Jean Pierre Kloppers

Curious about AI and how it is going to transform the world. Past MD of Yoyo, CEO of BrandsEye & Cell-Life. Father of 4 boys.

[Jean Pierre Kloppers @jpkloppers]

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[Jean Pierre Kloppers @jpkloppers]

This is an excellent take on what this Deepseek moment means for AI.

[Yishan @yishan]

I think the Deepseek moment is not really the Sputnik moment, but more like the Google moment.

If anyone was around in ~2004, you'll know what I mean, but more on that later.

I think everyone is over-rotated on this because Deepseek came out of China. Let me try to un-rotate you.

Deepseek could have come out of some lab in the US Midwest. Like say some CS lab couldn't afford the latest nVidia chips and had to use older hardware, but they had a great algo and systems department, and they found a bunch of optimizations and trained a model for a few million dollars and lo, the model is roughly on par with o1. Look everyone, we found a new training method and we optimized a bunch of algorithms!

Everyone is like OH WOW and starts trying the same thing. Great week for AI advancement! No need for US markets to lose a trillion in market cap.

The tech world (and apparently Wall Street) is massively over-rotated on this because it came out of CHINA.

I get it. After everyone has been sensitized over the H1BLM uproar, we are conditioned to think of OMG Immigrants China as some kind of Alien Other. As though the Alien-Other Chinese Researchers are doing something special that's out of reach and now China The Empire is somehow uniquely in possession of Super Efficient AI Power and the US companies can't compete. The subtext of "A New Fearsome Power Now Under The Command of the CCP" is what's driving the current sentiment, and it's not really valid.

Like, no. These are guys basically working on the same problems we are in the US, and not only that, they wrote a paper about it and open-sourced their model! It is not actually some sort of tectonic geopolitical shift, it is just Some Nerds Over There saying "Hey we figured out some cool shit, here's how we did it, maybe you would like to check it out?"

Sputnik showed that the Soviets could do something the US couldn't ("a new fearsome power"). They didn't subsequently publish all the technical details and half the blueprints. They only showed that it could be done.

With Deepseek, if I recall correctly, a lab in Berkeley read their paper and duplicated the claimed results on a small scale within a day.

That's why I say it's like the Google moment in 2004. Google filed its S-1 in 2004, and revealed to the world that they had built the largest supercomputer cluster by using distributed algorithms to network together commodity computers at the best performance-per-dollar point on the cost curve.

This was in contrast to every other tech company, who at that time just bought what were essentially larger and larger mainframes, always at the most expensive leading edge of the cost curve. (To the young people reading this, this will sound incredible to you)

I worked at PayPal at the time, and in order to keep pace with the rising transaction volume, the company was forced to buy bigger and bigger database servers from Oracle. We were totally Oracle's bitch. At one point when we ran into scalability issues, the Oracle reps told us we were their biggest installation so they had no other reference point on how to help us overcome our scalability issues. We literally resorted to flipping random config switches and rebooting it.

(This heavily influenced me when I was a young manager later at Facebook. I deliberately torpedoed an Oracle salesman's pitch to try and get us to switch from open source MySQL databases to an Oracle contract: of course we had scalability problems, but at least when we had them, we could open up the hood and figure out how to fix it ... assuming we had good enough engineers, and we did. When it's closed-source infra, you're at the mercy of the vendor's support engineers)

Back to Google - in their S-1, they described how they were able to leapfrog the scalability limits of mainframes and had been (for years!) running a far more massive networked supercomputer comprised of thousands of commodity machines at the optimal performance-per-dollar price point - i.e. not the more expensive leading edge - all knit together by fault-tolerant distributed algorithms written in-house.

Some time later, Google published their MapReduce and BigTable papers, describing the algorithms they'd used to manage and control this massively more cost-effective and powerful supercomputer.

Deepseek is MUCH more like the Google moment, because Google essentially described what it did and told everyone else how they could do it too. In Google's case, a fair bit of time elapsed between when they revealed to the world what they were doing and when they published a papers showing everyone how to do it. Deepseek, in contrast, published their paper alongside the model release.

