Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited. by Denis Davydov and Leonid Blonsky
[REGNUM] On January 29, 1863, a Prussian delegation sent by Otto von Bismarck arrived in Warsaw : Prussia was deeply disturbed by the Polish rebellion against the Russian Empire and wanted to clarify its scale. And at the same time, to coordinate joint actions against the Polish rebels. On February 5, the delegation was already in St. Petersburg and met personally with Emperor Alexander II, but, in fact, this did not affect anything.
The Polish national uprising that began with a surprise attack on Russian garrisons on January 22, 1863, forever became a vivid example of how essentially unresolved, frivolously pushed aside problems always “shoot up.” Especially when they are based on such a grievance as the Poles had, having lost their ancient statehood as a result of three partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
It all started in the era of Alexander II "the Liberator" not at all immediately, the flame of the "Polish question" smoldered for quite a long time, gradually flaring up due to the complacent connivance of the authorities. Until it flared up into a full-fledged armed struggle, which lasted for almost a year and a half (until June 1864), reached the Kyiv province and took the lives of about 35 thousand people.
One of the consequences of these events was the adoption of the now famous Valuev Circular, which was not an "act of destruction of the Ukrainian language," but rather a counteraction to the rebels' attempts to attract the Little Russian peasantry to their side. But far more important was the experience of creating a "secret state" and an inspiring example for the next generation of revolutionaries.
The leaders of the Polish state, after the restoration of independence in 1918, repeatedly turned to the historical understanding of the January Uprising, giving it special significance in the formulation of their geopolitical doctrines.
The idea of a Polish empire (even if not directly expressed) played a significant role in them, the leading and guiding role of Poland in Europe, and most importantly, the image of a sinister enemy in the person of Russia, which must be destroyed from within and divided into small states. By and large, this concept is still alive today, determining policy already in the 21st century.
FROM GOODNESS TO EXPLOSION
It all began, of course, with a general relaxation and the crumbling freedoms with which Alexander II tried to bring peace and prosperity to his empire, beginning with the abolition of serfdom. During his visit to Warsaw in May 1856, the Tsar addressed the Polish nobility with a promise to give Poland everything that could be useful to it, “everything that my father promised to grant it and actually granted it.”
"Stick to reality, forming one whole with the empire, and abandon all dreams of independence as impossible to realize... It depends on you to facilitate the solution of the problem. You must help me in my work. You alone will bear the responsibility if my intentions meet any chimerical obstacles along the way. In order to prove to you my readiness to ease the lot of all the guilty, I will tell you that I have just signed an amnesty: I allow all emigrants who wish to do so to return to Poland," Nikolai Berg, the first military correspondent in Russia, translator and author of "Notes on Polish Conspiracies and Uprisings," quotes the emperor's very naive speech.
Alexander II offered Poland a peaceful development within the empire
In this case, what was meant was, first of all, the participants of the previous rebellion that took place in November 1830, when the Russian army had to take Warsaw by force. Then the actual autonomy of the Polish Kingdom, guaranteed by the constitution of 1815, was abolished - an appointed Russian viceroy began to rule.
But those who returned from Siberia or European countries, of course, were not at all inclined to “live in peace and prosperity,” just like all the bearers of the idea of Polish independence.
Numerous interest groups, among which was the organization of officers of Polish origin in St. Petersburg, received a powerful impetus in the development of political ideas, which were increasingly seeking an outlet in the public space. Complete connivance in the opening of a Polish printing house and the publication of Polish newspapers in the Russian capital, the transformation of Sunday schools into an agitation network provided a basis for the dissemination of propaganda "to raise the spirit of the people."
Street protests in Warsaw began with breaking windows, tearing down signs in Russian, intimidating Russian residents of the city, and petty mischief, to which teenagers were recruited. The first serious test of strength was the demonstration of the "Academicians" circle, Warsaw students, on the anniversary of the November Uprising, with songs, recitations, distribution of portraits of old heroes of Poland - and, ultimately, a memorial service for the Poles killed in 1830-31 with the singing of patriotic hymns.
The authorities did not react to all this, which inspired the conspirators. Just as they were inspired by Russian liberal circles with their "underground literature".
Subsequently, the revolutionary nobles would be sung by the Soviet authorities as fighters against tsarism: the allies of the Polish separatists in the destruction of the autocratic Russian state were representatives of the underground organizations "Land and Freedom" and "Committee of Russian Officers in Poland". They were sympathized with by Mikhail Bakunin, Alexander Herzen and Nikolai Ogarev, who published the newspaper "Kolokol" in London; the disgraced Nikolai Chernyshevsky spoke out for the separation of Poland.
