In the early 1950s, the United States faced a critical intelligence challenge in its burgeoning competition with the Soviet Union. Outdated German reconnaissance photos from World War II could no longer provide sufficient intelligence about Soviet military capabilities, and existing U.S. surveillance capabilities were no longer able to penetrate the Soviet Union’s closed airspace. This deficiency spurred an audacious moonshot initiative: the development of the U-2 reconnaissance aircraft. In only a few years, U-2 missions were delivering vital intelligence, capturing images of Soviet missile installations in Cuba and bringing near-real-time insights from behind the Iron Curtain to the Oval Office.
Today, the United States stands at a similar juncture. Competition between Washington and its rivals over the future of the global order is intensifying, and now, much as in the early 1950s, the United States must take advantage of its world-class private sector and ample capacity for innovation to outcompete its adversaries. The U.S. intelligence community must harness the country’s sources of strength to deliver insights to policymakers at the speed of today’s world. The integration of artificial intelligence, particularly through large language models, offers groundbreaking opportunities to improve intelligence operations and analysis, enabling the delivery of faster and more relevant support to decisionmakers. This technological revolution comes with significant downsides, however, especially as adversaries exploit similar advancements to uncover and counter U.S. intelligence operations. With an AI race underway, the United States must challenge itself to be first—first to benefit from AI, first to protect itself from enemies who might use the technology for ill, and first to use AI in line with the laws and values of a democracy.
For the U.S. national security community, fulfilling the promise and managing the peril of AI will require deep technological and cultural changes and a willingness to change the way agencies work. The U.S. intelligence and military communities can harness the potential of AI while mitigating its inherent risks, ensuring that the United States maintains its competitive edge in a rapidly evolving global landscape. Even as it does so, the United States must transparently convey to the American public, and to populations and partners around the world, how the country intends to ethically and safely use AI, in compliance with its laws and values. — Read More
Monthly Archives: January 2025
The AI guys were lying the whole time
Last week, a Chinese startup called DeepSeek launched their r1 generative-AI model via a free app that is now sitting atop the iOS App Store. Egg-shaped tech investor and former Clubhouse influencer Marc Andreessen called DeepSeek r1, “AI’s Sputnik moment” in an X post Sunday.
And, yes, it is causing a lot of panic. AI and chip manufacturer stocks are in free fall this morning as the market reacts to DeepSeek, which is both open source and basically as good as ChatGPT. Chip manufacturer Nvidia had the biggest market loss in history today and DeepSeek is also being targeted by a cyber attack. But if you’re looking for a real break down of what DeepSeek can’t do that ChatGPT can, it’s a lot of quality of life stuff. It can’t generate images, can’t talk to you, doesn’t support third party plugins, and doesn’t have “vision” like ChatGPT does. (I’ve actually been using that last feature recently to troubleshoot what’s wrong with my cactuses lol.) All that said, on Monday, DeepSeek released an open-source image generator called Janus-Pro-7B that is, once again, as good, if not better, than OpenAI’s DALL-E 3.
Limitations aside, the fact DeepSeek is essentially free, costing cents to use its API, open source, and was reportedly created by a team for only around $5 million (if you believe that) has, as Fast Company put it, raised “several existential questions for America’s tech giants.” Or as noted AI evangelist and OpenAI superfan Ed Zitron wrote on Bluesky this morning, “The AI bubble was inflated based on the idea that we need bigger models that both are trained and run on bigger and even larger GPUs. A company came along that has undermined the narrative — ways both substantive and questionable.” — Read More
DeepSeek R1’s recipe to replicate o1 and the future of reasoning LMs
[On] January 20th, China’s open-weights frontier AI laboratory, DeepSeek AI, released their first full fledged reasoning model.
… This is a major transition point in the uncertainty in reasoning model research. Until now, reasoning models have been a major area of industrial research without a clear seminal paper. Before language models took off, we had the likes of the GPT-2 paper for pretraining or InstructGPT (and Anthropic’s whitepapers) for post-training. For reasoning, we were staring at potentially misleading blog posts. Reasoning research and progress is now locked in — expect huge amounts of progress in 2025 and more of it in the open.
This again confirms that new technical recipes normally aren’t moats — the motivation of a proof of concept or leaks normally get the knowledge out. — Read More
Writers vs. AI: Microsoft Study Reveals How GPT-4 Impacts Creativity and Voice
Rather than fear AI, writers should learn how to use them properly. While this tech is transforming many sectors, and creative writing is no exception, it boils down to how unique a written content.
To this end, the Microsoft research team joined hands with the University of Southern California to experiment on whether generative AI boosts or weakens a writer’s uniqueness.
