Making America Great Again may not be as simple as the President hopes when it comes to the burgeoning artificial intelligence competition from China. The recent release of DeepSeek has understandably shaken the confidence of US Big Tech giants, especially OpenAI. It has led, according to the BBC, to ‘reputational downsizing’ and potential market difficulties because of DeepSeek’s demonstrated ability to compete with Western equivalents at lower cost and higher levels of efficiency.
DeepSeek illustrates that despite having access to a relatively small number of graphic processing units (GPUs), not even the latest generation, it is possible to compete with more proficient American models. This is largely because of the more efficient management of the software component. In other words, greater intelligence can compensate for brute force.
And here lies the moral. AI is no exception to the general rule that exemplifies the evolution of emerging technologies: initially they rely on brute force, crudely exploiting available resources, and then gradually they optimise their use through experience-based technical innovations and evolution. But the rules of the AI game are still based on the ability to accumulate more and more powerful GPUs.
Nevertheless, growth in computing power is not linear with respect to energy consumption and other variables, such as the ability to invent new software approaches that define what it takes to develop an LLM (large language model). This is at the core of the cost-effectiveness of DeepSeek and why it poses a problem for its competitors.
Despite the emergence of approaches such as so-called ‘frugal AI’ which promotes more efficient and intelligent use of resources, the belief that more computing power equals more artificial intelligence remains widespread. With a nightmarish compulsion to repeat, the AI industry has adopted marketing strategies that differ little from those practised in other technology sectors. Consider, for example, how PCs, cameras and smartphones are promoted: they vaunt the idea that bigger (the processor, sensor, screen etc.) is better.
This is a much easier concept to understand for those who hold the purse strings and need to loosen them, than unique selling propositions based on mathematical or engineering arguments, let alone those related to software, which are complex, hard to summarise in a few catch phrases, and difficult for users, investors and decision makers to understand.
In the case of AI, this strategy has created barriers to market entry. In fact, the common perception is that to play the LLM game requires such enormous investment and infrastructure that it discourages attempts to do so. By maintaining this approach, the giants of the sector succeed in, on the one hand, monopolising financial resources and, on the other hand, keeping out potential newcomers.
However, thanks to DeepSeek, there is the unexpected realisation that it may be possible to ‘do more but spend less’ and that, as a result, it may not make sense to invest in technologies and hardware that are unnecessarily expensive to buy and manage. This is especially true in view of the similar warnings in the chip sector, where new ARM processors promise affordability and performance.
However, the greater appeal of DeepSeek is true if and only if the development costs are as publicly stated, that is, a fraction of those incurred by US competitors. Although, in fact, the approach to the overall design of the Chinese model is clearly efficiency-oriented, it is unclear whether, and if so to what extent, there has been even indirect support from the Beijing Government. This could be in respect of access to the energy and computing power required to train the model, or other forms of support.
If, in fact, the lower cost of DeepSeek’s development was even partly possible because of state aid, it would be legitimate to raise doubts about whether the project is actually more sustainable than its American competitors, and to ask whether, instead, we are not faced with the use of economic leverage to disrupt the market by lowering the value of competitors. If so, it runs the risk of having to chase DeepSeek instead of dictating the pace and the risk of suffering the introduction of new technologies into the market instead of controlling them. Moreover, they would lose their privileged status as suppliers of ‘raw material’ for the rest of the supply chain that develops LLM-based products and services, since DeepSeek is more efficient, cheaper but, above all, ‘open source’.
For some time now, the concept of open source, a generic term that, essentially denotes the right to access the information necessary to understand a technology, and the right to use it freely, has been moving towards losing its original role as a tool that fosters the free circulation of knowledge to become an important component of states’ geopolitical arsenal.
It’s no mystery that DeepSeek was unashamedly developed in compliance with the guidelines set by the Chinese authorities in relation to how to respond to issues involving socialist values and policies. In this sense, such a choice is the perfect match of the ‘ethical constraints’ embedded in proprietary and open source LLMs already available in the West.
