[HN Gopher] An analysis of DeepSeek's R1-Zero and R1
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       An analysis of DeepSeek's R1-Zero and R1
        
       Author : meetpateltech
       Score  : 315 points
       Date   : 2025-01-29 17:44 UTC (5 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (arcprize.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (arcprize.org)
        
       | dagelf wrote:
       | Well o3 scored 75% on AGI-1, R1 and o1 only 25%.... watch this
       | space though....
        
         | mohsen1 wrote:
         | with 57 million(!!) tokens
        
           | sheepdestroyer wrote:
           | From the article :
           | 
           | o3 (low) 75.7% 335K $20
           | 
           | o3 (high) 87.5% 57M $3.4K
        
             | jl6 wrote:
             | $3.4K is about what you might pay a magic circle lawyer for
             | an opinion on a matter. Not saying o3 is an efficient use
             | of resources, just saying that it's not outlandish that a
             | sufficiently good AI could be worth that kind of money.
        
               | ant6n wrote:
               | What's the liability insurance of the AI like
        
               | baq wrote:
               | Refer to IBM's 1979 slide for details on that
        
               | victorbjorklund wrote:
               | You pay that price to a law firm to get good service and
               | to get a "guarantee" of correctness. You get neither from
               | an LLM. Not saying it is not worth anything but you cant
               | compare it to a top law firm.
        
             | mrandish wrote:
             | When I saw these numbers back in the initial o3-ARC post, I
             | immediately converted them into "$ per ARC-AGI-1 %" and
             | concluded we may be at a point where each increased
             | increment of 'real human-like novel reasoning' gets
             | exponentially more compute costly.
             | 
             | If Mike Knoop is correct, maybe R1 is pointing the way
             | toward more efficient approaches. That would certainly be a
             | good thing. This whole DeepSeek release and the reactions
             | have shown by limiting the export to China of high-end
             | GPUs, the US incentivized China to figure out how to make
             | low-end GPUs work _really_ well. The more subtle meta-
             | lesson here is that the massive flood of investment capital
             | being shoved toward leading edge AI companies has fostered
             | a drag race mentality which prioritized winning top-line
             | performance far above efficiency, costs, etc.
        
           | Davidzheng wrote:
           | I view it as a positive that the methodology can take in more
           | compute (bitter lesson style)
        
         | optimalsolver wrote:
         | But can o3 write a symphony?
         | 
         | Seriously though, I'd like to hear suggestions on how to
         | automatically evaluate an AI model's creativity, no humans in
         | the loop.
        
           | fragmede wrote:
           | we'd have to create a numerical scale for creativity, from
           | boring to Dali, with milliEschers and MegaGeigers somewhere
           | in there as well
        
             | rpastuszak wrote:
             | It's essential that we quantify everything so that we can
             | put a price on it. I'd go with Kahlograms though.
        
           | johnfn wrote:
           | Have you tried suno.ai?
        
           | baq wrote:
           | LLMs have read everything humans made so just ask one if
           | there's anything truly new in that freshly confabulated slop-
           | phony.
        
           | gsam wrote:
           | In my view there's two modes of creativity:
           | 
           | 1. That two distant topics or ideas are actually much more
           | closely related. The creative sees one example of an idea and
           | applies it to a discipline that nobody expects. In theory,
           | reduction of the maximally distant can probably be measured
           | with a tangible metric.
           | 
           | 2. Discovery of ideas that are even more maximally distant.
           | Pushing the edge, and this can be done by pure search and
           | randomness actually. But it's no good if it's garbage. The
           | trick is, what is garbage? That is very context dependent.
           | 
           | (Also, a creative might be measured on the efficiency of
           | these metrics rather than absolute output)
        
         | levocardia wrote:
         | What's interesting is that you can already see the "AI race"
         | dynamics in play -- OpenAI must be under immense market
         | pressure to push o3 out to the public to reclaim "king of the
         | hill" status.
        
           | spoaceman7777 wrote:
           | I suppose they're under some pressure to release o3-mini,
           | since r1 is roughly a peer for that, but r1 itself is still
           | quite rough. The o1 series had seen significantly more QA
           | time to smooth out the rough edges, and idiosyncracies what a
           | "production" model should be optimized for, vs. just a top
           | scorer on benchmarks.
           | 
           | We'll likely only see o3 once there is a true polished peer
           | for it. It's a race, and companies are keeping their best
           | models close to their chest, as they're used internally to
           | train smaller models.
           | 
           | e.g., Claude 3.5 Opus has been around for quite a while, but
           | it's unreleased. Instead, it was just used to refine Claude
           | Sonnet 3.5 into Claude Sonnet 3.6 (3.6 is for lack of a
           | better name, since it's still called 3.5).
           | 
           | We also might see a new GPT-4o refresh trained up using
           | GPT-o3 via deepseek's distillation technique and other
           | tricks.
           | 
           | There are a lot of new directions to go in now for OpenAI,
           | but unfortunately, we won't likely see them until their API
           | dominance comes under threat.
        
       | anothermathbozo wrote:
       | The claim is that this removes the human bottleneck (aka SFT or
       | supervised fine tuning) on domains with a verifiable reward.
       | Critically, this verifiable reward is extremely hard to pin down
       | in nearly all domains besides mathematics and computer science.
        
         | Onavo wrote:
         | By verifiable do they mean it in the complexity theory P/NP
         | sense of the word?
        
