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DeepSeek roundup: banned by governments, no guard rails, lied about its training costs (pivot-to-ai.com)

submitted 4 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 weeks ago (9 children)

DeepSeek-V3 costs only 2.788M GPU hours for its full training. Assuming the rental price of the H800 GPU is $2 per GPU hour, our total training costs amount to only $5.576M. Note that the aforementioned costs include only the official training of DeepSeek-V3, excluding the costs associated with prior research and ablation experiments on architectures, algorithms, or data.

Emphasis mine. Deepseek was very upfront that this 6m was training only. No other company includes r&d and salaries when they report model training costs, because those aren't training costs

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) (8 children)

consider this paragraph from the Wall Street Journal:

DeepSeek said training one of its latest models cost $5.6 million, compared with the $100 million to $1 billion range cited last year by Dario Amodei, chief executive of the AI developer Anthropic, as the cost of building a model.

you're arguing to me that they technically didn't lie -- but it's pretty clear that some people walked away with a false impression of the cost of their product relative to their competitors' products, and they financially benefitted from people believing in this false impression.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 4 weeks ago (4 children)

but it's pretty clear that some people walked away with a false impression of the cost of their product relative to their competitors' products

Ask yourself why that may be, as you are the one who posted a link to a WSJ article that is repeating an absurd 100m-1b figure from a guy who has a vested interest in making the barrier of entry into the field seem as high as possible the increase the valuation of his company. Did WSJ make an attempt to verify the accuracy of these statements? Did it push for further clarification? Did it compare those statements to figures that have been made public by Meta and OpenAI? No on all counts - yet somehow "deepseek lied" because it explicitly stated their costs didn't include capex, salaries, or R&D, but the media couldn't be bothered to read to the end of the paragraph

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

"the media sucks at factchecking DeepSeek's claims" is... an interesting attempt at refuting the idea that DeepSeek's claims aren't entirely factual. beyond that, intentionally presenting true statements that lead to false impressions is a kind of dishonesty regardless. if you mean to argue that DeepSeek wasn't being underhanded at all and just very innocently presented their figures without proper context (that just so happened to spurn a media frenzy in their favor)... then i have a bridge to sell you.

besides that, OpenAI is very demonstrably pissing away at least that much money every time they add one to the number at the end of their slop generator

[+] [email protected] -6 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (2 children)

"the media sucks at factchecking DeepSeek's claims" is... an interesting attempt at refuting the idea that DeepSeek's claims aren't entirely factual.

That's the opposite of what I'm saying. Deepseek is the one under scrutiny, yet they are the only one to publish source code and training procedures of their model. So far the only argument against them is "if I read the first half of a sentence in deepseeks whitepaper and pretend the other half of the sentence doesn't exist, I can generate a newsworthy headline". So much so that you just attempted to present a completely absurd and unverifiable number from a guy with a financial incentive to exaggerate, and a non apples-to-apples comparison made by WSJ as airtight evidence against them. OpenAI allegedly has enough hardware to invalidate deepseeks training claims in roughly five hours - given the massive financial incentive to do so, if deepseek was being untrustworthy, you don't think they would have done so by now?

if you mean to argue that DeepSeek wasn't being underhanded at all and just very innocently presented their figures without proper context (that just so happened to spurn a media frenzy in their favor)... then i have a bridge to sell you.

What do you mean proper context? I posted their full quote above, they presented their costs with full and complete context, such that the number couldn't be misconstrued without one being willfully ignorant.

OpenAI is very demonstrably pissing away at least that much money every time they add one to the number at the end of their slop generator

It sounds to me like you have a very clear bias, and you don't care at all about whether or not what they said is actually true or not, as long as the headlines about AI are negative

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 weeks ago

this is utterly pointless and you’ve taken up way too much space in the thread already

It sounds to me like you have a very clear bias, and you don’t care at all about whether or not what they said is actually true or not, as long as the headlines about AI are negative

oh no, anti-AI bias in TechTakes? unthinkable

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

That's the opposite of what I'm saying. Deepseek is the one under scrutiny, yet they are the only one to publish source code and training procedures of their model.

this has absolutely fuck all to do with anything i've said in the slightest, but i guess you gotta toss in the talking points somewhere

e: it's also trivially disprovable, but i don't care if it's actually true, i only care about headlines negative about AI

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