Chinese AI Enters the Chat

Plus: Federal employees offered buyouts, immigration crackdown continues, and more...

Big week for DeepSeek: A Chinese artificial intelligence company released its model, R1, about a week and a half ago, sending American chipmaker Nvidia's stocks plummeting. What's going on here? And why does R1 matter?

Well, the model is profoundly sophisticated. It "can mimic the way humans reason," says Bloomberg. Developed in 2023 by a quant hedge fund, the app distinguishes itself in a few major ways—"articulating its reasoning before delivering a response to a prompt" (per Bloomberg) as well as being open-source (though "open-weight" might be a better way of putting it, per people who know more about the technical side than I could ever hope to). It's also much more efficient compared with other models, using way less compute—the hardware required to train and run these programs—and thus requiring less money.

DeepSeek "claims its R1 release offers performance on par with the latest iteration of ChatGPT," reports Bloomberg. "It is offering licenses for individuals interested in developing chatbots using the technology to build on it, at a price well below what OpenAI charges for similar access." (Quick explainer video here, from my friend Melody Kim.)

The news of DeepSeek's advancement sent American chipmaker Nvidia's stocks tumbling earlier this week, though they've since rebounded a bit. Theories abound as to what's actually going on here:

DeepSeek is legitimately impressive, but the level of hysteria is an indictment of so many.

The $5M number is bogus. It is pushed by a Chinese hedge fund to slow investment in American AI startups, service their own shorts against American titans like Nvidia, and hide sanction…

— Palmer Luckey (@PalmerLuckey) January 28, 2025

Nobody's quite sure how this will end or what this advancement means for compute/chip needs, for the stocks of prominent AI hardware companies, or for global competition in the sector. In the meantime, God's strongest soldiers (American Redditors) have been sent to fight his toughest battles (subverting the censorial impulses of R1).

Information wants to be free.

DeepSeek's censorship is no match for the jailbreakers of Reddit

(from u/JimRice18) pic.twitter.com/mSzn5thkwP

— Justine Moore (@venturetwins) January 27, 2025

Federal shakeup: "A federal judge on Tuesday afternoon temporarily blocked part of the Trump administration's plans to freeze all federal aid, a policy that unleashed confusion and worry from charities and educators even as the White House said it was not as sweeping an order as it appeared," reports CNN. "The short-term pause issued by US District Judge Loren L. AliKhan prevents the administration from carrying through with its plans to freeze funding for 'open awards' already granted by the federal government through at least 5 p.m. ET Monday, February 3."

Meanwhile, in the department of cost cutting, the White House issued a memo yesterday "offering to pay federal workers who don't want to return to the office through Sept. 30, as long as they resign by Feb. 6," reports Axios. Details here. The protocol for resignations? "1) Select 'Reply' to this email. You must reply from your government account." Then, "2) Type the word 'Resign' into the body of this reply email. Hit 'Send.'" The format mirrors the email Elon Musk sent to employees of Twitter in 2022 when he bought the site. Most of the federal government's 2.3 million workers are eligible for this deal, and some estimates have projected that between 5 percent and 10 percent of the work force may resign. "Purging the federal government of dedicated career federal employees will have vast, unintended consequences that will cause chaos for the Americans who depend on a functioning federal government," said their union, because of course it did. Buyouts make a lot of sense, counters venture capitalist Katherine Boyle. ("This is why we need business people in government—it's a simple and good solution to a big problem.") "Who knows what agencies will end up with what staffing? What will passport wait times, IRS phone hold times, [National Park Service] facility availability be in a few months?" counters journalist Josh Barro.

"The most competent people with the most options for employment elsewhere have the highest incentive to leave," writes The Atlantic's Conor Friedersdorf on X. "The otherwise unemployable have the biggest incentives to stay. Not optimal."

Immigration crackdown continues: "On Tuesday, Kristi Noem, the secretary of homeland security, decided to revoke the 18-month extension of what is known as Temporary Protected Status, which is intended to help people in the United States who cannot return safely and immediately to their country because of a natural disaster or an armed conflict," reports The New York Times. "The move is a blow to hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan migrants who believed they would not only be protected from deportation but also provided work permits until at least the fall of 2026." These protections had been extended under the Biden administration, but many Venezuelans are now left in the lurch, fearing they will have to return to a country that's notoriously unstable and impoverished.

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Scenes from New York: "Get them the hell off the street! Get them the hell out of the street so people don't have to walk in fear," one Bronx resident told the New York Post following Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids this week that allegedly nabbed Anderson Zambrano-Pacheco, a 25-year-old believed to be ringleader of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan prison gang, who was taken into custody in the Bronx.

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QUICK HITS

• "For [Yenifer Alvarez-Estrada] Glick, her care was constrained by her poverty, her lack of insurance, and her distance from competent doctors," writes Leah Sargeant of the Texas woman written about in The New Yorker's piece "Did an Abortion Ban Cost a Young Texas Woman Her Life?" Sargeant continues: "Even if no one raised abortion explicitly, her instructions to her mother made it clear she didn't want to end her child's life to improve her own prognosis. Framing her case as the fault of an abortion ban presumes that abortion is the escape clause for bad medical care.…Saying women who can't receive adequate care should be counseled to abort is a brutal exile from hope."
• The European Union seems to believe this *checks notes* prayer app is a real problem:

Update:

China shut us down by outright removing us from the App Store.

The EU is shutting us down by over-regulation, apparently targeting any religious app, making it effectively impossible for us to operate in the EU.

Honestly pretty heartbreaking - was just talking with… https://t.co/baYCpDvq6A

— Alex at Hallow (@alexathallow) January 29, 2025

• We're so, so, so very close to 5,000 YouTube subscribers over at Just Asking Questions, where we recorded a super good immigration episode yesterday. We've also been streaming to X, so if you don't want to wait for episodes to come out, you can always catch them live by following me or Zach Weissmueller over there.
• Fascinating:

In 2021/2022, Dartmouth went test-optional. The results were really bad for poor kids.

When disadvantaged students with high (> 1420) SATs submitted scores to Dartmouth, 10.2% got in.

When they didn't submit, 2.9% got in.

Submitting tests more than tripled admissions odds pic.twitter.com/8hMPBUdkQ1

— dylan matthews ???? (@dylanmatt) January 27, 2025