           | ks2048 wrote:
           | I think it just means that you can objectively score an
           | answer as being correct or not. (e.g. if the generated
           | program passes some tests; a discovered proof is valid, etc).
        
           | pertymcpert wrote:
           | They mean that the solutions can be verified to be correct in
           | a binary sense. E.g. a coding solution passes all the unit
           | tests vs writing poetry.
        
           | logicchains wrote:
           | As in there's an objective truth that can be determined by a
           | computer. E.g. whether code compiles, whether a unit test
           | passes, whether the answer given to a mathematical question
           | like 3+5 is correct. Many other fields have no objective
           | truth (like art or creative writing), or objective truth
           | requires measurement of the physical world (although if the
           | world can be simulated accurately enough for the problem
           | class at hand, then sufficient training data can still be
           | generated by a computer).
        
             | bpfrh wrote:
             | Isn't "code compiles" an insufficient criteria?
             | 
             | e.g you would need to prove that for all inputs the code
             | produces the correct output which would in turn make the
             | problem way more complex
        
               | pressbuttons wrote:
               | Not if the problem as written is "does this code
               | compile", which is still a useful stepping stone for some
               | workflows. Yours is certainly a more useful query in most
               | cases but repositioning or re-scoping the original
               | question can still lead to a net win.
        
               | logicchains wrote:
               | It's not a sufficient criteria by itself, but where no
               | better criteria is possible it would still produce better
               | results in reinforcement learning than if the model has
               | no reward for producing correctly compiling code vs code
               | that failed to compile.
        
           | drdeca wrote:
           | The other replies have said what was meant, but I don't think
           | they've explicitly addressed whether or not that is the sense
           | used in the idea of NP.
           | 
           | I would say... it is at least somewhat similar.
           | 
           | A problem in NP might be of the form "For this value of X,
           | does there exist a Y such that q(X,Y)?" for some predicate q
           | and value X, and where when the answer is "yes", the answer
           | of "yes" can be verified by being given a value Y, and
           | evaluating q(X,Y). (Specifically in the case of 3SAT, X would
           | be a 3CNF formula, Y would be an assignment of values to the
           | variables in the formula, and q(X,Y) would be "the formula X
           | when evaluated with variable assignments Y, results in
           | 'true'.".)
           | 
           | This is sort of like the task of "Given requirements X that
           | can be checked automatically, produce code Y which satisfies
           | those requirements", except that in this case the question is
           | specifically asking for Y, not just asking whether such a Y
           | exists, but.. well, often in practice when one wants a
           | solution to a problem in NP, one actually wants the witness,
           | not just whether there exists such a Y, right?
           | 
           | So, I would say there is a substantial similarity, but also a
           | difference.
        
           | sgt101 wrote:
           | There's a big difference. The membership of these classes is
           | determined in the worst case - so if there is no polynomial
           | time solution in the worst case then it's NP.
           | 
           | For this problem we don't care if it's possible that
           | sometimes there are things that aren't verifiable, or the
           | answers aren't exact, we just need training signal.
        
           | calebkaiser wrote:
           | In the case of DeepSeek-R1, they used a series of heuristic
           | reward functions that were built for different data types.
           | The paper mentions the use of sandboxed environments to
           | execute generated code against a suite of tests, for example,
           | to evaluate it for correctness. The reward functions also
           | evaluated syntax and formatting.
           | 
           | In general, the use of externally verifiable sources of truth
           | (like simulators) is referred to as "grounding" and there has
           | been quite a bit of research around it over the years, if
           | you're interested in digging deeper. I've always found it
           | super compelling as a research direction.
        
           | HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
           | For some reasoning data (e.g. you talking out loud as you
           | figure something out, mistakes and all) to be useful for RL
           | training, the conclusion to your reasoning needs to be
           | correct/verified, else that's not the kind of reasoning you
           | want to learn!
           | 
           | Some types of reasoning output, such as solving a math
           | problem or writing a computer program can be automatically
           | verified (e.g. respectively by a symbolic solver, or by
           | compiling and running the program), but in the general case
           | it's hard for a computer to verify whether a chain of
           | reasoning is correct and arrived at a valid answer or not,
           | although LLM-as-judge should work some of the time.
        
         | gadtfly wrote:
         | Reasoning transfers across domains.
        
           | Philpax wrote:
           | See https://www.interconnects.ai/p/why-reasoning-models-will-
           | gen... for more information.
        
         | nextos wrote:
         | IMHO, there are strategies that could extend this approach to
         | many other domains.
         | 
         | I was discussing this idea (along with a small prototype) with
         | a prominent symbolic AI researcher who also agrees, and thinks
         | that with the emergence of RL as a viable training method for
         | LLMs, it might be possible to pursue neuro-symbolic learning at
         | a large scale.
         | 
         | Current systems are impressive, but reasoning is too fragile to
         | trust them. They fall into obvious logical and statistical
         | fallacies that are evident to a layperson.
        
         | aithrowawaycomm wrote:
         | It's also extremely hard to nail down in much of mathematics or
         | computer science!
         | 
         | - is such-and-such theorem deep or shallow?
         | 
         | - is this definition/axiom useful? (there's a big difference
         | between doing compass-straightedge proofs vs. wondering about
         | the parallel postulate)
         | 
         | - more generally, _discovering_ theorems is generally not
         | amenable to verifiable rewards, except in domains where simpler
         | deterministic tools exist (in which case LLMs can likely help
         | reduce the amount of brute forcing)
         | 
         | - is this a good mathematical / software model of a given real-
         | world system?
         | 
         | - is the flexibility of dynamic/gradual typing worth the risk
         | of type errors? is static typing more or less confusing for
         | developers?
         | 
         | - what features should be part of a programming language's
         | syntax? should we opt for lean-and-extensible or batteries-
         | included?
         | 
         | - are we prematurely optimizing this function?
         | 
         | - will this program's memory needs play nicely with Rust's
         | memory model? What architectural decisions do we need to make
         | now to avoid headaches 6 months down the line?
        
