The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 46 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Kedrosky: Minimal model differentiation will crush AI investment returns
“The convergence means that the model differences while there are so minimal as I can't tell the difference in the kind of Pepsi Coke phenomenon, which again, to cut to the investment chase suggests that the competition then becomes much more about marketing ex…”
Amodei: Open-source is a red herring; DeepSeek's open status didn't matter
“I've actually always seen it as a red herring. When I see it, when I see a new model come out, I don't care whether it's open source or not. Like if we talk about Deep Seek, I don't think it mattered that Deep Seek is open source. I think I ask, is it a good m…”
Enjeti: DeepSeek Model Cost Over $1 Billion to Train
“This idea that it's six million dollars or whatever to run is ludicrous. It obviously cost over a billion dollars to train the model before it eventually got to the point where it could run off of that six million.”
Kantrowitz: Open-source models are poised to surpass proprietary AI labs
“It put the whole proprietary model industry, the OpenAI's and the anthropics of the world On their back feet, understanding that they are about to be passed by open source, and they have to embrace it.”
Ranjan Roy: DeepSeek and Chinese models are now in almost every agent conversation
“The conversation around moving towards deep seek and adding it into your agentic process or adding Chinese models did not exist in any conversation I was in 12 months ago and now is in almost every conversation, at least as an option, because cost has become s…”
DeepSeek's Enterprise Growth Spike Unlikely To Withstand Rival Price Cuts
“Only about .4% of businesses are using it. Again, that's up from .1. So, Forex increase, but it's extremely small, and I think it's not going to be very durable, given that OpenAI and Anthropic are well positioned to respond to that with some price cuts.”
Mensch: DeepSeek built on Mistral's open-source MoE architecture
“Like we released the first
Sparse mixture of experts back at the beginning of 2024, and they built on top, and they released deep seek free, and deep seek was built on top of that. Well, it was, it's the same architecture, and we released, like, everything tha…”
Altman: Google's Gemini 3 Exposed OpenAI Weaknesses But Failed to Hinder Growth
“Gemini three has not, or at least has not so far had the impact we were worried it might, but it did in the same way that deep seek did identify some weaknesses in our product offering and strategy.”
Costica: DeepSeek's database leak was a typical cloud exposure, not an exotic exploit
“It was a very, ah, what I would say, typical exposure that exposed a lot of sensitive data, but yet, ah, if we look historically, there were similar incidents, for instance, with Microsoft releasing a token that had access to sensitive data in, you know, a buc…”
Lebaredian: DeepSeek efficiency gains fit NVIDIA's decade-long progress curve
“So what we've seen here with DeepSeq is, is a great advancement that's on that same curve that we've been on for a decade now.”
Hoffman: China will produce multiple strong contenders in global AI
“China and multiple companies within it, because, you know, I haven't evaluated yet. Minimax, which also just came out recently, but will have a number of very strong contenders for this in the world technology landscape.”
DeepSeek used model distillation to match OpenAI's o1 at lower cost
“And, you know, they've just used the process of distillation to, you know, effectively bring those bigger versions of the sort of state-of-the-art models and distill them down into you know, smaller models, which eventually led to this R-one, you know, the equ…”
U.S. chip restrictions forced Chinese AI innovation through compute scarcity
“The constraints that were put in place by the US because of the, you know, everything going on with chip constraints and sort of forcing AI companies not to export to China you know, led to sort of this very interesting cauldron that I think could only happen …”
Demis Hassabis says Western frontier AI models remain ahead of China
“It's for sure, it's impressive what they've been able to do. And you know, I think that's something we're going to have to think about how to keep the western frontier models in, in the lead. I think they still are at the moment, but you know, for sure China's…”
Wang: China's DeepSeek produced the first replication of OpenAI's o1 model
“OpenAI released O-one and released the O-one preview a number of months ago... Yeah, this is OpenAI's advanced reasoning model, which is great at sort of scientific reasoning and mathematical reasoning and reasoning and code, et cetera. And the very first repl…”
Shao: Compute Limits Force Chinese AI Labs Into Distinct Specializations
“What you've seen is a lot of these tiny labs faced with compute constraint and in some ways capital constraint, they're forcing them to specialize rather than compete across every dimension. So, you know, for the sake of, you know, deep seek, it's really, real…”
Shao: Huawei and DeepSeek Are Collaborating Closely on Hardware Optimization
“Huawei is working very closely with deep seek on how to optimize hardware and software and try to figure out this.”
Shao: Quant Hedge Fund Backing Allows DeepSeek to Ignore Immediate Profits
“On the China side, deep seeks people have talked about how they are not revenue driven. So whatever money they, sorry, they're not profit driven. So whatever revenue they make, they want to put that money into R&D, given that they have the quant fund kind of l…”
Shao: DeepSeek Lacks Capital Constraints and Pressure to Commercialize
“The fact that they don't actually have that much pressure to commercialize because they have enough money, he says, like, look, we have enough capital, we are not capital constraint compared to maybe other, other labs, and we are really, really focused on just…”
Roy: Due to cost, DeepSeek is discussed in every AI agent conversation
“The conversation around moving towards deep seek and adding it into your agentic process or adding Chinese models did not exist in any conversation I was in 12 months ago and now is in almost every conversation, at least as an option, because cost has become s…”
DeepSeek Is One Of Ramp's Fastest Growing Vendors Despite Low Share
“Last month, DeepSeq was one of the fastest growing vendors on ramp. And yet, it's still a very small share of AI spend that is actually going through those rails.”
