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  1. DeepSeek Elastic Compute (DSec) (arxiv.org)
    34comments
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DeepSeek Elastic Compute (DSec)

127 pointsby 5h agoarxiv.org
34 comments
3h agoHN ↗

Is there a lab more innovative than DeepSeek? Imagine if they had the same compute resources that Anthropic and OpenAI have.

3h agoHN ↗

Food for thought: Constraints are the source of creativity.

3h agoHN ↗

Yeah if they had the resources of an OpenAI or anthropic they’d be OpenAI or Anthropic. Scrappy underdogs have to be nimble and innovative.

3h agoHN ↗

They are as “underdog” as Linux is to Windows.

1h agoHN ↗

Not really, they are underdogs in the true sense of the word.

3h agoHN ↗

Possibly relevant: 突破技术壁垒, "break the technical barricade" -> overcome an obstacle through innovation (in this case, sub SOTA GPUs at least).

Native Chinese speakers to confirm....

3h agoHN ↗

your translation is correct, I would say Chinese labs may be able to figure out the current capability of latest frontier models in 3-6 months, but then Anthropic and OpenAI may have already been ASI in that time already. China's main problem is still lack of (good) chips, and that is a hardware issue that is unlikely to be solved for a while. and more effort for efficiency means less effort for actual capability improvements. we have already seen what anthropic can do if they focus on efficiency with opus 5.5

3h agoHN ↗

Short term they might have less compute, but long term they will most definitely have more compute. They don't have to worry about energy, they don't have to worry about people blocking them building data centers the only thing stopping them is there no Chinese manufacturer that can produce a chip as good as Nvidia but I would bet that solved in a year or so.

33m agoHN ↗

They don't have to worry about people blocking DC construction in the US either. All new AI datacenters are designated "dual-use" so the federal government is already letting local councils know to fuck off.

2h agoHN ↗

Just because other companies don't write papers about what they do doesn't mean they aren't innovative...

2h agoHN ↗

Sure, but we’ll never know what they do or if it is innovate because we won’t know what they do.

1h agoHN ↗

I'm actually the most innovative, I've written thousands of papers advancing the state of human knowledge. They're just in my basement and I don't show anyone.

2h agoHN ↗

"Necessity is the mother of invention."

Not sure they'd be the same without the constraints.

3h agoHN ↗

380.000 concurrent sandboxes on 160 Epyc based server nodes. Crazy stuff

26m agoHN ↗

if it's agentic stuff, they likely aren't hammering a core constantly and they will maybe sit idle quite often between model requests, so it makes sense. I do wonder how much memory they allocate to each one though.

it's just very efficient use of shared cores that is required to make these kinds of workloads cost efficient

2h agoHN ↗

Will admit that I haven’t read it yet, just saw the crazy number of authors and think this may compete for one of the papers with the most authors.

1h agoHN ↗

Even without that particularly special case, high-energy physics collaborations have long since broken the idea of authors. There are now many collaborations with hundreds of authors publishing regularly and quite a few that are into the thousands.

1h agoHN ↗

I like it, represents science's general 'standing on the shoulders of our precedents' far more realistic then the 'genius solo' PR mythos.

2h agoHN ↗

how do you even keep up with the amount of research coming out these days

1h agoHN ↗

Still very impressive! Love how it's done!

1h agoHN ↗

Can you give a brief for what this is and why it is impressive?

53m agoHN ↗

It just describes the platform they built for scheduling workloads, and running those workloads. After a second thought it is not that impressive and probably doesn't deserve any kind of hype. It's the same kind of setup AWS is running for Lambda, as well as anyone else basically running SLURM clusters out there.

Still giving them credit because creating such as scheduler/platform from scratch is quite complex, and I know that they probably struggled a lot to get it right.

22m agoHN ↗

I'd say it's cool that they're openly writing about it and how they run their workloads. shows a nice window into how these things are actually deployed at scale.

it also shows how much density you can get easily from a single core if you wanted to replicate this

1h agoHN ↗

The topic isn't as interesting as how 131 authors communicated to get this out.

1h agoHN ↗

Is it possible they're doing a research lab "socialism style" and everyone gets equal credit for just being a part of the lab, regardless of actual input into the specific papers? If they're innovating in computer, maybe they're not so afraid of innovating in social/academic structures as well?

49m agoHN ↗

This is common practice in Biology labs in the west I think

31m agoHN ↗

It seems every DeepSeek paper/patent has a huge number of authors, and this one is no exception. They couldn't even fit everyone on the page, there are 31 others not shown. This could be an asset protection strategy (i.e., human assets). Imagine if there were only 3 authors. Those authors may get hired away by competitors. If you list every employee on every paper then competitors don't know who to lure away.