Buzz. All runaway sheep bound back bopeep, trailing their teenes behind them.
DeepSeek’s origins are in finance, not technology for technology’s sake. Its parent company, a Chinese hedge fund called High-Flyer, began not as a laboratory devoted to safeguarding humanity from A.I. like Open AI, but as a business using A.I. to make bets in the Chinese stock market.
{ NY Times | Continue reading }
The nice thing about building an artificial intelligence model out of a quantitative hedge fund is that there are interesting ways to monetize it. A standalone AI company will probably think of ideas like “sell subscriptions to an AI chatbot” or “sell access to an application programming interface,” but with a hedge fund you can be more creative. […]
There is a much funnier approach. […]
• Build a good AI model that can compete with the leading large language models built by tech giants, but cheaply, with fewer and less sophisticated chips and less electricity.
• Sell short the stocks of the tech giants with expensive AI models, and the big chipmakers, and electric utilities and everyone else who is exposed to the “AI is a gusher of capital spending” trade.
• Then announce your cheap good open-source model.
• Wipe out almost $1 trillion of equity market value, and take some of that for yourself.
I have no reason to think that quant fund manager and DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng actually did that, or even thought about it, but, man, wouldn’t it be cool if he did?
oil on canvas triptych painting { Francis Bacon, Triptych Inspired by the Oresteia of Aeschylus, 1981 }
related { interview with Liang Wenfeng, founder and CEO of Deepseek }
