. The proprietary model is the convenience layer you rent when you don't care. The open model is the thing you own when the work is yours. Two different products for two different needs not two horses in one race. open models are the second-biggest in the room. Ahead of Anthropic. Behind only OpenAI.

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Instead, you train Alexa to train you to train it to know you so that it wins your trust with good recommendations so that it can modify your behaviour – ‘encourage’ you to buy a commodity from with Bezos retaining up to 40% of the price you pay (as a cloud rent). In short, the work that Alexa performs for you is not a commodity, unlike ChatGPT which works to sell you a commodity. In other words, ChatGPT is subject to market competition, to the likes of DeepSeek, but Alexa is not. This is why OpenAI, ChatGPT’s maker, is seriously damaged by the emergence of DeepSeek but Amazon is not. Thus, my basic point: Cloud capital is in a league of its own, beyond market competition from DeepSeek-like upstarts, because its power lies in its capacity to modify our behaviour and remove us from any market (e.g., to shift us from real markets to cloud fiefs like Amazon and Alibaba). In conclusion, cloud capital’s capacity to drive technofeudalism is not challenged by companies like DeepSeek. Only companies like OpenAI, which invested so much and so foolishly in providing a commodified service, stand to lose enormously. Yet another sign that capitalism is dead at the hand of cloud capital while technofeudalism is going from strength to strength and, as it does so, fuels even further the New Cold War between the US and China which in my book, Technofeudalism, I have explained away as the clash of the two huge concentrations of cloud capital: the American dollar-denominated super cloudalist power and the Chinese yuan-denominated one. Speaking of this New Cold War, which I have argued is mostly fuelled by the clash between American and Chinese cloud capital, I wonder what impact DeepSeek’s success will have on the US government. Silicon Valley and Washington DC had convinced themselves that America had a huge AI lead over China. Now, a tiny Chinese company has destroyed that confidence by producing on a shoestring better AI tech than Sillicon Valley had imagined possible. I can almost hear the whirring inside the heads of people in power on both America’s East and West Coast thinking that if the Chinese can do this out of the blue, what else can they do tomorrow? It is reminiscent of the Sputnik moment, isn’t it? It will be interesting to see how Trump reacts to this threat to companies American AI companies, especially since Elon Musk understands, and has spoken out against, the folly of commodifying AI services rather than going full on technofeudal. These are interesting times, in the traditional Chinese sense of the phrase.
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Cloud capital versus AI - What DeepSeek’s spectacular success means for technofeudalism & the New Cold War DeepSeek, a Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) company, this week changed the global AI landscape, not to mention caused $1 trillion losses in the New York stock exchange and the NASDAC. In the process, it demonstrated the difference between cloud capital, which drives technofeudalism onward and upward, and AI-services, which were always a bubble waiting to burst. What remains to be seen is DeepSeek's impact on the New Cold War between the US and China which, from its beginning, was motivated by the clash between US and Chinese cloud capital. DeepSeek is China's response to OpenAI's ChatGPT. Its models perform as efficiently as their US counterparts. The difference is that DeepSeek is offered for free, making money only by selling services to developers - not to the public – at a fraction of the price OpenAI charges! The gist of DeepSeek’s arrival on the AI scene is a sudden transition from proprietary to open source technology. It is, therefore, no great wonder that, the moment DeekSeek became the most downloaded app on the Apple Store, it pulverised the market capitalisation of the, hitherto overinflated, US Big Tech companies. But how did this happen? How is a private commodity suddenly being offered for free? And does this mean that technofeudalism is in trouble? To begin with it is important to note AI was never a proprietary technology in itself. The underlying code has always been open source. What made AI quasi-private was the way these models were trained using huge amounts of privatised (that is stolen from us) data. A leaked Google memo in 2017, that was widely discussed in the industry at the time, but also widely refuted, explained: "If an open source LLM trained for a few million dollars outperforms the effectiveness of proprietary models... There will be no firewall to safeguard OpenAI either." DeepSeek pierced the US AI companies’ bubble by decommodifying the results of the model’s training, shifting them from behind a paywall to the public arena. Within days, developers around the world started building their own models on top of DeepSeek's. This is was the nightmare for US Big Tech's AI service providers who offered the results of prompts as a commodity, in the form of subscriptions. DeepSeek-type applications can now produce high-quality translations for free and, in so doing, undermine companies specialising in, for example, translation services, such as Germany's Deepl. In the broader scheme of things, this means that the morsels of cloud capital that Europe owns has lost its market value. Nevertheless, and this is a huge nevertheless, it is only AI-as-a-commodity that has lost its (grossly exaggerated) value. In sharp contrast, cloud capital utilised not as a commodity producing piece of tech but as produced means of behavioural modification is not at all threatened by companies like DeepSeek. And since technofeudalism is powered by cloud capital working that way, rather than commodity-like AI services of the ChaptGPT type, our technofeudal order is not threatened by competitors such as DeepSeek. To help understand the difference between cloud capital and AI-based commodified services it helps to compare and contrast Alexa and ChatGPT. Alexa is not offering you a commodified service. It is your free pretend-slave. Unlike ChatGPT you do not pay a subscription to Amazon for the right to order Alexa to order you milk or to switch off your lights. Instead, you train Alexa to train you to train it to know you so that it wins your trust with good recommendations so that it can modify your behaviour – ‘encourage’ you to buy a commodity from with Bezos retaining up to 40% of the price you pay (as a cloud rent). In short, the work that Alexa performs for you is not a commodity, unlike ChatGPT which works to sell you a commodity. In other words, ChatGPT is subject to market competition, to the likes of DeepSeek, but Alexa is not. This is why OpenAI, ChatGPT’s maker, is seriously damaged by the emergence of DeepSeek but Amazon is not. Thus, my basic point: Cloud capital is in a league of its own, beyond market competition from DeepSeek-like upstarts, because its power lies in its capacity to modify our behaviour and remove us from any market (e.g., to shift us from real markets to cloud fiefs like Amazon and Alibaba). In conclusion, cloud capital’s capacity to drive technofeudalism is not challenged by companies like DeepSeek. Only companies like OpenAI, which invested so much and so foolishly in providing a commodified service, stand to lose enormously. Yet another sign that capitalism is dead at the hand of cloud capital while technofeudalism is going from strength to strength and, as it does so, fuels even further the New Cold War between the US and China which in my book, Technofeudalism, I have explained away as the clash of the two huge concentrations of cloud capital: the American dollar-denominated super cloudalist power and the Chinese yuan-denominated one. Speaking of this New Cold War, which I have argued is mostly fuelled by the clash between American and Chinese cloud capital, I wonder what impact DeepSeek’s success will have on the US government. Silicon Valley and Washington DC had convinced themselves that America had a huge AI lead over China. Now, a tiny Chinese company has destroyed that confidence by producing on a shoestring better AI tech than Sillicon Valley had imagined possible. I can almost hear the whirring inside the heads of people in power on both America’s East and West Coast thinking that if the Chinese can do this out of the blue, what else can they do tomorrow? It is reminiscent of the Sputnik moment, isn’t it? It will be interesting to see how Trump reacts to this threat to companies American AI companies, especially since Elon Musk understands, and has spoken out against, the folly of commodifying AI services rather than going full on technofeudal. These are interesting times, in the traditional Chinese sense of the phrase.

Yanis Varoufakis

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