Jan 25, 2025 · 2h 20m · tbpn
DeepSeek, Stargate Update, Bees Do Enjoy Honey, Golden Retriever Maxxing, Bring on the Trilly
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In this episode of Technology Brothers, co-hosts John Coogan and Jordi Hays analyze the technical, geopolitical, and economic disruption of China's DeepSeek AI models while evaluating megascale compute infrastructure, autonomous software agents, and shifting startup trends.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. The hosts hold 99.8% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
The hosts as informed peer 6.4 Guest teaching 2.1 Guest disagreement 1.8 The hosts pushing back 2.0
speaking balance: gold is the hosts, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 48:05 Clash over DeepSeek threat classification
Hays insists DeepSeek poses a severe CCP threat comparable to TikTok, while Coogan challenges this by arguing that locally hosted open-source weights cannot phone home.
Hardest push from the hosts ▶ 45:50 Pushback on DeepSeek cost faking claimsCoogan refuses the premise that DeepSeek pricing is purely predatory dumping, explaining that genuine algorithmic compression makes local inference legitimately cheaper.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 1:34:24 The listener-enforced honey correctionCoogan opens the segment by formally retracting his prior claim that bees do not eat honey after listeners corrected him that hives starve if too much honey is removed.
The host holds their own ▶ 1:19:20 Mastery of Stargate's TCO accountingCoogan demonstrates deep domain expertise by deconstructing OpenAI's $500B figure as multi-year Total Cost of Ownership rather than liquid capital.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | The hosts as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | The hosts pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SemiAnalysis Breakdown: OpenAI, Meta, and DeepSeek's Technical Moats | 7 | 2 | 1 | 2 | John Coogan and Jordi Hays break down Dylan Patel's SemiAnalysis report, diving deeply into GPU cluster economics, multi-head latent attention, and inference margins. The dialogue is collaborative and peer-to-peer with high shared technical literacy. | |
| DeepSeek's Origins: Liang Wenfeng, High-Flyer Quant, and State Subsidies | 7 | 2 | 2 | 2 | Coogan and Hays explore Liang Wenfeng's background at High-Flyer Quant, dissecting how Chinese provincial state subsidies and power incentives obscure the actual training cost. The hosts trade detailed commentary on foreign venture models and energy infrastructure. | |
| The DeepSeek R1 Fallout: Open Source vs. Economic Warfare Debate | 6 | 3 | 3 | 3 | The hosts engage in a friendly back-and-forth debating Marc Andreessen's praise versus Vinod Khosla's condemnation of DeepSeek R1. Coogan pushes back on treating open-source model weights as an active malware threat while acknowledging the economic dumping risks. | |
| Chip Export Controls, Smuggling Realities, and xAI's Memphis Supercluster | 7 | 2 | 2 | 2 | The conversation covers the mechanics of GPU export restrictions, illicit intermediary routing, and xAI's Colossus cluster in Memphis. Both hosts display command of data center power requirements and megawatt scaling constraints. | |
| Project Stargate Deconstructed: OpenAI's $500B Abilene Mega-Campus | 8 | 2 | 1 | 2 | Coogan details the financial engineering and physical campus layout of Project Stargate in Abilene, Texas, referencing Crusoe, Lancium, and Oracle. He parses out the difference between Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and liquid capital commitments. | |
| The Great Bee Correction and Chinese Tech Conglomerates vs. US Antitrust | 6 | 4 | 2 | 2 | Coogan admits his previous mistake regarding bee nutrition before transitioning to discuss how Chinese tech conglomerates expand across adjacent hardware categories unimpeded by FTC-style antitrust enforcement. | |
| Daily Health Hacks, AI Sales Spam Evolution, and Stargate Governance Inquiries | 5 | 1 | 1 | 1 | The hosts review audience questions and social media takes concerning AI SDR outreach spam and Bill Gurley's inquiries regarding Stargate's legal governance structure. | |
| Trump's Crypto Executive Order and the Elusive Future of Web3 Gaming | 6 | 2 | 2 | 2 | The hosts examine the Trump crypto executive order, discussing tokenization of real-world assets and why Web3 gaming studios struggled against incumbent publishers like Valve and Epic. | |
| e/acc Reality Check, Luxury Vintage Cars, and Corporate PR Blunders | 6 | 1 | 2 | 2 | The hosts critique online e/acc discourse, evaluate bespoke vintage sports cars, and dissect the public relations missteps of Bank of America's debanking response. |
Statements from this episode (35)
Hays: DeepSeek is China's Next Subsidized Tech Trojan Horse Like TikTok
“I'll go out on a limb to say this is China's next attempt at a DJI TikTok type. Product where, hey, let's basically sell this product in America for way less than it costs. Give it away for free. Try to get a bunch of important, you know, companies using it or…”
Hays: ChatGPT leads consumer AI through mindshare and search-like utility
“The reason that ChatGPT has stayed very dominant from a user standpoint is because they have the consumer mindshare. The average person is not like prompt engineering. They don't care about the context window. They're just almost using it like a Google that ca…”
Coogan: DeepSeek-V2 matched near-GPT-4 performance with one-twentieth the FLOPs
“DeepSeq V-II training required one-twentieth as much energy, essentially, one-twentieth the flops of GPT-IV, while not being far off in performance.”
