It’s possible to run the big Deepseek model locally for around $15k, not $100k. People have done it with 2x M4 Ultras, or the equivalent.
Though I don’t think it’s a good use of money personally, because the requirements are dropping all the time. We’re starting to see some very promising small models that use a fraction of those resources.
So long as there are big players releasing open weights models, which is true for the foreseeable future, I don’t think this is a big problem. Once those weights are released, they’re free forever, and anyone can fine-tune based on them, or use them to bootstrap new models by distillation or synthetic RL data generation.
The strangest twist to this is that Deepseek itself seems to be the only company not trying to cash in on the Deepseek frenzy:
Liang [Deepseek’s founder] has shown little intention to capitalise on DeepSeek’s sudden fame to further commercialise its technology in the near term. The company is instead focusing the majority of its resources on model development…
These people added the independently wealthy founder has also declined to entertain interest from China’s tech giants as well as venture and state-backed funds to invest in the group for the time being. Many have found it difficult to even arrange a meeting with the secluded founder.
“We pulled top-level government connections and only got to sit down with someone from their finance department, who said ‘sorry we are not raising’,” said one investor at a multibillion-dollar Chinese tech fund.
Maybe, maybe not – but I’m discounting anything the UK government says on Internet-related issues, so long as they’re trying to insert encryption backdoors into everything. For all we know, this is just an attempt to blackmail Apple and Google over the encryption thing.
This headline has the structure of the famous Simpsons joke.
Cyan (Myst, Riven)
Homer: that’s good.
to lay off
Homer: that’s bad.
12 people
Homer: that’s good.
“roughly half of team”
Homer: ??
Narrator: that’s bad.