Technology

Ed Zitron has the best takes on this imo. One of his pieces is linked in the posted article, but here it is again. His podcast also has some of the most grounded and hilarious insight into the absurdity of the AI bubble. If you want to hear from him in a more mainstream setting, I highly recommend the interview he did with Brooke Gladstone on On The Media. That was the first time I heard anyone really talk about the AI industry with genuine frankness and honestly.

Basically, OpenAI, Sam Altman, and all of the big tech players have defrauded us and investors by raising laughably high amounts of money and wasting precious resources to build inferior and closed products, when any reasonable person would have known there were better ways. This whole thing also proves how essential competition is to a healthy market and producing things people actually want to use.

In essence, DeepSeek — and I'll get into its background and the concerns people might have about its Chinese origins — released two models that perform competitively (and even beat) models from both OpenAI and Anthropic, undercut them in price, and made them open, undermining not just the economics of the biggest generative AI companies, but laying bare exactly how they work. That last point is particularly important when it comes to OpenAI's reasoning model, which specifically hid its chain of thought for fear of "unsafe thoughts" that might "manipulate the customer," then muttered under their breath that the actual reason was that it was a "competitive advantage." -Zitron