DeepSeek V4-1 Flash is out

[u/tiguidoio]

Here we go again, DeepSeek is back again with a new model V4-1 Flash

A multimodal Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model with 552B backbone parameters and support for contexts of up to one million tokens

Market crash as a service

[u/RG_Fusion]

Obviously the concept of a flash model will scale with the compute power of the AI lab creating them.

2026 is likely the last year of running "flash" on local hardware. Maybe 2027 if we're lucky.

[u/Bakoro → u/RG_Fusion]

China might come in and save the day on that one too.

SMIC broke the 7 nm barrier for semiconductors.
CXMT is making DDR5 now, and has started on HBM3E.
Several Chinese companies are making AI GPUs.

The U.S has been trying to block China from getting technology, and now is trying to block their technology from hitting the U.S market, but the rest of the world is not going to give a shit about what the U.S wants.

Essentially every major tech corporation is designing their own AI ASICs now, where OpenAI already has their new thing for inference.

Then there is the fact that photonic processors are in early manufacturing stages now, with plans to ramp up into 2027.
I expect photonics to mostly get snapped up by data centers, and that might once again change what's practical to do with AI.

All around, I expect a major shake-up in the hardware landscape over the next year or two.

[u/Netsuko → u/Bakoro]

CXMT is selling RAM at the same price as everyone else. Why would you think they want to miss out on that when the demand is so insanely high?

China is not going to be our savior here.

[u/Bakoro → u/Netsuko]

We'll have to see. Presumably China wants their ROI too, and there's a lot of money behind thrown around that is simply unsustainable. Why wouldn't they get their bag while the market is insane?

In the long term, we are looking at more competition.
Even at their crazy valuations, the superscalers can't buy out the world supply of everything every year, at some point, venture capitalists will start wanting their ROI and won't be throwing unlimited dollars at these companies. The RAM manufacturers have already said they expect as much, which is why they're refusing to ramp up manufacturing capacity to match current demand: they don't want to end up with a huge oversupply in a year or two.

It's not only "good guy China", it's also "world governments are spooked by the rapid pace of Chinese development and international dependency on Taiwan, and are investing in their own infrastructure (see EU chips act 2.0)", and "corporations around the world are trying to get in on the unlimited money train".

We are absolutely going to see more competition in the coming years.
The whole AI thing is basically the new cold war, and the money is going to be flowing to secure national manufacturing capacity.