Sabina Hossenfelder on DeepSeek and its implications

4:08: As we discussed previously, some experts including Yann LeCun and Gary Marcus, doubt that Large language models will ever get us to general intelligence, and I agree with them. The market will only react to this once it becomes clear that the existing LLMs can’t be recued with further updates. At that point a lot of money will evaporate like this. But at the moment, the stargate project is just pumping more money into an existing bubble. Building power plants, extending the grid, and improving data infrastructure generally seems like a good idea, and all these are part of the stargate project. 

But to me the Stargate Project is as crazy as if Americans had taken the first semi-conductors and spent $500 billion on factories to produce them, rather than letting markets do their thing and wait for technological developments to make microchips smaller and cheaper. Ie, to wait for them to make economic sense. It’s like the dot-com bubble, except instead of getting free T-shirts from Pets dot com, we get hallucinating chatbots and 17-hour debates about whether sentience can be monetized.

5:17: That said, the arrival of DeepSeek drives home an important message: you can save a lot of money if you let Americans do the heavy lifting and then build on that knowledge. And that goes well with the European approach, which is basically to wait and see what goes wrong in America. I’m not usually a fan of the European risk-aversity. It reminds me of how my younger brother was waiting for me to touch the electric fence. But in this case “wait and see” might indeed work out to our advantage. And if not, we’ll always be here to give Americans lectures about responsibility, sustainability, and how our regulation-heavy bureaucracy prevents us from having fun.