           | Davidzheng wrote:
           | Not clear to me that theorem discovery is not amenable to
           | verifiable rewards. I think most important theorems probably
           | are recovered automatically by asking AI systems to proof
           | increasing complicated human conjectures. Along the way I
           | expect emergent behaviors of creating conjectures and
           | recognizing important self-breakthroughs. Much like regret
           | emergence
        
             | youoy wrote:
             | Theorems discovery is amenable to verifiable rewards. But
             | is meaningful theorems discovery too? Is the ability to
             | discern between meaningful theorems and bad ones an
             | emergent behaviour? You can check for yourself examples of
             | automatic proofs, and the huge amount of intermediate
             | theorems that they can generate which are not very
             | meaningful.
        
       | artninja1988 wrote:
       | >Ultimately, R1-Zero demonstrates the prototype of a potential
       | scaling regime with zero human bottlenecks - even in the training
       | data acquisition itself.
       | 
       | I would like this to be true, but doesn't the way they're doing
       | RL also require tons of human data?
        
         | Davidzheng wrote:
         | I think yes. But hopefully in math with compute advances we can
         | lower the human data input by increasing the gap that is
         | bridged by raw model capabilities vs search augmentation
         | (either with tree search or full rollouts)
        
       | polishdude20 wrote:
       | I predict that the future of LLM's when it comes to coding and
       | software creation is in "custom individually tailored apps".
       | Imagine telling an AI agent what app you want, the requirements
       | and all that and it just builds everything needed from backend to
       | frontend, asks for your input on how things should work,
       | clarifying questions etc.
       | 
       | It tests the software by compiling and running it reading errors
       | and failed tests and fixing the code.
       | 
       | Then, it deploys the software in production for you. It compiles
       | your app to an APK file and publishes it on the Google play store
       | for example.
       | 
       | Sure an LLM now may still not be able to get everything perfect
       | as far as it's outputs go. But surely there's already systems and
       | workflows in place that will auto run your code, compile it, feed
       | errors back to the LLM, some api to interact with cloud providers
       | for hosting etc?
        
         | dboreham wrote:
         | It doesn't need to write tests: it can just use the application
         | and figure out if it works.
        
           | logicchains wrote:
           | That's going to be much slower and more expensive than
           | writing tests because image/video processing is slower and
           | more expensive than writing tests. And because of lag in
           | using the UI (and re-building the whole application from
           | scratch after every change to test again).
        
             | ClumsyPilot wrote:
             | But it's actually correct from a usability perspective
        
             | drdeca wrote:
             | Hm, what if instead of using video of the application...
             | 
             | Ok, so if one can have one program snoop on all the
             | rendering calls made by another program, maybe there could
             | be a way of training a common representation of "an image
             | of an application" and "the rendering calls that are made
             | when producing a frame of the display for the application"?
             | Hopefully in a way that would be significantly smaller than
             | the full image data.
             | 
             | If so, maybe rather than feeding in the video of the
             | application, said representation could be applied to the
             | rendering calls the application makes each frame, and this
             | representation would be given as input as the model
             | interacts with the application, rather than giving it the
             | actual graphics?
             | 
             | But maybe this idea wouldn't work at all, idk.
             | 
             | Like, I guess the rendering calls often involve image data
             | in their arguments, and, you wouldn't want to include the
             | same images many time as the input to the encoding thing,
             | as that would probably (or, I imagine) make it slower than
             | just using the overall image of the application. I guess
             | the calls are probably more pointing to the images in
             | memory though, not putting an entire image on the stack.
             | 
             | I don't know enough about low-level graphics programming to
             | know if this idea of mine makes any sense.
        
         | jumploops wrote:
         | The future is bespoke software.
         | 
         | In some sense, this is how computers were always supposed to
         | work!
        
         | prmph wrote:
         | This will almost certainly never materialize, and the reasons
         | are not just technical
        
         | ClumsyPilot wrote:
         | > Imagine telling an AI agent ... requirements... asks for your
         | input on how things should work, clarifying questions etc.
         | 
         | That's hard work. I watch people do that every day, and always
         | get something wrong.
         | 
         | Also what about deploying the application, paying for database
         | or cloud resource that will run it, etc?
        
         | aprilthird2021 wrote:
         | > auto run your code, compile it, feed errors back to the LLM,
         | 
         | Can't wait for companies to juice profits by having the LLM run
         | excessive cycles or get stuck in a loop and run up my bill
        
           | genewitch wrote:
           | aider jams the backend on my PC, i have to kill the tcp
           | connection or python to stop it running a GPU on the backend,
           | from time to time. I can't imagine paying for tokens and not
           | knowing if it's working or wasting money.
        
