I’m curious whether Deepseek will gaf about this. They’ve been rather uninterested in commercialization, and the app is mainly a way of showing off their model, which itself is released open-weights. In fact, it’s literally impossible to spend money in the app! They sell tokens but it’s API-only, and you can’t spend it in the app.
So it’s entirely possible the Deepseek will shrug, let their app be banned in Germany, and keep doing what they’re doing.
It’s a bit hard to believe, but the vast majority of China’s manufacturing is consumed in China. They’re actually not that export oriented compared to other countries like Germany or Japan, it’s just the scale that makes them such an export juggernaut. The flip side of this is that most of the energy use is also actually China’s own energy use.
And China’s energy use is increasing simply because its people are getting richer and consuming more. Based on this, I don’t think China is the main concern. There are lots more developing countries that will likewise use more energy as they develop. China’s green transition seems to be going full tilt, but I’m not sure those other countries can transition as quickly.
With the success of BG3, Larian has a great opportunity to strengthen their own IP. Their Divinity games were great but had pretty nonsensical world-building (to this day, I still have no idea how DOS and DOS2 are related plotwise), and one of the great things about BG3 was the fusion of Larian game design with an appealing fantasy world. If Larian can build up a coherent setting of their own, their future would be bright.
According to the article, that’s exactly what happened ;-)
It’s on Bioware not EA. This is the third flop out of Bioware, and the post mortems for the past failures have all indicated that Bioware’s management has a dumpster fire for years, with EA often uncharacteristically serving as a voice of reason to protect them from their own mistakes. For example, it was EA that got them to include the flying in Anthem, the only fun part of the gameplay. Unfortunately, in the case of Andromeda and Dragon Age 4, EA’s mistake may have been giving Bioware’s management so much rope that they hung themselves.
there may be strategic reasons for EA to keep supporting BioWare… In order to grow, EA needs more than just sports franchises… Trying to fix its fantasy-focused studio may be easier than starting something new.
Ironically, EA grew out of Origin, one of the original grand-daddies of computer RPGs and the maker of the Ultima series in the 1980s-1990s.
By that metric, you can argue Kasparov isn’t thinking during chess, either. A lot of human chess “thinking” is recalling memorized openings, evaluating positions many moves deep, and other tasks that map to what a chess engine does. Of course Kasparov is thinking, but then you have to conclude that the AI is thinking too. Thinking isn’t a magic process, nor is it tightly coupled to human-like brain processes as we like to think.
Pretty sure it’s at least semi-autonomous. In the video you can see the bots react to hits and recover their footing, there’s no way a human can control all those reflex actions in real time.
Does it? They’re a middle-upper income country now, and child labor tends to be an issue at much lower levels of development. Anyway, for the Chinese electronics sector, you’re vastly more likely to see humanoid robots than children.
This headline has the structure of the famous Simpsons joke.
Cyan (Myst, Riven)
Homer: that’s good.
to lay off
Homer: that’s bad.
12 people
Homer: that’s good.
“roughly half of team”
Homer: ??
Narrator: that’s bad.
That article is overblown. People need to configure their websites to be more robust against traffic spikes, news at 11.
Disrespecting robots.txt is bad netiquette, but honestly this sort of gentleman’s agreement is always prone to cheating. At the end of the day, when you put something on the net for people to access, you have to assume anyone (or anything) can try to access it.
It’s seldom the same companies, though; there are two camps fighting each other, like Gozilla vs Mothra.
It’s possible to run the big Deepseek model locally for around $15k, not $100k. People have done it with 2x M4 Ultras, or the equivalent.
Though I don’t think it’s a good use of money personally, because the requirements are dropping all the time. We’re starting to see some very promising small models that use a fraction of those resources.
So long as there are big players releasing open weights models, which is true for the foreseeable future, I don’t think this is a big problem. Once those weights are released, they’re free forever, and anyone can fine-tune based on them, or use them to bootstrap new models by distillation or synthetic RL data generation.
Power usage probably won’t be a major issue; the main take-home message of the Deepseek brouhaha is that training and inference can be much more efficiently than we had thought (our estimates had been based on well-funded Western companies that didn’t have to bother with optimization).
AI spam is an annoyance, but it’s not really AI-specific but the continuation of a trend; the Internet was already drowning in human-created slop before LLMs came along. At some point, we will probably all have to rely on AI tools to filter it out. This isn’t something that can be unwound, any more than you can undo computers being able to play chess well.
“But… the future refused to change” – game over screen, Chrono Trigger
They released the major components of their training and interference infrastructure code a couple weeks ago.
Deepseek actually released a bunch of their infrastructure code, including the infamous tricks for making training and interference more efficient, a couple of weeks ago.
The strangest twist to this is that Deepseek itself seems to be the only company not trying to cash in on the Deepseek frenzy:
Liang [Deepseek’s founder] has shown little intention to capitalise on DeepSeek’s sudden fame to further commercialise its technology in the near term. The company is instead focusing the majority of its resources on model development…
These people added the independently wealthy founder has also declined to entertain interest from China’s tech giants as well as venture and state-backed funds to invest in the group for the time being. Many have found it difficult to even arrange a meeting with the secluded founder.
“We pulled top-level government connections and only got to sit down with someone from their finance department, who said ‘sorry we are not raising’,” said one investor at a multibillion-dollar Chinese tech fund.
Fermentation-made milk substitute was available at supermarkets in Singapore (under the brand name Very Dairy, though the original product was from the startup Perfect Day). I really liked it—a lot nicer than oat milk for drinking straight up. Unfortunately it went off the shelves after a while, seems like demand wasn’t high :-(