Barry Weiss
speaker
976 appearances
13 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Mar 2025
Barry Weiss’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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And they did it despite America's prohibition on shipping our most advanced microchips to China.
America was caught flat-footed, asking, how did this even happen? And could we actually lose this tech war? Now, if your understanding of computers stops at the word hard drive, don't worry. I have two incredible guests, experts on both AI and China, who are going to break it all down for you.
Tyler Cowen is an economics professor, an AI expert, and a must-read writer at his blog Marginal Revolution. He is the author of over a dozen books, but frankly, I've lost count. He is joined today by Jeffrey Cain, an expert on China and the author of The Perfect Police State, an undercover odyssey into China's terrifying surveillance dystopia of the future.
We talk about how this happened, what it means. Is it a 21st century Sputnik moment? And if so, is China now officially ahead of us in the AI race? Stay with us. Tyler Cowen and Jeffrey Cain, welcome to Honestly.
Okay, the biggest news in the world of AI dropped, at least from my perspective, out of nowhere last week. And that news did not come out of California. It didn't come out of Silicon Valley. It came out of China. Tyler Cowen, tell us about DeepSeek, what it is, and why it matters.
You seem to have been using DeepSeek before it was even a headline in the news. Did you somehow get early access to this product?
When I wrote you about it, here's what you emailed me back. DeepSeek is not so PC like the American programs, though, of course, it is packed with Chinese restrictions, which we'll talk about in a second. But it's really fun to chat with, has lots of personality, a kind of Barry Weiss LLM. I guess I should be flattered by that.
But tell me about the personality and tell me a little bit about the restrictions.
Wow. Jeff, do you want to add a little bit to that before we talk about the implications of it? Have you yourself been using it?
Okay, well, the major headline and the reason that this has caused such a stir – and this was the surface headline. We'll get into whether or not it was true – It appeared as if a small Chinese startup surpassed what we believed until that moment was sort of the bleeding edge of this technology and that they did it for $6 million over the course of about two months.
Now, for comparison, OpenAI reportedly spent $100 million training its last model. It has 20 times the number of employees. The numbers that we're talking about here just were a fraction of what we consider to be par for the course here in the United States.
Now, the question is whether or not that's actually true, whether or not they were actually able to do this on such a small budget and in a very short amount of time. So, Tyler, what's the truth there? Where did the headline get it wrong?
Well, there are a lot of theories floating around about how DeepSeek pulled this off. The company claims that they did this without what until now we had all viewed as the sort of crucial component, which are these advanced chips. Do you guys buy DeepSeek's claims here that they built this advanced AI without the chips?
Or did they find a way around the export control that had been set up by the Biden White House? Jeff, you want to take that one?
Just to underline the point, you don't think there's any chance here that they really, truly innovate it. You're saying that it's all basically a sort of rehash or a steal of what we've already created.
I was texting with Neil Ferguson the day that this news came out, the historian and the free press columnist, and his basic take was a sentence, technological containment never works. Tyler, do you agree with that?
So one of the things that happened, I think the day or within a few days of DeepSeek sweeping the world, at least it felt like that the day that it came out, was that NVIDIA stock tanked by like 17 percent, indicating that the market certainly thought that they did this without the chips. Is that how you guys understood that news? Yeah.
Well, one of the assumptions that it seemed was shattered last week is this idea that largeness and scale meant being ahead, right? It seemed like the assumption or the consensus before this deep-seek innovation was that the large tech companies thought they were uniquely able to be ahead because of their size and their power.
And then you have this little small player like DeepSeek sort of turn that on its head. And it reminded me a little bit of, you know, a comparison between, let's say, SpaceX and NASA. For decades, we all thought only NASA could put a rocket into orbit. And then SpaceX, smaller, more agile, was able to do it. And now NASA seems more reliant on SpaceX.
So it makes sense for me, guys, of what this is. means in terms of the consensus about scale and whether or not that's actually the advantage?
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