Trump Is Going Woke - The New York Times
Hey, Friedman, why do you keep comparing America and China?
It’s certainly not because I’d prefer to live there or have its problems, which are many and deep, particularly in banking. No, it’s because, despite its problems, China still knows how to make big stuff — often with sheer force from the top down, usually buttressed by massive government support but also often by common-sense planning and, more often than we’d like to believe from an authoritarian system, by creative innovation.
China is also not so silly as to treat one form of electricity generation as more conservative, liberal or Maoist than another. In the end, the outputs are all just electrons. They have no politics. All Beijing cares about is which is most abundant, efficient, cheap and clean.
I was struck by the “coincidence” that on the day of Trump’s inaugural, where he boasted that “America will soon be greater, stronger and far more exceptional than ever before,” the Chinese A.I. start-up DeepSeek unveiled its newest flagship A.I. model, R1, which demonstrated a new level of reasoning power — power that it was able to achieve with a smarter algorithm and without importing the most advanced U.S. chips that we’ve placed restrictions on China from acquiring. You can get more A.I. juice either by getting a bigger orange (more neural networks and data) or by squeezing a smaller orange tighter with a smarter algorithm. That is what DeepSeek has reportedly done.
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As an article in Business Insider described it, “DeepSeek says R1 achieves ‘performance comparable to OpenAI o1 across math, code and reasoning tasks,’” and it quoted Theo Browne, a software developer behind a popular YouTube channel, as saying, “The new DeepSeek R1 model is incredible.”
So what does that have to do with energy policy?
Because everything today is connected — which is exactly what Trump and his right-wing wokesters don’t understand.
via www.nytimes.com
January 28, 2025 at 01:28PM
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