New DeepSeek AI chatbot challenges other chatbots and US monopolies

A new AI chatbot called DeepSeek created by Chinese investors has been released and sent shock waves through the US AI industry because it seems to be able to do all that the other chatbots can do (and perhaps more) for much lower cost and with less sophisticated chips.

Investors punished global tech stocks on Monday after the emergence of a Chinese chatbot competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, DeepSeek, raised doubts about the sustainability of the US artificial intelligence boom.

The tech-heavy Nasdaq index in New York opened lower after investors digested the implications of the latest AI model developed by the startup DeepSeek.

Nvidia, the most valuable listed company in the US and a leading maker of the computer chips that power AI models, lost more than $400bn (£321bn) in stock market value in early trading as its shares declined 13.6%, while Microsoft shed $130bn and Google’s parent, Alphabet, declined by $80bn.

Nvidia’s fall – which wiped about $465bn off its value, was the biggest in US stock market history, according to Bloomberg.
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Trump’s obsession with ending birthright citizenship

Birthright citizenship is the right that grants automatic citizenship to anyone born in the US, irrespective of the status of their parentage. Trump issued an executive order cancelling birthright citizenship for any child born after February 19, 2025 to anyone other than US citizens or permanent residents. This order was immediately challenged by multiple states and in the first hearing on it, a federal judge in Seattle immediately suspended the order, calling it “blatantly unconstitutional”.

“I’ve been on the bench for over four decades. I can’t remember another case where the question presented was as clear as this one is,” U.S. District Judge John Coughenour told a Justice Department attorney. “This is a blatantly unconstitutional order.”

Thursday’s decision prevents the Trump administration from taking steps to implement the executive order for 14 days. In the meantime, the parties will submit further arguments about the merits of Trump’s order. Coughenour scheduled a hearing on Feb. 6 to decide whether to block it long term as the case proceeds.

Coughenour, 84, a Ronald Reagan appointee who was nominated to the federal bench in 1981, grilled the DOJ attorney, Brett Shumate, asking whether Shumate personally believed the order was constitutional.

“I have difficulty understanding how a member of the bar could state unequivocally that this is a constitutional order,” he added.
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The U.S. is among about 30 countries where birthright citizenship — the principle of jus soli or “right of the soil” — is applied. Most are in the Americas, and Canada and Mexico are among them.

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20th anniversary of this blog

Today marks the 20th anniversary of my blogging. I started in 2005 but that was on the platform created by my university to encourage people to start using this new method for disseminating their opinions and research. The support people there helped and encouraged me as I tentatively started doing it. At that time, blogging was considered not quite respectable and some academics shied away from using it or blogged under pseudonyms so that their peers would not look. down on them.

That view has definitely changed dramatically over the last twenty years.

I switched over to this site on FreeThoughtBlogs in 2012.

Blogging takes time away from other things but it has its own rewards. I get a lot of useful tips and information from commenters and as well as in private communications. The blog also serves as a useful repository of data for me. Often, when I am thinking of something, I recall that I blogged about it before and can search easily on the site and get back all the data and links that I had used without having to scour the internet again.

It also allows me to think ideas through while they are still unformed and thus refine them. One of my books God vs. Darwin grew out of an extended series of blog posts and some of ideas in my last book The Great Paradox of Science first got aired here.

So thanks for reading!

What is Vladimir Putin’s game?

Russia’s president has said that Trump was right when he claimed that the Ukraine war would never have happened if Trump had been in office. He also supported the idea that the 2020 elections was stolen.

In an interview with Russian state television, Putin praised Trump as a “clever and pragmatic man” who is focused on U.S. interests.

“We always had a business-like, pragmatic but also trusting relationship with the current U.S. president,” Putin said. “I couldn’t disagree with him that if he had been president, if they hadn’t stolen victory from him in 2020, the crisis that emerged in Ukraine in 2022 could have been avoided.”

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The anti-science attacks begin

One of the things that has made the US a leader in the global economy is the high quality of its science research. The infrastructure that has been set up to promote science, with organizations such as the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation giving out grants to scientists or, in the case of the NIH, also doing research doing research internally, has resulted in prospective students and researchers from around the world flocking to the US. That has changed more recently with China luring foreign scientists with promises of greater access to research funds. India too has been making attempts to have scientists return to that country.

But the moves by the Trump administration may threaten US dominance much more than the efforts of those countries to attract scientists away.
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Every sperm is sacred

A legislator in Mississippi has filed a bill in the state legislature titled “Contraception Begins at Erection Act”.

As written by Sen. Bradford Blackmon, the bill would make it “unlawful for a person to discharge genetic material without the intent to fertilize an embryo.”

There are also fines involved, the third strike resulting in the loss of $10,000 from the perpetrator.

