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 Trump rescinded a Biden executive order on AI safety.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
Daily Archives: January 28, 2025
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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