DeepSeek, China, OpenAI, NVIDIA, xAI, TSMC, Stargate, and AI Megaclusters | Lex Fridman Podcast #459

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.
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*OUTLINE:*
0:00 - Introduction
3:33 - DeepSeek-R1 and DeepSeek-V3
25:07 - Low cost of training
51:25 - DeepSeek compute cluster
58:57 - Export controls on GPUs to China
1:09:16 - AGI timeline
1:18:41 - China's manufacturing capacity
1:26:36 - Cold war with China
1:31:05 - TSMC and Taiwan
1:54:44 - Best GPUs for AI
2:09:36 - Why DeepSeek is so cheap
2:22:55 - Espionage
2:31:57 - Censorship
2:44:52 - Andrej Karpathy and magic of RL
2:55:23 - OpenAI o3-mini vs DeepSeek r1
3:14:31 - NVIDIA
3:18:58 - GPU smuggling
3:25:36 - DeepSeek training on OpenAI data
3:36:04 - AI megaclusters
4:11:26 - Who wins the race to AGI?
4:21:39 - AI agents
4:30:21 - Programming and AI
4:37:49 - Open source
4:47:01 - Stargate
4:54:30 - Future of AI

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