The decision to release Deepseek in open source could not only reduce the value of the AI giants, it also risks removing user market share from them. Companies, developers and researchers might, in fact, be interested in accessing sophisticated technologies without having to pay expensive licences or experience other limitations. We would be facing a complementary situation to the one created by the choice made by Huawei to release HarmonyOSNext (Android’s competing operating system) as a ‘free’ version, capable of running on a wide range of devices, from wearables to terminals, potentially enabling the creation of a global technological infrastructure independent of Western technologies. And it is worth mentioning that Huawei also produces AI GPUs optimised for DeepSeek!
With its wider use, DeepSeek could become part of a strategy for spreading ideas that do not necessarily conform to Western values. Lycurgus, writes Plutarch in Parallel Lives, banished from Sparta all foreigners who had no good reason to stay, fearing “that they would spread something contrary to good customs. Foreigners bring foreign words; these produce new ideas; and on these are built opinions and sentiments whose discordant character destroys the harmony of the state”.
This may be (relatively) simple in the case of humans, much more challenging when it comes ‘new’, or rather ‘different’ ideas conveyed by software that can be duplicated, modified and circulated without any effective restrictions. It is hard not to think of the TikTok squabble, and the reasons, real or supposed, that led the US administration to order its forced sale.
Although a direct, immediate, and large-scale impact of this kind is unlikely, it’s not unreasonable to suggest that in the long run ‘heterodox’ ideas may more easily infiltrate mainstream thinking by passing through smartphone screens, and contribute, if not to redefining it, at least to orienting it in a way that is more favourable to China or, which is the same thing, more critical of our own governments.
Andrea Monti and Raymond Wacks are co-authors of Protecting Personal Information: The Right to Privacy Reconsidered; COVID-19 and Public Policy in the Digital Age; and National Security in the New World Order: Government and the Technology of Information.
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Why worry? We are essentially at or beyond the threshold of Herd immunity: Britain, where almost 70% of adults now have COVID antibodies.We are in a strong position wrt this virus.
there’s no need to worry now and there was no need to worry last april or last march either. its a mild sniffle that only kills the terminally ill and has only taken UK overall mortality back to 2008 levels. I didn’t see any panic back then
Well indeed, so you have to ask yourself why those in the driving seat do still seem/pretend to be worried.
facebook and google are in the driving seat
I was thinking primarily of the PM and the Cabinet, plus SAGE, in the UK at least. Facebook and Google are indeed on the long list of entities who have been a force for bad during this madness.
Interesting that only if you click on the full author list is the dreaded Devi Shridhar revealed as being one. What a surprise (not!)
are politicians allowed to buy shares?
Beyond that, if T cells were tested. What fun to be able to agree with Fon.
What has NZ’s test cycle rate been? Why was there a big flu surge there early last year? How do you show the rest of the world that you are in control and have beaten nature? Theatrics?
NZ is living a ‘normal’. life – sealed off from the world, with panic always gibbering at its elbow, and snap lockdowns every couple of months as a sniffler gets loose. And so it will remain. The world’s biggest open prison.
Yes, I used to hanker after taking a holiday to NZ. In more idle moments might have thought about relocating there. Not any longer.
Again – no proper cost/benefit analysis, even if you accept the barmy premise.
There is no cost.
Not to those people that matter – as far as they are concerned. They’ve been living like kings for the last year.
It feels like there’s now a mad race on between the anti-lockdown pro-lifers, who are demanding their freedom back thanks to herd immunity, antibodies etc, and the Big Pharma/Big Tech “pro-covid” faction that desperately needs to keep the pandemic going just long enough to force their vaccines and digital IDs on all of us. Who gets to the door first?
On the plus side Bacofoil is still in production so you’re sorted.
It’s amusing to see people who are themselves wearing non-functional masks and visors, leaving their shopping in quarantine in the garage for 3 days and being vaccinated with a vaccine that isn’t a vaccine against a virus which is only marginally more threatening than seasonal influenza, accusing sceptics of being tinfoil hatted conspiracy theorists.
Literal tin foil hat wearers calling everyone else tin foil hat wearers.
Yes we can all eliminate the virus.
All we have to do is become exactly like China and the job is done.
Which I suspect is what authors like these want.
exactly. and why even bother to eliminate something so mild. Might as well go for ‘zero athlete’s foot’ policy
My athlete’s foot players me up something rotten, I’d go for that, as long as I can have my liberty back.