The technologies also coincided: the future scenario of the Russian revolutionaries envisaged the use of the social expectations of the peasantry, caused by the liberation reform of 1861, to organize an anti-state rebellion with the aim of realizing the ideas of utopian socialism, social equality and federalism.
To set the lower classes against the upper classes and thereby provoke the Russian peasantry to mass violence against the Russian nobility, landowners and officials, that is, to unleash a fratricidal civil war - these ideas were by no means born of the Bolsheviks.
BATTLE FOR THE EMPIRE
The main political goal of the uprising eventually became not just independence, but the restoration of an independent Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth within the borders of 1772. According to the famous Slavic scholar Alexander Hilferding, “to recapture Western Russia was the main, essential task of the entire Polish movement from the very beginning. The fulcrum was Warsaw, but the goal was Vilna and Kiev.”
The trigger for the uprising that spread across the North-West and South-West regions of Russia was the recruitment campaign for the Russian Imperial Army. The draft dodgers left Warsaw and formed the first insurgent units (around thirty in total, with a total of up to 6,000 people). However, a far greater danger was posed by a ramified and powerful underground organization with its center in Warsaw, supported and directed by influential Polish emigration in Western Europe.
Representatives of the national Polish movement created a network of local authorities, organized underground press, police, courts, post office and treasury institutions that collected funds for the uprising. The Roman Catholic clergy, relying on the sympathy of the papal throne, played an energetic, mobilizing role.
The political and religious mobilization of the rebels took place under the slogans of patriotism, defense of the Catholic faith, aggressive Russophobia and bribing social promises. Underground propaganda and religious sermons of priests inflamed political and religious hatred in all classes of society towards the "Muscovite" and "schismatic", which meant Russia, the Great Russians and Orthodoxy.
An internal political enemy, supported from outside, armed, ideologically and religiously motivated, cruel, purposeful and organized, rose up against the state.
"Simple independence is not enough for him. He wants dominance; it is not enough for him to free himself from foreign domination, he wants the destruction of his triumphant enemy. It is not enough for him to be a Pole; he wants the Russian to become a Pole or to retreat beyond the Ural Mountains. He renounces his kinship with us, turns history into a phantom, and in place of today's mighty Russia there must be a mighty Poland along Kiev, along Smolensk, from the Baltic to the Black Sea," noted the famous Russian public figure and journalist of that time, Mikhail Katkov.
The rebellious państwo podziemne sought to involve all classes of Polish society in the armed struggle with the aim of giving the uprising national significance. Państwo podziemne is a reference to the Polish underground in WWII, but instead being applied to the war between Russia and Poland.
However, neither in the Kingdom of Poland nor in the Western region of Russia did it acquire a large-scale, truly national character.
First of all, because the peasantry did not side with the rebels.
In the Western Territory of Russia, the rebels' support was the small Polish irredenta, consisting of the nobility, gentry, priests and their Catholic peasant and bourgeois flock. It was intended to overcome the narrowness of the class-clerical base of the uprising with the help of the Western Russian peasant population, the absolute majority of which were Orthodox Belarusians and Little Russians.
However, they did not understand the vague ideas of the uprising, and only about 20% of those who supported the rebellion throughout the territory it covered were from the peasant class: this is why literature was printed for Ukrainians in a more or less understandable "simple language". And in the territory of the South-Western region (in the Volyn, Podolsk and Kyiv provinces) only 35 clashes between regular troops and the rebels took place.
A RESERVE FOR THE FUTURE
At the peak of the uprising, the number of participants, both direct and indirect, on the territory of Right-Bank Ukraine hardly exceeded 3,000 people. The Czech historian and political figure František Palacký wrote about it as follows:
“Those Little Russians who, perhaps, are now fighting together with the Poles against the Russians, are not fighting under the Little Russian banners for the political independence of Little Rus', but, like the Poles, for the restoration of old Poland.”
For the Orthodox population of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the victory of the Polish uprising meant the transformation of the region into a "home" colony of the restored Polish state, the return of slavery and the defeat of the Russian Orthodox Church. After all, one of the slogans of the rebels was the restoration of the union, abolished in Russia by the decisions of the Polotsk Council of 1839.
The events in Lithuania and Belarus were much more large-scale (which then led to corresponding repressions). But this time it was not possible to provoke an all-Russian peasant revolt aimed at destroying state institutions of power and governance and destroying public order.