             | girvo wrote:
             | The loops and constant useless changes drive me nuts haha
        
         | jacobsenscott wrote:
         | What's it called when you describe an app with sufficient
         | detail that a computer can carry out the processes you want?
         | Where will the record of those clarifying questions and updates
         | be kept? What if one developer asks the AI to surreptitiously
         | round off pennies and put those pennies into their bank
         | account? Where will that change be recorded, will humans be
         | able to recognize it? What if two developers give it
         | conflicting instructions? Who's reviewing this stream of
         | instructions to the LLM?
         | 
         | "AI" driven programming has a long way to go before it is just
         | a better code completion.
        
           | repelsteeltje wrote:
           | That.
           | 
           | Plus coding (producing a working program that fits some
           | requirement) is the least interesting part of software
           | development. It adds complexity, bugs and maintenance.
        
         | fragmede wrote:
         | I mean, we're halfway there, with aider and open-interpreter,
         | just give it a couple of years
        
         | kristjansson wrote:
         | Most people really do not know what they want at any level of
         | detail.
        
           | travoc wrote:
           | It's ok, they'll know it when they see it. Keep trying.
        
         | jrsdav wrote:
         | I have been trying to imagine something similar, but without
         | all the middleware/distribution layer. You need to do a thing?
         | The LLM just does it and presents the user with the desired
         | experience. Kind of upending the notion that we need "apps" in
         | the first place. It's all materialized, just-in-time style.
        
         | acchow wrote:
         | Have you tried https://bolt.diy ?
         | 
         | It does what you describe
        
           | IAmGraydon wrote:
           | It _claims_ to do what he describes.
        
         | IAmGraydon wrote:
         | Most software is useful because a large number of people can
         | interact with it or with each other over it. I'm not so certain
         | that one-off software would be very useful for anyone beyond
         | very simple functionality.
        
       | mohsen1 wrote:
       | The idea that a lot of compute is moving towards inference has a
       | huge consequence for the current "AI investments". This is bad
       | news for NVDA particularly. The inference focused solutions have
       | better economics than paying NVDA those huge margins (e.g. Grog)
        
         | talldayo wrote:
         | Nvidia can actually charge _larger_ margins if inference
         | compute goes down. It would enable them to manufacture more
         | units of smaller GPUs using inferior and cheaper silicon, all
         | of which would increase the profits per unit sold as well as
         | the number of units they can manufacture.
         | 
         | The industry has to find a way to separate itself from Nvidia's
         | GPGPU technology if they want to stop being gouged. The issue
         | is that nobody, not Apple, not AMD, not Intel, has been
         | treating Nvidia's hardware as a serious threat.
        
           | logicchains wrote:
           | >The issue is that nobody, not Apple, not AMD, not Intel, has
           | been treating Nvidia's hardware as a serious threat
           | 
           | Google has and they've built a much more cost efficient (for
           | them) system: the TPU. They even rent them out, and in terms
           | of cost per unit compute TPUs are significantly cheaper than
           | renting GPUs from the big cloud providers. Amazon's also
           | tried to do something similar with Trainium chips, however
           | they're usefulness is more limited due to software issues
           | (Amazon's much weaker at compiler development than Google, so
           | Trainium software is quite slow and buggy).
        
           | vidarh wrote:
           | For inference Nvidia has more significant competition than
           | for training. See Groq, Google's TPU's etc.
        
             | pants2 wrote:
             | People talk about Groq and Cerberus as competitors but it
             | seems to me their manufacturing process makes the
             | availability of those chips extremely limited. You can call
             | up Nvidia and order $10B worth of GPUs and have them
             | delivered the next week. Can't say the same for these
             | specialty competitors.
        
               | moralestapia wrote:
               | You mean Cerebras.
               | 
               | >call up Nvidia and order $10B worth of GPUs
               | 
               | Doubt it.
               | 
               | No idea about Groq, but Cerebras might give you a similar
               | timeline than nVidia. Each of their wafers are 50x-100x
               | H100s so they need to make less of them, in absolute
               | units.
               | 
               | But cooling, power, etc... nVidia might have an advantage
               | as their ecosystem is huge and more "liquid" in a sense.
        
               | vidarh wrote:
               | > You can call up Nvidia and order $10B worth of GPUs and
               | have them delivered the next week
               | 
               | Nvidia sold $14.5 billion of datacenter hardware in the
               | third quarter of their fiscal 2024 and that led to severe
               | supply constraints, with estimate lead times for H100's
               | up to 52 weeks some places, so no you can't, as that
               | $14.5 billion was clearly capped by their ability to
               | supply, not demand.
               | 
               | You're right, though, that Groq etc. can't deliver
               | anywhere near the same volume _now_ , but there's little
               | reason to believe that will continue. There's no need for
               | full GPU's for inference only workloads, so competitors
               | can enter the space with a tiny proportion of
               | functionality.
        
             | panabee wrote:
             | Nvidia generates revenue with hardware, but digs moats with
             | software.
             | 
             | The CUDA moat is widely unappreciated and misunderstood.
             | Dethroning Nvidia demands more than SOTA hardware.
             | 
             | Without diving into the gory details, the simple proof is
             | that billions were spent on inference last year by some of
             | the most sophisticated technology companies in the world.
             | 
             | They had the talent and the incentive to migrate, but
             | didn't.
             | 
             | OpenAI, Meta, AWS, AMD, and others have long attempted to
             | eliminate the Nvidia tax, yet failed.
             | 
             | People are desperate to quit their NVDA-tine addiction, but
             | they can't, at least for now.
        
