Links for 2025-01-27
A quick note on R1 and today's extremely irrational market behavior:
1. There is no such thing as enough energy, because there is no such thing as enough computing power, because there is no such thing as enough intelligence.
More efficient algorithms do not eliminate the need for expensive development of better processors. No one has stopped building more powerful supercomputers because of hardware optimizations and algorithmic advances. Doing more with less means being able to do even more with more.
The idea that more efficient use of resources makes further growth unnecessary is fundamentally wrong. It is to be expected that such arguments come from green degrowth nutters. But people who trade stocks for a living should really know better.
2. We are now in an arms race with China for dominance of the universe until the end of time. Whoever has more computing power wins. If R1 is as revolutionary as some claim, it will inevitably accelerate innovation and drive substantially higher demand for companies like Nvidia, as computing power becomes an even greater competitive advantage.
3. Although China’s semiconductor industry has made significant strides, it remains years behind Western companies. Just because they can catch up to the latest Western AI model in a few months does not mean they will be able to continue to do so as Western companies increase their computing power exponentially.
4. That R1 is more efficient is no surprise, since it is several months younger than o1. A better comparison would be between R1 and o3-mini.
5. Today’s market crash represents a strategic victory for the CCP. Faced with the realization that they might not win a prolonged arms race, China opted to open-source R1. This move creates the illusion that Western companies’ competitive edge in closed models is diminished, discouraging investment and confidence.
However, this perception is fundamentally flawed for the reasons outlined above. Nonetheless, the strategy worked—at least in the short term—by rattling markets and sowing doubt.
P.S. China could still win if it puts the full weight of its larger human capital and state resources behind it, while the West is reluctant to follow suit.
AI:
“For weakly superhuman intelligence, I think the path to that is increasingly quite clear. Doesn't have too many missing pieces left and I think it's very credible what the leaders are saying that we're looking at one to three years, where AI is better than any human in every task in 2027.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MbX9J1Tt_I0&t=5237s
Yann Lecun says within the next 3-5 years we will see the emergence of a new paradigm of AI architectures that don't have the limitations of current systems, leading to a revolution in AI capabilities https://youtu.be/MohMBV3cTbg?si=aClBtK2mfdYE-1PD&t=272
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff says the $500 billion Stargate Project is "the beginning of trillions" and "the very beginning of what will be one the biggest investment levels in the history of the world" that will "completely transform how we do everything" https://youtu.be/DasG1N68Wog?si=_qiMvfp-BTnnFX7Z&t=43
Reliance plans world’s biggest AI data center in India, report says https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/23/reliance-plans-world-biggest-ai-data-centre-in-india-report-says/
Chain-of-Retrieval Augmented Generation https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.14342
Standard LLMs can do protein sequence analysis - no modification required https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.09274
Anomalous Tokens in DeepSeek-V3 and r1 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xtpcJjfWhn3Xn8Pu5/anomalous-tokens-in-deepseek-v3-and-r1
Deployment of Aerial Multi-agent Systems for Automated Task Execution in Large Scale Environments https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eyRCCRAEYg
Six Thoughts On AI Safety https://windowsontheory.org/2025/01/24/six-thoughts-on-ai-safety/
Asked about risks from artificial superintelligence, President Trump says the first question he asks is how to absolve yourself from mistake and make sure it is not "the rabbit that gets away" https://youtu.be/jIE8lFeHpag?si=lTCIbTqOwNlhkA2X&t=761
Christian Szegedy is a co-founder and researcher at Musk's xAl and Max Winga is a research engineer at Conjecture.
All major labs now agree that AGI (Hassabis) or even ASI (Musk, Amodei, Altman) could happen before 2030.
Consider the implications: even if there is only a 1% chance that these predictions are correct, this would still make it the most critical issue in human history.
Miscellaneous:
How to Prove False Statements: Practical Attacks on Fiat-Shamir — “We break soundness of a standard protocol (essentially commit to witness and run GKR) by constructing a circuit for which we can prove a false statement.” https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/118
“Useful quantum computing is inevitable—and increasingly imminent” https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/01/27/1110540/useful-quantum-computing-is-inevitable-and-increasingly-imminent/ [no paywall: https://archive.is/OofYe]
Regions of our brains making multiple predictions of others' actions. https://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2025/01/regions-of-our-brains-making-multiple.html
What I have taken away from Deepseek's achievement is that there is as of yet no moat for frontier AI labs. A lab makes a breakthrough, and even if they are guarded about how they did it the mere fact that it is demonstrated gets other labs thinking about how to do it. And how to do it faster and cheaper.
I agree with Alexander that this does not mean that Chinese labs can exceed OpenAI or DeepMind. All it indicates - what almost all Chinese technical progress has indicated since the 1980s - is the ability to catch up. And without the CCP going all in on AI funding, centralizing control, etc. they won't bypass the US labs. It will, however, keep the pressure on the frontier labs to continue and increase their breakneck speed of advancement.