metalspot

OpenAI/Anthropic's purchase obligations don't matter. They are made to companies with plenty of cash, real assets, and other revenue streams. The only thing that happens is that AMZN, MSFT, GOOG squeeze out some upstart rivals and stay on top.

All of the compute being built will be consumed very profitably, that profit just won't be captured by delusional weirdos who believe they can build an AI god because machine elves showed them the future in a DMT trip at a poly sexy orgy, or whatever the case may be.

Sounds like the dead ANT faction with their monopoly wrapped in sanctimony schemes wants to throw shade on the smartest guy in the room, as if Trump or anyone around him is going to believe anything that comes out of the NY Times anyway. I wouldn't expect these people to lose gracefully but this is just pathetic.

> Things look about as good as they ever will

Anthropic looks like Wylie Coyote spinning their legs in open air at the moment. They are fucked from so many angles it is hard to comprehend how anyone would buy their bags.

Simple question: What is their IP? What are you actually buying? They didn't invent anything. They have no IP. They copied other people's IP and did a mediocre job of it.

There are a half dozen Chinese companies who can build the same thing, better, for a tenth of the price, and will give it away just to fuck with the US. If you are buying Anthropic you are buying a ticket to a hurt box where you are going to get relentlessly pummeled from all sides until your capital turns to ash.

On top of all this, the company is run by an incompetent psychopath and a bunch of dumb cultists, who are blacklisted by the US Military, and have at least another 2 years of the current admin doing everything possible to cripple their company.

What is the story for how you succeed in the most important strategic technology of all time when you are blacklisted by your government's military? There is no story because you simply don't exist in that scenario.

But they were right? For good or ill data and digital services are more valuable and just as ubiquitous as oil.

this is really basic stuff. it isn't even legal rules it is the rules of grammar. there is no ambiguity at all. "DeepSeek" in this context can only mean one thing, and anyone arguing differently is basically arguing that 2+2=3. it is either ignorance or FUD.

No, it is being interpreted that way by people who either don't understand basic legal writing and the legal standards for an order of this nature, or by people [who] are purposefully FUD'ing in order to take advantage of that lack of specialist knowledge.

"DeepSeek implementation" in this context means a third-party product that uses a DeepSeek product, e.g. the DeepSeek API. This does not apply to open data running on a non-affiliated third-party inference provider.

It is absolutely clear and unambiguous. "DeekSeek" can only mean the corporate entity "Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Co., Ltd (DeepSeek)" and so there is no doubt at all about what an "implementation" means in this context.

An implementation must be a third party product that is using a product provided by the DeepSeek corporate entity.

No, that isn't going to happen. The US can't afford to lose the AI race and US companies that can't compete will get thrown under the bus and replaced with those that can.

The DHS order only bans buying DeepSeek products directly (e.g. doing inference on their China hosted servers). It does not apply to open weights at all. And DeepSeek just gave their response to the DHS order.

The legal language is important here. In this context "DeepSeek" is referring back to the corporate entity "Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Co., Ltd (DeepSeek)" and from a legal document interpretation perspective this is not disputable at all. So an "implementation" of DeepSeek must mean a third party product that uses a DeepSeek product.

If you read the justifications for the order, there are zero mentions of open weights data or associated risks, and everything focuses on the use of DeepSeek commercial products with regards to their being hosted in China. The only mention that maybe could apply is "The models themselves may contain malware or other security vulnerabilities." but this is followed with another reference to a DeepSeek commercial product: "Indeed, open-source security research has found that the DeepSeek iOS mobile application contains multiple critical vulnerabilities."

The findings that form the basis of the order make no claims or references to open weights data at all, and plainly focus entirely on DeepSeek commercial products, so any attempt to apply the order to open weights data used by non-DeepSeek affiliated inference providers has not basis at all.

The order is limited to DeepSeek as a corporate entity and "implementations" means third party software that purchases and uses products directly from DeepSeek.

> For purposes of this Order, an individual or business is an "affiliated entity" or "affiliate" of DeepSeek AG if, directly or indirectly, either one controls or can control the other; or a third party controls or can control both.

This does not apply to open model weights, which are not a product or service, and does not apply to independent hosts of model weights if they have no affiliation with DeepSeek as defined.

There is either no correlation or a negative correlation between product utility for price and Enterprise and Government purchasing decisions so OpenAI and Anthropic should do just fine.

They made very bad bets on scaling, which has cost ~10B scale in wasted capital allocation, but it is manageable. Their purchase commitments for future compute capacity are absurd nonsense, but all of that is just shtick for retail investors, and they will reshuffle the deck as needed to adjust.

I spend a lot of time using deepseek, and by extension providing them with highly valuable training data, specifically because I want to have Chinese competitors to the US labs. As long as they continue to release the weights this is a very good deal and for the benefit of the entire world, including the US Government. The monopolization of AI by any one country or company is the most dangerous outcome possible and insuring that this technology is distributed as broadly as possible is the most effective method of preventing that. Since US companies operate in oligopolistic cartels and engage in many dubiously legal practices to suppress competition it is impossible to build real competitors in the US and Anglosphere, so the necessary competitive forces to create a functioning market can only exist at a multi-national level with countries like China and India providing the scale, resources, and geopolitical positioning to develop true competitors.

law moves much slower and is much less complex than code. it isn't like computer code though. the interpretations and rulings are mostly fugazi to justify power relations and corruption, so I doubt that an LLM can grok law the way it can computer code, because if you think that logic and precedent actually matter, you are missing the point.

most law firms are basically assembly line processes that have one fixed specialty, with a small set of claims that they will file, and typically targeted at insurance companies, so there is very little real practice of law. you just set up your assembly line to scam insurance in your particular niche and then search for clients that fit your cut out. LLMs can definitely disrupt this model in interesting ways.

> their current moat is the fact that they're ahead

the problem is that they are not ahead. they are ahead on producing one-shot demos, which are useless party tricks, but when it comes to shipping real products these large models are just a big expensive waste of time and what you need is deterministic systems that integrate small efficient purpose built models in the places where they are actually the best solution for the problem.

the anthropic game plan was to wrap the entire software industry up in a magic box called "AI" and then rule the world but these people are delusional and their house of cards is rapidly collapsing. the technology is real, but they didn't invent it and they don't own it. it is kind of amazing to think of a $2T company with zero IP ... they didn't invent a single thing that they are selling, and for the most part they are implementing it worse, and serving it less efficiently than at least a half-dozen other competitors.