Afraid of a Doomsday Gap

Everyone has been panicking all week about DeepSeek, the Chinese AI startup. It is spending an estimated $500M a year on AI research and development, and has no announced plans for AI revenue. It threatens to compete with OpenAI and Si Valley AI startups. It is giving away a model that is faster, cheaper, and supposedly better than OpenAI's.

But OpenAI investors are not worried:

OpenAI may have billions of dollars in the bank. But it’s gearing up to raise billions more, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.

Per The WSJ, OpenAI is in talks to secure up to $40 billion in a funding round that would value the startup at $340 billion. SoftBank would lead the round, pouring between $15 billion to $25 billion into the ChatGPT maker, according to The WSJ.

Should OpenAI successfully close the round, it’d be a remarkable feat for the startup, which was valued at $157 billion in October.

It appears that Deepseek has not caught up with OpenAI, Anthopic, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Perplexity. It just seems better because it is more openly showing off its research.

I think that this is the end of concerns about AI safety. No one wants to lose to China. Even if an AI superintelligence is going to kill us all, it ought to be our AI and not China's. More computing capacity means more intelligence. That has been the pattern for 50 years. So we will spend a trillion dollars on building a super AI, if we have to.

The title is from a line in this movie.

Some people are worried

Humanity is closer than ever to catastrophe, according to the atomic scientists behind the Doomsday Clock.

The ominous metaphor ticked one second closer to midnight this week. The clock now stands just 89 seconds away — its first move in two years and the closest the clock come to midnight in its nearly eight-decade history.

They used to be worried about large-scale nuclear war, but now they are more worried about climage variation and misinformation.