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Underappreciated Aspects of the New Chinese AI Breakthrough. [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-01-29
A lot of electrons are being directed at putting a spin on the recent and groundshaking development of DeepSeek-R1. Apparently, this including frantic efforts by some, perhaps hedge fund speculators, to launch denial-of-service attacks on the Chinese start-up with the hope of slowing it down or at least taking the shine of its recent development of low cost AI. While tech investors and speculators do have much to fear in a low-cost, open source alternative to their own preferred highly proprietary and very expensive large language models, the greater threat lies beneath the surface and one that few in the US tech industry, fossil-fuel funded think tanks, political action committees, or media establishments, who see themselves as either the protectors of the status quo or as the worms happily feeding off its carcass want to talk about, lest they let the proverbial cat out of the bag.
Behind all the massive investments in AI large language technology and the hype and potential promise for both good and simply pure greed and machinations of unlimited political power, lies the assumption that the external costs of the technology can be passed on to both consumers and non-consumers alike, with little disruption to the traditional methods of doing business that are essential to keep governments and societies stable. While the PR and propaganda always acknowledges that "you get what you pay for", much less attention is focused on the reality that in many cases you also get what you had no intention of paying for. You also get what you hadn't paid for but will be getting anyway, because of the way the industry operates to shunt external costs of the technology that they create on to others, whether it be pollution, false promises, excuses for high -end lifestyles, corruption, political destabilization needed to perpetuate the ponzi schemes and fraud essential to keep such products and their development viable, the quid pro quo, or just much higher energy prices and much more global warming with all its attendant external costs.
If a bot prompts a young child to commit suicide, the AI firm bears no cost, but the chlld's family, friends, and community do, although such costs are never tabulated. It’s much like Trump's approach to COVID testing. If the testing doesn't take place, there will be fewer cases reported and hence, why worry? Right? Similar unreported costs get handed down without accounting. There are simply too many such external costs to count; so many, that we have been trained, fooled, cajoled, brow-beaten or in some cases, threatened or corrupted into ignoring them or just shrugging our shoulders without so much as a sigh or second thought. Unfortunately, this doesn't actually make the costs go away, they just accumulate or at least hang around until some other poor soul (perhaps like you) is forced to pay for them. If that child is the habitability of planet Earth can we afford to ignore that too?
Unfortunately, one major cost now being handed down to everyone else is the high cost of simply developing and running large language models. They don't simply require data centers, each of which may use the equivalent of enough electricity to power 500,000 homes/year, but rather they require a great many such data centers. Of course, they also require vast amounts of water to cool as well. It is these costs that gives rise to the real threat of AI and the low-cost Chinese open-source AI entry.
With each passing year, China continues to develop more and more renewable energy resources than the rest of the world combined. Their industry, including their AI industry is able to rely, more and more on the advantage of vast amounts of new relatively minimally polluting energy, with enormous solar arrays and increasingly vast onshore and offshore windfarms with the largest of turbines that are rapidly bringing down their costs of electricity while dramatically expanding their export markets. This allows them to develop, train and use their AI programs much more cost effectively at a time when the US is relying more and more on fossil-fuels and increasingly expensive AI models. Without massive government subsides and with high external costs that are seldom discussed, fossil fuels are increasingly expensive in both relative and absolute terms, that you, dear consumer, will have passed on to you so the already wealthy can get even wealthier. While much of the American public constantly fed fossil-fuel indusry paid-for news stories of the made-up horrors of windfarms and enthralled with the lie-filled rants by Trump, may be oblivious to this reality, neither the false stories nor the lies do anything to address the real and increasing disparity and strategic advantage the Chinese enjoy by Trump and America adopting a suicidal and self-defeating fossil-fuels based energy policy.
Yes, China still does have many coal-fired plants (about 1,042), than the US (about 215), which is relatively a slightly larger percentage relative to their relative population population (1,400,000,000 China vs. 345,000,000 US). However, their reliance on natural gas to generate electricity is estimated to be about 140–150 GW/yr in 2025 according to the Oxford Institute of Energy Studies. This is about 3% of their total energy consumption. In the US, gas-generated electricity formed 42% of electricity generated in 2024 and this share is expected to rise dramatically under Trump, who is determined to block nearly every renewable energy program he can to favor fossil fuels. This means China is likely to meet its 2030 Paris Climate targets, while the US is abandoning its own and intent on moth-balling large components or outright destroying segments of the US economy in the process. This will give China considerable economic advantage as well as tremendous PR leverage going forward that it can use in many overseas markets eager to contend with the increasing havoc now being wrought by rising global temperatures and increasingly extreme weather it induces along with rising sea levels.
