Bryan Zepp Jamieson
January 27th, 2025
Hey, everyone, remember the gigantic AI thing, the one that Musk wanted to raise a trillion* dollars to invest, backed by bitcoin? Trump was talking about a $500 billion that he would probably just steal from the Social Security fund. All the tech giants were in a huge race to pour money into AI, hoping to make it bigger, stronger, faster? Remember that?
Sure you do. It was all just there yesterday.
Well, funny story.
China has released something called DeepSeek. It’s their own AI platform, easily as powerful and flexible as the ones the tech bros have been dumping all those trillions into. They did it on a grand total of six million dollars budget. Pocket change for Intel, and for Musk, just part of his pocket lint.
Oh, yeah. Also, it’s open source. That means anyone can take it, play with it, use it, adapt it, all for free.
The financial bubble pop was probably big enough that it caused that earthquake in Maine. It may well be the biggest financial pop in history, even bigger than the real estate crash of ‘08.
Investors react to such upheavals with the equanimity of a flock of chickens in a thunderstorm, and as a result, the tech markets are busily tearing out their own entrails and eating them feverishly in a effort of minimize the scale of the crash.
A glance at the markets this morning shows carnage. Nvidia is down 17%. NASDAQ is down over 600 points. Marketwatch has the reassuring headline, “Does DeepSeek spell doomsday for Nvidia and other AI stocks? Here’s what to know.” The lede was interesting, as well: “That’s the big question on the minds of investors Monday, given newfound attention on DeepSeek, a Chinese AI app that has climbed to the top of downloads from Apple’s U.S. App Store. The service has become so popular that it’s restricting registration due to what it called ‘large-scale malicious attacks.’” Hmm. I’m guessing those attacks aren’t coming from Dark Web hackers. Care to guess which companies and/or countries are behind it? I’m imagining the TrumpenMusk coalition is quite busy this morning.
On one hand, it’s gratifying to see the techbros take a haircut on this scale. Most of them have accumulated vast amounts of wealth and power, which they’ve combined with a vapid kleptomaniacal libertarianism in hopes of unlimited wealth and power while the other 99.9% of us eke out an existence in an Ayn Randian hellscape.
And I was contemplating a vast bubble backed by cybercurrency, a truly frightening prospect. It’s one thing to say currency has no real intrinsic value and thus bitcoin is equal, and that’s true so far as it goes; you can’t eat gold, as they say. But regular currency has consensus value: a dollar is worth a dollar because everyone roughly agrees that a dollar has value. With bitcoin, the “consensus” lies in computer algorithms which are far more volatile and not attuned to human needs. If the lights go out, bitcoins value vanishes. Vaporware backed by pretend money really does sound a bit…tenuous, doesn’t it?
But I also feel apprehension. DeepSeek doesn’t just open Pandora’s Box; it blows that sucker to smithereens. Everyone will have access to extraordinarily powerful AI and can play with it in any way they choose.
The Trump administration will probably yell that it can’t be trusted because there’s no guessing what the Chinese have in the way of back doors or acquisitionware. You know, like they supposedly do with TikTok.
But being open source means anyone can examine the source code, line by line, making unexpected guests on board next to impossible.
The drawback, of course, is that anyone else can take that code and add all sorts of goodies and foist that off on an unsuspecting public.
I would imagine that something similar to the Linux community will spring up and monitor the various flavors of DeepSeek that emerge. While significantly more complex than a desktop OS, Deep Seek does have the advantage over Windows and other programs in that it’s ALL visible.
But if you thought AI was expanding at a fantastic rate before, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
This doesn’t bring about a smarter AI that can actually think. And it can make some really amazing mistakes. Peter Cawdron posted an in-depth, probing five-page AI-spawned review of his book “Enclave.” It was very convincing except for one little thing—he never wrote a book called “Enclave.” And I can’t imagine writing a five page review of his work without mentioning First Contact. The other day, someone asked an AI if water freezes at 27F. The AI replied it does not, it freezes at 32F, so in order to freeze the water, you would need to raise the temperature from 27 to 32. And you thought Bible-based “science classes” were ridiculous.
Right now, we’re all just blinking at the afterglow of a thermonuclear explosion. I suspect we’re in for an interesting few months, even without the Nazis in Washington.
* Yes, trillion, one thousand billions, one million millions unless you learned to count English style, in which case it’s a British billion.
