So, a Chinese financial firm (not even a software or computer company) has put out an open source AI model which is 50 times more efficient than Chat-GPT or any other American AI. It’s so simple you can run it on some phones, it doesn’t have to call home.
The sound you hear is Sam Altman screaming at the Devil as he realizes he sold his soul to become the world’s richest man, and it ain’t gonna happen.
(Faintly, in the background, the devil laughing his ass off.)
Absolutely hilarious. Oh, and they did it with a tiny team for hardly any money. Didn’t take billions. Doesn’t require massive amounts of energy.
And that whole open source thing matters: everyone else can build off their model. Deepseek, being Chinese, has some censorship in it (type Xi Jingping’s name to see it in action), but you can build your own without the censorship.
One of the interesting things is that it was built by a team of quants. Seems that the Chinese have been crushing the finance industry lately, since they saw what it has done to the West, so the Quants decided to try their hand at a bit of optimized AI code.
This chart is one of the most illustrative of Xi’s policy over the last six years or so:
Seems Xi has also figured out (as I’ve noted in the past) that billionaires suck. They form a power center outside the party and they act against the best interests of everyone in society but themselves.
Turns out that having lots of billionaire is a policy choice. The West made that choice and so did China, for a while, but when they saw how dangerous and harmful billionaires are, they reversed themselves and changed policy to crush them. They’ve even thrown them in prison. (Vietnam recently executed a mogul, though she wasn’t quite a billionaire.)
China’s CCP wants prosperity for everyone in the country. It’s the best way for them to stay in power, and hell, there’s every indication they really believe it’s the right thing to do. They’ve deliberately crushed their housing bubble and the state is moving heavily into building housing, they cracked down on exam-prep tutors, because that’s a red-Queen’s race which favors the rich and hurts everyone else, including kids. They built recreation centers just for delivery workers and forced companies to treat them better.
And they have the tech lead in about 80% of fields, plus, it appears, one more now. Just as Trump announces his five hundred billion dollar AI fund, launches his own shitcoin so people can bribe him without having to stay at one of his hotels and juices crypto, a fraudulent field which caters to the Western desire to get rich without actually doing anything useful for society.
America’s flailing around. Their only real plans is “let’s loot our vassals and satrapies”, and they’ll manage to do more of that. But it isn’t going to change America’s trajectory. It’s a failing Empire, it’s swirling the drain and nothing is going to stop that, since the actual necessary steps require policies like, y’know, slashing home prices, gutting billionaires, raising taxes on the rich, taking utilities and other public goods back into public control and so on: all the stuff no one, Trump included, wants to do.
Empires die hard, and a lot of suffering goes with that. But die the American Empire is, and will. China has already won, and they deserve to.