The Test of Time.

Downside risks.

“It’s the first thing I read every morning.” — David Barboza, founder of WireScreen and former Shanghai Bureau Chief for The New York Times.

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1. Google DeepMind and OpenAI’s artificial intelligence models performed at a “gold-medal level” in a competition known as the “coding Olympics”, marking a milestone in the technology’s development. The AI models achieved the result against the best human competitors at the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) World Finals in early September. The competition is considered the most prestigious programming contest in the world. Former participants include Google co-founder Sergey Brin and OpenAI’s chief scientist Jakub Pachocki. (Source: ft.com)

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2. Scientific American:

The success of DeepSeek’s powerful artificial intelligence (AI) model R1 — that made the US stock market plummet when it was released in January — did not hinge on being trained on the output of its rivals, researchers at the Chinese firm have said. The statement came in documents released alongside a peer-reviewed version of the R1 model, published today in Nature.

R1 is designed to excel at ‘reasoning’ tasks such as mathematics and coding, and is a cheaper rival to tools developed by US technology firms. As an ‘open weight’ model, it is available for anyone to download and is the most popular such model on the AI community platform Hugging Face to date, having been downloaded 10.9 million times.

The paper updates a preprint released in January, which describes how DeepSeek augmented a standard large language model (LLM) to tackle reasoning tasks. Its supplementary material reveals for the first time how much R1 cost to train: the equivalent of just US$294,000. This comes on top of the $6 million or so that the company, based in Hangzhou, spent to make the base LLM that R1 is built on, but the total amount is still substantially less than the tens of millions of dollars that rival models are thought to have cost. DeepSeek says R1 was trained mainly on Nvidia’s H800 chips, which in 2023 became forbidden from being sold to China under US export controls. (Sources: scientificamerican.com, nature.com, arxiv.org. Italics mine. )

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