Most importantly, the claim to “imperial borders” was a decisive factor in the reluctance of Britain and France (primarily) to support the rebels – it was a violation of the “rules-based order.”
The head of the British Foreign Office, Lord John Russell, addressed the Polish National Government in the House of Lords with the following words: "What kind of Poland do you wish to restore? Should we include Poznan and Galicia in it? If so, then we will provoke the resistance of Prussia and Austria, and what then - a European war? Nothing can be more alien to the intentions of Her Majesty's Government; they will limit themselves to the ideas that the dignity of England demands of them."
Thus, France was effectively left harnessed to the Polish cart alone and, of course, did not want to pull it. And the head of the Russian Foreign Ministry, Prince Alexander Gorchakov, only wound up his European colleagues with carefully calibrated formulations, reporting that “the rebels do not demand amnesty, nor autonomy, nor more or less broad representation. … Their goal is dominion over the provinces in which the vast majority of the population is Russian… in a word, the expansion of Poland’s borders to the two seas.”
And, in general, he was absolutely right: the Poles created all their problems with their own hands - including, of course, the three partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. But they still did not calm down.
The actual creator of the Second Polish Republic (1918–1939) and its first leader, Józef Piłsudski, devoted an entire study to the January Uprising. During his own revolutionary-terrorist activities, he was inspired by the structure of the National Government of that time. From there, the dictator derived the enduring idea of Poland “from river to river” and the dismemberment of Russia into many small states through internal strife and civil war.
In fact, on the British side, Pilsudski's friend, one of the fathers of geopolitics, Halford Mackinder, proposed at the same time the creation of an anti-Russian political bloc in Europe, which would also include Georgia and Azerbaijan. Which would mean a reliable blockade of Russia from world trade, control over which has always been in the English interests.
So if you look closely at current events, you can clearly see in them everything that already happened in our history more than 160 years ago.
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited. by Denis Davydov
[REGNUM] Perhaps no missile strike has caused Ukraine as much damage as Donald Trump's decision to suspend funding for all USAID projects due to the need to "align these programs with his foreign policy goals."
The freeze on US foreign aid programs concerns, of course, not only Ukraine, but it was there that the news from overseas caused real panic and a state close to severe depression. After all, it was this country that was one of the largest "testing grounds" for the activities of US grant programs that distributed money for a wide variety of needs.
Since the beginning of 2022 alone, according to the official website of the US Agency for International Development, it has provided Ukraine with $2.6 billion in humanitarian aid, $5 billion in development assistance, and more than $30 billion in direct budget support.
"With the closure of the USAID Ukraine program, we will lose support for schools, universities, hospitals, frontline towns with humanitarian problems. I won't even mention the entire layer of cultural content, free media and anti-corruption editorial boards. They all moved the country forward. Now they are under threat," journalist Yanina Sokolova * wrings her hands.
However, she is, of course, not worried about schools, but about the fact that now there is no one left to engage in “development of democracy and freedom of speech,” which for many years was the main task of grantors. As the director of the Institute of Mass Information (one of the champions of “freedom of speech”) Oksana Romanyuk stated, “almost 90% of Ukrainian media survived thanks to grants.” That is, they were controlled by the West through a financial collar and worked within the framework of the prescribed agenda.
Obviously, it is worth immediately recalling that it was precisely these media that played a leading role first in destabilizing the political situation during the presidency of Leonid Kuchma, full of endless street protests. It was then that “Ukrainska Pravda” arose from the dollar mass, whose first editor-in-chief Georgiy Gongadze was allegedly killed by order of the authorities, and his severed head was never found, thus the “Ukraine without Kuchma” campaign appeared, and eventually the “orange revolution”.
The coming to power of the pro-American Viktor Yushchenko became a golden time for grant-eaters, who effectively began to dictate the agenda on any issue. At the same time, hundreds of programs were launched to shape public opinion in the direction needed by the United States, as well as by global liberal globalism.
An interesting feature of the creation of the "net" was the opening of regional media, which kept local elites in suspense, as they could do nothing with these angry bees - there was no one to put pressure on, and it was scary. For example, in Donetsk, the publication "Ostrov" constantly sucked the blood of "Yanukovych's team", which was headed by long-time correspondent of Radio Liberty Sergei Garmash (who was always embarrassed by his real name Peteshov). Subsequently, he was even included in the Trilateral Contact Group at the Minsk talks - as a person tested in the struggle.