Coogan: Most future consumer AI usage will occur through existing platforms
“Most future consumer LLM usage will go through existing platforms, Google, Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook, iPhone, Android.”
Hays: Meta's metaverse budget could have launched a Starlink competitor
“Meta could have probably almost launched a Starlink competitor with how much they spent on the metaverse.”
Coogan: Meta's AI Deployment Will Likely Hurt Google Search More Than Bing
“And so Meta's deployment probably hurts Google search more than Bing or perplexity ever will. Because people will just wind up searching in Facebook and Instagram.”
Coogan: Microsoft Has the Least Custom AI Silicon Deployed in Cloud
“Microsoft has the least custom AI Silicon deployed to their cloud, but they're working on it.”
Coogan: Risk-Reward Payoff Heavily Favors AI Overinvestment for Big Tech
“If you under invest and AI is real, you're screwed. If you overinvest and AI is real, you're great. If you overinvest and AI isn't real, you still have a lot of assets. It's still valuable. Like there was a lot of dark fiber that wound up getting used later on…”
Coogan: DeepSeek Founder Liang Wenfeng Is the Next Frank Wang
“This guy is he's the next Frank Wang.”
Coogan: High-Flyer Quant Stockpiled 10,000 Nvidia GPUs Before US Bans
“High Flyer Quant managed to buy more than 10,000 NVIDIA graphics processing units before the U.S. Government imposed the chip bans, according to a local media outlet.”
Coogan: 77% of Chinese Expect AI Job Growth vs 36% in US
“The 70, 77% of Chinese agreeing with the statement, AI will lead to many new jobs created in my country, contrasts pretty, pretty dramatically with America's 36%.”
Coogan: Alibaba Offloaded Warehouse Costs to Chinese Regional Governments
“Alibaba was able to get regional governments to absorb warehouse construction costs on their balance sheets rather than directly pay for it, and looked extremely asset light and software-y when it went public.”
Coogan: DeepSeek's training data relies heavily on OpenAI's GPT-4 API
“I think the training data, a lot of it is synthetic data that's been pulled from the GPT-IV API.”
Coogan: DeepSeek develops talent internally without US-trained PhDs
“They are largely developing their own talent. They're not relying on US trained PhDs.”
Coogan: DeepSeek Open Sourcing Leading-Edge Model Will Disrupt AI Competition
“Zuck has been running this playbook with Llama open sourcing the lagging edge AI model, and it's had a strong effect on the competition. And so deep seek open sourcing, the leading edge model is going to have a similar effect.”
