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Nathan Lambert: belief

3 Feb 2025 Lex Fridman Podcast #459 – DeepSeek, China, OpenAI, NVIDIA, xAI, TSMC, Stargate, and AI Megaclusters

“Very long-term motivated in how the ecosystem of AI should work. And I think from a Chinese perspective, he wants a Chinese company to build this vision.”

— Nathan Lambert

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Speaker
Nathan Lambert
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
belief
Recorded
3 Feb 2025
Publisher
Lex Fridman Podcast

Transcript context

…Okay. All right. Well, I just got a Chinese translator, so it was great. This is a push. So fascinating figure, engineer pushing full on into AI, leveraging the success from the high-frequency trading. Very direct quotes. “We will not switch to closed source,” when asked about this stuff. Very long-term motivated in how the ecosystem of AI should work. And I think from a Chinese perspective, he wants a Chinese company to build this vision. And so this is sort of like the “visionary behind the company.” This hedge fund still exists, this quantitative firm. And so DeepSeek is the sort of … Slowly, he got turned to this full view of AI, everything about this, but at some point it slowly maneuvered and he made DeepSeek. And DeepSeek has done multiple models since then. They’ve acquired more and more GPUs. They share infrastructure with the fund. Right? And so there is no exact number of public GPU resources that they have. But besides this 10,000 GPUs that they bought in 2021, and they were fantastically profitable, and then this paper claims they did only 2,000 H800 GPUs, which are a restricted GPU that was previously allowed in China, but no longer allowed. And there’s a new version, but it’s basically Nvidia’s H100 for China. And there’s some restrictions on it specifically around the communications sort of speed, the interconnect speed, which is why they had to do this crazy SM scheduling stuff. So going back to that, it’s like this is obviously not true in terms of their total GPU count.…

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