This will happen while the US will look ever more like the villian, joining only Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Libya, Angola, Sudan, Yemen and Eritrea as global mean temperatures climb above 1.5 C and heads for what looks more and more likely to be between 3 and 4 + C by 2100. It should be noted that nearly all of the countries in this new “club” of climate change deniers we are joining will likely become virtually uninabitable as global mean temperatures begin to exceed 2+C as most of them are already approaching lethal wet-bulb temperatures intolerable by humans that can be expected by 2030-2040 with near absolute certainty.
It should be also kept in mind that the IPCC model-based estimates are probably optimistic, as the best current direct measurements of global warming are derived from the coraline sclerosponge Ceratoporella nicholsoni that lives to 300 years. These more direct rather than more inferential measures demonstrate that global warming has likely actually already risen by 1.7 C over preindustrial levels. This probably explains why so many modeled predictions of expected climatological events, such as glacial retreats and rising sea levels, have been showing up “early”.
Consequently, this is not something that only kids in the future need to worry about. These are effects that are likely to be experienced by American seniors as well, as surviors of Huricane Helene and the fires in LA can attest. What most, like Trump, with limited knowledge of biology fail to appreciate, is that the greatest danger from higher tempertures does not come from the temperature directly, but rather from the effects that the temperature increases have on the ecosystems we humans depend upon for our survival, as well as the rate at which such increases occur and hence, the speed of the changes they induce.
While not all of the price increases may show up at the gasoline pump in the heating bill, they certainly will show up in notably higher external costs that go unaccounted for: the costs of more severe droughts, costlier floods, more intense storms, higher air, water and soil temperatures, falling oceanic pH, disruption to natural ecosystems, loss of biodiversity, lower crop yields, more meager fishery catches, the costs for more PR and missinformation to manage public perceptions, lower life expectancy resulting from the adverse health effects of greater fossil fuels use, etc. ... each of which create their own costs to the economy, whether they are factored into the corporate or government budget ledgers or not.
Have you noticed how fast your electric bills have been rising since AI was invented? Have you noticed how fast insurance premiums are rising? Have you noticed how destabilization of insurance markets are having increasing adverse effects on the banking sector and housing markets? Have you noticed how much more expensive cereals, coffee, and seafood have become? Have you noticed how many more tropical diseases North Americans need to worry about now? If so, ask yourself, do "external costs" such as these, and many more matter to you or your family? If not, how much further and how quickly can they rise before they do?
Consequently, while Trump is busy pursuing a strategy that has no realistic hope of prevailing in the long term, since it will destroy agriculture and fisheries, along with our foreign export markets, thereby making unbudgeted costs for Americans as well as everyone else go up dramatically, the Chinese will be increasing their strategic advantage. They will be doing so by operating with less costs for electricity, moving products and people, and selling at ever relatively lower costs to the rest of the world, thereby increasingly dominating resources and markets at scale. This will make it easier for them to make friends or influence others while we are busy antagonizing people everywhere, by telling everyone, even our own populace, that only our billionaires matter.
While we are bashing our allies and trading partners, China will be busy courting new opportunities on every continent, and doing so with an increasingly less expensive and more efficient industrial base. While we will be busy polluting our groundwater, air and coastal environments until they are unable to support us at the level they did in the past, China will be busy selling renewable non-polluting energy sources into new markets that were once ours. Unfortunately, these are not the kinds of problems that can be fixed by invading other countries or imposing tariffs, increasing demands on our friends and neighbors, or threatening them to buy our stuff and do as we demand or else. Just ask Vladimir Putin how that strategy is working out these days. Clearly, it didn’t work for us in Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan and there is little reason to suppose that it would work elsewhere without significant costs and many unexpected consequences.
DeepSeek-R1 also reveals the hidden cost of ideological zealotry associated with trying to stamp out "woke ideology" with a "MAGA/pro-Trumpian" cultish substitute, rather than investing in public education in science and technology. China now leads the world in science PhD's and patents and the disparity grows each year. Instead of competing and cooperating in sustainable ways that matter, Trump and associates prioritze funneling more and more money to the already uber-wealthy, as well as to religous American madrasas, euphemistically known as "charter schools", using increasingly bombastic and threatening tones. These often heavily religiously-oriented facilities primarily benefit the few ultra-wealth individuals, who own most of them and often serve to indoctrinate, rather than to educate the vast majority of young Americans, who need an education to compete and survive in a technological world. Such attitudes disuade foreign students from attending our universities further weakening both our intellectual capital as well as the global reach of our power to pursuade.
