Weekly Scroll: The Deep State Cometh

/r/FedNews, DeepSeek hot takes, and a brutal menswear guy post

Reminder: there’s now a Top Posts page where you can catch up on all the most popular Infinite Scroll articles from the past two years.

DeepSeek’s Cool and I Don’t Care

If you’re like me you read a lot of internet and technology focused blogs. And every other tech site on the internet seems to be hitting me over the head with scorching hot DeepSeek takes about the future of AI, capitalism, China vs America, etc.

Sorry, I but I can’t bring myself to care that much.

DeepSeek, if you missed it, is a Chinese LLM that’s achieved parity with several leading Western AIs at a fraction of the development costs (you can read more about it in a lot of places - Tim Lee’s joint is a good place to start). I’m sure DeepSeek impactful for many reasons. Probably important ones. But as somebody in the creative world, I think a lot of commentary about AI and LLMs in particular is misguided. And I think people get excited about all the wrong things with AI.

AIs can now do a bland, bad impression of writing blog posts and articles. Jeff Maurer did a good exploration of this - apparently Deep Seek can kinda-sorta-but-not-really mimic his style. It’s still not actually any good, but it’s not quite as terrible as previous generations of AI were. The jokes don’t make sense and aren’t funny, but there’s at least some structure to them?

AI will almost certainly continue to get better. Maybe at some point you will be able to just press a button and spit out essays as good as our best writers. I’m skeptical, but it could happen.

But here’s the thing. If you stop reading and writing, if you rely on AI to do all these things for you, over time you will lose the ability to read and write. You are what you practice, and just like muscles atrophy from lack of use so too does the mind.