It is not at all surprising that when the hour struck, all the Donetsk “grant eaters” unanimously supported the Maidan and the civil war that followed, covered up by the name “Anti-terrorist operation”.
After all, grants were received not only by the media, but also by public organizations fighting corruption, developing democracy and civil society at the local level, various cultural and educational projects, etc. As a rule, all of them, one way or another, worked within the framework of “patriotic” ideas – to denigrate the Soviet past, to prove the uselessness of any ties with Russia, to promote the “Ukrainian idea,” the language, “European values” – in general, the whole standard set of a “freedom fighter.”
There were even guys in Kyiv on a grant from the Soros Foundation who fought against nuclear energy, promoting the “green agenda”, with quite understandable vested interests behind them.
And now UP informs readers that "access to materials on Ukrainska Pravda may soon become paid. But we believe that quality content should be available to everyone, so we will not introduce restrictions until the very end. Support us so that we can continue working without restrictions."
Among the same sufferers are the “Hromadske Television” that grew up on the support of the second Maidan in 2014, and the same radio, “Detector Media”, which systematically engaged in the persecution of dissidents, “Slidstvo Info”, the “Ukraїner” project, which deliberately sows hatred under the guise of cultural research, the “anti-corruptionists” from Bihus info. The latter are even trying to challenge Ukrainian society, offering to find out whether it really needs the work of these honest and incorruptible guys who expose the sores of corruption.
They have three months left to wait, after which, perhaps, not all of them will survive. Therefore, on January 27-28, almost all Ukrainian grant-recipient media published similar appeals to their readers asking them to buy a paid subscription, since the free ride is over. Which, from the point of view of the tasks of influencing Ukrainian society, at first glance, does not seem very logical.
However, if you look at what 112 active projects worth $7 billion through USAID are doing, broken down by year, Trump's decision looks much more logical.
The Zelensky family has always been one of the largest recipients of USAID grants.
Here is the first striking example: $297 million for communications for three years - a solid sum, more than the budget of the first Avatar film. However, this money is spent on all sorts of nonsense, such as supporting the creation of a talk show on the YouTube platform with an almost indecent name, where two tongue-tied girls with speech defects have "candid conversations." Or the promotion of the musical group TVORCHI, which has created one musical composition in all this time, but travels all over the country on "charity tours."
Grants were given for the creation of some murals, the development of electronic music, the identification of “fakes of Russian propaganda,” the filming of a reality show “about the restoration of cultural spaces in frontline settlements and recently liberated areas,” some incomprehensible “veteran programs.” Even for a documentary with the participation of “star chefs” exploring the culinary traditions of Ukraine — how grandmothers in Volyn villages bake cabbage on firewood.
Or here: the global development and education organization IREX oversees the project “National Identity of Ukraine through Youth,” designed until 2027 and aimed at “forming in young people a sense of personal responsibility for the democratic European future of Ukraine by further mobilizing youth leadership around the value concept of Ukrainian identity.”
In short, it's pure money laundering.
People's Deputy from "Servants of the People" Maryan Zablotsky is indignant that once 100 thousand dollars were spent on developing and introducing one paragraph into a bill regulating the agricultural sector. And there are tons of such projects.
"Problem number one: almost all of them boil down to endless round tables and conferences, and therefore are talentless and meaningless. Problem number two, the main one: most of these funds remain in the US itself as net profit of private companies implementing these grants," he writes on his social network page, warmly welcoming the decision of the new US State Department head Mark Rubio and hinting at friendship with him.
In that quote, he was specifically referring to Chemonics International Inc., a major Washington-based consulting firm that oversees projects to improve the “sustainability of Ukrainian democracy,” support decentralization, and strengthen the justice system. Some of these were planned through 2026.
But at the same time, the MP politically correctly avoids such funny nuances that the family of Volodymyr Zelensky has long and tightly sucked from the American budget. For example, USAID gave money to the first lady's project "All-Ukrainian mental health program on the initiative of Olena Zelenskaya" and all her humanitarian initiatives in schools. But, more importantly, the American agency financed the development and implementation of the "Diia" application in 2020 through the Ministry of Digital Transformation of Ukraine, which is now used by 20 million people.
On the one hand, it is a convenient thing similar to the Russian “Gosuslugi”, which contains all documents in electronic form, provides access to various services, allows you to receive government payments, sign documents, etc.