The study, titled “It Was 80% Me, 20% AI”, included 19 fiction writers, 30 readers, and AI-generated suggestions using OpenAI’s GPT-4. … Lead researcher Angel Hsing-Chi Hwang explained that for an author or writer, the value of someone’s work is what it means to be authentic. In this regard, co-writing with AI might destroy this purpose. — Read More
OpenAI launches ChatGPT Gov, hoping to further government ties
OpenAI has announced a new more tailored version of ChatGPT called ChatGPT Gov, a service that the company said is meant to accelerate government use of the tool for non-public sensitive data.
In an announcement Tuesday, the company said that ChatGPT Gov, which can run in the Microsoft Azure commercial cloud or Azure Government cloud, will give federal agencies increased ability to use OpenAI frontier models. The product is also supposed to make it easier for agencies to follow certain cybersecurity and compliance requirements, while exploring potential applications of the technology, the announcement said.
Through ChatGPT Gov, federal agencies can use GPT-4o, along with a series of other OpenAI tools, and build custom search and chat systems developed by agencies. — Read More
Open-R1: a fully open reproduction of DeepSeek-R1
If you’ve ever struggled with a tough math problem, you know how useful it is to think a little longer and work through it carefully. OpenAI’s o1 model showed that when LLMs are trained to do the same—by using more compute during inference—they get significantly better at solving reasoning tasks like mathematics, coding, and logic.
However, the recipe behind OpenAI’s reasoning models has been a well kept secret. That is, until last week, when DeepSeek released their DeepSeek-R1 model and promptly broke the internet (and the stock market!).
Besides performing as well or better than o1, the DeepSeek-R1 release was accompanied by a detailed tech report that outlined the key steps of their training recipe. … [This] prompted us to launch the Open-R1 project, an initiative to systematically reconstruct DeepSeek-R1’s data and training pipeline, validate its claims, and push the boundaries of open reasoning models. By building Open-R1, we aim to provide transparency on how reinforcement learning can enhance reasoning, share reproducible insights with the open-source community, and create a foundation for future models to leverage these techniques. — Read More
DeepSeek FAQ
It’s Monday, January 27. Why haven’t you written about DeepSeek yet?
I did! I wrote about R1 last Tuesday.
I totally forgot about that.
I take responsibility. I stand by the post, including the two biggest takeaways that I highlighted (emergent chain-of-thought via pure reinforcement learning, and the power of distillation), and I mentioned the low cost (which I expanded on in Sharp Tech) and chip ban implications, but those observations were too localized to the current state of the art in AI. What I totally failed to anticipate were the broader implications this news would have to the overall meta-discussion, particularly in terms of the U.S. and China. — Read More
It’s time to come to grips with AI
We live in interesting times. On Monday morning, tech stocks plunged on investor shock and awe over DeepSeek, a Chinese AI company that has built — I’m leaving out a lot of details — an open-source large language model (LLM) that performs competitively with name brands like ChatGPT at a fraction of the computing cost.
Meanwhile, two stories got buried in the avalanche of activity by President Trump last week. Trump rescinded a Biden executive order on AI safety. And he announced Stargate, a nine-figure AI joint venture aimed at entrenching American AI competitiveness, which has triggered a feud between Elon Musk and Sam Altman, the frenemy cofounders of OpenAI.
These stories will have far bigger geopolitical implications than, say, Musk’s choice of hand gestures. They may even mark an inflection point where the world has decided to charge forward with AI at full speed, for better or worse. — Read More
NVIDIA Senior Research Manager Jim Fan Praises DeepSeek R1
NVIDIA Senior Research Manager Jim Fan recently shared his in-depth evaluation of DeepSeek R1 on social media. As the co-founder of GEAR Lab, lead of Project GR00T, Stanford Ph.D., and OpenAI’s first intern, Fan’s perspectives carry significant weight in the industry. He particularly emphasized DeepSeek’s outstanding contributions to AI open-source development as a non-US company.
In his commentary, Fan noted: “We are living in a timeline where a non-US company is keeping the original mission of OpenAI alive – truly open, frontier research that empowers all. It makes no sense. The most entertaining outcome is the most likely.” He particularly appreciated that DeepSeek not only open-sources a barrage of models but also spills all the training secrets. — Read More
The Short Case for Nvidia Stock
… [W]henever I meet with and chat with my friends and ex colleagues from the hedge fund world, the conversation quickly turns to Nvidia. It’s not every day that a company goes from relative obscurity to being worth more than the combined stock markets of England, France, or Germany! And naturally, these friends want to know my thoughts on the subject. Because I am such a dyed-in-the-wool believer in the long term transformative impact of this technology— I truly believe it’s going to radically change nearly every aspect of our economy and society in the next 5-10 years, with basically no historical precedent— it has been hard for me to make the argument that Nvidia’s momentum is going to slow down or stop anytime soon.
But even though I’ve thought the valuation was just too rich for my blood for the past year or so, a confluence of recent developments has caused me to flip a bit to my usual instinct, which is to be a bit more contrarian in outlook and to question the consensus when it seems to be more than priced in. The saying “what the wise man believes in the beginning, the fool believes in the end” became famous for a good reason. — Read More
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