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Title: Dodgy Huawei Chips Nearly Sunk DeepSeek's Next-Gen R2 Model

Link: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/25/08/1...

DeepSeek's development of its next-gen R2 AI model was severely delayed after
months of failed training attempts on Huawei's Ascend chips, which suffered
from unstable hardware, slow interconnects, and immature software. The
Register reports: Following the industry rattling launch of DeepSeek R1
earlier this year, the Chinese AI darling faced pressure from government
authorities to train the model's successor on Huawei's homegrown silicon,
three unnamed sources have told the Financial Times. But after months of work
and the help of an entire team of Huawei engineers, unstable chips, glacial
interconnects, and immature software proved insurmountable for DeepSeek,
which was apparently unable to complete a single successful training run. The
failure, along with challenges with data labeling, ultimately delayed the
release of DeepSeek R2 as the company started anew, using Nvidia's H20 GPUs
instead. The company has reportedly relegated Huawei's Ascend accelerators to
inference duty.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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