But at the same time, the entire array of personal data of Ukrainians is in the hands of others. And after the application was tested in Ukraine, the source code was made open last year. "Governments and IT specialists can use this code to digitalize public services," reports the EU4Digital project of the European Union, which also invested in the creation of the application. In 2023, it was even planned to allocate 650 thousand dollars "to form an approach to the dissemination of the digital experience of Ukraine and the Diia mobile application to other countries."
That is, as is already easy to understand, the development of various technologies useful for the "white master" and the formation of a food base for him always went hand in hand. The formation of public opinion in Ukraine, the creation of a whole corps of agents of influence, their infiltration into government bodies at all levels inevitably provided opportunities to earn money. And no one has cancelled the simple "development of budgets".
And everyone who was allowed to this trough felt good.
Take, for example, the OPORA Civil Network, which received funding for a project to monitor elections and political processes from November 1, 2022 to January 31, 2026. At the same time, there have been no elections in the country, and political processes are mainly reduced to the destruction of any opposition.
Now (at least temporarily) everyone feels bad: the tight-fisted Trump decided to count the taxpayers' money and, perhaps, conduct an audit. Then many will feel even worse, and they are already sending generously tear-stained letters to the State Department, proving their usefulness as a "soft power".
Although all these initiatives will not radically change the Ukrainian picture in the short term.
In addition to USAID, there are also the aforementioned structures of the Soros Foundation, foundations from Canada, Japan, Germany, Britain, Denmark, Switzerland, and the European Union. True, the US, as a rule, financed half or more of the totality of grant programs, and if we exclude them, this is a truly serious blow to "Ukrainian democracy.
Let's say, the "Platform for Development and Support of Civil Society Organizations" received $8.9 million from various sources in 2023, spent $8.4 million. USAID's share was 66% - $5.6 million. And what is the result of this activity - no one knows. But even if 34% of the amount remains, it is still nice money for simulating activity.
So the "grant eaters" will continue some activity. The main thing has already been achieved: over many years, Ukraine has been molded into exactly what various funds needed, which means it is simply necessary to maintain a slow burn. Plus, there are still private structures-sponsors of the US Democratic Party, which have not gone anywhere and to which Trump's decree does not apply. And the money for military expenses has already been allocated and spent anyway - in this sense, nothing changes for Ukraine.
It is unlikely that the activities of the "anti-corruption fighters" will change - one can safely predict that their content will be preserved and even expanded at the expense of all sorts of useless talk shows. Especially since the largest anti-corruption packages and various programs that give the Americans control over the expenditures of the Ukrainian budget are in the hands of "the right people". Thus, the Center for Audit Excellence of the US Accounting Chamber is implementing a project to help the Accounting Chamber of Ukraine, and this is a very useful option.
The firm hand on the Ukrainian udder will remain, only squeezing it tighter - that is what can be said with absolute certainty. As well as the fact that many of those who are accustomed to the sweet life at the expense of the State Department will now have to get acquainted with vacancies on the Ukrainian labor market.
Major Ukrainian media outlets are asking for donations following the Trump administration’s 90-day foreign aid pause since many of them are funded by the US government.
Ukrainian-Canadian professor and researcher Ivan Katchanovski noted on X that the Ukrainian online newspaper Strana.ua reported that two outlets — Hromadske and Bihus.Info — acknowledged in their fundraising pitches that they lost US funding.
BIHUS.Info said in a Facebook post that a “large portion” of its work had been funded by the US Agency for International Development (USAID). “Therefore, now the role of donations from viewers is changing from an alternative source to one of the key ones. What will happen in 90 days, we do not know, but we know one thing: now is the time to find out whether our work is really needed by Ukrainian society,” the post said.
Hromadske said that some of the “projects that we implement thanks to grants are temporarily stopped. That is why we especially need the support of each and every one of you.”
Other major Ukrainian outlets, including Ukrainska Pravda and Detector Media, also began asking for donations following the pause in US foreign aid but did not explicitly name that as the reason they’re fundraising.
Katchanovski, author of the book “The Maidan Massacre in Ukraine,” said many of the US-funded media outlets whitewashed the Ukrainian far-right and smeared opponents as pro-Russia.
“Major Ukrainian media outlets financed by the US and other Western governments, such as Ukrainska Pravda & Detector Media, propagated the war to the last Ukrainian, glorified & whitewashed neo-Nazi-led Azov, the OUN, and the UPA, & smeared anyone who opposed this as Russian agents paid by Kremlin,” Katchanovski wrote on X.
