Played, Part 1

     The makers of China's Deep Seek AI announced Monday they got the AI up and running for six million dollars -- pocket change in the AI world.  U.S. AI firms spend that much just furnishing their boardrooms, espresso machines and all.

     Stock markets plunged, especially AI-related stocks.  Chip-maker Nvidia, whose top-of-the-line chips were unavailable to Deep Seek, was hit especially hard: if you can run top-end AI on much cheaper second-tier processors, why would you ever pay top dollar?

     Two facts emerged:
     First, Deep Seek was a subsidiary not of some high-tech development company but a hedge fund.
     Second, and much later, they might have been a teensy bit wrong about the price tag.  It wasn't $6,000,000.00  It was at least $1,300.000,000.00 -- over 200 times as much.  It's like ordering a fancy $5.00 cup of coffee and finding out the real cost is $1,000.00: they lied

     Hedge funds are very, very smart about investing and financial markets.  From Wikipedia: "A hedge fund is a pooled investment fund that holds liquid assets and that makes use of complex trading and risk management techniques to aim to improve investment performance and insulate returns from market risk. Among these portfolio techniques are short selling [...].

     Short selling?  Ahem, Wikipedia again: "In finance, being short in an asset means investing in such a way that the investor will profit if the market value of the asset falls."

     It doesn't require a genius-level investor to know that a drastically cheaper AI using drastically cheaper hardware would yank the rug out from under the big names in AI, some of whom are publicly traded.  With a big pool of funds to take advantage of that knowledge, hey, presto, Chinese hedge fund makes a nice tidy sum, Chinese government gets a week of financial instability in U.S. (and other Western-aligned) markets.

     We got played.

     And meanwhile, the giant, energy-sucking plagiarism machines still don't have a sustainable use case other than listening in on your Zoom conference and writing a more-or-less accurate summary of it.  You could hire a professional administrative assistant to do that without needing to boil Niagara Falls to power her, and she'd probably even make coffee, too, if you asked nicely.

     But you do you.  Just try to not do in everything and everyone else in the process, maybe?