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by ncann 507 days ago
So I checked out the original report:

https://semianalysis.com/2025/01/31/deepseek-debates/

They cite themselves as the source, and throughout the article are just a bunch of "We believe...".

Am I missing something?

3 comments

Likely pulling numbers out of their ass.

They're getting challenged on X about how parent Highflyer hedgefund with 8B AUM, aka their single digit % management fees since founding is in low 100s millions total (for all operating expenses) can sustain 1B+ of just capex, somehow got 1B+ of hardware. It's not financially possible, well not anymore since founder just met with PRC premiere whose going to unlock national compute bazooka. But the fact they just got political attention means they were operating on limited capex, the founder himself said the original batch of A100 cards represented significant gamble and shared resource with hedgefund. They simply did not have the cash for 1B+ of cards that semianalysis thinks they have, doesn't pass basic smell test.

Deepseeks paper also pretty transparent about training cost was for that run. IMO people fixate on the 6m training cost number, but really the story is a bunch of kids, from PRC universities with access to some compute is closing gap with US AI... which TBH is just as embarassing / destabilizing.

Yes. Thhat they also talk about the company group's total costs and silently imply that the training for this model is a significant part of that, or maybe silently implying that the costs for the other stuff the group did should be counted as part of this success.
They do reference a DeepSeek job ads boasting of "access to 10,000s GPUs" for use without usage restriction.

Though no link to it.