Communities do not propser, when increasing number of youth grow up without a good education, especially in the sciences. Demanding conformity, banning books, imposing values, and demeaning others can not substitute for education and critical thinking. Going from a world of more Diversity-Equality-Inclusion to one championing Exclusiveness-Inequality-Exclusion is NOT going to "Make America Great Again". Rather, it has only served to make a mockery of Christ's Beatitudes, the Preamble of our Constitution to form a "more perfect union", the words on the Statue of Liberty that once served as a beacon of hope for the entire world, and the very concept of justice under the law, which now seems so out of place on the fascade of our Supreme Court building. This is especially self-defeating in a world where Americans, as diverse as we are, make up only a little more than 4% of the world’s population. Despite this, Trump and the MAGA/GOP are determined to prove otherwise. Hence, it should have come as no surprise that Trump refused to place his hand on the Bible during when taking his oath. Since he had no intention of actually keeping it, as his recent executive orders demonstrate without doubt, he wanted to send a message to his flock that he really has no use for it nor the ideas within it, beyond whatever value it might have as a prop. He wants to be now be seen above such rituals.
While many authors are in some respects right to claim that DeepSeek-R1 is a "Sputnik moment", Trump is no Eisenhower, an understatment if there ever was one. Certainly, there is no Vannevar Bush in among his cabinet of billionaires. Nor, is there a Lyndon Johnson within the GOP, who is in any way interested in pushing any effective GOP response. They have no use for science, since science often forces people to accept as reality what we humans often prefer not to accept because it show us how we are wrong. Nor is their an Eilene Galloway within the media, who can steer the rest of the media away from fawning adoration and sycophancy toward an effective, collective response. Like the Daily Mail, too many in the media are way too busy feeding off of titillation based on misogyny, celebrity, and making sure their readership doesn’t pay attention to what really matters in world affairs. Instead, Trump's response appears to be shutting down the entire scientific establishment grant and funding process and instead contracting for 40 icebreakers that will do little other than accelerate the decrease of the Earth's albedo and thus make the lives of indigenous peoples and organisms of the Arctic that much harder.
Add to this Trump's plan to back the full faith and credit of the United States with Bitcoin and its hard to see how this ends well. To make matters worse, China having banned bitcoin, will not have to subsidize a ponzi scheme that can only result in requiring more and more expenditure of electricity to keep the scheme afloat, thereby giving them further competitive advantage.
One can only imagine that at some point, given the current trajectory of Trump economic and foreign policy, it will be necessary for US households to store nuclear waste in their backyards just to keep the entire economy, currency, and government from collapsing. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised when many run to the Trump altar at Mar-a-Lago in the hope that Trump can write Kim Jong Un enough love letters to keep from being targeted. It is eerily reminiscent of the last days of Athens, where they would send couriers up to the Oracle at Delphi to glean what should be done about Sparta.
An “Iron Dome” will hardly be of much help given the directon winds blow in the Northern Hemisphere, since all the the North Koreans will have to do is make their weapons dirty enough with enough radioactive Cobalt and Cesium and then set their detonators to go off on impact with intercepting missiles so that the fallout will make the US unihabitable for a few dozen millenia. One would think that with so many GOP pollsters around, they wouldn’t have any difficulty sticking their fingers into the air to determine which way the wind blows. However, judging from recent media trends it seems more likely a few more meteorologists will need to duck for cover instead and argue that the jet stream really flows from east to west and, in any event like hurricanes, it can be redirected by the use of a Sharpie.
No doubt the sycophants, pundits, talking heads, and lobbyists, by the hundreds, with many, if not most, paid to do so, will soon be out proclaiming that Trump has America "On Track". However, in reality, there is almost no "track". China has 45,000 km of high-speed rail (> 150 mph) vs. the US 55 km and is planning to add 2,600 km more this year and reaching 60,000 by 2030. In contrast, presumably Trump plans to eliminate AMTRAK and the only 55 km the US has. One can only image this will happen soon with Trump trying to convince commuters between Boston and New York City that they should wait patiently in line at gas stations while he tries to convince the Canadians to end their refusal to send their oil to US markets in response to the tariffs he has imposed on Canada. It is as if the US has descended into a dystopian Shakespearean play with poor Yorick as the ring master having arisen from the dead.
Perhaps, one of the most signficant and "Earth-shaking" aspects of DeepSeek-R1 is that hype, misinformation, disinformation, distortion, lies, and pure BS don't always tell the full story no matter how often it is repeated on Fox News. Clearly, this is a rude "Awokening" that can and will continue to shake fragile markets and ideologies built on them. That goes a long way toward explaining the magnitude of the panic its emergence has generated and why we are already seeing such a massive effort to spin its significance into insignificance. Expect more such shocks, as the world comes to recognize that China has a realistic, effective and sustainable longterm strategy that is self-reinforcing, unlike our new self-annointed emperor, who acts as if he is devoid of intellectual clothing that will hardly keep him warm in Greenland. More omininously for America, DeepSeek-R1 may indicate that China may well have much more advanced technology, that is more cost effective and more appealing to the rest of the world that may alllow it to see right through any such clothing that Trump fancies himself wearing as he tries to gussy up his megalomania. Surely, there must be a way out of this nightmare.
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