The New York Times reported that several humanitarian organizations in Ukraine have had to shut down due to the Trump administration’s foreign aid pause. US officials at the US Embassy in Ukraine are asking for exemptions for humanitarian operations in the country, but so far, the only known exemptions are for military aid to Israel and Egypt under the State Department’s Foreign Military Financing program.
The vast majority of US military aid to Ukraine is provided by the Pentagon, and that does not appear to be affected by the State Department’s pause. “I am focused on military aid; it has not been stopped, thank God,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Saturday.
Before leaving office, President Biden approved a huge amount of military aid for Ukraine, and there’s no sign those shipments have been frozen.
Continued on Page 47
As a matter of disclosure, I tried DeepSeek yesterday. It's pretty good, and could give the Big Guys a run for their money. by Ivan Lizan
[REGNUM] On January 27, the American IT giant Nvidia Corporation lost $600 billion in capitalization. This happened after the Western world discovered the existence of the Chinese startup DeepSeek.
The word "discovered" is not used by chance. DeepSeek has been working since the beginning of December, and by the New Year, specialized publications had paid attention to it. And only at the end of January, business media began to write about the startup.
One can only guess why journalists and stock speculators showed such miraculous slowness. Perhaps they had other things to do in December — they were preparing for Christmas and the New Year. And in January, the US saw a change of power, and the heads of all IT companies immediately swore allegiance to Donald Trump, who had returned to the White House. If the former-current president was an enemy for them during the first five years, now he has become a dear friend — the Democrats have managed to spite the top managers.
It is possible that the "tops" themselves fueled interest in DeepSeek, fanning the flames of the stock market fire. Or someone skillfully played the "bear" (on the downside) on the stock market.
However, this does not really matter, because the US has much bigger problems than the 600 billion virtual dollars that burned. The phenomenon of the Chinese startup has shown the uncompetitiveness of the American approach to the development of artificial intelligence (AI) systems.
THE SANCTIONS WORKED IN THE OPPOSITE DIRECTION
DeepSeek is a chatbot that has proven to be more effective than the super-popular ChatGPT from American OpenAI. In addition, the Chinese version is available for free and runs on less powerful chips.
Chinese specialists managed to create an advanced AI model in conditions where it cannot be created in the United States. The Americans themselves had a hand in this. DeepSeek was created on Nvidia H800 AI accelerators - slower versions of H100 accelerators created specifically for the Chinese market. American sanctions imposed in 2022 under Joe Biden banned the supply of advanced AI accelerators to China in order to slow down the pace of technological development in the PRC.
But, as you can see, instead of slowing down, the US got an acceleration through optimization.
In the end, the need forced the Chinese to use their wits. DeepSeek was trained for $5.5 million, while OpenAI spent $78 million on comparable “pumping” of GPT. That is, the Chinese chatbot was about 90% cheaper. In total, OpenAI spent more than $7 billion on its networks and invested another $1.5 billion in personnel.
The worst thing for the Americans is that DeepSeek distributes many of its developments for free, and asks for the same 90-95% less than OpenAI for paid access to advanced systems - this explains the turmoil in the market. And the DeepSeek model is also open software, which allows other companies to use it to develop their products.
Simply put, the Chinese, with fewer staff and not the most advanced accelerators, managed to create an advanced AI model, and are even ready to provide access to it for pennies compared to what the leader, OpenAI, is asking for.
At the same time, it was an unnamed Chinese company owned by a local billionaire that achieved success, while Microsoft is behind the flagship of American AI. It is its funding that allows it to cover losses. Expenses and losses are fine: they can be written off, especially in the case of Microsoft, the corporation behind OpenAI, known for its impressive graveyard of corporate products. But now OpenAI will have to reconsider its monetization model, reducing prices in conditions when its services do not allow it to break even.
Another major problem for the US is that OpenAI was the country's IT flagship, a kind of dream of a future where a machine can create at the level of a human, creating not only music and images, but also rocket engines - complementing and even replacing humans. AI was supposed to be a tool that would provide the US with global leadership. Only now this leadership can be provided to its competitor - China.
Now it's time to return to Nvidia, whose stocks plummeted on January 27, despite the fact that OpenAI screwed up. The latter company has little to lose - it is not public.
If OpenAI is the software embodiment of the American AI dream, then Nvidia could well be called its hardware base. And it was no secret that Nvidia's stock was wildly overvalued.
At the end of February 2024, Nvidia's capitalization exceeded $1.97 trillion - for comparison, Russia's GDP is $1.92 trillion. And the amount was constantly growing. In September 2024, the corporation's shares fell by 17%, losing almost $279 billion. In January 2025 - another minus 600 billion. But despite this, Nvidia's capitalization is currently $2.89 trillion. They continue to pump money into the huge bubble.