In a statement to WLBT News, Blackmon wrote, “All across the country, especially here in Mississippi, the vast majority of bills relating to contraception and/or abortion focus on the woman’s role when men are fifty percent of the equation.

This bill highlights that fact and brings the man’s role into the conversation. People can get up in arms and call it absurd but I can’t say that bothers me.”

I am not sure if he is being genuine or this is a parody meant to highlight the extreme measures that anti-abortion extremists will go to to control the bodies of women.

Either way, it reminded me of this scene from Monty Python’s Meaning of Life (1983).

When all you’ve got is a hammer …

… every thing looks like a nail.

Trump promised that he would end the Ukraine war within 24 hours of taking office. That, of course, did not happen. But on day two he revealed his grand plan for ending the war. It turns out that the plan is the same as what he has proposed for pretty much all the problems, and that is to threaten to impose “Taxes, Tariffs, and Sanctions on anything being sold by Russia to the United States, and various other participating countries”.

Trump seems to think that tariffs and other measures on imports is the magic formula to solve every single problem with other countries, and even to solve the budget deficits, irrespective of any realistic analysis of whether that will work. In this case, a little thought would reveal the weakness of his position. The US imports $15.7 billion worth of goods and services from Russia. Russia’s GDP is about $2.2 trillion, so exports to the US account for just 0.7% of Russia’s GDP. This is hardly of the size that would have Russia quaking in its boots and force it to change its policy. Putin has to know that Trump’s tariff threat is a paper tiger.

I wonder what Trump will do when he realizes that tariffs cannot do everything he wants. In fact, it is a very blunt and limited weapon.

Putin has grand ambitions for Russia, such as taking it back to what he sees as its glorious past when it was part of the Soviet Union and even earlier to Tsarist Russia. While he may do something symbolic in Ukraine in order to allow Trump to save face, I cannot see him abruptly ending the war because that would cause him (and in his mind Russia) to look weak and subservient to the US.

The real test for Trump will come when Ukraine asks for more money and weapons to continue the war.

The US is a dying democracy

One way that democracies end is suddenly, by means of a coup or other other extra-legal or quasi-legal means that replace an elected government by an unelected one.

But democracies can also die slowly. While the functions of governments are supposed to be based on the laws and constitutions that prescribe how they should operate, those cannot cover every possible eventuality. The filling of those gaps is heavily dependent on institutions and norms that have been built up over time. These institutions are the legal system, a free press, trade unions, and public interest groups that protect the rights of minorities and individuals against the unchecked use and abuse of governmental power. Democracies die more slowly when those institutions and norms that form the foundation upon which democracies are based are eroded and become merely shells and thus effectively eliminated. [Read more…]

How much license does a writer of nonfiction have?

The 1936 Berlin Olympics is recalled as the effort by Adolf Hitler to showcase Germany as a prosperous modern state that showed the superiority of the Aryan race. This effort was dented by Jesse Owens, the Black American athlete who won four gold medals in the 100m, 200m, long jump, and 4x100m relay. But there was another event, rowing, in which the American team edged out the Italian team to second and the German team to third place. The nine-member American team was all white so this result had no racial implications but it still stung for the Germans who had hoped to get the gold. Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, and Hermann Goering all were present for this event and were seemingly excited when it seemed like the German team would win, only to be deflated at the last minute.

The book The Boys on the Boat by Daniel James Brown tells this story. Rowing had long been dominated n the US by the east coast Ivy League schools like Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, and by Oxford and Cambridge in the UK, but this American team was made up of mostly people with working class backgrounds at the University of Washington.
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Distinguishing between long-term and short-term trends

When it comes to gauging the public mood on issues of importance, we tend to be overly swayed by the results of high-profile elections. For example, when Barack Obama was elected president in 2008 and re-elected in 2012, it seemed to suggest that the country was beginning the process of overcoming its deep history of racism. But other than those conservatives who argued that this showed that systemic racism was over, few were naive enough to think that it marked the end of racial discrimination, and that much still needed to be done. But the feeling was that there was a positive trajectory. Trump’s election in 2012 shifted the mood back towards darkness, suggesting that overt racism was indeed alive and well. Joe Biden’s election seemed to suggest a swing back towards more positive attitudes on a whole range of social issues. But the last election has made many people feel depressed, that we have actually regressed quite a bit, and maybe entering a period that has attitudes more reminiscent of the 1950s when it comes to issues of race, gender, and sexuality.

I think that this deep pessimism is mistaken. There are surface and deep changes that take place in any society at the same time and one must distinguish between them. The former are like the ripples on waves on the ocean that can change fairly quickly while the latter are the deep ocean currents that change slowly. The former are short term swings in attitudes while the latter are deep-seated. We have to remember that relatively small changes in voting patterns, of the order of a few percent, can produce huge swings in election results, and some of that swing may be due to ephemeral factors.
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