It's probably just shifted the goalposts a bit. Investors bet on large short-term profits in the building out of compute capacity for known players with clear commercial models. DeepSeek has introduced uncertainty in costing, pricing, and availability, which has to be resolved to reassure markets.
It's only uncertainty if you ignore how costs around development of a technology almost always drop over time. If it was a 'shifting of the goalposts,' then it was a very predictable shift.
It's all about timings, but that's often a big part of any investment decisions. AI improvement is happening at a rate that's unprecedented for such large systems though, so the question of whether you can extract as much value from deploying now as you'll save by waiting is particularly fuzzy.
When it comes to timings, good luck predicting when, or even where, the next development will come. It's worth considering that most of the major advances in programming over the decades haven't come from large corporations, but from "the wild," the massive international community of programmers.
There's a reason the Zuckerberg's and Musk's are prepared to saddle up with whatever politician necessary - the big bet is now in who gets to shape that regulation, and nobody has a more vested interest in that than the biggest data thieves in the West.
The bets will be on how much data big corporations are allowed to exploit.
The likes of Meta and X will push for minimal regulation, to keep up with China. This would involve effectively ending personal rights over anything digital - even your own face in a selfie is theirs to exploit.
How the US pretends to compete with a society obsessed with math, tech and progress is the icing on the dumb ego cake that is white men terror. They're small children. Ignorant. Overvalued. Due for ass whooping.
DeepSeek's budget was less than your average Silicon Valley weekend retreat. The tech sector doesn't have any more miracles to sell now that semi conductors approach their physical limitiations. So, they resort to chicanery to keep their inflated valuations.
Betting on the wrong horse is the reason for a free market to quickly sort it out. In the case of AI, billionaires put their thumb on competition. They invested billions to keep an advantage and used Trump to close it off by backing a winner. While this gamesmanship was going on China went ahead.
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What is it that all these arseholes want "AI" to take over?
The conversation will likely shift to regulation in the years ahead, around the use of AI and the broader use of digital data.
We're in the bit where AI shifts to a more political discussion. That'll mean data policy in manifestos going forward.
The likes of Meta and X will push for minimal regulation, to keep up with China. This would involve effectively ending personal rights over anything digital - even your own face in a selfie is theirs to exploit.