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DeepSeek Has Blackwell
China doesn't need to participate in Donald Trump's pay-to-play deal with Nvidia, apparently.
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Exactly.
If you ever tire of referencing drug trade analogies (which is a perfect analogy), you can also cite commodity trading (especially oil)- in both past and present situations where the traders trade for financial gain without regard for moral or legal consequences (other than not wanting to get caught). There are numerous examples, but the stories of oil trading in Libya, thereby funding both Gaddafi and the rebels through the back door, are fascinating. Currently, we’ve got Venezuelan and Russian oil trading. This is normal, not the exception.
The Nvida GPU CHIPS are superior for the initial training of LLMs. After that, the advantage is less compelling, as evidenced by efforts by Microsoft and others to bypass NVDA GPUs for inference.
But what was more significant about DeepSeekand other Chinese models is a different approach to analyzing.and using data in a fashion relevant to the end user.
If one is curious sbout this, I recall that in the past week the Medium published an indepth explanation of the more efficient approach the Chinese firms are using versus the brute force “big is better” US models employ.
Excellent and accurate analysis of NVIDIA and China situation Mr H. The official policy and posturing of both countries is a distraction and is being circumvented as demand for computing power is relentless. People are still stuck in the simplistic notion that AI is merely a new iteration of advanced software. Instead, it is a whole new computing paradigm requiring total overhaul of hardware infrastructure on a colossal scale.
You sound well informed so please tutor me on this. Are you speaking of the training step or inference?
I ask because I just enjoyed an extended visit from an old friend from the early 80s when I was a (very) junior coder on a database analysis program at an investment bank while he worked as a database writer at a marketing company. I moved over to trading while he had a long career designing and maintaining databases for private companies. So he has a far better feel for what is going on in AI.
He was impressed by and excited over the new Gemini model. But he was also really psyched about the new USB protocol that allows for ultra-fast data transfer. What caught his eye was that he read about how some gearheads had used the new USB technology to daisy chain five standard iPads which allowed them to run AI models. No doubt at the inference (not training) level? He was demanding that we drive over to the Apple store and buy five iPads so we could try it out then and there. Imagine how compute and energy efficient that array would be!