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How DeepSeek Shocked Silicon Valley & Crashed Nvidia | Pivot

January 28, 2025 / 07:52

This episode discusses the new AI model Deep Seek from China, its impact on Silicon Valley, and market reactions. The conversation covers Deep Seek's performance compared to models from OpenAI, Meta, and Anthropic, and its cost-effectiveness.

The hosts highlight how Deep Seek reportedly outperforms its competitors while operating at a fraction of the cost. They mention that Nvidia's stock has dropped significantly, along with other tech companies, as a reaction to Deep Seek's emergence.

Yan Lon from Meta argues that the rise of open-source models like Deep Seek challenges the proprietary models of US companies. He emphasizes the importance of open research in driving innovation.

The discussion also touches on the potential market correction and the implications for the tech industry, questioning whether this is a significant turning point for major tech stocks.

Overall, the episode raises concerns about the future of AI development and the competitive landscape between US and Chinese companies.

TL;DR

Deep Seek, a new Chinese AI model, disrupts Silicon Valley, outperforming US competitors and causing significant stock market reactions.

Video

00:00:00
there's a new AI model on the scene
00:00:01
that's smart cheap and made in China
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it's called Deep seek and it's causing a
00:00:05
panic in Silicon Valley which is paying
00:00:06
a lot of attention and also on Wall
00:00:08
Street deep seek has reportedly
00:00:10
outperformed models from open AI meta
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and anthropic in some tests and it
00:00:13
operates at a fraction of the cost of
00:00:15
those models using fewer high-end chips
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this is the ones that are made by Nvidia
00:00:19
and are hard to get and the incumbents
00:00:21
have been pricing them up heavily by
00:00:24
grabbing all of them the markets are not
00:00:25
reacting well to deep seek as of this
00:00:27
recording Nvidia is down 16% Oracle is
00:00:30
down 10% Microsoft is down nearly 4%
00:00:34
obviously meta is going to be affected
00:00:36
all the others so there's a lot to talk
00:00:38
about and I've seen different analysis
00:00:40
of exactly what deep seek does Yan laon
00:00:43
from meta was making an argument that it
00:00:45
isn't as what they're re they're doing
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sort of a cheap and dirty version then
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it's not nearly as the stuff they're
00:00:51
doing is much more advanced by the US
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companies uh it's currently number one
00:00:55
on Apple's uh free top apps chart uh
00:00:57
again China invading it in this country
00:01:00
in a very different way so thoughts on
00:01:02
this situation because you and I have
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talked about this quite a bit is this
00:01:05
money ill spent by us uh companies and
00:01:09
is it being relegated to the rich
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incumbents well first you just have to
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temper the or put some context to the I
00:01:16
mean Nvidia is down 15 or 16% it's shed
00:01:18
something like a half a trillion dollars
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which basically if you take out Tesla
00:01:21
it's shed today the value of the entire
00:01:23
Global automobile industry sounds Tesla
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so this is pretty dramatic but at the
00:01:27
same time that just takes it back to its
00:01:29
valuation in October
00:01:30
and when you look at market dynamics
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when these companies have experienced
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these type of run-ups it is like a
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balloon inflating Beyond its natural
00:01:38
capacity and the slightest the slightest
00:01:40
touch can pop it and so in some ways the
00:01:44
market was probably looking for an
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excuse to take these stocks down a bit
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and it got it because what's interesting
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is NVIDIA will have a pretty interesting
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argument on on Capitol Hill saying when
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you refuse to let us sell into these
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countries they come up with workarounds
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and in this case work around might tank
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the US economy and everyone's excited by
00:02:04
the fact that these models open AI
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supposedly the models their llms cost
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100 million to train and they're
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claiming this thing costs and they've
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been public it's open source cost a
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little over 5 million to train so
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whereas the majority of lm's and U AI
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companies have been taking sort of this
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Brute Force strategy where it's buy as
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many chips as possible this is saying
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maybe you don't need as many chips the
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thing find it equally interesting is the
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second order effects here and that is
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Constellation Energy and some of these
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nuclear stocks have skyrocketed because
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the choke point was supposedly going to
00:02:38
be energy but now with this this model
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which appears to have chips speaking to
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each other in a more efficient less
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Energy consumptive Way nuclear stocks
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are crashing electric Constellation
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Energy all these things that have had
00:02:52
incredible run-ups are saying wait the
00:02:54
entire supply chain or the assumptions
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we made about the supply chain in terms
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of the the kind of the Brute Force of
00:03:00
chips that we're going to need the
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amount of energy it's all now coming
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into a little bit of question but to be
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clear the correction here is like it's
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taking them back three months and all of
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the stocks that have crashed quote
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unquote crashed are are only up you know
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70% for the year now not 98 and a lot of
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analysts the smart analysts I've read
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have said like every Community or any
