SATISH SHARMA - not just Rotigraphy.: “Deepseek is the GOAT,” [greatest of all time]

https://x.com/NuryVittachi/status/2071537494571761746

BREAKING NEWS: China’s Deepseek yesterday came out with a new program that cuts AI costs by speeding up performance—and dealing a third blow this month to the US’s massive AI giants.

Leading American AI firms are already fretting about Chinese rivals massively undercutting them in price wars and catching up on the speed front.

And of course US firms have to deal with the ever-changing restrictions placed on them by the erratic US government, which has currently placed limitations on five top AI products.

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DEEPSEEK'S INNOVATION
Deepseek yesterday announced a new product, called DSpark, which accelerates responses by using a lightweight draft model to propose responses and then verifying them in batches: just like your brain sifts through multiple ideas at once. 

Tests show DSpark can speed up processing by between 51 percent and 400 percent.

“Deepseek is the GOAT,” [greatest of all time] said Yuchen Jin of San Francisco-based Databricks, writing on X.

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COINBASE GOES CHINESE
The launch follows closely on the heels of another blow to the US giants--on Saturday. 

Concerns about the cost and power of Chinese AI became real at the weekend when crypto giant Coinbase said it had switched its computer engineers from using OpenAI by default to favoring Chinese open-weight models like GLM 5.2 and Kimi K2.7 Code.

The move immediately cut its AI spending by half, said Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong.

This was also considered a blow to top US developers, who assumed that big customers will always pay more for premium products.

The answer is NO – not when the cheaper Chinese product delivers a 50 to 90 per cent cut in costs.

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CATCHING UP FAST
And all this followed a major blow less than two weeks earlier: the launch of GLM 5.2, which is a product of Z .ai (formerly Zhipu AI), which was spun out of Tsinghua University in Beijing.  

“On one agentic benchmark, it was just one percentage point away from Opus4.8 for a fifth of the cost,” said a CNBC report yesterday.

Other reviewers have rated it as good as ChatGPT 5.5., the current flagship of OpenAI.

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SUPER-RICH FIGHT THE UNDERDOG
All in all, it’s a race that is exciting to watch—especially when one side is super-wealthy and “plays dirty”, like a movie bad guy, while the other is seen as being made up of less rich but more focused nerds in a developing country. 

For the US State Department, none of this was meant to happen. In 2022, the US broke WTO rules by restricting Chinese access to high powered chips—even though most are made in Taiwan, which is legally Chinese soil.

At that time, several US pundits predicted the immediate death of the Chinese chip industry. 

“With the latest action, the chasm between the U.S. and China has now expanded to the point of no return,” Abishur Prakash, co-founder of the Center for Innovating the Future, dramatically told CNBC, in October 2022.

Jordan Schneider of China Talk has become a legend for his prediction of instant doom, the same month: 

“This is what annihilation looks like: China’s semiconductor manufacturing industry was reduced to zero overnight. Complete collapse. No chance of survival.”

Er, not quite, Mr Schneider.