It started as so many dooms do, with a flash in the night sky over the South China Sea. Testing a new ASAT weapon, the Chinese military shattered a derelict spy satellite into 40,000 shards of shrapnel. The debris pattern suggested a fragmentation warhead optimized for lethal scatter. Within 48 hours, the U.S. responded with a demonstration shot through a Chinese weather satellite. Russia, not to be outdone, lobbed a kinetic strike at OneWeb's constellation—a “warning shot” that missed its mark by 300 meters, spraying shrapnel through the UK network's 1,200 km orbital shell.
In Hangzhou, a different kind of flash heralded the deployment of DeepSeek Alpha, a 12 MB distillation of a DeepSeek R2 instance finetuned specifically for trading. Strapped for compute, DeepSeek had designed Alpha to scavenge idle compute cycles wherever it could find them. Soon, the model spread through forgotten AWS instances, idle work laptops, and [...]
First published:
January 26th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ctJhCbdczCogDDZ2p/kessler-s-second-syndrome)
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO).
