While the world was focused on the actions of the Trump administration in its first week, a little-known Chinese startup startled the tech world last week with the release of an open source artificial intelligence tool that for a fraction of cost and resources of American competitors such as ChatGPT matches and in some cases outperforms its American rivals.
The company, DeepSeek, has gone even further, making its eponymous tool available for download for free. Only those seeking to use the company’s application programming interface―something which allows the tool to interface more easily with existing programs—must pay a fee that is only about 3 percent of that of other tools.
DeepSeek sheds light on two important issues. First, U.S. export controls on advanced computer technology, both hardware and software, are meaningless against a rival that has a highly educated population with the training and tools to work around such controls. The lack of resources essentially forced the DeepSeek team to solve problems related to efficiency that they would not have bothered to tackle if U.S. technology had been available. The team ended up producing a superior, much more cost-effective product as a result. In my December 2024 piece “U.S. China trade war: Is the latest battle really tit for tat?” I wrote:
China has all the intellectual infrastructure to produce top engineers and scientists, a vast computer chip manufacturing sector, and large deposits of and refining capacity for critical high-tech related metals. Not having access to U.S. chip-making equipment, software and advanced chips will just be a bump in the road for China.
In the wake of the DeepSeek achievement, that assessment turned out to be a gross overstatement. There wasn’t even a bump in the road. Instead, China easily shot ahead in AI technology development.
The other issue is one that has preoccupied me for years: How technology is giving growing power to individuals to do mass mischief. The DeepSeek breakthrough in AI is just the latest chapter. As long as AI required huge computing resources and vast amounts of money, the mischief would be more contained. But now, it seems, those barriers have fallen.
We can now add “personal” AI to my list of individual “empowerment” that already includes do-it-yourself genetic engineering; do-it-yourself drones (good for anonymous surveillance, property destruction and murder); do-it-yourself designer viruses (to which we humans have no immunity) using a combination of AI and synthetic biology; and 3D printing for guns and ammunition. I’m sure I’ve missed some that readers may have knowledge of.
The trouble with these technologies is that preventing a tiny minority of individuals from creating mass mayhem would require extremely intrusive and comprehensive surveillance and control measures. So, it’s either a brutally enforced ban on such technologies (never happen and may not be possible) or the extreme surveillance and control I just mentioned if we want to live in anything resembling peaceful civil society. Otherwise, a tiny number of individuals or groups will regularly be able to inflict mayhem on the rest of us. Will we decide that this is just the price we have to pay for new technologies that “empower” the individual?
Interbeing.
I think that while humans see themselves as separate individuals, or even a separate species, then eventually a technology will enter our hands that destroys the collective whole. In reality, we are this mass of mostly shared genomes washing in a thin, thin layer trying to maintain life using the flow of energy from the sun and the material resources of the planet's formation. There is no separate. Human cells cannot exist without thousands of other species doing their chemical magic. Even human bodies are mostly not human cells (by count). Individuality is a mistaken perspective. It feels real but only because the connections are not visible.
My personal feeling is that increasing technology will force either increasing cooperation, or collapse. Over and over, until eventually technology stops increasing, or cooperation evolves (genetically or behaviorally) to manage that technology.
Aside from protecting genetic diversity from our current collapse stage, I think seeding the technologies for improved cooperation is a good way to speed the next up cycle.
Eventually societies will find a way to have leaders selected for stability, reasoning and putting the collective good over individual gain, not psychopathy. My conjecture is that such a society will be able to stay stable at a higher level of technology.
The key question is how does such a society fend off the attacks of this malignant society, which will use violence to prevail, as it has for millennia. There are answers to the question of how society can set up processes so the wisest, instead of the least wise, are empowered. The problem is that a healthy, wise, egalitarian society is a peaceful society, and when the predators come in from the outside, peaceful societies are unable to defend themselves.
Thomas Sowell wrote 'A Conflict of Visions' about the nature of reason, justice, equality and power, distinguishing between those who have a 'constrained' vision which sees human nature as enduring and self centred and the 'unconstrained' vision in which human nature is malleable and perfectible (quote from the back of the paperback book). This then leads to what kind of government should take place – elite well educated people who know what is best and should be in charge or one where decisions are made on a more egalitarian basis. By the end of the book, I honestly felt I did not want elites etc running the show which is not the same as the wisest are empowered.
You bring up a very good point mwildfire, about how can a sustainable society survive in a world of unsustainable aggressors? It is a puzzle I have wondered about for several years now. It seems like an evolutionary Red Queen problem, like trees needing to race each other sun ward. If they don’t try to be tallest they get over shadowed and die. If they do keep trying to race upward, they become top heavy and vulnerable to blow down. That is why I think evolving cooperative strategies must be a key in there somewhere. Like how trees interlock roots to resist blow down, even while trapped in the Red Queen race. Maybe this is the puzzle all intelligent societies must solve to survive long term?
For a technical summary of the breakthrough the Chinese team made, see the thread on X
https://x.com/morganb/status/1883686162709295541?t=Q3Y5eTXsADBcY4JDkYx_rA&s=19
Not sure if anyone on this discussion has read the deepseek terms of use. Sections 3.3 and 3.4 read as follows:
3.3 To fulfill legal and compliance requirements, DeepSeek has the right to use technical means to review the behavior and information of users using the Services, including but not limited to reviewing inputs and outputs, establishing risk filtering mechanisms, and creating databases for illegal content features.
3.4 You will not use the Services to generate, express or promote content or a chatbot that:
(1) is hateful, defamatory, offensive, abusive, tortious or vulgar;
(2) is deliberately designed to provoke or antagonize another or is bullying or trolling another;
(3) may harass, intimidate, threaten, harm, hurt, scare, distress, embarrass or upset another;
(4) is discriminatory such as discriminating another based on race, gender, sexuality, religion, nationality, disability or age;
(5) is pornographic, obscene, or sexually explicit (e.g., sexual chatbots);
(6) facilitates, promotes, incites or glorifies violence or terrorist/extremism content;
(7) exploits, harms, or attempts to exploit or harm or minors or exposes minors to such content;
(8) are designed to specifically appeal to or present a persona of any person under the age of 18;
(9) constitute, encourage or provide instructions for a criminal offence; or
(10) impersonates or is designed to impersonate a celebrity, public figure or a person other than yourself without clearly labelling the content or chatbot as "unofficial" or "parody", unless you have that person's explicit consent.
I suspect that they have developed ways to enforce this policy. Section 3.3 warns of this.
In peace, Paul
I have been thinking about AI and social inequality.
It seems to me that if AI is real, it eliminates the arguments for social inequality. There should be no need for a very large percentage of resources to flow into the hands of a small portion of the population.
Nor should there be a need for things like Patents.
AI communism may be much more efficient, just, and sustainable than the Zombie capitalism of the West. All that is really needed to kick off this change is a giant financial crisis (LOL because the biggest financial in history is on its way ).
(now of course, the oligarchs will use AI to try and keep their massive unearned wealth, so things will likely get weird and dangerous for awhile until this sorts itself out).