th<\/sup>, 2025<\/i><\/p>\nHey, 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?<\/p>\n
Sure you do. It was all just there yesterday.<\/p>\n
Well, funny story.<\/p>\n
China has released something called DeepSeek. It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Oh, yeah. Also, it\u2019s open source. That means anyone can take it, play with it, use it, adapt it, all for free.<\/p>\n
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 \u201808.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
A glance at the markets this morning shows carnage. Nvidia is down 17%. NASDAQ is down over 600 points. Marketwatch has the reassuring headline, \u201cDoes DeepSeek spell doomsday for Nvidia and other AI stocks? Here\u2019s what to know.\u201d The lede was interesting, as well: \u201cThat\u2019s 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\u2019s U.S. App Store. The service has become so popular that it\u2019s restricting registration due to what it called \u2018large-scale malicious attacks.\u2019\u201d Hmm. I\u2019m guessing those attacks aren\u2019t coming from Dark Web hackers. Care to guess which companies and\/or countries are behind it? I\u2019m imagining the TrumpenMusk coalition is quite busy this morning.<\/p>\n
On one hand, it\u2019s gratifying to see the techbros take a haircut on this scale. Most of them have accumulated vast amounts of wealth and power, which they\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n
And I was contemplating a vast bubble backed by cybercurrency, a truly frightening prospect. It\u2019s one thing to say currency has no real intrinsic value and thus bitcoin is equal, and that\u2019s true so far as it goes; you can\u2019t 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 \u201cconsensus\u201d 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\u2019t it?<\/p>\n
But I also feel apprehension. DeepSeek doesn\u2019t just open Pandora\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
The Trump administration will probably yell that it can\u2019t be trusted because there\u2019s no guessing what the Chinese have in the way of back doors or acquisitionware. You know, like they supposedly do with TikTok.<\/p>\n
But being open source means anyone can examine the source code, line by line, making unexpected guests on board next to impossible.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s ALL visible.<\/p>\n
But if you thought AI was expanding at a fantastic rate before, you ain\u2019t seen nothing yet.<\/p>\n
This doesn\u2019t 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 \u201cEnclave.\u201d It was very convincing except for one little thing\u2014he never wrote a book called \u201cEnclave.\u201d And I can\u2019t 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 \u201cscience classes\u201d were ridiculous.<\/p>\n
Right now, we\u2019re all just blinking at the afterglow of a thermonuclear explosion. I suspect we\u2019re in for an interesting few months, even without the Nazis in Washington.<\/p>\n
* Yes, trillion, one thousand billions, one million millions unless you learned to count English style, in which case it\u2019s a British billion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 … <\/p>\n
Continue reading “DeepSeek — China gets the drop on us”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[10,2,18,799],"tags":[1779,2202,1778,1127,2200,2204,2205,2206,2203,2201],"class_list":["post-1727","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-humor","category-science","category-technology","tag-ai","tag-app","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-china","tag-deepseek","tag-economic-bubble","tag-economic-crash","tag-market-turmoil","tag-program","tag-software"],"yoast_head":"\nDeepSeek -- China gets the drop on us · Zepp's Commentaries<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/zeppscommentaries.online\/?p=1727\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"DeepSeek -- China gets the drop on us · Zepp's Commentaries\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"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? 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