               | vidarh wrote:
               | The CUDA moat is largely irrelevant for inference. The
               | code needed for inference is small enough that there are
               | e.g. bare-metal CPU only implementations. That isn't
               | what's limiting people from moving fully off Nvidia for
               | inference. And you'll note almost "everyone" in this game
               | are in the process of developing their own chips.
        
               | onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
               | > OpenAI, Meta, AWS, AMD, and others have long attempted
               | to eliminate the Nvidia tax, yet failed.
               | 
               | Gemini / Google runs and trains on TPUs.
               | 
               | You have no incentive to infer on AMD if you need to buy
               | a massive Nvidia cluster to train.
        
               | panabee wrote:
               | Google was omitted because they own the hardware and the
               | models, but in retrospect, they represent a proof point
               | nearly as compelling as OpenAI. Thanks for the comment.
               | 
               | Google has leading models operating on leading hardware,
               | backed by sophisticated tech talent who could facilitate
               | migrations, yet Google still cannot leap over the CUDA
               | moat and capture meaningful inference market share.
               | 
               | Yes, training plays a crucial role, since this is where
               | companies get shoehorned into the CUDA ecosystem, but if
               | CUDA were not so intertwined with performance and
               | reliability, customers could theoretically switch after
               | training.
        
               | buyucu wrote:
               | My company recently switched from A100s to MI300s. I can
               | confidently say that in my line of work, there is no CUDA
               | moat. Onboarding took about month, but afterwards
               | everything was fine.
        
           | ClumsyPilot wrote:
           | I think future of inference is on the client side
           | 
           | You can do inference on almost any hardware, I do not see any
           | edge for NVIDIA here
           | 
           | I can download DeepSeek 30b model and run inference at good
           | speed on AMD GPU ms and even on CPU. Apple silicon works fine
           | too. I get >50 tokens/s on PS300 AMD GPUs.
           | 
           | The main bottleneck appears to be memory, not processing
           | power.
        
             | mrbungie wrote:
             | In fact, I'm not sure how the "we will need tons of
             | centralized inference infrastructure" argument works when
             | Apple with +50% smartphone market share in the USA has a
             | totally opposite strategy focused on privacy: on-device
             | inference.
        
               | gajjanag wrote:
               | This is much more nuanced now. See Apple "Private Cloud
               | Compute": https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-
               | compute/ ; they run a lot of the larger models on their
               | own servers.
               | 
               | Fundamentally it is more efficient to process a batch of
               | tokens from multiple users/requests than processing them
               | from a single user's request on device.
        
               | talldayo wrote:
               | Apple's strategy already failed. Their big bet on NPU
               | hardware did not pay off at all, and right now it's
               | effectively wasted silicon on every iDevice while the GPU
               | does all the heavy inference work. Now they partner with
               | OpenAI to handle their inference (and even that's not
               | good enough in many cases[0]). The "centralized compute"
               | lobby is being paid by Apple to do the work their devices
               | cannot.
               | 
               | Until Apple or AMD unifies their GPU architectures and
               | implements complex streaming multiprocessors, Nvidia will
               | remain in a class of their own. Apple used to lead the
               | charge on the foremost CUDA alternative too, but then
               | they abandoned it to focus on proprietary standards
               | instead. It's pretty easy to argue that Apple shot
               | themselves in the foot with every opportunity they had to
               | compete on good faith. And make no mistake: Apple _could_
               | have competed with Nvidia if they weren 't so stubborn
               | about Linux support and putting smartphone GPUs in
               | laptops and desktops.
               | 
               | [0] https://apnews.com/article/apple-ai-news-
               | hallucinations-ipho...
        
         | pertymcpert wrote:
         | So far it's moving towards test time compute true, but
         | reasoning models are still far too large to be done on the
         | edge.
        
       | rybosome wrote:
       | Fascinating. R1 really punches above its weight with respect to
       | cost-per-token.
       | 
       | As the article alluded to at the end, my thoughts immediately go
       | to using R1 as a data generator for complex problems, since we
       | have many examples of successful distillation into smaller models
       | on well-defined tasks.
        
       | mikejulietbravo wrote:
       | Mike from Baseten here
       | 
       | We're super proud to support this work. If you're thinking of
       | running deepseek in production, give us a shout!
        
         | fxttr wrote:
         | We currently evaluate DeepSeek-R1 for our production system. We
         | aren't done yet, but I think it's a match.
        
           | mikejulietbravo wrote:
           | Awesome - we'd love to have our CEO/CTO chat with you and
           | your team if you're interested. Shoot me a note at
           | mike.bilodeau @ baseten.co and I'll make it happen!
        
         | littlestymaar wrote:
         | Earlier today I read a reddit comment[1] about a guy who tried
         | running the quantized version from unsloth[2] on 4xH100 and the
         | results was underwhelming (it ended up costing $137 per 1
         | million tokens).
         | 
         | Any idea of what they're doing wrong?
         | 
         | [1]:
         | https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1icphqa/how_to_...
         | 
         | [2]: https://unsloth.ai/blog/deepseekr1-dynamic
        
           | philipkiely wrote:
           | They're using Llama.cpp which is an amazing tool for local
           | inference but doesn't match fast inference frameworks like
           | TensorRT-LLM/SGLang for production speeds and throughputs on
           | Hopper GPUs.
           | 
           | The Unsloth quantizations are really cool, but if you want to
           | experiment with the R1 models in a smaller form factor the R1
           | Distills like Llama 70B are great and should run a lot faster
           | as they take advantage of existing optimizations around
           | inferencing llama-architecture models.
        
