this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2025
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 week ago (16 children)

I'm sorry but this says nothing about how they lied about the training cost - nor does their citation. Their argument boils down to "that number doesn't include R&D and capital expenditures" but why would that need to be included - the $6m figure was based on the hourly rental costs of the hardware, not the cost to build a data center from scratch with the intention of burning it to the ground when you were done training.

It's like telling someone they didn't actually make $200 driving Uber on the side on a Friday night because they spent $20,000 on their car, but ignoring the fact that they had to buy the car either way to get to their 6 figure day job

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 week ago (15 children)

i think you're missing the point that "Deepseek was made for only $6M" has been the trending headline for the past while, with the specific point of comparison being the massive costs of developing ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, et al.

to stretch your metaphor, it's like someone rolling up with their car, claiming it only costs $20 (unlike all the other cars that cost $20,000), when come to find out that number is just how much it costs to fill the gas tank up once

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago (3 children)

No, it's not. OpenAI doesn't spend all that money on R&D, they spent majority of it on the actual training (hardware, electricity).

And that's (supposedly) only $6M for Deepseek.

So where is the lie?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

shot:

majority of it on the actual training (hardware, ...)

chaser:

And that’s (supposedly) only $6M for Deepseek.

citation:

After experimentation with models with clusters of thousands of GPUs, High Flyer made an investment in 10,000 A100 GPUs in 2021 before any export restrictions. That paid off. As High-Flyer improved, they realized that it was time to spin off “DeepSeek” in May 2023 with the goal of pursuing further AI capabilities with more focus.

So where is the lie?

your post is asking a lot of questions already answered by your posting

[–] [email protected] -5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

SemiAnalysis is “confident”

They did not answer anything, only alluded.

Just because they bought GPUs like everyone else doesn't mean they could not train it cheaper.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago

standard “fuck off programming.dev” ban with a side of who the fuck cares. deepseek isn’t the good guys, you weird fucks don’t have to go to a nitpick war defending them, there’s no good guys in LLMs and generative AI. all these people are grifters, all of them are gaming the benchmarks they designed to be gamed, nobody’s getting good results out of this fucking mediocre technology.

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