Roger McNamee: Andreessen and Schumer call Deepseek a "Sputnik moment." We would be smarter to view it as a lucky break.

[Dennis Donovan]

‪Roger McNamee‬ ‪
@moonalice.com‬
19m
🧵about Deepseek 1/6

Andreessen and Schumer call Deepseek a “Sputnik moment.”

We would be smarter to view it as a lucky break.

OpenAI, Microsoft, Google et al have claimed that AGI is coming soon, that it will be wonderful for humanity, but there is only one way to do it: their way.

‪Roger McNamee‬
‪@moonalice.com‬
19m
🧵 about Deepseek 2/6

Their way may cost about $1 Trillion. The energy load is distorting the power grid and accelerating climate change. Their way uses huge amounts of drinking water. It steals copyrights and private information. It will eliminate millions of creative jobs.

AGI makes that okay.

‪Roger McNamee‬
‪@moonalice.com‬
19m
🧵 about Deepseek 3/6

Altman et al have persuaded politicians and CEOs that LLMs are The Big Thing and the US must get there first. They say the only way to get to AGI is their way.

Deepseek just introduced a product with similar functionality that used a tiny fraction of the resources.

Oops.

‪Roger McNamee‬ ‪
@moonalice.com‬
19m
🧵 about Deepseek 4/6

Walk Street freaked out …

LLMs do some interesting things today, but there is no evidence that applying statistics to historical data will ever get you to anything that approximates intelligence.

If that goal is unlikely, how do you justify investing $1 trillion?

‪Roger McNamee‬ ‪
@moonalice.com‬
19m
🧵 about Deepseek 5/

Industry has already invested $250B, much of which could suffer instant depreciation if Deepseek is real.

But if we are smart, we will study Deepseek and see how to get where OpenAI, Google et al are now for a lot less capital, energy, water.

It could be a lucky break.

Roger McNamee
‪@moonalice.com‬
🧵 about Deepseek 6/6

My bet is we will screw it up.

OpenAI, MSFT, GOOG et al like “their way” because it limits competition.

Trump and Schumer listen to Big Tech and can be persuaded by the testosterone-heavy messaging.

But that may not be in the best interests of the US or humanity.

/end
January 28, 2025 at 12:21 PM

https://bsky.app/profile/moonalice.com/post/3lgsxpizsp22y

[Whyisthisstillclose]

1. Change the last line to

"WILL not be in the best interests of the US or humanity"

[Ligyron]

2. A potential economic advisor told me

That utilities are the smart investment because AI will consume enormous quantities of electricity.

I thanked him and went to go home and laugh but he may have something there, idk.

[Johonny]

4. These companies were hurt yesterday

But maybe prone for a rebound.

[Happy Hoosier]

3. DeepSeek is interesting, but nots a game-changer technology-wise

It's value is in "distilling" a model from its larger, more capable counterparts. It's not a full capability model. It trains using the larger models and distills those models down to a subset which gets you MOST of the performance at a much lower cost of entry,

If ChatGPT is the Mercedes of GenAI, DeepSeek is the Volkswagen. Or as I suggested in another place earlier, DeepSeek is Temu ChatGPT. In a large number of use cases, the Volkswagen will work just fine.

DeepSeek will be more likely to hallucinate, or just be plain ole wrong.

[delisen]

5. I can afford the Volkswagen. nt