           | coder543 wrote:
           | I'm not an expert on at-scale inference, but they surely
           | can't have been running at a batch size of more than 1 if
           | they were getting performance that bad on 4xH100... and I'm
           | not even sure how they were getting performance that low even
           | at batch size 1. Batching is essential to serving large token
           | volumes at scale.
           | 
           | As the comments on reddit said, those numbers don't make
           | sense.
        
         | WhitneyLand wrote:
         | Can you share at a high level how you run this model?
         | 
         | We know it's 671B params with each MOE node at 37B...
         | 
         | If the GPUs have say, 140GB for an H200, then do you just load
         | up as many nodes as will fit into a GPU?
         | 
         | How much do interconnects hurt performance vs being able to
         | load the model into a single GPU?
        
           | philipkiely wrote:
           | Yeah so MoE doesn't really come into play for production
           | serving -- once you are batching your requests you hit every
           | expert at a large enough batch size so you have to think
           | about running the models as a whole.
           | 
           | There are two ways we can run it:
           | 
           | - 8xH200 GPU == 8x141GB == 1128 GB VRAM
           | 
           | - 16xH100 GPU == 8x80GB == 1280 GB VRAM
           | 
           | Within a single node (up to 8 GPUs) you don't see any
           | meaningful hit from GPU-to-GPU communication.
           | 
           | More than that (e.g. 16xH100) requires multi-node inference
           | which very few places have solved at a production-ready
           | level, but it's massive because there are way more H100s out
           | there than H200s.
        
       | Stevvo wrote:
       | "The o3 system demonstrates the first practical, general
       | implementation of a computer adapting to novel unseen problems"
       | 
       | Yet, they said when it was announced:
       | 
       | "OpenAI shared they trained the o3 we tested on 75% of the Public
       | Training set. They have not shared more details. We have not yet
       | tested the ARC-untrained model to understand how much of the
       | performance is due to ARC-AGI data."
       | 
       | These two statements are completely opposed. I can't take
       | seriously anything this article says about o3.
        
         | usaar333 wrote:
         | No they aren't. Every arc problem is novel - that's why it
         | resisted deep learning for so long (and still does to a
         | degree).
         | 
         | We just don't know how much the model seeing what an arc
         | problem is on the first place boosts its ability to solve them
         | - that limited statement is all the author is making.
        
         | 7thpower wrote:
         | They are testing with a different dataset. The authors saying
         | that they have not tested on the version of o3 that has not
         | seen the _training_ set.
        
       | spyckie2 wrote:
       | > But now with reasoning systems and verifiers, we can create
       | brand new legitimate data to train on. This can either be done
       | offline where the developer pays to create the data or at
       | inference time where the end user pays!
       | 
       | > This is a fascinating shift in economics and suggests there
       | could be a runaway power concentrating moment for AI system
       | developers who have the largest number of paying customers. Those
       | customers are footing the bill to create new high quality data
       | ... which improves the model ... which becomes better and more
       | preferred by users ... you get the idea.
       | 
       | While I think this is an interesting hypothesis, I'm skeptical.
       | You might be lowering the cost of your training corpus by a few
       | million dollars, but I highly doubt you are getting novel, high
       | quality data.
       | 
       | We are currently in a world where SOTA base model seems to be
       | capped at around GPT4o levels. I have no doubt that in 2-3 years
       | our base models will compete with o1 or even o3... just it
       | remains to be seen what innovations/optimizations get us there.
       | 
       | The most promising idea is to use reasoning models to generate
       | data, and then train our non-reasoning models with the reasoning-
       | embedded data. But... it remains to be seen how much of the chain
       | of thought reasoning you can really capture into model weights.
       | I'm guessing some, but I wonder if there is a cap to multi-head
       | attention architecture. If reasoning can be transferred from
       | reasoning models to base models, OpenAI should have already
       | trained a new model with o3 training data, right?
       | 
       | Another thought is maybe we don't need to improve our base models
       | much. It's sufficient to have them be generalists, and to improve
       | reasoning models (lowering price, improving quality) going
       | forward.
        
         | mohsen1 wrote:
         | every time you respond to an AI model "no, you got that wrong,
         | do it this way" you provide a very valuable piece of data to
         | train on. With reasoning tokens there is just a lot more of
         | that data to train on now
        
           | jeffbee wrote:
           | If such labels are collected and used to retrain the model
           | then yes. But these models are not learning online.
        
             | jvanderbot wrote:
             | Really? Isn't that the point of RL used in the way R1 did?
             | 
             | Provide a cost function (vs labels) and have it argue
             | itself to greatness as measured by that cost function?
             | 
             | I believe that's what GP meant by "respond", not telling
             | GPT they were wrong.
        
               | daveguy wrote:
               | That is still inference. It is using a model generated
               | from the RL process. The RL process is what used the cost
               | function to add another model layer. Any online/continual
               | learning would have to be performed by a different
               | algorithm than classical LLM or RL. You can think of RL
               | as a revision, but it still happens offline.
               | Online/continual learning is still a very difficult
               | problem in ML.
        
               | jvanderbot wrote:
               | Yes, that makes sense. We're both talking about offline
               | learning.
        
           | aprilthird2021 wrote:
           | So if I just pay OpenAI $200/mo, and randomly tell the AI, no
           | that's wrong.
           | 
           | I can stop the AI takeover?
        
             | Exoristos wrote:
             | You can have our thank-you cards forwarded to your cell at
             | Guantanamo Bay.
        
