Surgeon's Record February 4, 2025
Outsider threats to an entrenched industry
Last week, the artificial intelligence community was rocked by the sudden rise of DeepSeek, a scrappy Chinese upstart that seemingly came out of nowhere. Promising ChatGPT (or Claude/Gemini/Grok/Llama—pick your favorite LLM) level performance at a fraction of the cost, compute power, and energy consumption, DeepSeek’s R1 model quickly became the talk of tech circles.
Deep-pocketed American tech giants, long engaged in an expensive, resource-hungry AI arms race, saw their stocks sink and their methodologies questioned. Reactions varied, from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella pulling out Jevons’ Paradox to Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg promising to stick to his playbook of “borrowing” from the competition. Public bravado aside, the tech industry was clearly put...
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