DeepSeek is making everyone look silly, except Apple

It is time once again to see how things are going on the good ship Artificial Intelligence, sailing merrily through the seas of current technology.

Sorry?

Look, the Macalope just writes about tech, he doesn’t get to decide what’s currently hot. Clearly. Or we’d all be talking about the cool new small phones we have.

At any rate, no need to worry. It is smooth sailing for our glorious leaders in AI. Everyone loves the product, venture capital funding keeps rolling in and the moats are dee-

“iPhone users turn on to DeepSeek AI”

That sound you heard early Monday morning was not the earthquake in Boston but rather the sound of AI stocks crashing to the ground after the Chinese app DeepSeek was unveiled.

By the way, stay in your lane, Boston. Don’t try to steal our beloved West Coast institutions like earthquake anxiety. Very rude. It’s not like you see us running around inventing new chowders.

The reason for the anxiety over DeepSeek is that apparently, the Chinese developers have found a way to engineer an AI that uses a fraction of the processing power and money while still delivering the same laughably incorrect answers as competing models from Google, Microsoft, and ChatGPT.

In addition to shares of AI companies sliding, Nvidia’s shares also tumbled on the fear that it would not be able to personally thaw the ice caps.

The Chinese AI startup behind the model was founded by hedge fund manager Liang Wenfeng, who claims they used just 2,048 Nvidia H800s and $5.6 million to train R1 with 671 billion parameters, a fraction of what OpenAI and Google spent to train comparably sized models.

Oops. The Macalope supposes they do not get the rarified water that we have here in the good ol’ you ess of ay that causes the brains of venture capitalists to soften to the point where they shoot money out of a t-shirt canon at anything their buddy Pete told them to aim at.

The lack of a moat around these companies was already predicted by lots of people, as early as 2023. Now it’s starting to look like maybe there wasn’t even a wall.

(Tell the Macalope again how Apple is the one behind it and was foolish not to invest huge bucks in this.)

Part of the problem is that these AIs are learning from each other. When you spend billions and melt Antarctica to come up with a chatty way to deliver a bunch of admittedly useful code suggestions (which you stole from some poor schlub on the internet) and great recipes for rock pizza because your AI can’t interpret sarcasm, someone else is going to spend just millions to lift that from you. Again, that would be really sad except you scraped content that you didn’t license and laughed off the copyright concerns of the people you stole it from. Sucks to be you.

This all, of course, comes after (during?) the whole TikTok debacle which raises the question of whether or not we’ll have to deal with more rigamarole. Presumably, the current president will suggest a ban of or tariffs on or forced deportation of DeepSeek and then the subsequent Hunter Biden administration will enact that ban only to have the Baron Trump administration grandiosely (and possibly illegally) rescind the ban.

Meanwhile, the rest of us will be ankle-deep in water and will have forgotten what eggs taste like.

If you’re not in the U.S., then it’s merely a choice between whether or not an American company will have your queries or a Chinese company will. Pick your poison.

The Macalope knows he just wrote a column two weeks ago in which he tried to show his views of AI are more nuanced than you’d think, but while the technology has some very good applications, the companies and business models that surround it can go suck those rocks they tell us to put on our pizzas.

The one and only piece of evidence you need for this is OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s recent redefinition of “artificial general intelligence”. According to the leading company in AI (at least as of the close of business last Friday), it’s not about the specific capabilities of the system. No, it’s about being able to put enough regular people out of work in order to generate $100 billion in profit.

AI could be a great technology. It’s too bad it’s currently in the hands of a bunch of sentient popped Izod collars. If DeepSeek is here to take some of the air out of their proverbial tires, the Macalope is popping corn, not collars.