             | dr_kiszonka wrote:
             | You would need a lot of pro accounts! I would be surprised
             | if they didn't use any algorithms for detecting well
             | poisoning.
        
           | nine_k wrote:
           | This assumes that you give honest feedback.
           | 
           | Efforts to feed deployed AI models various epistemic poisons
           | abound in the wild.
        
             | hammock wrote:
             | The AI models to begin with assume that a significant
             | majority of the training material is honest/in good faith.
             | So that is not new?
        
             | BorisMelnik wrote:
             | I am not in this space, question: are there "bad actors"
             | that are known to feed AI models with poisonous
             | information?
        
               | tsunamifury wrote:
               | If the AI already has a larger knowledge domain space
               | than the user then all users are bad actors. They are
               | just too stupid to know it.
        
               | nine_k wrote:
               | Bad or not, depends on your POV. But certainly there are
               | efforts to feed junk to AI web scrapers, including
               | specialized tools: https://zadzmo.org/code/nepenthes/
        
               | mrandish wrote:
               | I'm not in the space either but I think the answer is an
               | emphatic yes. Three categories come to mind:
               | 
               | 1. Online trolls and pranksters (who already taught
               | several different AIs to be racist in a matter of hours -
               | just for the LOLs).
               | 
               | 2. Nation states like China who already require models to
               | conform to state narratives.
               | 
               | 3. More broadly, when training on "the internet" as a
               | whole there is a huge amount of wrong, confused
               | information mixed in.
               | 
               | There's also a meta-point to make here. On a lot of
               | culture war topics, one person's "poisonous information"
               | is another person's "reasonable conclusion."
        
               | theendisney wrote:
               | The part where people disagree seems fun.
               | 
               | Im looking forwards to protoscience/unconventional
               | science and perhaps even that what is worthy of the
               | fringe or pseudoscience labels. The debunking there
               | usually fails to adress the topic as it is incredibly
               | hard to spend even a single day reading about something
               | you "know" to be nonsense. Who has time for that?
               | 
               | If you take a hundred thousand such topics the odds they
               | should all be dismissed without looking arent very good.
        
               | immibis wrote:
               | Creators who use Nightshade on their published works.
        
               | blibble wrote:
               | yes, example: me
               | 
               | I more often than not use the thumbs up on bad Google AI
               | answers
               | 
               | (but not always! can't find me that easily!)
        
               | kristofferR wrote:
               | Great arsticle from today: https://arstechnica.com/tech-
               | policy/2025/01/ai-haters-build-...
        
             | Uehreka wrote:
             | This assumes that the companies gathering the data don't
             | have silent ways of detecting bad actors and discarding
             | their responses. If you're trying to poison an AI, are you
             | making all of your queries from the same IP? Via a VPN
             | whose IP block is known? Are you using a tool to generate
             | this bad data, which might have detectable word frequency
             | patterns that can be detected with something cheap like tf-
             | idf?
             | 
             | There's a lot of incentive to figure this out. And they
             | have so much data coming in that they can likely afford to
             | toss out some good data to ensure that they're tossing out
             | all of the bad.
        
               | aprilthird2021 wrote:
               | > If you're trying to poison an AI, are you making all of
               | your queries from the same IP? Via a VPN whose IP block
               | is known?
               | 
               | We can use the same tactics they are using to crawl the
               | web and scrape pages and bypass anti-scraping mechanisms.
        
               | Uehreka wrote:
               | Not necessarily, not all tactics can be used
               | symmetrically like that. Many of the sites they scrape
               | feel the need to support search engine crawlers and RSS
               | crawlers, but OpenAI feels no such need to grant
               | automated anonymous access to ChatGPT users.
               | 
               | And at the end of the daty, they can always look at the
               | responses coming in and make decisions like "95% of users
               | said these responses were wrong, 5% said these responses
               | were right, let's go with the 95%". As long as the vast
               | majority of their data is good (and it will be) they have
               | a lot of statistical tools they can use to weed out the
               | poison.
        
               | whilenot-dev wrote:
               | > As long as the vast majority of their data is good (and
               | it will be)
               | 
               | So expert answers are out of scope? Nice, looking forward
               | to those quality data!
        
             | scarmig wrote:
             | Probably it's something like "give feedback that's on
             | average slightly more correct than incorrect," though you'd
             | get more signal from perfect feedback.
             | 
             | That said, I suspect the signal is very weak even today and
             | probably not too useful except for learning about human
             | stylistic preferences.
        
           | stetrain wrote:
           | > What is today's date?
           | 
           | >> Today's date is Tuesday, January 28, 2025.
           | 
           | > No, you're wrong, today's date is actually Wednesday the
           | 29th.
           | 
           | >> My mistake. Yes, today's date is Wednesday, January 29th,
           | 2025.
           | 
           | Three months later in April when this tagged data is used to
           | train the next iteration, the AI can successfully learn that
           | today's date is actually January 29th.
        
             | mr-wendel wrote:
             | But thats exactly what you get when you ask questions that
             | require shifting, specific contextual knowledge. The model
             | weights, by their nature, cannot encode that information.
             | 
             | At best, you can only try to layer in contextual info like
             | this as metadata during inference, akin to how other
             | prompting layers exist.
             | 
             | Even then, what up-to-date information should present for
             | every round-trip is a matter of opinion and use-case.
        
