#459 – DeepSeek, China, OpenAI, NVIDIA, xAI, TSMC, Stargate, and AI Megaclusters

Dylan Patel is the founder of SemiAnalysis, a research &
analysis company specializing in semiconductors, GPUs, CPUs, and AI
hardware. Nathan Lambert is a research scientist at the Allen
Institute for AI (Ai2) and the author of a blog on AI called
Interconnects. Thank you for listening Check out our sponsors:
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transcript, and to give feedback, submit questions, contact Lex,
etc. Transcript:
https://lexfridman.com/deepseek-dylan-patel-nathan-lambert-transcript
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Nathan's X: https://x.com/natolambert Nathan's Blog:
https://www.interconnects.ai/ Nathan's Podcast:
https://www.interconnects.ai/podcast Nathan's Website:
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nutrition drinks. Go to https://drinkag1.com/lex OUTLINE: (00:00) -
Introduction (13:28) - DeepSeek-R1 and DeepSeek-V3 (35:02) - Low
cost of training (1:01:19) - DeepSeek compute cluster (1:08:52) -
Export controls on GPUs to China (1:19:10) - AGI timeline (1:28:35)
- China's manufacturing capacity (1:36:30) - Cold war with China
(1:41:00) - TSMC and Taiwan (2:04:38) - Best GPUs for AI (2:19:30)
- Why DeepSeek is so cheap (2:32:49) - Espionage (2:41:52) -
Censorship (2:54:46) - Andrej Karpathy and magic of RL (3:05:17) -
OpenAI o3-mini vs DeepSeek r1 (3:24:25) - NVIDIA (3:28:53) - GPU
smuggling (3:35:30) - DeepSeek training on OpenAI data (3:45:59) -
AI megaclusters (4:21:21) - Who wins the race to AGI? (4:31:34) -
AI agents (4:40:16) - Programming and AI (4:47:43) - Open source
(4:56:55) - Stargate (5:04:24) - Future of AI