Hays: Any Important Chinese Tech Company Defaults to CCP Front
“The main thing from my point of view is China has repeatedly shown that they're willing to lie, they're willing to sell things for less than they cost to make in order to get an edge in the U.S. Market, and I do think this is, again, the default state of any i…”
Coogan: Self-Hosting DeepSeek Carries Far Less Security Risk Than TikTok
“I just, this is a different scenario because if you just download the Git repo for deep seek and you host it on Amazon or, you know, Google cloud or whatever, like there's no data feeding back. Like you're not helping them improve the model at all. Like that's…”
Coogan: Meta's Llama is the most-used LLM due to Instagram integration
“They're, because Llama is the number one LLM, not because people are hosting it independently. Although they are, plenty of companies are hosting Llama independently. They're the number one used LLM Because it's tucked into Instagram, and so they just have a t…”
Hays: Sam Altman was right that OpenAI could not compete as a nonprofit
“It really, it does seem that he was correct in believing that you weren't going to be able to raise enough money via nonprofit structure to compete.”
Coogan: China is building domestic equivalents to TSMC, Nvidia, and ASML
“China is actively working to catch up in chip fabrication with SMIC and SME. So they have their own TSMC, they have their own NVIDIA, and they have their own ASML.”
Hays: Elon Musk's infrastructure track record makes xAI a standout
“The reason to be extra bullish on XAI is that Elon is the only founder mode model, you know, CEO. I don't know if he's actually CEO or, but whatever chairman, at least who has done large scale infrastructure projects over and over and over the factories at Tes…”
Coogan: CoreWeave operates 200,000 GPUs with billions in revenue
“CoreWeave has 200,000 GPUs, billions in revenue, and they convert, they're converting old crypto data centers, and then hooking into on-site gas plants”
Coogan: Stargate $500B figure represents total cost of ownership not upfront capex
“We believe this project is being measured on the total cost of ownership, not capital expenditures, i.e. The one hundred billion and the five hundred billion is TCO, which includes the capital expenditures for data centers, servers, Networking costs, power cos…”
Hays: Nvidia captures over 100% of all AI industry profits
“Nvidia is the real winner here. You've said it before, they have more than a hundred percent of all the profits in AI right now.”
Coogan: Stargate joint venture is incrementally negative for Microsoft long-term
“Microsoft is the biggest loser. Microsoft is largely left on the sidelines as OpenAI utilizes another infrastructure partner. As such, and Adele stated, all I know is I'm good for my eighty billion. Microsoft's recent blog post stated the facts of the partners…”
Coogan: SoftBank will likely sell part of Arm stake to fund Stargate
“SoftBank will likely have to sell off a chunk of its stake in the company to fund Stargate. We think investors are largely missing this point and mistakenly view this announcement as materially incrementally good news.”
Coogan: OpenAI Will Run Its Own Cluster Management Software for Stargate
“OpenAI will main control of operations and run almost all of its own cluster management software.”
Coogan: First $100 Billion of Project Stargate Goes to Texas
“We know the first hundred billion will be spent in Abilene, and that there will be more campuses developed for the remaining four hundred billion.”
Coogan: Stargate Campuses Will Be Built for Distributed AI Training
“Even more impressive, all these data center campuses will be, will continue to be built out with the aim of distributed training.”
Hays: US will get smoked by China on drone manufacturing volume
“In a. Near peer conflict. If drones actually are an important aspect, you know, player in that, we will not be able to compete purely on an output basis. So even if we were to have a better product, say Andrel has a better product than DJI, it just purely on a…”
Hays: AI sales tools will crash cold email value and elevate relationship selling
“So relationships seem, the value of relationships seems to be accelerating the value of a cold email is going to decline, you know, pretty dramatically.”
Coogan: Major Game Studios Have Zero Incentive to Adopt Crypto
“There was always just this big problem with like the crypto stuff like sounded good, but there was very little reason for a game company like Valve or Electronic Arts to say like, yeah, sure. You can take your assets out of our beautiful ecosystem that we taxe…”
Hays: Users will interact solely with preferred AI models to orchestrate others
“Eventually you will be able to use a model to use another model. So your, that your preferred model, if you want to do something with another model, but you say, Hey go find the best model to do this task or like create this type of content and it'll just do i…”
Hays: One-Person AI Rollup Lacks Edge Over Private Equity
“I would find it hard pressed to invest in the founder, unless it was like a personal relationship, because I don't know that you're going to have any edge over the many other Private equity firms that will all presumably follow the same strategy, right?”