             | genewitch wrote:
             | the date is in the "system prompt", so the cron job that
             | updates the prompts to the current date may be in a
             | different time zone than you. 7f5dbb71f54322f271c4d3fc3aaa4
             | d3282a1af5541d82b2cbc5aa10c1420b6bc
        
           | echelon wrote:
           | > you provide a very valuable piece of data to train on
           | 
           | We've been saying this "we get valuable data" thing since the
           | 2010s [1].
           | 
           | When will our collective Netflix thumbs ups give us
           | artificial super-intelligence?
           | 
           | [1] _Especially_ to investors. They love that line.
        
             | genewitch wrote:
             | our collective netflix thumbs up indicators gave investors
             | and netflix the confidence to deploy a series of adam
             | sandler movies that cost 60 to 80 million US dollars to
             | "make". So depending on who you are, the system might be
             | working great.
        
               | beAbU wrote:
               | Through analytics Netflix should know exactly when people
               | stop watching a series, or even when in a movie they exit
               | out. They no doubt know this by user.
               | 
               | They know exactly what makes you stay, and what makes you
               | leave.
               | 
               | I would not be surprised if in the near future movies and
               | series are modifed _on the fly_ to ensure users stay
               | glued to their screens.
               | 
               | In the distant future this might be done on a per user
               | level.
        
           | deegles wrote:
           | not being snarky, but what is the point of using the model if
           | you already know enough to correct it into giving the right
           | answer?
           | 
           | an example that just occurred to me - if you asked it to
           | generate an image of a mushroom that is safe to eat in your
           | area, how would you tell it it was wrong? "oh, they never got
           | back to me, I'll generate this image for others as well!"
        
             | vincentperes wrote:
             | You constantly have to correct an AI when using it because
             | it either didn't get the question right or you guide him
             | towards a more narrowed answer. There is only more to
             | learn.
        
             | dematz wrote:
             | A common use of these models is asking for code, and maybe
             | you don't know the answer or would take a while to figure
             | it out. For example, here's some html, make it blue and
             | centered. You could give the model feedback on if its
             | answer worked or not, without knowing the correct answer
             | yourself ahead of time.
        
             | Levitz wrote:
             | >not being snarky, but what is the point of using the model
             | if you already know enough to correct it into giving the
             | right answer?
             | 
             | For your example, what if you want to show what such a
             | mushroom looks like to a friend? What if you want to use it
             | on a website?
        
           | amluto wrote:
           | Does it?
           | 
           | If I say "no, you hallucinated basically the entire content
           | of the response", then maybe a newer training set derived
           | from that could train on the specific fact that that specific
           | hallucinated response is hallucinated. This seems to be of
           | dubious value in a training set.
        
         | ClumsyPilot wrote:
         | > The most promising idea is to use reasoning models to
         | generate data, and then train our non-reasoning models with the
         | reasoning-embedded data.
         | 
         | Why is it promising, aren't you potentially amplifying AI
         | biases and errors?
        
         | jcims wrote:
         | >You might be lowering the cost of your training corpus by a
         | few million dollars, but I highly doubt you are getting novel,
         | high quality data.
         | 
         | The large foundational models don't really need more empirical
         | data about the world. ChatGPT already 'knows' way more than I
         | do, probably by many orders of magnitude. Yet it's still
         | spewing nonsense at me regularly because it doesn't know how to
         | think like a human or interact with me in a human-like way. To
         | that end, the ability for a company like OpenAI to collect
         | novel data from interacting with real humans is a material
         | advantage over their competition.
        
         | fizx wrote:
         | You're not getting new high-quality textual data for pre-
         | training from your chat service. But you are potentially
         | getting a lot of RL feedback on ambiguous problems.
        
         | baq wrote:
         | It doesn't need much. 1 good lucky answer in a 1000 or maybe
         | 10k queries gives you the little exponential kick you need to
         | improve. This is how the hockey stick take off looks like and
         | we're already here - OpenAI has it, now deepseek has it, too.
         | You can be sure others also have it; Anthropic at the very
         | least, they just never announced it officially, but go read
         | what their CEO has been speaking and writing about.
        
         | sheepscreek wrote:
         | > The most promising idea is to use reasoning models to
         | generate data, and then train our non-reasoning models with the
         | reasoning-embedded data.
         | 
         | DeepSeek did precisely this with their LLama fine-tunes. You
         | can try the 70B one here (might have to sign up):
         | https://groq.com/groqcloud-makes-deepseek-r1-distill-llama-7...
        
         | vagabund wrote:
         | > I highly doubt you are getting novel, high quality data.
         | 
         | Why wouldn't you? Presumably the end user would try their use
         | case on the existing model, and if it performs well, wouldn't
         | bother with the expense of setting up an RL environment
         | specific to their task.
         | 
         | If it doesn't perform well, they do bother, and they have all
         | the incentive in the world to get the verifier right -- which
         | is not an extraordinarily sophisticated task if you're only
         | using rules-based outcome rewards (as R1 and R1-Zero do)
        
       | dr_dshiv wrote:
       | > The R1-Zero training process is capable of creating its own
       | internal domain specific language ("DSL") in token space via RL
       | optimization.
       | 
       | Um, what's that now? Really?
        
         | svdr wrote:
         | Yeah, if I understand correctly AI will create it's own
         | internal reasoning language through RL. In R1-Zero it was
         | already a strange mix of languages. They corrected that for R1
         | to make the thinking useful for humans.
        
       | Developerx wrote:
       | Make America s*k again
        
       | Developerx wrote:
       | Make America s again
        
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