We don’t really know what happened in China.
I think he was joking.
Probably was, but Rick H makes a good point. Half the planet followed what they thought China did, hoping to achieve the result they thought China achieved. We based the most expensive state action in global peacetime history on the actions of and information from a totalitarian regime that few would have given much credit to for truthfulness up to now.
Why haven’t opposition and journalists and ordinary people called out the lockdown zealots on this?
Wuhan’s famously draconian lockdown didn’t even bring covid under control (it reduced R from 3.9 to 1.3 IIRC). China actually beat the virus in China by a form of test and trace where the suspected infected and their contacts were actually rounded up into quarantine facilities rather than being allowed to self-isolate at home.
Many other East Asian countries were to imitate them (and New Zealand did eventually adopt this practice, but far too late to have been decisive in their own success) but as far I know the only country outside the Pacific region to try it was Israel. And for them it didn’t work out (although they have of course redeemed themselves with their top-notch vaccination programme).
I doubt we can know the true status of CoViD-19 in China. As to causation of any drop in prevalence, we can’t even be sure about this for countries we regard as reasonably open and honest.
See my other comment, quoting from “SARS : how a global epidemic was stopped”. Elsewhere, in that report, the authors explain why they can’t even be certain that containment measures explain the disappearance of the, less transmissible, SARS. (https://apps.who.int/iris/handle/10665/207501)
China beat the virus by putting out bulletins saying they’d beaten the virus.
Zero Covid is a sensible strategy if your objective is to have an excuse to impose draconian restrictions on the freedom of your citizens, in order to fulfil other policy objectives.
But as a public health policy, it’s insane, barking mad, scientifically illiterate and should be thrown in the policy skip along with vaccine passports, masks and vaccines which aren’t vaccines.
In most countries, coronavirus is already endemic. In a few, it is not. But it is those countries – the ones aiming for Zero COVID – which have the problem now. The vaccines, it is clear, are not the solution, as they do not prevent transmission or infection.
So these countries are faced with a future which either involves:
isolation of their countries from the rest of the world, with all of the economic and social impacts that would mean, together with the constant need for “snap lockdowns” and the wider risks to the immune systems of its populations with their ongoing lack of exposure to other viruses from the rest of the world
or
at some point, having to “let the virus rip” to use a topical expression, while protecting the vulnerable.
The latter would of course be the correct thing to do but would be politically difficult given what has been invested in the “zero COVID” narrative.
Aus and NZ are in a real pickle now.
Aus and NZ are in a real pickle now.
I had this very same thought the other day when I read recently about a cluster of cases in Australia that spread to NZ triggering yet another panic and a bunch of snap lockdowns. New Zealand achieved ‘zero covid’ because it completely shut its borders to the entire world. You can’t live in isolation for ever – and all this isolation policy is doing is storing-up much bigger problems for the future. It would have been a much better policy to let people carry on as normal as possible while using all resources available to protect the elderly and the vulnerable.
(Exactly as Giesecke predicted)
“It would have been a much better policy to let people carry on as normal as possible while using all resources available to protect the elderly and the vulnerable.”
A bit like those highly distinguished academics said at Great Barrington and were promptly cancelled from social and mainstream media.
No way will zero covid countries open their borders because they are sufficiently vaccinated for herd immunity. This issue is that the leaders of those countries may be too afraid to reopen their borders even then because it’s likely that a few unlucky sods (likely those whose immune systems were already so weak that the vaccine doesn’t work) will die of Covid never the less, and the populace has been whipped up into such a frenzy that they’ll (metaphorically) crucify whoever reopened the borders.
Why? Herd immunity will be gained by vaccines.
zero covid strategy is BIG TECHS strategy… this way we can be more and more dependent on them for longer
In this the alarm should be loud and clear. Big Tech have an investment in keeping the lockdowns alive and their consumers held captive. There is arguably a clash of interests and currently the power held by Big Tech means that there can be no balancing of those interests; the equation is slanted all one way.