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sector it's going to bifurcate into the
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cheap layer and then the high-end layer
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which will still go hard at massive
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Computing and massive energy and do more
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sophisticated things and this will be
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sort of you know everything eventually
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goes Walmart Tiffany right and they're
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saying this might be the Walmart and
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it's the Chinese and they'll come up
00:03:41
with cheaper models but I it's
00:03:43
fascinating to see that basically this
00:03:46
notion this this kind of conventional
00:03:49
wisdom that you would need massive gpus
00:03:50
and massive Energy may not be um kind of
00:03:54
the written in law that we thought it
00:03:56
was going to be let me read Yan Lon
00:03:58
who's the head of meta I just read
00:03:59
recently interviewed him and you can go
00:04:01
listen to that long interview about this
00:04:02
but he's writing to the people who see
00:04:04
the performance of deep seeds and think
00:04:06
China is surpassing the US and AI you're
00:04:07
reading this wrong the correct reading
00:04:09
is open- Source models are surpassing
00:04:11
proprietary ones deep seek has profited
00:04:13
from open research in open source for
00:04:16
example pie torch and llama from meta
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they came up with new ideas and built on
00:04:20
top of other people's work because their
00:04:21
work is published and open source
00:04:23
everyone can profit from it this is the
00:04:25
power of open research and open source
00:04:26
obviously this is the way he's talking
00:04:28
his own book that's correct I was just
00:04:30
going to make SCE yes that's correct
00:04:32
that's what I was going to say but it's
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interesting he's having really
00:04:35
interesting arguments and he said he's
00:04:38
having a bunch of them which is just
00:04:39
interesting and one of them that he just
00:04:41
did because Gary Marcus this guy who's
00:04:42
somewhat of a a crank a little bit um
00:04:45
was saying that Congress needs to bring
00:04:46
in Zuckerberg and Lon to discuss how
00:04:48
their unilateral open sourcing decision
00:04:49
rapidly undermined the US advantage in
00:04:51
general of AI he goes an absolutely
00:04:53
hilarious take revealing the complete
00:04:55
misunderstanding of the fact that open
00:04:56
research open source accelerates
00:04:58
progress for everyone from some repet
00:05:00
claimed that deep learning was hitting a
00:05:01
wall but one of the things he just wrote
00:05:03
again cuz he's he's he's getting in
00:05:05
there very deeply major misunderstanding
00:05:07
about AI infrastructure Investments much
00:05:09
of those billions are going into
00:05:11
infrastructure for inference not
00:05:12
training running AI assistant services
00:05:14
for billions of people requires a lot of
00:05:16
compute once you put video understanding
00:05:19
reasoning large scale memory and other
00:05:20
capabilities into AI systems inference
00:05:22
costs are going to increase the only
00:05:24
real question is whether users will be
00:05:25
willing to pay enough directly or not to
00:05:27
justify capex and Opex I think that's
00:05:30
that's probably he thinks these
00:05:32
reactions are woefully unjustified and
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at the same times he's sort of arguing
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that they aren't right which is
00:05:37
interesting interesting interesting it's
00:05:39
just so typical to Chinese to come up
00:05:41
the entire Chinese economy was sort of
00:05:43
built on more us yeah and my guess is
00:05:47
they had a mandate or they've said all
00:05:49
right we're not going to have access to
00:05:50
the same level of high-end ships we need
00:05:54
workarounds and it's it it appears to
00:05:57
spond really interesting Innovation and
00:05:59
using open source yeah using open source
00:06:02
the I mean the scary thing I I mean in
00:06:04
typical meta fashion their llm you can
00:06:07
download a version of llama with
00:06:09
absolutely no guard rails and you can
00:06:11
you can request information on anything
00:06:15
you know the most politically correct I
00:06:17
find of them is is
00:06:20
anthropic if I start asking questions
00:06:23
about insider trading from speaker to
00:06:25
Emer Pelosi it immediately gives me all
00:06:28
these things back we cannot endorse nor
00:06:30
promote strategies around inside of
00:06:31
trading chpt kind of goes straight into
00:06:34
it and I think I think llama will say
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well here's what you do you call your
00:06:41
cousin I find it fascinating it be
00:06:43
interesting to see what happens to the
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stock I mean these companies have
00:06:47
already let some air out it's already
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gone to the energy guys it'll be
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interesting to see how the market reacts
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is this I mean the question is and I
00:06:54
don't know the answer is this the
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beginning of a massive correction that
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will infect the entire NASDAQ the entire
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S&P and quite frankly now these
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companies I don't say become too big to
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fail but they fail you know if they
00:07:07
sneeze the US economy is going to catch
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a cold right now because the stock
00:07:10
market's going to crash so is this the
00:07:12
beginning of the correction we've been
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waiting for for 15 years I mean a real
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correction we had a mild one in 21 or is
00:07:18
this feel a little nervous I think
00:07:20
people feel I think people feel a little
00:07:21
nervous about or or and it's also kind
00:07:24
of a in a weird way an argument for free
00:07:26
trade and that is if we had let them
00:07:27
just buy Nvidia gpus would they have
00:07:30
figured out this workaround would they
00:07:32
have felt as motivated to figure out a
00:07:34
workaround or quite frankly is today one
00:07:37
of those days we're going to look back
00:07:39
when we're going to think that was a
00:07:40
buying opportunity because they're going
00:07:41
to resume their hyperscaling so I think
00:07:45
it's fascinating

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Episode Highlights

  • Market Reaction
    Silicon Valley is in a panic as Nvidia and other tech stocks drop significantly due to Deep Seek's emergence.
    “Nvidia is down 16%, Oracle is down 10%.”
    @ 00m 27s
    January 28, 2025
  • Open Source vs Proprietary
    Deep Seek's success highlights the power of open research, challenging the dominance of proprietary models.
    “Open-source models are surpassing proprietary ones.”
    @ 04m 09s
    January 28, 2025
  • Potential Market Correction
    Concerns arise about a potential market correction affecting major tech companies and the broader economy.
    “Is this the beginning of a massive correction?”
    @ 06m 56s
    January 28, 2025

Episode Quotes

Key Moments

  • Panic in Silicon Valley00:05
  • Market Downturn00:27
  • Open Source Advantage04:09
  • Market Correction06:56

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