Nvidia shares "fell" because it became obvious that thousands of its most advanced accelerators are not needed for an AI breakthrough, and therefore demand for the company's products may decrease.
GAMES THAT ARE NOT PLAYED
Overall, the DeepSeek story is a good illustration of the general decline in competitiveness in American IT.
Chinese developers have a number of advantages over their US competitors. First of all, it is much cheaper to develop a new product. The average salary of a programmer in California in 2023 was $85,000 per year (7,000 per month), in China - from 18 to 36 thousand (1.5-3 thousand per month). If you multiply the monthly salary by a conditional 100 employees and a couple of years of development, the scale of the problem with the wage fund in the USA will become clear.
Deepseek employed between 100 and 140 people out of the 200-300 employees of the developer company. OpenAI employs more than 3.5 thousand people, which explains the $1.5 billion payroll. It's all about the exorbitant cost of living in California, especially real estate prices. It won't be possible to reduce expenses, and therefore the payroll.
At the same time, the high cost of living is hurting not only the AI industry, but also the American computer games industry, which was hit by the crisis long before DeepSeek got going.
The Chinese game Black Myth: Wukong cost $70 million and was developed over 6 years. It sold over 20 million copies, which brought the developers about $1 billion. Cyberpunk 2077 cost the Polish CD Projekt about 3-4 times more than The Witcher, and sold more than 30 million copies. At the same time, the development cost of Spider-Man 2 from Californian Insomniac Games was $315 million with a circulation of about 11 million copies.
Examples with production budgets and print runs are given for a reason. The goal of any company is to release the best product at the lowest price. The Chinese and Poles cope with this task, the Americans do not. Development is constantly becoming more expensive, the quality of the final product leaves much to be desired, the risks of failure are ever higher.
And this leads to another problem: managers are trying to reduce the risk of losing money. Instead of new projects, they have to choose a well-known franchise, hoping to attract its fans to the ranks of buyers (for example, "Star Wars"). The "agenda" still gets in the way: for example, instead of beautiful female characters, they have to add heroes of "incomprehensible" gender to games, selected by transgender people and other minorities in focus groups.
As a result, instead of an interesting game, we get bland, stuffy and uninspired crafts. Instead of profit, managers record a financial failure, although from the point of view of abstract business they do everything right.
In general, American IT giants have become victims of corporatization and financialization. IT companies in the US are public, their shares are listed on the stock exchange, and IPOs were once used as a tool to attract financing for expansion.
But going public changes both the managers' mindset and motivation. Their number one goal is to increase the company's profitability per share, maintain the stock price, and pay out generous dividends. If this means cutting funding for development, firing a dozen or so engineers, or "optimizing" something (like removing the charger from the smartphone box), you can be sure it will be done.
IT WON'T WORK TO STOP CHINA FROM LEADING
For decades, American IT giants had no competitors as such. This period was their golden age, but the fat years always end. Now the space for competition is expanding, and the number of opponents in the market is growing.
At the same time, we don’t even think about a number of stories of American IT failures. Once upon a time, Android in its version from Google was the only alternative, and depriving a smartphone manufacturer of access to Google services could have been a death sentence for it. Now life without these services has become the norm.
And the American IT sector will only have more problems. It is not clear how to solve them. If we were talking about physical production, it could be moved to Southeast Asia, where many uncompetitive things have been sent. But IT has a different specificity; this industry is the only truly flagship one in the USA. The American authorities, including the federal ones, cannot afford to lose it.
But the problem is that there is nothing to fight the Chinese with. The world games market is global, it will not work to ban the sale of Chinese games. It will not work to ban Chinese companies from developing AI either - they have already tried, the result is known.
All that remains is to selectively ban the use of individual Chinese products under the pretext of ensuring national security. And also to try to quickly "stake out" a part of the once global IT market.
In general, if you can’t win with your head, you’ll have to push with your elbows.
#3
"As a matter of disclosure, I tried DeepSeek yesterday. It's pretty good, and could give the Big Guys a run for their money."
I can confirm that. Asked Deepseek a couple of difficult questions (ChatGPT started to hallucinate) and Deepseek got the answers right. Then I went into some complicated reasoning with it and the answers were astonishingly accurate.
Certainly a wakeup call. The question is: This is China's free for all version. What capabilities may its secret AI have?