I’ve bookmarked this article and the Lancet article for future reading and comment, but I’ll probably never get to it, but here’s my first takeaway:
The authors’ binary classification (elimination vs. mitigation) is not the classification we’ve been debating over the past year, suppression (lockdowns) vs. mitigation (“herd immunity”). Of the 5 OECD “elimination” countries (Australia, Iceland, Japan, New Zealand, and South Korea), “elimination” the majority (Japan, Iceland, and SK) never had lockdowns – whereas the majority of “elimination” countries did have lockdowns, several of them more than one. (If I do write about this, I’ll tot up the statistics).
Instead the authors are classifying countries in terms of outcomes (elimination = little COVID vs. mitigation = lots of COVID) instead of actual strategy. By classifying all of OECD Europe as ‘mitigation’, the differences between the countries’ actual strategies can be ignored.
Which fits Team Lockdown’s defensive strategy they’ve been using since last October, to defend lockdowns by changing the subject.
A good analysis.
Beyond that – it’s essentially predictive modelling – and we know all about that.
Exactly. If Japan has “zero COVID” it’s more likely because their population aren’t very susceptible to it, not because it was government policy.
When they wrote “Countries that consistently aim for elimination – i.e., maximum action to control SARS-CoV-2 and stop community transmission as quickly as possible”, this doesn’t describe what Japan did, at all.
Indeed: neither Japan nor South Korea are really “zero covid”. South Korea of course is an example of containment via extremely effective test and trace (of a kind likely too invasive for Westerners to tolerate), while Japan is still something of a mystery.
“Certain characteristics of the SARS virus made containment possible. Infected individuals usually did not transmit the virus until several days after symptoms began and were most infectious only by the tenth day or so of illness, when they develop severe symptoms. Therefore, effective isolation of patients was enough to control spread. If cases were infectious before symptoms appeared, or if asymptomatic cases transmitted the virus, the disease would have been much more difficult, perhaps even impossible, to control.” (Emphasis added)
Source: https://apps.who.int/iris/handle/10665/207501 (page “243” = 254 in viewer).
The population of Japan have very high levels of D3 in their system, and the elderly population of Japan are the healthiest in the world.
Japan seems to have had four waves of Covid, each worse than the one before it. Anybody here got any idea what would lead to such an infection history? It can’t be lockdowns (as I don’t think Japan had any) and it’s not the right shape to be caused by seasonality.
A pattern of Covid infection driven by seasonality would look like that of Sweden (or of other European countries with very bad first waves): one big wave at the start of the pandemic and another big wave in the late autumn and winter, but almost nothing in the summer.
I expect Labour and the vast majority of Tories are thrilled at this report. Gotta keep that pot boiling !!!
Zero Covid strategy is a money making machines…
Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Netflix profits have soared in 2020 to 2021 to unprecedented billions. In the second quarter of 2020 Amazon had reported a 40% sale increase amounting to $88.9 billion dollars and Twitter reported a 34% growth increase.
The services offered by the Tech giants have become indispensable to a world in lockdown. Their power has increased exponentially and with this they have developed an unfettered power to control who appears on their platforms and the information that is permitted to be published.
It wouldn’t surprise me if some of the US teachers’ unions which are vehemently opposed to in-person education, turned out to be on the take from tech companies with an interest in online learning
Well done – You say it all… It is glaring people in the face and they refuse to see it…
Let us not forget Big pharmaceutical
Baloney, the Lancet and some of the LDS article. Islands plus S Korea/Japan which are representative of a lot of East Asian country experience. S. Korea never locked down, that is a fallacy. East Asian countries experienced SARS1, they have some inbuilt immunity. They also don’t use ACE inhibitors as in the west. Its one of the tragedies of SARS2/covid that the link between illness and recipients of ACE inhibitors ( and statins) has been completely covered up. Yet S Korean scientists pointed to this over 12 months ago.
https://www.upi.com/Health_News/2021/04/26/coronavirus-ace-inhibitors-risk-mice-study/5471619450818/
Devi Schrider is an author so it should be ignored immediately. Depressingly the Mail is running this story without suggesting it is what it is, batshit crazy.
The idea that you can pursue a zero-covid policy in a country that is heavily dependent on international trade is clearly nonsense. But this is pretty much what you would expect from the Lancet, which seemingly promulgates the idea that the entire country revolves around the NHS and we should all bow down and worship it.
