DeepSeek (Chinese AI co) making it look easy today with an open weights release of a frontier-grade LLM trained on a joke of a budget (2048 GPUs for 2 months, $6M). For reference, this level of capability is supposed to require clusters of closer to 16K GPUs, the ones being brought up today are more around 100K GPUs. E.g. Llama 3 405B used 30.8M GPU-hours, while DeepSeek-V3 looks to be a stronger model at only 2.8M GPU-hours (~11X less compute). If the model also passes vibe checks (e.g. LLM arena rankings are ongoing, my few quick tests went well so far) it will be a highly impressive display of research and engineering under resource constraints. Does this mean you don't need large GPU clusters for frontier LLMs? No but you have to ensure that you're not wasteful with what you have, and this looks like a nice demonstration that there's still a lot to get through with both data and algorithms. Very nice & detailed tech report too, reading through.

Bank run won't work in India. If company started withdrawing funds, bank would inform they need re-KYC. All Directors to fill form, sign affidavit, visit branch w/ aadhar & stamp, and answer why they need the money? Everyone would give up. Bank takes lunch break. Life resumes.