WR 52: DeepSeek Q&A; competitive Excel
Weekly Reckoning for the week of 3/2/25
Welcome back to the Ethical Reckoner. It’s been a week of a lot of news. We have some lighter news from the tech world, including an asteroid discover and the crowning of the Excel world champion (yes, really). Plus, some overlooked news on OpenAI’s future plans, and a short DeepSeek Q&A.
This edition of the WR is brought to you by… dumplings
The Reckonnaisance
“Building blocks” of life discovered in asteroid
Nutshell: A sample from the Bennu asteroid showed that conditions for life may have been widespread across the solar system.
More: The 4.5-billion-year-old asteroid contained many amino acids, nucleobases (which encode genetic information), and other elements that were key for life on Earth. These have been discovered in other space rocks, but not in any with such strict contamination control measures, and not in concert with traces of saltwater that could have helped them combine and react.
Why you should care: One small step for man, one giant leap for contamination control measures. This doesn’t mean that we’ve found life in outer space, but the scientists behind the study said that it helps support the theory that life was distributed around the cosmos by asteroids and thus that there could be life elsewhere in the universe.
OpenAI might get more open
Nutshell: In a Reddit “ask me anything,” Sam Altman said that OpenAI needs to “figure out a different open source strategy,” possibly including open-sourcing older models.
More: OpenAI has received criticism for not being, well, open (including a lawsuit from Elon Musk). The plans are very wishy-washy so far (a Reddit post does not a promise make), but if OpenAI open-sources more models, it could encourage other companies to follow suit and force AI companies to re-think their business model. It could also offer people an alternative to DeepSeek’s open models, which are causing panic because they’re performing really well but were created by a Chinese company.
Why you should care: Open-sourcing, say, GPT-3 or GPT-4 is unlikely to cause significant risks; they’ve been available long enough and jailbroken enough that releasing them is probably fine on that angle. It would, of course, cause concerns related to the ethical use of LLMs; we’ll see how (or whether) they address them. Overall, this would definitely shake up the industry; we’ll see if they follow through.
Excel World Champion crowned
Nutshell: The new hot e-sport anointed a world champion in Vegas last month and has its eyes set on becoming a global sensation.
More: Yes, this is a thing. And this year, there was an upset: the reigning three-time champ, the “Kobe Bryant of Excel,” was dethroned by a British financial consultant. Organizers have a vision of growing the audience and a million-dollar prize. For now, it’s $5k and a championship belt.
Why you should care: You don’t have to. But isn’t this delightful?
“You’d never see this with Google Sheets. You’d never get this level of passion.” - Erik Oehm
Extra Reckoning
Ok, it’s been a week and everyone is still talking about DeepSeek. We discussed it a little bit last week and earlier in January,1 but considering it’s one of the tech topics that has broken through to a general audience, it’s time to address some of what people have been asking me about it.
Q: What’s going on?
A: DeepSeek, a Chinese start-up owned by a hedge fund, released two large language models that are competitive with the best proprietary US models.
Q: Is this a big deal?
A: Yes, but maybe not for the reason you think. It means that we can create strong models with worse chips and less compute than previously thought. It doesn’t mean that the US has “lost” the “AI race”—all the Big Tech firms are now going to adopt DeepSeek’s advances and leverage their better chips and greater resources.
Q: So did export controls fail?
A: No. DeepSeek had the resources it needed before chip restrictions kicked in, and will probably have a hard time making further advances because of the newer restrictions.
Q: What does this mean for <insert stock here>?
A: I’m not a financial advisor. But I think this will be worse for hardware companies than software companies (this is why Nvidia took such a big hit). But regardless, demand for chips isn’t going anywhere; ambitions will instead get higher.
Have more questions? Drop them in the comments below.
I Reckon…
that we’ve hit a year (+ a bit) of the Weekly Reckoning!
Just for the record, I was right when I said that techies and politicians would be raising the alarm. Unfortunately, I did not make any stock bets based on this prediction.
Thumbnail generated by ChatGPT with a variation on the prompt “Please create an image that's an abstract brushy Impressionist painting of the concept of life emerging from a rock”.