While government employees scramble to make sense of a rash of unprecedented executive orders out of the White House, tech leaders are also reeling from a dramatic week in both the political and AI arenas.
First, there was Elon Musk’s “did he or didn’t he” drama surrounding the salute seen around the world.
Subsequently, he did what anybody battling Nazi allegations would do: give remarks at a Nazi far-right political rally in Germany.
“I think there is too much focus on past guilt [in Germany], and we need to move beyond that. Children should not feel guilty for the sins of their parents – their great grandparents even.”
Naturally, nobody expects the new DOGE overseer to face any political consequences for these highly controversial acts. But that’s not the only area where he’s been causing trouble: just one day into the job, he publicly undermined his boss’ investment in Open AI’s Stargate Project, which plans to invest $500B in in AI infrastructure over the next four years.
Heading up the Stargate Project is of course Open AI CEO Sam Altman, Elon Musk’s presumed rival. (Elon Musk was an early OpenAI investor and board member before suing the company for abandoning its non-profit status.)
For the uninitiated, “npc” here refers to “non-playable character,” a gaming term used within the manosphere/online right to demean perceived “low agency” individuals.
Meanwhile, China rocked the AI world when DeepSeek, an AI start-up owned by the Chinese hedge fund High-Flyer, released its open source R1 reasoning model, which it claims it trained at a mere fraction of the cost of popular models like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude.
With the model available for download, industry experts wondered if the commodification of AI is imminent, a development that could jeopardize the high valuations of companies like Open AI and Anthropic. On Monday, Nvidia, whose chips power much of the world’s AI development, dropped 17%.
There are three elements of DeepSeek R1 that really shocked experts. First, the Chinese startup appears to have trained the model for only $6 million (reportedly about 3% of the cost of training o1) as a so-called “side project” while using less powerful Nvidia H800 AI-acceleration chips due to US export restrictions on cutting-edge GPUs. Secondly, it appeared just four months after OpenAI announced o1 in September 2024. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, DeepSeek released the model weights for free with an open MIT license, meaning anyone can download it, run it, and fine-tune (modify) it. –ars technica
Across the tech sector, a mix of awe, skepticism, fear, and good old fashioned schaudenfraude abounded.
With stocks plunging, American tech CEOs are scrambling to assure investors and the public that, no, this is actually a good thing for them.
In economics, the Jevons paradox occurs when technological advancements make a resource more efficient to use (thereby reducing the amount needed for a single application), however, as the cost of using the resource drops, overall demand increases causing total resource consumption to rise. Governments have typically expected efficiency gains to lower resource consumption, rather than anticipating possible increases due to the Jevons paradox. –Wikipedia
If you live in San Francisco, just brace yourself for a wave of Jevons paradox costumes this October. (Just kidding, we’ll all be dead by then.)
In a highly complex and rapidly evolving arena with major implications for the global economy, national security, and the U.S. labor force, I’m just grateful, like Sam Altman is, to have such a sophisticated thinker at the helm.
For a more informed analysis of this saga, I recommend the Hard Fork emergency podcast!
The Kids Aren’t Alright
The latest chronicle of our rapidly eroding civic culture came in the form of a New York Magazine cover story on the young right. Millennials, once again: vindicated.
It’s easy to see the festivities as an obnoxious victory lap of the MAGA coalition, and of course they are. Conservatism — as a cultural force, not just a political condition — is back in a real way for the first time since the 1980s. But here in D.C., among the tourists from Tampa, the donors, and the last politicians Trump whipped into submission, one can also witness the emerging influence of a newer type of conservative. They are not disenfranchised or working class or anti-elite or many of the other adjectives used to describe Trump supporters since 2016. Rather, they are young, imposingly well connected, urban, and very online. They are rebels once again storming Capitol Hill, though without the pathetic scariness of the January 6 rioters. –New York Magazine
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