#deepseek

So on the 27th DeepSeek R1 dropped (a chinese version of ChatGPT that is open source, free and beats GPT's 200 dollar subscription, using less resources and less money) and the tech market just had a loss of $1,2 Trillion.

Source

Courtesy of an awesome friend of mine, here's some nice reassurance that no, AI isn't going to actually replace basically anyone or take over the world anytime soon.

Specifically, it's a web page that currently displays nine different world clocks live, according to nine leading AI models.

And they're horribly, horribly wrong.

AI programs currently featured at the link:

GPT-3.5

GPT-4o

GPT-5

Haiku 3.5

Gemini 2.5

Deepseek v3.1

Grok 4

Qwen 2.5

Kimi K2

Only two out of these nine clocks are correct as I'm writing this (interestingly, it's DeepSeek and Kimi - both Chinese models - that are the only ones that are roughly correct), though you can't read for precision time.

Also, six out of the nine are literally not readable clocks (the excepts are those two, plus GPT-5). And in several cases, not clocks at all.

Personally I'm also bookmarking this and keeping it on hand for when I need to show people not to trust AI, because it's hard to reliably use an exploit, especially now that they keep patching the models.

And you know if you say "look how terrible and wrong this always is" and then it's right, you've kinda lost your audience there permanently rip.

US wants to build an AI advantage over China, uses their part in the chip supply chain to cut off China from the high-end chip market.

China's chip manufacturing is famously a decade behind, so they can't advance, right?

They did see it as a problem, but what they then did is get a bunch of Computer Scientists and Junior Programmers fresh out of college and funded their research in DeepSeek. Instead of trying to improve output by buying thousands of Nvidia graphics cards, they tried to build a different kind of model, that allowed them to do what OpenAI does at a tenth of the cost.

Them being young and at a Hedgefund AI research branch and not at established Chinese techgiants seems to be important because chinese corporate culture is apparently full of internal sabotage, so newbies fresh from college being told they have to solve the hardest problems in computing was way more efficient than what usually is done. The result:

American AIs are shook. Nvidia, the only company who actually is making profit cause they are supplying hardware, took a hit. This is just the market being stupid, Nvidia also sells to China. And the worst part for OpenAI. DeepSeek is Open Source.

Anybody can implement deepseek's model, provided they have the hardware. They are totally independent from DeepSeek, as you can run it from your own network. I think you will soon have many more AI companies sprouting out of the ground using this as its base.

What does this mean? AI still costs too much energy to be worth using. The head of the project says so much himself: "there is no commercial use, this is research."

What this does mean is that OpenAI's position is severely challenged: there will soon be a lot more competitors using the DeepSeek model, more people can improve the code, OpenAI will have to ask for much lower prices if it eventually does want to make a profit because a 10 times more efficient opensource rival of equal capability is there.

And with OpenAI or anybody else having lost the ability to get the monopoly on the "market" (if you didn't know, no AI company has ever made a single cent in profit, they all are begging for investment), they probably won't be so attractive for investors anymore. There is a cheaper and equally good alternative now.

AI is still bad for the environment. Dumb companies will still want to push AI on everything. Lazy hacks trying to push AI art and writing to replace real artists will still be around and AI slop will not go away. But one of the main drivers of the AI boom is going to be severely compromised because there is a competitor who isn't in it for immediate commercialization. Instead you will have a more decentralized open source AI field.

Or in short:

"This could be an extinction-level event for venture capital firms that went all-in on foundational model companies. Particularly if those companies haven't yet productized with wide distribution."

I always appreciate when the capitalist class just says it out loud so I don't have to be called a conspiracy theorist for pointing out the obvious.