Meta scrambling 'war rooms' of engineers to figure out DeepSeek's AI (opens in new tab)

What is different about Deepseek's use of MoE vs all the other MoE models that makes training more efficient?

FP8 training and GRPO make sense to me, but that only gets you a 4x improvement total, right?

(annoying voice) "Hold on to your papers...!"

there's entire books on this phenomenon, it isn't at all unusual. happened to japan, korea, etc. moving up the value chain!

OpenAI and others are valued for expected future revenue of running the models. And they were also valued as having magic "secret sauce" in their closed source models. Investors are now pulling back from this kind of company.

Deepseek is open source and based on Meta's open source Llama models. So Meta can easily run Deepseek on their pipeline.

The revenue model for both Meta and Deepseek is to apply the model to their business, not just sell it as a chatbot or API. That's why they publish it, they benefit from the community improvements and ironing out bugs.

My guess: they're somewhat uniquely positioned for the data. With 'the feeds' they're closer to a source/can withstand more. They plan to monetize another way

I'm imagining four rooms of candlelight and collective reading of publications. "War room" is executive-speak for "Important/Urgent Panic" or "rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic"

Four war rooms to read a document; so Meta

This interpretation is heavily based on the journalists choice of words designed to create drama. If Meta can recreate this success in llama, they just cut their power bill by 80+%. That deserves jumping on something immediately and not waiting for next half’s planning cycle.

Spun differently - Meta just reacted to take advantage of a new opportunity in just a couple of weeks. Completely reshooting an entire years worth of work for dozens of engineers. That sounds… appropriate? For an announcement big enough to chop $600M off nvidia market cap.

Come to think of it, I wonder how much meta spends on AI power. 80% of that number could be a billion dollars.

They are still social-media company. And make most money from there. AI is like metaverse bets. And AI being cheaper to create might even be positive for them, if they can figure out a use case.

They make all their money on ads in FB and IG. It's how their stock barely budged despite losing $30b on a VR ghost town.

They are the users of AI, not sellers of AI. Better and cheaper AI would benefit them, no matter who trained it.

i think it's because openai makes a bunch of money off "AI stuff" by being regarded the best at this game... and guess what, there's a new player that makes "AI stuff" as good as them (or possibly better) and maybe even cheaper. this could be a threat to their source of revenue.

Meta on the other hand makes money off whatsapp, facebook, instagram and threads. for meta an additional provider of "AI stuff" is not a threat to their source of revenue.

Expensive models are AI companies core business.

Meta can use cheap models to enhance core business.

My experience is that a "War Room" is just a meeting room, but one where 1. engineers are rounded up to work in (because as we all know, developers type code faster when co-located in a single room under pressure), and 2. where panicked executives occasionally wander in to say things like "How are things going?" and "What's the current status?" and "Do you have an ETA for when we can stop panicking?"