The moat is probably mostly inertia. Microsoft or whoever will offer a code assistant that directs to OpenAI’s model, and users will just use that. Most software moats are like that, rather than being based on intrinsic technological superiority.

Kudos to Deepseek for continuing to releasing the code and model under a permissive license. Would be nicer if the weights were under an MIT license rather than a custom license, but I guess they’re afraid of liability. Strange situation we’re now in, where the future of open AI (as opposed to “open but actually closed” AI) now almost entirely depends on Chinese companies.

In practice, though, I wonder how many people would actually self host and tinker with this, since the model is way too large to run on any desktop. It would be very interesting to find downstream use-cases and modifications, which is supposed to be a strength of the open source model. Deepseek themselves don’t seem to be much concerned about applications; from my understanding, they are basically funded by a sugar daddy and are happy to just do R&D (funnily enough, that is kinda what OpenAI was originally supposed to be before they sold out to Microsoft).

I mean, there’s plenty of mediocre/bad IRL engineering too.

It’s like the term “social scientist”. People always like to quibble, but eh… whatever…

For the vast majority of military applications, including missiles, you do not want to use bleeding edge chip tech. You use 50nm or higher, anything with smaller feature sizes is not robust enough for a military environment.

See, this was always the problem with Chinese efforts to indigenize their semiconductor industry. Each individual Chinese firm had no incentive to use Chinese suppliers, rather than their more established Western competitors. Well, guess what, the US Government has solved that coordination problem for them. Just about every Chinese company, up and down the supply chain, now has an excellent reason to buy Chinese. Sure, they’ll take years to work out the kinks, and there will be lots of chances to point and laugh in the meantime. But in the long run, the Sullivan-Blinken strategy of squeezing the Chinese chip industry might end up being one of the most counterproductive geostrategic ideas of all time.

South Korea’s conservative ruling party, the People Power Party (PPP), is pushing for legislation that would give the semiconductor industry subsidies and an exemption from a national cap on working hours.

Yes, that’s what South Korea needs… longer working hours…

Funny thing is, TSMC in Taiwan is considered a premium employer. It offers much better pay and parks than other companies.

People are quick to blame Google for the slow uptake of Jpeg XL, but I don’t think that can be the whole story. Lots of other vendors, including non-commercial free software projects, have also been slow to support it. Gimp for example still only supports it via a plugin.

But if it’s not just a matter of Google being assholes, what’s the actual issue with Jpeg XL uptake? No clue, does anyone know?

If this passes, this would have the perverse effect of making China (and maybe to a lesser extent the Middle East) the leading suppliers of open source / open weight AI models…

Just Google for Mihoyo and Energy Singularity. They invested $65M back in 2022.

This is the one that’s partly funded by Mihoyo, using the absurd amounts of money they made with Genshin Impact.

The power of the anime waifu, in the palm of your hand…

It’s nothing to do with stopping pedos. The people pushing this year-in and year-out don’t care THAT much about pedos. It’s not a cause that’s motivating enough for them to be putting in so much effort, trying to sneak in legislation after being repeatedly rebuffed.

Did the car get successfully recharged though?

Loyalty pledges are kabuki theatre. There’s no point talking about them, since the state has plenty of degrees of freedom to force citizens to do what they want, with or without them. And not just the Chinese state; the US just outright decided one day that no US citizen will be allowed to work in the Chinese semiconductor industry, as though citizens are property of the government – they didn’t need no signed loyalty pledges to enforce that.

Yes, you caught me out as a pro-CCP shill. All hail Xi Jinping, thought leader of the world (please ignore my previous comments calling him a dumbass).

Clearly the university did have stuff China wanted, otherwise China wouldn’t have targeted it. You don’t have to be educated at IC to figure that out.

Chinese orgs love signing MOUs. Looking at the underlying story, this looks like bog standard research into computer vision and related topics. If it were the Chinese government wanting to steal stuff, they’d be going after companies. There won’t be anything in Imperial College that they won’t find already in top Chinese universities, let alone their tech giants.

Huh? China has much better domestic sources of AI tech than anything out of Imperial College.

The British always like to think they’re on par with the US in all things, so I guess now they’re imagining they’re the world leaders in AI and the Chinese want to steal their tech…?

It’s pretty sad to see Vox’s decline into gutter clickbait media. I guess it was inevitable once Klein and Yglesias left, and their mediocre minions took over.

Reads like NIMBY propaganda. “Oh no muh construction dust.” Bitch you live in a desert…

The US can make them, they’ll just cost $10,000 and be several design generations behind the world market.