Now, I've also written about how I think this is also a demonstration of Deepseek's trajectory, but that's also no different from Google in ~2004 revealing what it was capable of. Competitors will still need to gear up and DO the thing, but they've moved the field forward. But it's not like Sputnik where the Soviets have developed technology unreachable to the US, it's more like Google saying, "Hey, we did this cool thing, here's how we did it."

There is no reason to think nVidia and OAI and Meta and Microsoft and Google et al are dead. Sure, Deepseek is a new and formidable upstart, but doesn't that happen every week in the world of AI? I am sure that Sam and Zuck, backed by the power of Satya, can figure something out. Everyone is going to duplicate this feat in a few months and everything just got cheaper. The only real consequence is that AI utopia/doom is now closer than ever.

====

Bonus: This is also a little similar the Ethereum PoS moment, when AI finally has a counterpoint to the environmentalists who say AI uses so much electricity. We just brought down the cost of inference by 97%!

[Jean Pierre Kloppers @jpkloppers]

@BrawlStars team. My 10 year old son thought of some new hypercharges for your brawlers and wanted to show you.

[Jean Pierre Kloppers @jpkloppers]

Privilege to receive this award on behalf of Omnisient! Such a legendary company doing great things! #BankingTechAwards

[Jean Pierre Kloppers @jpkloppers]

@_ThreeSons @FullPreneur Huge growth!
Have loved seeing your adventures and particularly your boys turning into great men.
Taking notes...

[Michael Girdley @girdley]

I built my ideal "look great on Zoom/podcasts" setup.

It costs some money -- but it’s worth it.

Here is how I did it (if you want to copy it):

[Jean Pierre Kloppers @jpkloppers]

@agarwal__gaurav SEND

[Aleksandr Volodarsky @volodarik]

Sunday read.

This is hilarious. Engineers are competing who creates the worst UI on Reddit.

I think the winners are:

1/ Enter your phone number

[Jean Pierre Kloppers @jpkloppers]

@woutercouvaras @KalamazooGrills It was!

[Jean Pierre Kloppers @jpkloppers]

Here's a video of my first attempt to do a 20kg lamb on @KalamazooGrills rotisserie grill https://t.co/Hog1JqyDr5

[Jean Pierre Kloppers @jpkloppers]

@shawaj2 - when is your company going to deliver the @NebraLtd miners I bought 2 years ago?

[Jean Pierre Kloppers @jpkloppers]

@tedaomori Do not promote this company. They don't deliver. I ordered 2 years ago and am still waiting.

[Jean Pierre Kloppers @jpkloppers]

@Mdevo18 @NebraLtd I'm in the same boat. They'll an unscrupulous company. Consumers need to be warned to never deal with them.

[Jean Pierre Kloppers @jpkloppers]

Forced to use my debit card, and so miss out on the avois points which is the only reason I got the CC in the first place.

[Jean Pierre Kloppers @jpkloppers]

I have spent more time on the phone to @Barclays on the last few months than many years of @MetroBank_Help . People are lovely, but the Barclays system is rubbish. Too many issues to mention

[Jean Pierre Kloppers @jpkloppers]

I went into the branch twice today to unblock my brand new @Barclaycard premier avios card. Staff are wonderful, but the overactive fraud team keep blocking every transaction. I've just been blocked again for THIRD time today!!!

[Jean Pierre Kloppers @jpkloppers]

@Jabradshaw Wow, love it

[Jean Pierre Kloppers @jpkloppers]

Great video about the death of Luna and lessons that can be learned. https://t.co/P0ctVjEDnx via @YouTube

[Nick Kapur @nick_kapur]

In Shanghai, people started opening their windows and singing to protest the draconian lockdown, so the govt. sent drones to scold them:

"Strictly abide by the restrictions. Control your soul's desire for freedom. Do not open your window and sing."

[Jean Pierre Kloppers @jpkloppers]

@Jabradshaw Incredible