Well China is an exemplar of zero covid as well as being the champion exporter par excellence.
The issue isn’t with international trade in general, but with international trade by truck. Countries in the Asia/Pacific region tend to do amost all their international trade by easily-quarantinable means: the crews of container ships need never leave their vessels, while those of cargo aircraft can be isolated within airports until they fly out again.
By contrast, making truck transport Covid-safe would mean changing drivers anytime trucks cross borders, which would impose a serious limit on throughput. A Covid-secured border crossing between China and Vietnam took roughly 150 trucks per day, but the number of trucks crossing the English Channel daily is closer to 7,000.
Many of the better-known Asia/Pacific countries never had to deal with the issue of cross-border truck traffic because they never had any in the first place. Australia and NZ are far enough away from any other country that the labour cost of having a trucker babysit his cargo across the sea would outweigh the savings in time (and thus money) that roll-on roll-off could enable. Taiwan also won’t have roll-on roll-off access from mainland China because of the state of war that exists between the two regimes.
What are they proposing to do about the (ahem) bats?
The ones in the labs?
While the linked tweetstorm by Devan Sinha (eerily similar name to one infamous zero covid advocate!) is certainly a sterling demolition of the wider zero covid cause, it doesn’t actually have much to say about the first wave in particular. That seems to indeed to be fairly simple: major Western nations were highly connected (as Noah had said), weren’t culturally amenable to sealing their borders quickly (as East Asian countries were), and didn’t have extra time to react due to favourable seasonality in the critical early weeks (as Australia and NZ did thanks to being in the southern hemisphere).
Dr Sinha seems more concerned with addressing the query that goes something like “in August 2020 the UK had fewer Covid cases per capita than Victoria, so why could Victoria go to zero but not the UK?”
His point on this question is that the whole Dictator Dan bargain of “harsh lockdown now, so you can get your freedom back when the country is covid-free” cannot work in a country like the UK because it has too many essential arrivals from abroad (truckers crossing the Channel, and people crossing the Irish border whose openness is a GFA requirement) to offer the “freedom back”.
Australia and NZ averaged roughly one quarantine breach for every 18,000 arrivals (even though returnees had to test negative before they were allowed to fly in) with about 40% of those breaches resulting in lockdowns.
Just a question: if the UK had decided on a “zero covid” strategy back in March 2020, wouldn’t it have meant in practice that the government would spend the first lockdown reconfiguring the UK’s trade patterns to eliminate international truck traffic (either by Chunnel or by roll-on roll-off ferries) in favour of using only container ships as the Pacific zero covid countries do?
Did any MPs (of any party) explicitly suggest such a policy, and if not do you think it is because they considered it practically impossible, or was it because they didn’t believe the British public wouldn’t tolerate a “seal the borders until vaccination” policy?
Just a question: if the UK had decided on a “zero covid” strategy back in March 2020, wouldn’t it have meant in practice that the government would spend the first lockdown reconfiguring the UK’s trade patterns to eliminate international truck traffic (either by Chunnel or by roll-on roll-off ferries) in favour of using only container ships as the Pacific zero covid countries do?
Did any MPs (of any party) explicitly suggest such a policy, and if not do you think it is because they considered it practically impossible (due to time delays and/or lack of port staff), or was it because they didn’t believe the British public would tolerate a “seal the borders until vaccination” policy?
As Ivor Cummins notes, the population of Japan in particular, but also other East Asian countries have very high levels of Vitamin D3 in their systems.
That would certainly help, but Japan is clearly using some kind of suppression method (even if not the kind of lockdowns seen in Western countries) because the shape of their infection curve doesn’t look like one which seasonality would generate.
A very interesting thread about the futility of zero covid for UK with interesting data.according to Prof Balloux, all chances for zerocovid in UK was already minimal in the end of 2019.This thread should be read regarding the Lancet article discussing zerocovid options.
https://twitter.com/DevanSinha/status/1387828825061564422
That exact tweetstorm was quoted in the original article: it’s the link at “It’s very unlikely that large, highly connected countries like France, Italy or the US would have been able to contain the virus during the deadly first wave.”