Alex Kantrowitz: Governments cannot practically enforce bans on large language models
“They won't be banned. It's impossible. I mean, how can you ban them? Are you going to go and take your, is the government going to go grab your Mac mini out of your office where you've downloaded a version of deep seek and be like, all right, right to the poke…”
Patel: GPT-4-Level Training Costs Have Dropped 10x to 100x
“If you look at what it costs to train GBT for originally, I think it was like 20,008, 100 over the course of a hundred days. So I think it costs on the order of like half a million to a hundred million dollars, somewhere in that range. And I think you could tr…”
Roy: Increased competition will commoditize the AI model layer
“I still believe that overall increased competition will see a commoditization at the model layer.”
Patel: Model inference costs dropped 60x from GPT-4 to DeepSeek-V3
“And likewise, when we look at from GPT-IV to DeepSeq VIII it's fallen roughly 600 X in cost. Right. So we're not quite at that 1200 X, but it has fallen 600 X in cost from 60 dollars to less than you know, to about a dollar. Right. Or to less than a dollar. So…”
Shao: Manus AI agent is not a foundational DeepSeek moment
“I don't think it's a deep seek moment for China. Because I think it did not fundamentally change how we Believe AI is being developed, right? Like in the sense that Deepsea completely challenged the scaling law and what we believed in more capital is better tr…”
Shao: DeepSeek on WeChat was 'game over' for ByteDance's Doubao
“Once Tencent integrated Deepseek into their WeChat product, it was like game over for them.”
Kantrowitz: DeepSeek overnight captured one-third of ChatGPT's daily traffic
“You see last week, so January, 28th, chat GPT at 139.3 web and mobile visits. Deep seek at 49 million. So it cut About, like, further than any other company has been able to cut into the lead of OpenAI, and it had about a third of the traffic that ChatGPT took…”
Meta is better positioned for open-source AI disruption than peers
“Meta's probably in a bit better position than the other ones, just because they, at the end of the day, they do want, like, you know, their whole philosophy is to open source this, not for necessarily altruistic reasons, but because they know that it's histori…”
Shao: DeepSeek and Moonshot Founders Focus on AGI Over Consumer Apps
“I think both, you know, DeepSeek and Kimi, if not seen as kind of the top two labs right now coming out of China, both founders have openly talked a lot about management of people you know, removing distractions, really focused on the pursuit of AGI, not kind …”
Kantrowitz: DeepSeek blocked Tiananmen Square queries until user modifications removed censorship
“What happened when you tried to search for Tiananmen Square in DeepSeek? It was blocked. Now people were able to modify deep seek and, you know, strip that out, but it was only after modification.”
Costica: Almost 10% of organizations adopted DeepSeek within one week
“Within a week, almost 10% of organizations were using DeepSeq.”
Masad: AI Frontier Labs Are Becoming Architecturally More Efficient
“And what we're seeing based on speed and things like that, it's actually probably the models are getting more efficient. I mean, Deep Seek showed that the models are getting more efficient, and if, you know, Deep Seek open source was able to make it, you bette…”
Rice: Every national security expert I know was surprised by DeepSeek
“Every national security expert that I know was surprised by DeepSeek.”
Rice: No AI specialist or computer scientist I know was surprised by DeepSeek
“Not a single, ah, AI specialist, computer scientist that I know, Was surprised by DeepSeek.”
Roy: There will be more breakthroughs like DeepSeek in AI
“There will be more deep seeks. And I think I feel very confident in saying that.”
Kantrowitz: Attention on Meta's Llama has dropped amid DeepSeek's surge
“As deep sea continues to surge, the conversation around Meta's llama models has certainly fallen off in a big way.”
Shao: US LLMs decisively led China until DeepSeek breakthrough
“In terms of frontier models, the U S companies, like you mentioned, the open eyes and the tropics of the world have definitely led China's LLM development by far for a long time until deep sea made a breakthrough.”
Kantrowitz: Nearly 100 Chinese hospitals announce plans to adopt DeepSeek
“Nearly, nearly 100 hospitals around China have announced they will adopt DeepSeq in their operations.”
Kantrowitz: 20 Chinese automakers announce plans to integrate DeepSeek models
“20 Chinese automobile brands have announced plans to embed deep seek models.”
Shao: Tencent was first to integrate DeepSeek into WeChat
“What's interesting is I do want to point out is Tencent actually has not really been leading in their LLM development at all. In fact, they're the only and first one that have actually integrated Deep Seek into their products into their WeChat, which obviously…”
Kantrowitz: China's top 5 smartphone makers adopt DeepSeek in updates
“China's top five smartphone sellers, I think you mentioned this, have all adopted DeepSeek in their system updates.”
Shao: DeepSeek CEO Liang Wenfeng and his team were educated in China
“Liang Wenfeng, the CEO of DeepSeek and his whole team, they're actually educated in China.”
Roy: Displaying AI chain-of-thought reasoning drives user attachment and trust
“Deep Seek brought this to the general population, and it's brilliant because it makes people even more attached to these type of tools. Like, it makes them really think that there's thinking, which makes them more usable.”
Kantrowitz: SimilarWeb Data Shows Gemini at 10.9M and DeepSeek at 16.5M Daily Visits
“Google's Gemini web traffic grew to 10.9 million average daily visits worldwide in March. That's up seven, four, 7.4% month over month, while daily visits to Copilot, that's Microsoft's bot, Increased to 2.4 million, up 2.1% from February. SimilarWeb also says…”