Posted by: European Conservative ||
01/30/2025 6:07 Comments ||
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#4
Btw its website seems to be busy a lot but the app works fine.
Posted by: European Conservative ||
01/30/2025 6:09 Comments ||
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Commentary by Russian military journalist Boris Rozhin:
[ColonelCassad] Western intelligence agencies conduct cyberattacks against critical infrastructure facilities of their opponents to obtain sensitive information, and also spy on their partners.
The US desire for hegemony in cyberspace is only increasing every year. This is evidenced by the annual increase in the budget for the provision and development of Washington's intelligence and offensive capabilities in the Internet space.
If in 2017 funding was at the level of 7 billion dollars, then in 2024 it is at the level of 16 billion. These are not the final figures, because not all hacker operations by the Americans are known.
The current trend puts stability around the world at risk. Victims of operations in the Internet space are not only US opponents. First of all, their allies become victims. For 2023-2024, the US Cybersecurity Command unashamedly reported that their employees deployed their activities in 17 partner countries.
These countries have found themselves in a situation where all their sensitive information is in the hands of the Americans. According to a 2021 Danish investigation, US intelligence agencies, using bilateral cooperation agreements, gained access to classified documents, correspondence and calls of high-ranking officials of the country. Let's not forget about the German Chancellor, who became one of the victims of American intelligence. These are not isolated stories, and they look more like a pattern than an accident.
The White House does not want to limit itself to just spying on allies; it wants to have access to critical infrastructure. In this regard, Washington announced the creation of the "AI Security Center" - a new American structure to oversee the development and integration of artificial intelligence capabilities.
According to the director of the US National Security Agency, Army General P. Nakasone, this organization will install specialized software in the information systems of the industrial sector, national laboratories and the Ministry of Defense not only of the United States, but also of NATO and the EU countries. Observers of authoritative publications in the field of cybersecurity, in particular, "Register" (Great Britain) and "Cybersecurity News" (Germany) noted that the employees of this Center will be able to freely penetrate the internal systems of critical infrastructures, allegedly for the purpose of ensuring security. It is noteworthy that no one in Europe is resisting the Americans.
Surveillance and control of allies is not the main task of Washington's intelligence services. The US Central Intelligence Agency is working to expand the network of hacker groups for a larger-scale development of malicious software with the aim of its further implementation to as many users as possible around the world.
The main goals of this activity are to obtain intelligence information, personal data, access critical infrastructure and disrupt its operation. In particular, the NSA, in cooperation with the Pentagon Cyber Command and the NATO Cyber Defense Center of Excellence (Talli, Estonia), plans and carries out attacks on Russia's critical information infrastructure "under the Ukrainian flag".
[eugyppius: a plague chronicle] I don’t have the energy to write you a proper post, mainly because I spent all day watching debate in the German Bundestag. I cannot, however, let this moment pass in silence:
Just over an hour ago, an anti-migration resolution proposed by the centre-right CDU passed the Bundestag with the support of Alternative fur Deutschland. The vote was 348 in favour and 345 against, with 10 abstentions.
The cordon sanitaire — on life support since Sunday — came down for the very first time. It was an epochal moment. Although the resolution itself is a non-binding measure, the centre-right CDU and CSU have achieved a parliamentary outcome with AfD votes, and that has never happened before. As Green Party Chancellor candidate Robert Habeck said in his speech today, "If you vote with the AfD on this very important issue, on what issue won’t you vote with the AfD?" That is the crux of the matter. This vote suggests that the Influx Limitation Act, up for a vote on Friday, will also pass the Bundestag (if not the Bundesrat), once again with a majority made by the AfD. If we are lucky the cordon sanitaire will come down not once, but twice in the same week.
After today’s vote, the left side of parliament broke out in jeering and booing; SPD representatives became particularly hysterical after their leader, Rolf Mutzenich, lamented that the Union had "abandoned the political middle." That is good. The left have become just a little less powerful, and the events set in motion this afternoon threaten to marginalise them ever further in the years to come.
There will of course be no coalition between the CDU and the populist opposition after this election. The present CDU leadership, including their Chancellor candidate Friedrich Merz, are committed enemies of the AfD, however happy they may be to cast themselves as anti-migration hardliners. It is even possible that the CDU throw their weight behind schemes to ban the AfD after the elections in an effort to put the toothpaste back in the tube.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[eugyppius: a plague chronicle] I don’t have the energy to write you a proper post, mainly because I spent all day watching debate in the German Bundestag. I cannot, however, let this moment pass in silence:
