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DeepSeek releases what a research firm calls the cheapest well-known AI model to run, hours after Alibaba unveils its largest model yet, escalating China's AI price war DeepSeek launched a new model that the research firm Artificial Analysis called by far the cheapest of any well-known model to operate, undercutting rivals on inference cost. The release came shortly after Alibaba unveiled its largest artificial-intelligence model to date. The dueling launches sharpen a race among Chinese developers to combine frontier performance with ultra-low prices. Analogies Bacon names printing as a world-changing engine Again, we should notice the force, effect, and consequences of inventions, which are nowhere more conspicuous than in those three which were unknown to the ancients; namely, printing, gunpowder, and the compass. For these three have changed the appearance and state of the whole world: first in literature, then in warfare, and lastly in navigation; and innumerable changes have been thence derived, so that no empire, sect, or star, appears to have exercised a greater power and influence on human affairs than these mechanical discoveries.
Francis Bacon, Novum Organum (The New Organon), Book I, Aphorism 129, 1620, trans. from the Latin; Project Gutenberg edition (eBook #45988). → Babbage: machinery, competition, and the collapse of price We have seen that the application of the division of labour tends to produce cheaper articles; that it thus increases the demand; and gradually, by the effect of competition, or by the hope of increased gain, that it causes large capitals to be embarked in extensive factories.
Charles Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, 1832 (paragraph 269); Project Gutenberg edition (eBook #4238). → Capek's cheapest possible worker DOMIN. No. The one that is the cheapest. The one whose requirements are the smallest. Young Rossum invented a worker with the minimum amount of requirements. He had to simplify him. He rejected everything that did not contribute directly to the progress of work. Everything that makes man more expensive. In fact he rejected man and made the Robot. My dear Miss Glory, the Robots are not people. Mechanically they are more perfect than we are; they have an enormously developed intelligence, but they have no soul.
Karel Capek, R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), 1920, English translation by Paul Selver and Nigel Playfair; Project Gutenberg edition (eBook #59112). → The spark of being infused into an engineered mind It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, Chapter 5, 1818; Project Gutenberg edition (eBook #84). → The Mechanical Turk: a machine that seems to think Racknitz's cutaway engraving exposes the hidden operator crouched inside Wolfgang von Kempelen's chess-playing 'Turk,' the eighteenth century's most famous automaton. For decades audiences across Europe believed a mere mechanism could out-reason a human being. The print is a fitting emblem for an age dazzled by the apparent intelligence of machines and by the question of how cheaply that intelligence can truly be produced.
Joseph Friedrich Freiherr zu Racknitz, engraving of Kempelen's chess automaton, from Ueber den Schachspieler des Herrn von Kempelen, 1789. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. → Knowledge made visible around a machine In Joseph Wright of Derby's candlelit scene, a lecturer demonstrates an orrery, a clockwork model of the solar system, to an enthralled group of ordinary onlookers. A single lamp stands in for the sun, throwing rapt faces into golden light. Painted at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, it captures the moment when mechanized instruments began to place once-rarefied knowledge within everyone's reach.
Joseph Wright of Derby, A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery, oil on canvas, c. 1766, Derby Museum and Art Gallery. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. → 
