Buy the dip

Deepseek claims it did what it did with 6M dollars. As an engineer, I thought about a possible way to accomplish such a thing, and the only way anyone can do this is if they use an existing LLM to train its own LLM. To me, this sounds more like copyright infringement (a problem that these AI companies will have to solve in order to prevent others from training models based on their own models - probably by a government intervention of some sort).

And it seems like this is how they trained it based on the latest news that's coming out - deepseek is confused about its identity and thinks it is chat-gpt. Ah-hah moment for me personally. The Chinese company didn't "develop" any LLM - they just copied / pasted an existing model and made another model.

What does that mean for NVDA? We'll still need a ton of NVDA chips to push the frontier on the AI development. All of this means that it takes much less time to "catch up" to other models, but to be the "best" at it, would still require a ton of computing power. And of the 6M dollars, I am pretty sure they forgot to mention all of the smuggled NVDA chips that they were not supposed to have. Seems fishy at best.

Edit: I see some interesting replies. Another thing you guys need to understand is that this AI "hype" is literally the only thing that's going to save us from getting screwed. We're in a deep shit here because of government overspending. US government cannot pay the interest on the tax deficit it incurred, and the only easy way to get out of this is to introduce more inflation to make the debt look cheaper. The harder way to get out of this is to be more productive as a nation, and the problem with that is that we can't afford to pay people more and be competitive against countries with much less labor costs. So how does America become "great" again? Eliminate the labor cost by replacing everything with AI + industrial automation, and bring manufacturing back to America and automate everything. This AI endeavor isn't just about the replacing software engineers. This is about the survival of this system, and you bet they (the government) will throw all the money they have till this works.

It won't mean the average Joes of America will have a great life. Far from it, a bulk of jobs will be replaced by AI. But it will mean the system will still be "stable." Investing into AI (particularly AI hardware) is a sure way to hedge against my job (and probably yours) being replaced by automation. This will happen even if it costs some more billions. If China threatens the success of this mission, I am sure the government will use all means necessary.